by Alan Emmins
“I guess you guys see worse than this all the time, huh?”
Oh, here we go, I think to myself. Weren’t you in a rush just a moment ago? Somebody around here must be late with their rent? Should you not go bang on the door? Collect?
I decide to nip the conversation in the bud. After all, I now have serious concerns about my health that need to be addressed severely.
“No!” I tell him. “This is pretty much as bad as it gets. The work we do really isn’t as bloody and gory as people make out.”
Jake allows me this and says nothing. The manager moves away and waves good-bye. I see him off the premises, little more than an inch behind him all the way. As soon as he is away up the path I gasp for air. You see, ever since I heard the word hepatitis, I have been trying to take as few breaths as possible. I stand outside, trying to retrace my steps.
What did I touch?
Where did I put my water bottle?
Did I touch the top of the bottle before I drank from it?
When will I lose control of my bodily functions?
At which point will I pass out and crack my head open on the floor?
Jake comes out of the apartment laughing his head off.
“Dude, you should have seen your face! Christ, it was just instant panic. I thought you were going to just turn and run. I really didn’t think you were going to keep it together.” He is almost doubled over.
But I am not laughing. I am certainly not keeping it together. What if I have contracted this hep C? What if, even after the televised health warning, I take hepatitis C home to Denmark, to my friends? All of a sudden the gift of transgender porn stolen from a dead guy is not looking as thoughtless as it once did.
“Alan,” Jake says, sensing a panic attack to be imminent. “You’re okay. You can’t get hepatitis by breathing.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Shit no! If someone with hepatitis sneezed on you, then be concerned. You didn’t lick the linoleum while I was out at the truck, did ya?” Jake asks with mock severity on his face.
“What about if he sneezed on the counter, and then I touched that and somehow got bacteria in my mouth or something? What about my camera? He could have bled on the counter where I put it and now I’ve had it in front of my face—”
“Er … I don’t know about that,” says Jake, frowning. “But I’m sure you’re fine. Don’t worry. We’ll clean it all with pure alcohol, it’ll be fine. The chances are so small, but then if we clean everything, the chances are zero. Okay?”
I believe him, sure. But that doesn’t mean I’m okay. Had I had forewarning, I would never have helped remove the linoleum; or laid my belongings down inside the apartment. I would have worn a protective suit and thick rubber boots, a respirator or three. In fairness to Jake, he never asked me to help. He also didn’t know about the hepatitis.
Jake starts to bring my stuff out. I line it up on the pavement, holding everything at arm’s length as if it’s going to explode in my hands. Jake passes me a handful of cloths and some cans of 100 percent alcohol foam. I start with the minidisk, carefully wiping all the surfaces several times. I run a fresh cloth up and down the cable that runs to the microphone, spending a good two minutes on it. Once all the equipment is clean, I cover my hands and arms and rub vigorously. But my whole body is starting to itch, so I take my T-shirt off and cover my body in foam. Passersby point and laugh at me. Then they see that I am standing next to a Crime Scene Cleaners truck and stop. Jake finds this all very comical. But you never can be too sure, and I am not taking any risks.
“What happened?” one of the onlookers asks, grimacing at the thought of my answer.
Ears prick up all around. People shuffle and lean forward to better hear me.
“It’s hard to believe,” I tell him. “But absolutely nothing.”
“Oh,” a short man in jeans and a dirty white vest says with a laugh. “You got the heebie-jeebies?”
“Fuuuck yes!” I agree with a laugh of my own. “The heebie-jeebies.”
I notice Jake throwing something into the back of the truck. It’s the crime scene tape that was discarded by the front door. I stop thinking about hepatitis for a couple of minutes, because I realize now that it must have been the yellow tape. That must have been what had the neighbors speculating on the many and varied means of murder. When I spoke to them, none of them had gone over to ask the complex manager or the police officers what had happened. Otherwise they would have known that it was an accidental death. Instead, they had looked at the yellow tape and concluded that this tape spoke the facts. They read the tape as if it said “Crime scene, do not cross—deceased was either (a) shot twice in head, (b) stabbed twice in chest, or, (c) shot in chest and neck!”
How many people, when they say, “Guy across the street was murdered, it was drugs,” actually have a factual standpoint for their statement?
“Basically,” says Jake, “what the media has portrayed to society is that you see police, something has gone drastically wrong. They’re like, ‘Oh gee, something really bad has happened,’ and then it’s like … what’s that game called?”
“Operator? Chinese whispers?” I ask as we drive away from the complex.
“Yeah, operator, that’s it. As it moves from person to person the story changes from this to that. I find it amazing. Like right there, all the stuff you were told, and it turns out to be hepatitis. You know, they see the cops, the door all taped up. I mean that’s what it is, you know, yellow, the color yellow. Primarily, the color yellow is used for caution. I mean look at all the stuff I was saying back there—I had him dealing drugs.”
“Does it worry you at all, Jake?” I ask, shifting back to my own, more immediate concerns. “Hepatitis, AIDS …?”
“Yeah! I mean in all honesty … I mean we’re suited up pretty good. Each job’s different but you have to apply the same amount of caution. Yeah, it worries me. Of course, I’ve got all the vaccines, but still. I bet if you were to go out in the street and ask a hundred people to come in here and do this job, tell them he had hep C and that there was blood on the floor and that he had decomposed, you’d get about two people out of a hundred that would come and do this job. You know, a lot of the time we don’t know if these people had any diseases or not.”
“Alan, I’ve got Neal on the phone. He wants to speak with you,” says Jake, handing me the phone as he gets into the truck after stopping for gas.
“Hey, Neal.”
“Dude, I hear you picked up hep C?” asks Neal, amused by what Jake has obviously told him. “Listen up, there’s another job not far from you that Jake needs to get to quick, and then after that he’s off to the jail to clean the showers where’s there’s been a bloody fight—”
“Neal, tell me I can go to the jail, please?” I almost beg.
“Dude, you can’t. You have to be registered and I can’t take that kind of risk. Anyway, I need you to help him ’cause he’s short on time, okay? So get suited up and get cleaning, speak to you later, bye!”
“Neal, hold on a minute …” But Neal hasn’t held on a minute.
“How do you find it working with Neal?” I ask Jake as I hand him back the phone.
“In what way?”
“Just his harsh manner, and the way he speaks to people.”
“The way that he is to me is that he’s one of those guys that’s got little-man syndrome, you know. I mean he’s a great boss to work for, he’ll back you up, support you and get you jobs. He does all the hard work for sure; none of us technicians can do what he does. I mean he can close a deal by just telling people, ‘This is how it’s gonna be.’ Either you go with it or you don’t go with it. And he’s got that Texas accent that he uses. He’s not from Texas; he’s from Capitola. In reality he’s like a pimp, you know: ‘You want him, this is how much he costs.’ And he’s got a good deal. Like I said earlier, go outside and find two people that want to come and do this.”
“And they’re probably already working for N
eal.”
“Right. It’s one of those deals where it takes a special kind of person to do it, I guess, because most people don’t want to—you’re making money off someone else’s tragedy, you know. I don’t have a problem with it. But to have us do this, it really does help the grieving process, and then we make some money, too. We all win in the end. If that back there was a family dwelling with a wife and kids, and say the dad had been murdered, would you want the kids to see that? You walked in there with me; what did you see? You think the wife should clean that up? It was a body outline, you know, that’s where dad was last seen, blood coming from his head. We help with the grieving process. We’ll come in and clean him up, clean her up—clean something up.”
At the next job we find ourselves at another apartment complex. We are shown in by somebody on the maintenance team who warns us that we are about to enter a bloody mess. He isn’t wrong. The blood is spread out, trailing between the kitchen and the living room.
There are, of course, every year, in every part of the world, attempted suicides. Acted out by people who don’t really want to die, but who want or need the attention. For right or wrong, they need somebody, maybe a parent or a lover, to look away from everything else in their own life and to look at them. Then there are people who truly want to die, but who don’t succeed for whatever reason. There have been people who have shot themselves in the head and survived, sometimes even removing part of their frontal lobe with a bullet, but they didn’t remove enough, and so … There are others who were found and were rushed to hospital and saved. But then there are those who want to die and who want to make sure they are dead. They do not want to be found and saved, and so take precautions against it happening.
This job appears to be one such case.
A man slit his wrists. Going by the amount of blood and the trail left by it, he spent some time moving around after cutting his wrists. There is a lot of blood in the bath and all over the bathroom floor. There’s also a lot of blood in the kitchen, again all over the floor but also up on the cabinets. There’s a large pattern of blood on the side of the fridge and dried-up pools in and around the sink. All this blood, for me, represents certain death. Surely you couldn’t lose this amount of blood and survive? That said, this guy was found hanging from the light fixture in the bathroom.
I start work in the kitchen (fully clad, this time, in protective clothing), armed with a stiff brush, a pressure can of chemical enzyme, and several rolls of industrial tissue.
“Alan, it’s pretty simple,” says Jake. “Spray the enzyme on the blood, let it get to work. The blood’s all dry and the enzyme basically just breaks the blood down, then scrub with the brush until there’s no more dry blood, and wipe off with the tissue.” Jake watches me as I apply a few squirts of enzyme. “You see.” He smiles. “We’re just glorified janitors, really.”
I start with the refrigerator, pulling it out so that I can get to the blood that has dripped down the side. I try to get a grip on the fridge without actually touching any of the blood. I am sweating as I jig the fridge from side to side. Swearing at the doors that keep opening with my efforts. I pull the right side, gain an inch, but lose half of that inch as I try to edge the left side forward. I am huffing and puffing and at best making half an inch at a time. But the farther out I get it, the easier it comes. Finally I put all my strength into it, drag it out with a screech, and notice that my hand and arm have smeared their way through the blood on the side. I am wearing the suit and protective gloves, but I had been hoping I could get through this task without actually touching the blood. I thought I could spray the enzyme from a distance and then use such a big clod of tissue that I would not actually get too close to the blood itself. Which is pretty optimistic, when you think about it.
Blood comes off surfaces like this, the fridge, really easily, which aids me in my attempt not to think about what I’m doing. The job isn’t so much removing the sight of blood; it’s as much about killing all the bacteria left behind. As Jake told me, the cleaners never know what illnesses the dead had when alive, and so removing all traces of blood and body fluids, with regard to health issues, as far as I am concerned, is a serious aspect of the work.
The fridge is clean in no time. I stand back and admire my work, wishing, given how easy the task was, that I had not been so keen. Out of the corner of my eye I can see the bloody kitchen cabinets and I know they will not be so simple.
The cupboards are old and very, very plain. There’s no pattern or decorative styling at all. Just flat brown surfaces with small brass ball-like handles in the corners of the doors. There’s little to no varnish left on them. When cleaning blood off kitchen cabinets I imagine you would appreciate some varnish. I know I would, because right now I am scrubbing and scrubbing, but the blood has soaked in over a period of days, and unlike the fridge I see little fruit for my labors. It’s hard, sweaty work. Already I can see that it takes a very special kind of person to do this job. Not simply because of the ghastliness of it, but because the results of your grind often come at a slow pace. I can be spurred on if I see quick results, but this endless toil for such slow gains is thwarting my will to continue. And these are kitchen cabinets; it’s not like I am working on a ceiling with my hands above my head.
Neal and his crew make it look so easy.
It reminds me a little of when I used to go around my neighborhood cleaning cars for pocket money. Sometimes you’d get a really muddy mess. Even then I never really had the staying power. I’d clean the parts you could see, but that was it. I was a surface man. I noticed after a while that I knocked only on the houses that had relatively new cars on the drive, because it was so easy to make them sparkle. Of course, this isn’t a good target customer for a car washer. My earnings plummeted and I had to find another weekend job, one that didn’t involve any kind of cleaning. The point here is, if I ever really made it onto the Crime Scene Cleaners team, I think Neal would fire me for shoddy workmanship in no time at all.
I am pretty exhausted by the time I have the kitchen counter free of blood. My hands are sore and cramping. I feel like that really should be good enough. But I can see around the sink, where the metal meets the counter, that there are still traces of blood. They are tucked right into the metal. Surely we should just pull these cabinets out and dump them? Can we really be expected to clean in these grooves? Would anybody notice if I just left them?
Luckily for me, I get pissed off. I grab a regular table knife from the drawer, wrap it in an enzyme-soaked cloth, and start scratching away at the blood around the sink. Sweat is dripping from my face, but I realize that this is the only way to succeed: to get angry, to allow myself to get angry.
Eventually I remove all traces of blood from the wooden surfaces. As I tackle the inside of the sink area—which, while I know it is going to be a simple job, is by far the bloodiest—I have the smell of blood stuck in the back of my throat. It’s making me sick. I can’t now help but think about the suicide, the person, the method, the pain, and I think that to do this job properly you have to just treat the blood as matter. You have to avoid putting a person to it. It can either be red (or quite often brown) stuff that you’re cleaning, or it can be a person, the choice is up to you. But being new to this, I can’t ignore it, so the choice is not up to me. Which is why I find myself doubled over and retching. The smell combined with my imagination is simply too much.
I would like, at this point, to offer some sound advice: if you are ever to contemplate such work, and you know you may, in the early days, be a little weak in the stomach, make sure you eat something beforehand. I mention it only because I didn’t have the foresight to eat, and right now both sides of my neck are locked in jerking spasms that come in agonizing waves. The back of my throat is clucking and straining. My stomach seems to be fighting the urge to come flying out of my mouth, and this resistance is causing such muscle cramps that I feel I will soon have my first-ever six-pack abs. And my chest, why it feels the need to compete in
this painful arena I don’t know, but it’s in there giving it everything it has. I sense that if this doesn’t end soon I am going to tear a thousand muscles and cause myself permanent damage.
“Are you okay?” Jake asks, running into the room, his face expressing genuine concern.
I wave an arm at him and try to gasp some kind of communication between gags. I want him to know that it looks (and feels) more serious than it is. In reality, it is nothing more than an overzealous dry gag.
He stands there watching, seriously wondering if I am going to die right in front of him. His eyes light up for a minute and I realize that he is considering the Heimlich. I mean really? Can he believe that, surrounded by all this blood and horror, I have been snacking on the job here?
Finally the gag ends and I suck air back into my lungs with a loud wheeze.
“Dude, that was fucked up!” Jake says, as I lean against the wall and gather myself.
I am so relieved that I want to laugh. Yes, it was the most fucked-up dramatic dry gag in the history of dry gags. But I survived it and find myself overjoyed.
“I’ve opened the windows, but maybe you should just sit outside. I’ll finish up,” Jake says.
“No, I’m going to finish,” I assure him. “I’m all right now. It’s just, wow …” I have to stop for more panting. “Those dry gags are quite something.”
“Dude, take a walk. Go and drink a soda.”
My body aches. I feel like I’ve pulled several muscles. But Jake needs to be assured that I am okay, so I straighten up and try to get control of my breathing. It takes some convincing, but finally he lets me continue. After the sink there really isn’t that much to do anyway. The thing most on my mind now is the awkwardness brought about by my vomiting. I try to cover the awkwardness up with the metallic sound of my brush scrubbing the inside of the sink.
