by Alan Emmins
“Why do you think you were sick?” Jake asks me, as we load up the truck and get ready to leave.
“It was the smell of the blood,” I tell him. “It just got right to the back of my throat and I could taste it. I couldn’t take it. I was thinking, I have some dead guy’s blood odor in my throat, and that was it, I was off.”
As I step out of my protective suit I notice that I am still a little freaked out by the taste of blood. It’s not like I am going to break into a bout of gagging again. But I am still revolted by the thought, and will probably continue to be so for a long time.
“Dude,” Jake says as he lifts the enzyme canister into the back of the truck. “Dry blood doesn’t smell.”
“It doesn’t?” I ask, wondering if this is good news or bad news.
“I know what that was.” Jake grabs the enzyme tank and drags it closer. He pulls off several squares of tissue and squirts the enzyme onto it. “Smell this,” he says, wafting the tissue under my nose.
One quick, dry gag convulses instantly through my body. Still, I am a little relieved. It wasn’t dead guy in my throat after all, it was the smell of the enzyme mixed with the tissue. It was this scent that led me into a fit of dry vomiting. Now I gag only once. Being aware that it’s just chemicals, I am able to recover quickly. I feel a little stupid with this new knowledge, but happy at the same time.
It seems there is one more small job before we call it a day. Jake and I are off to the city morgue. To show the quality of the work Crime Scene Cleaners do, Neal has his staff clean several morgues every week for no charge. They clean off the gurneys and/or the insides of the vans in which the bodies are transported. They even clean inside the operating theater where the postmortems are done. Today, however, there’s a high-profile postmortem (though they won’t say who it is) being carried out and no unauthorized personnel are allowed into the operating theater. We will be cleaning only the gurneys: the tables on which bodies are stored and worked on. To do this, we have to collect some of them from the freezer.
The doors leading into the freezer room are electric. You stamp on a rubber pad in the floor and they open, you go in, and a few seconds later they close behind you. Never have I been so distrustful of electricity. When you are in a room with well over fifty pairs of dead feet sticking out from beneath cotton sheets, and your only escape is via a powered exit, electricity suddenly seems wholly unreliable.
The bodies here aren’t stored in extra-deep filing cabinets like in the old movies. Instead, the entire room is a refrigerator, hence the automatic door that closes quickly to keep the heat out. Lined up on either side of the room are gurneys with bodies on them. You can’t see the bodies, of course, just the cotton sheets and their feet. Some of these bodies have been in the morgue over a month. Sure, they’re well cooled, but the smell of fifty decaying bodies, I assure you, is not something you want to be associated with.
“Now this smell is exactly what you think it is,” says Jake. “And this isn’t that bad; it’s been a lot worse at times.”
I have noticed that whenever I’m in a room where the odor of decayed human hangs in the air I try not to breathe. I take little sips as if drinking piping-hot coffee while standing outside in freezing temperatures.
In the middle of the freezer room, pushed up against one another at crooked angles, are the used gurneys that need to be cleaned. Jake and I start wheeling them out into the yard.
The gurneys are easy to clean. In fact, most of them don’t even look dirty. There’s the odd dribble of body fluid here and there, but for the most part it’s just a case of dragging them outside, dousing them with enzyme, hosing them down, drying them, and taking them back inside, where they will await the future dead.
It’s a smart move of Neal’s, to offer this service for free. It’s another way of getting the company name out there, and the work is easy.
Jake is keeping up his talk while we clean the gurneys. He is talking about some of the strong smells that have been here at the morgue. He is talking about a time when the freezer was overfilled with bodies. He also tells me about a mortician who works at this facility, noting for the most part her attractiveness. She walks around the corner a few minutes later. She is beautiful. Jake and I both straighten up, smile, and say hello. We come across as ridiculous and we know this because, while sweet about it, the mortician laughs at us.
“In our dreams,” Jake says when she is gone. “Well, in mine. You’d probably do okay, being a writer and all.”
“Hahaha, that’s a myth, Jake. Everybody’s a writer these days. We have become a common cliché and we’re known for being notoriously poor.”
“Yeah, but you’re smart, you’re intellectual. At least … that’s the perception.” Jake pauses. “I mean writers generally, I don’t mean you.”
Jake and I both burst into laughter as we stand outside in the sun. I am hosing down the gurneys, ridding them of their enzyme dribbles, and Jake is drying them with tissue. Aside from my jeans being wet from the hose spray, I am feeling really good. The image of Jake and me in this yard, surrounded by water spray and stainless steel gurneys that glisten in the sun, is one that will stay with me for a long time. I realize, as I laugh with Jake, moving from gurney to gurney, that this is as good a place to be as any. I am enjoying the work now. I am enjoying the company. If ever I find myself wanting to take a year out, to lose or find myself, I am starting to think that this could be the job. Especially now that I have cut my teeth, and got the vomiting out of the way.
A coroner’s van pulls into the yard and Jake and I have to move the gurneys out of the way so the driver can back in, toward the freezer.
“There goes another one,” Jake says, as we watch the back doors open.
Five minutes later we are back in the freezer, lining up the clean gurneys.
“Which one do you think is the new arrival?” I ask Jake, as we look at all the dead feet.
“Well,” he says, surveying the options, “actually there’s a lot of fresh corpses in here right now, it’s pretty hard to tell.”
As the doors close behind us, on our way out of the freezer, we walk to the office to say goodbye, both hoping to see the beautiful mortician again. We do see her, and both dedicate too much time to smiling and waving before leaving the building.
In the truck, as Jake tries to remember where we left my rental car, Jake asks, “Are you sure you don’t want to run in there and get her number?”
“Hahaha, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? To see me crash on my ass?”
“Dude, just tell her you’re a writer. Scoring chicks off being a writer isn’t a myth; you’re just trying to make me feel better.” As Jake puts the truck into drive and edges toward the gate, he adds, “Remember, you’re an intellectual!” and we drive off, leaving the morgue behind and laughing our heads off.
“Hey, Alan, it’s Rachel.”
Last year, when I was in San Francisco my friend, Rachel, gave me her apartment for a week while she was visiting L. A. It was a tiny, cold apartment with an overfriendly cat that I just couldn’t find any love for. While I had told Rachel that I was coming back to San Francisco, I haven’t actually found the time to call her. Now she is inviting me out to dinner with her and her boyfriend. I accept, of course, but have to warn her that should there be some kind of life-ending tragedy in any of the neighboring boroughs I’ll have to leave.
She assures me that she understands.
In the shower I scrub every part of my body for longer than I have ever scrubbed before. I apply shower gel by the fistful. Once suitably raw, I get out, dress, and drive to Rachel’s new house in Twin Peaks.
I love my job. I love traveling around writing articles, meeting weird and wonderful people. But it’s moments like this that I like best, ones that really hit home how lucky I am. For me, there’s nothing quite like driving through an unfamiliar city with a map wrapped around the steering wheel and a coffee in the cup holder. I love everything about it. I love being lost.
I love darting onto the side of the road when I realize I am not where I’m supposed to be and need another, closer, look at the map. I love the cars that honk when I take a turning too late and cut off sharply. I like handling the map. I like the rustling of the paper as I spread it out. I even like the sound the map makes when I accidentally tear it in a bid to get it the right way around. The pen marks and the coffee stains made on previous jaunts are some of my favorite things. Running a red light and screeching to a halt because I was watching the map and not the road seems somehow thrilling, not stupid. I like the goose bumps. I like counting off the streets on the map as I go. But most of all I like turning a corner to discover that I have, even if in a somewhat roundabout way, successfully negotiated another trip.
Twin Peaks is a trendy, expensive district of San Francisco with a lively gay scene and a smattering of wine bars. As I drive through, looking at the many restaurants and bars, I remember from my research that this is the area where the man in the bath, Gary Lee Ober, used to hang out.
I wonder about the void left behind by those who are murdered. Because given a small change in the program, maybe just one coincidence less, perhaps a missed bus, they might not have been murdered. They could still be alive and well, doing what they would normally do. As I drive by I imagine the spaces in these local bars that are still allocated to Gary Lee Ober.
Turning right onto Twenty-fourth Street, I am greeted with one of those ridiculously steep roads that San Francisco is famous for. As this end of the street is quiet, I approach slowly, savoring the moment as I hit the incline at about two miles per hour. My weight shifts from beneath me and like an astronaut in a space rocket I am lying mostly on my back. In front of me I can see a young couple tackling this hill on foot. Instead of taking it head-on, they zigzag across the road from left to right, from right to left, increasing the distance covered at least threefold. They pant as they force their calves into the climb. Then they turn to me as I idle by, laughing at my two miles per hour as if I’m an idiot. I open the window to remind them that I’m not the one zigzagging up the street. But instead I ask them if they would like a ride. They jump in the back.
Acknowledging that this is the closest I will ever come to taking off in a rocket, I start to gather speed and enjoy a Thunderbird moment. Three hundred feet later my passengers get out and thank me for the ride.
A little farther up, I turn right onto Grand View Avenue. Just up on the right is Rachel’s silver Beetle; beyond that, the road disappears into a steep decline. Her new house, which she rents along with four other people, is fantastic. Not least because it has a pool table, but also because it has a great mix of characters in there. There’s a teacher, a dancer, and a community worker. Unlike in Walnut Creek, where my motel is, Rachel’s roommates seem very real and down-to-earth.
We take Rachel’s car and head out to North Beach for some Italian food. North Beach is a part of San Francisco that sits between downtown and the financial district. It’s where the famous City Lights bookstore stands. The neighborhood is famous for being the nucleus of the Beat generation, which spawned such writers as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Kesey. While those days are falling deeper into history, North Beach still has a vibe of something special going on behind every closed door.
North Beach is café society. Columbus Avenue is littered with Italian restaurants that look like they have stood there for decades. Most of the owners are outside trying to drum up trade—though I don’t truly understand why, as most of the restaurants are seemingly packed. But still the Italian men stand sentinel to their establishments, singing and catcalling to the ladies in a bid to beguile them through their doors.
Rachel steers us past another singing Italian man and through the door to his restaurant, Mona Lisa. There’s a sign telling us that any customer who sings “Mona Lisa” all the way to his or her table will get a free glass of wine. But I am not often praised for my chirping, and pass the offer by.
As we sit chitchatting, waiting for our food, sipping our wine, I feel a little distracted. I am not taking every part of the conversation in and am worried that I might appear rude. But what is it? There’s just something there….
I feel relieved when the food arrives. Partly because I haven’t eaten all day, and find myself ravenous, partly because it might help cover up my perplexed disposition.
David is asking me about my day, about why I am cleaning up suicides and why I think people might be interested in reading about it. I’m telling him about how I think death has been packaged in the media. About how the soap operas back home last Christmas were killing off all their biggest stars in bids to win the ratings war. How death has become chic and hairstyled and has morphed into the biggest sales tool modern culture has. I am telling him that I am working with Neal, that I am trying to discover whether he is a product of our death-as-entertainment society or whether he is defining it. Then I notice the hint of something malodorous in the air and look accusingly at Rachel’s ravioli.
Is she really going to eat that? Should she not call the waiter over and demand an explanation?
No. Instead, Rachel pops a ravioli into her mouth and takes a sip of wine. I look at David. Shouldn’t he stop her? She is his girlfriend, after all. They may not have been dating long, but from where I sit, the man needs to demonstrate some chivalry.
Then it occurs to me, as they go back and forth in conversation, even sample each other’s food and offer light moans of approval, that they can’t smell anything.
I look accusingly at my own plate.
My face twists and turns as my nostrils start to contract. Am I really the only one who can smell this?Yes, it occurs to me in a thunderbolt flash. I am the only one who can smell … who can smell … Eric! Eric, decomposed body print on the linoleum, “hepatitis C you later” Eric!
I lean forward and sniff my risotto: it smells of Eric. I raise my glass of wine: it smells of Eric. As discreetly as I can, under the pretense of having an itchy nose and while waffling some rubbish about perverse intrigue, I poke my nose into my armpit. A charming dinner-table gesture, I know, but etiquette aside, guess who I smell? The waiter comes to the table to refill our water glasses. He leans over and I can’t help but notice that he is wearing Eau de Eric.
I excuse myself hastily and dash to the restroom. First, I try to rid myself of the smell by blowing my nose. I take deep breaths as if I won’t get any more oxygen for several minutes; like a freediver I suck the air deep into my lungs. I look at myself in the mirror, make eye contact, take a short run, and lean into the blow, raising the tissue and releasing my lungs through my nasal passages as if in some kind of tribal war dance. Pinch, release, pinch, release, twist, turn, stamp the heel and bow. I grab fresh tissue and have another crack at it.
But the smell seems to be getting stronger.
I run the tap and twist my head so that the water will run into my nose, being careful not to flood my brain. I insert tissues in my nose to dry the nostrils. Twitching like a rabbit, I test the valves. It’s better, but I still smell Eric. So I smear some hand soap on the end of my fingertip and brace myself with my other hand on the sink. I know this will smart, but still, it has to be better than having a dead guy in my nose….
I am glad to report, back at the table with a concerned-looking Rachel and David, that I no longer smell Eric. But then again, nor can I smell my risotto, my wine, or, in fact, anything what-so-bloody-ever.
Job done.
We spent about an hour and a half in the restaurant, heartily covering many topics. But now, as I drive home, I think about nothing but Eric and the fact that I discovered him in my nose. Of course, it was the decayed version of Eric, but it was he, and it was probably the last time he would have an olfactory impact on another human being. It was one thing to leap around the restaurant toilet like an idiot, trying to rid him from my nose, but right now I am struck by his being there at all. It’s as if he wanted to be noticed one more time, it was his last chance to commit himself to a memory.
It’s clear that Eric and I couldn’t be further apart: I am of course alive and well and he is, one hopes, resting in peace. On the other hand, we were in that moment linked to each other, joined together by his last odor. Sure, as he left the stage he was no bunch of roses, but the fact that I was the last to carry his scent feels truly significant. I feel like I was a stage that he stood on as he concluded his last act.
Neal is so often the final curtain on the people he cleans up. How many times over the years has he been the last point of contact? It’s an odd relationship Neal has with the dead. They leave their final mark on the world, and for those who commit suicide, leaving that mark is often a conscious wish. Then Neal comes along and removes all traces of it. He is working against them for the most part, but what he is doing in that final moment is incredibly intimate. His work is the last physical contact the deceased have with this world. The interaction they share is on the limit of human experience. It may not look that way as he sprays and scrubs and sings his songs, but Neal is exposed to the parts of people that nobody else (barring a surgeon, maybe) has seen. Those who choose to die seem to serve themselves up; it is the ultimate offering: here I am, my every thought, desire, and wish is now plastered on the wall, enjoy. But Neal is the one who actually gets up close and personal with that gesture. He is the one targeting all those dreams and depressions with his putty knife. He is the one seeing them off the premises, as it were.
If there is an afterlife I wonder how these dead souls feel about being ushered off by such a man as Neal. If you went out with a big gesture, hoping for maximum impact on a lover or family member, only to be greeted by a singing stranger wielding a putty knife, it would be fair to feel a little cheated. It would turn your grand exit into a bit of a farce. Life’s last joke delivered by the fact that somebody simply must mop up the dead. People can’t be expected to live around the mess, and so out of a basic necessity Neal Smither arrives on the scene.
