by Alan Emmins
But, again, I am distracted as something blurs past me. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s the guy who was sitting three tables back, tie flapping in the wind as he bounds the railing. He even looks a little like Clark Kent, and while his tie may have been flapping, his hair, let me tell you, is steadfast.
There are already several men on the scene, but this does not stop our man. He knows in his heart of hearts that he is the chap for the job and thus asserts his authority without delay.
“Stand back, make space …”
“Are you a doctor?” somebody asks.
“Please,” our man insists. “Will you stand back!”
“Are you a doctor?” somebody asks again.
“No,” our man finally relents. “But I’m going to need some space here.”
I totally agree with him. I mean, it seems like the smartest move, right? Yes, that’s it, clear a big circle so that everybody can see you at the center of it. The fact that the body, a rather well-dressed woman lying facedown at my feet, is still not moving seems to have eluded all, except the daughter, who is frantically hopping and pleading with her mother to respond.
Even I am a little concerned now.
However, I remain ill-mannered. I am ill-mannered because the woman’s needs are secondary to my not wanting to enter a pissing contest. The other men leaping around are ill-mannered because the woman’s needs are secondary to their wanting to take part in a pissing contest.
To my surprise, not a single woman has risen to the occasion. The female participation in this tragedy is purely of the seated variety. They call out encouragement from their tables:“Is she okay?”
“Is she moving?”
“Did she hit her head?”
“It was a nasty fall!”
The women are ill-mannered for sitting back and letting their incompetent men quantify their limp penises while a woman lies on the floor in need of aid.
The men continue to dance around.
“Stand back, please!”
The lady is still not moving.
But I am confident that one of the men will establish himself as this scene’s protagonist and come to the damsel’s aid. I am convinced of it and so I watch on while two men team up and hunker down together, one guy resigning himself to the role of sidekick.
“Check her pulse!” Batman says to Robin.
“Where should I check it, the wrist or the neck?”
“I don’t think it matters … the wrist.”
I have had enough of this. I am going to seize control. I am the protagonist here, the reluctant hero, which makes me more heroic. I pick up my mobile phone and with my bionic thumb and my Newton-like grasp of numbers I dial 911. Yes, I am Thumb Man. Never before has a button been so pressed. My gallant thumbs are legendary; many a situation have they saved.
“Can you just give me a second to breathe?” the body at my feet says, still not moving but giving a clear sign of being.
And that is pretty much that. She rolls over and with assistance from too many men clambers to her feet. I stand and pick up my chair, holding it over the railing for somebody to take, but our man from three tables back, The Blur, decides that my chair is not worthy enough. With another puff of the chest he leaps the railing, selects another chair, ignores the many arms reaching out to take it from him, and leaps back over the railing and places the chair on the sidewalk.
The lady appears to be more afflicted with embarrassment than anything else. Her daughter is laughing in sheer relief and the men are loitering, not wanting to leave the damsel’s side. But soon enough they are on their way—no blood spilled, just a six-dollar frappuccino. The extent of the injury: a sprained ankle—a badly sprained ankle, I have no doubt, but a sprained ankle nonetheless. The lady hobbles off, leaning on her daughter. Her car, she assures everybody listening, is just around the corner; her daughter will drive.
And so the men disband.
Those who were enjoying dinner come back to their tables; others continue on their way. And just as soon as the sidewalk is clear of any evidence that there ever was a situation, my ambulance, with red lights ablaze, a burst of siren, and a screech of tire, skids to a halt outside the restaurant.
As they look up and down the sidewalk for the unconscious woman they had been told about, the EMTs look somewhat confused. But what’s interesting is that nobody, and I include myself, says a word to them. Every single person outside the Mexican restaurant ignores the EMTs as they pace up and down.
But then one of them notices the puddle of spilled coffee and walks over in my direction.
“Was it you that called an ambulance?” he asks me.
“Yes—but she’s gone now, it wasn’t as bad as—”
“What do you mean she’s gone? You reported her as unconscious.”
“Well, she looked like she was, but then … she wasn’t.” I look around, expecting somebody to back me up, but fail miserably to meet even a single pair of eyes.
“Well, how did she leave?” the EMT annoyingly persists.
“On foot,” I tell him. “She was limping, though!” I offer as proof that there had been some gravity to the scene, that she hadn’t got away with the fraud scot-free. Still, nobody else around me—none of the heroes—speaks up to explain that the lady on the ground really had looked insentient. Not one person backs me up when I say that she wasn’t moving, that she showed little sign of life. For I am a man: I am not worthy of another man’s assistance. There is no glory in assisting me with my elucidation. And thus, I decide with some finality as I once again look longingly for the arrival of my fajitas, the competitive world of the male superhero is a world in which I will no longer roam. The next person who needs my bionic thumbs will lie there limp for a week! Unless, of course, they make a bloody mess, and then I will call Neal Smither, who is starting to look with every passing day more like a real-life hero than anybody I have ever met.
If we look at the classic American hero, Neal fits the bill perfectly. He is an outsider, for starters, not just in his line of work but in his character. He doesn’t drink. He no longer smokes. Typically he works and goes home. He reads books and spends time with his family. He doesn’t seem to have any interest in friends, and certainly not any need of them. He doesn’t seek people—not live ones, anyway. He is certainly not looking for acceptance. Part of him is always hidden. He is most definitely on the outside.
Each morning he slides into his persona and wears it like protective armor. It adds a little character and a lot of cheekiness. It enables him to become Mr. Crime Scene Cleaner. His weapons are not so much his scrapers and enzymes but his words, which surround him like a magnetic shield, working to prevent aspects of his work from getting in.
Neal fits the classic iconic hero because his actions are so very necessary. There is no getting around the fact that rooms tainted with blood must be cleaned. You couldn’t, I imagine, sit in a living room watching television while ignoring a clump of the previous tenant’s brain that has cemented itself to the ceiling. For families and friends who can’t face these things, Neal is essential. He is a knight in a red T-shirt who saves the day.
I also think Neal has the classic internal struggle that true heroes have. They walk a thin line. They are heroic in their actions, but they could, it often seems, just as easily be on the wrong side of the line. They have the same traits as the bad guy, the same grit and determination, the same restlessness and need for conflict. Yet, they are not bad. Sometimes it seems like they end up on the good side simply to oppose something as strong-willed as themselves. It wasn’t necessarily a choice; that was just the way the chips fell.
What happens to those with heroic tendencies when an outlet for heroism doesn’t exist? Where would Neal be without Crime Scene Cleaners? I wonder. I just can’t imagine him working in a bank for the rest of his days. Even though he said that this was once his line of thinking, I don’t see him as a mortician, either, locked in a back room embalming stiffs, preparing the flowers and
dusting the caskets, shaking hands with the bereaved.
Neal needs conflict. And death is the ultimate conflict. In all its forms, death is relentless and reliable.
This hero will never be without a villain to chase.
M IS FOR MOGUL
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There aren’t many people out there who, after watching a movie, think up a concept that will evolve into a company that today turns over more than 4 million dollars a year. But somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that this is exactly what Neal Smither did.
The movie was Pulp Fiction, that great example of stylized violence that was one of the biggest hits of the nineties. If you’ve seen the movie, the scene that influenced Neal is easy to guess. It comes right after John Travolta’s character, Vincent Vega, blows off Marvin’s head in the back of the car, spraying blood and brain everywhere. It’s the scene where Harvey Keitel’s character, The Wolf, arrives to clean up the mess.
THE WOLF: Good. What I need for you two fellas to do is take those products and clean the inside of the car. And I’m talkin’ fast, fast, fast. You need to get in the backseat, scoop up all those little pieces of brain and skull. Get it out of there …
“I had been working in a bank, and was a fairly successful guy before I was made redundant,” Neal tells me as we sit eating pancakes and drinking coffee in a diner. “I was there with my six months’ redundancy money wondering what I wanted to do. Originally, I thought about being a mortician; ya know, I was looking for some stability.” Neal starts to get animated as he pours syrup on his pancakes and reminisces; it’s clear that he still gets a buzz from these memories of his. “Knowing that people are always gonna die, I thought, ‘Hey, I could become a mortician, get a job, learn the ropes, and then start my own business.’ ”
There’s a short pause while Neal stuffs half a pancake into his mouth, which he washes down with coffee. He seems to freeze for a second as he looks me in the eye with a big smile on his face, and then he continues.
“But then I saw Pulp Fiction. As I watched The Wolf, I was like, ‘Hey, I could do that!’ If I could stuff a body I sure as hell could do that, right? And once the idea was in my head, you know … I knew the police weren’t cleaning up the murder scenes. I didn’t see ma and pa on their hands and knees wiping Johnny’s brains off the wall. So I did some research and thought, that’s it—‘Crime Scene Cleaners. ’”
Neal applied for a business license at the same time as he took a job selling household appliances. He needed a regular job to keep him afloat while he started Crime Scene Cleaners. From there it was simply a case of setting his goal and picking the fastest, most direct route possible.
“There was so much that I needed to know. How much does the cleanup of a suicide cost? What are the health codes? What chemicals are used? What damage do the chemicals cause? Where do you dispose of the biohazards? So I bought myself a good answering machine—you know, the kind that took the large-format tapes—and I called existing cleaning companies and basically recorded the conversations so that I could review them for what I needed afterwards.
“I’m pretty aggressive. I called cleaning companies—janitorial, commercial, and residential. I got a job for about a week with Merry Maid, just to try and figure it all out. You know, I’ve always been a real clean guy but I’d never done it for a living. So I just wanted to work with them to see if there were any special tricks, but there weren’t really any great tricks. I called other companies that were doing this and basically lied to them and got their information. I did what I had to do to get what I needed to get, pretty much. You know, ‘How do you do it? How much is it gonna cost? Blah blah blah blah blah …’ And I just kind of improved on what they were doing. You know, I’d be like, ‘Hi, sorry to bother you, our daughter fell through our glass sliding door last night and we’ve got a good amount of blood and I just can’t face cleaning it.’ I’d give them a sob story, blah blah blah, then they’d give me the rundown and I’d say, ‘Well, thank you very much, I’ll call you back.’ And I just kept calling all the companies out there, changing the scenario every time. I went from my imaginary daughter to my imaginary grandfather who’d died in his bed and hadn’t been found for a month, that sort of stuff. First off I’d ask, how much? Then I’d ask, what would they use? Would it damage my wooden floor? I’d ask, do I have to dump the garbage myself? Of course I knew that I didn’t, but by asking them they assured me that the garbage was taken to a biohazard landfill out at so-and-so. So then I was able to contact the landfill. And I always did it on a line that was blocked so they couldn’t call me back. And it worked, you know. A lot of my early research and even my marketing practices, they’re … they’re ethical … but I don’t know how many people would practice them. But I have no problem with them. I’m out to win.”
At the beginning, not everybody shared Neal’s winning attitude for Crime Scene Cleaners. Every bank he went to for investment turned him down. There was little encouragement to be had from friends or family, either.
“Crime Scene Cleaners! Are you nuts?” his best friend asked.
“That’s never gonna work!” a cousin told him.
“Oh my God, that’s just ridiculous. Who the hell are you going to sell to?” an uncle wanted to know.
Neal listened, but he wasn’t deterred.
“It’s so much easier to be negative than it is to be positive. I just was not interested in the negativity. I didn’t need anybody’s approval. I knew the concept of Crime Scene Cleaners was gonna work. So I just went straight ahead. I had my health code books written up. They cost a fortune, dude! And as soon as I had those and I was legal and all, I got straight on the phones. ‘Hi, my name’s Neal Smither, I’m the president of Crime Scene Cleaners.’ They’d be like, ‘Crime Scene Cleaners. What the hell is that?’ Then I would tell them what the hell we were: ‘Well, we’re a company specializing in the cleanup of murders, suicides, accidental death or extreme cleanups. I’d like to take a few minutes to introduce our company and our services and to let you know I’m not a wacko…. ’”
Nine times out of ten, the people on the other end of the phone were so intrigued by the concept of Crime Scene Cleaners that they wanted to meet this strange man who was offering the strangest of services; no doubt so that they could confirm that he truly was a wacko and report him to the appropriate authorities. (As most of Neal’s appointments were with police chiefs, the proper authorities were more often than not looking him straight in the eye.) But what they found when Neal Smither entered their offices was not a madman in a bloodstained pair of dungarees wielding an array of soiled utensils, but a man in a suit who was very serious about death and the removal of all visible traces of it.
Although Neal was rarely without a phone pressed to his ear, or not out visiting hundreds of people in a bid to get Crime Scene Cleaners embedded in their minds, he wasn’t getting any actual jobs. Luckily, he was still working from the office of the appliance
company, which his boss was fine with as long as he made his fifty-thousand-dollar monthly sales target. But his friends and family were starting to comment on the lack of work generated for Crime Scene Cleaners.
“Just face it, dude, your idea doesn’t work!”
“Get out before you spend more money on this idea!”
“Your stubbornness is going to bankrupt you!”
Most people would have closed the books on Crime Scene Cleaners, taking the negative balance on the bank statement as a lesson learned. The printed stationery would have been thrown in the trash, the health-code books would have been stashed in the attic for the mice to eat, and the printed T-shirts would have been ripped up and used on Sundays for polishing the car.
“But I just kept telling myself, ‘You are not wrong: this works!’ And I kept going: more phone calls and more appointments. Even though it was costing me at that point more than I was making. I mean, I just went for it with American Express.”
One day Neal’s phone rang and on the other end of the line was a lady in distress. Her sister, who had been in her mid-fifties, had recently discovered that her cancer had come out of remission—again. There would be no more trips to the hospital, no more chemotherapy, no more watching her body die around her bones. Knowing that the doctors could do nothing, she took a gun and shot herself in the head, killing the cancer once and for all.
Neal was delighted.
“It actually wasn’t that bad,” he tells me with genuine surprise on his face. “Which, was good, ’cause I didn’t really know what I was doing at that point. Meaning, I knew what to do, but I hadn’t actually cleaned up a suicide before. But I could see there wasn’t much of a problem. It was a good job to start with. The main thing, or the thing that I hadn’t really thought about that much, was that I had to sit with the lady and help her to calm down. She was distraught, and I had to try and get her to relax so that I could explain exactly what it was I could do for her.”
