The Dead Janitors Club Read online

  Finally it's your turn and the clerk apologizes politely, if not seemingly a bit insincerely. You let him reach over the counter and into your cart to grab your purchases so he can scan them, refusing him any help whatsoever. All the while, you tell him how irate you are at having been so shabbily treated. He apologizes again and offers to get the manager to help make it right, but you are tired, and the manager will most likely just be a more slovenly, older version of this idiot who stands before you.

  You aren't going to go down that road again, and you tell the clerk this in a biting, grating tone that perfectly conveys how you feel. As he sets the last of your bags in your cart, you make a tart aside about how you don't know if you will be a repeat customer anymore. He blinks a couple of times and the corners of his mouth twinge, and yet he says nothing other than to wish you a better day in a flat, emotionless tone.

  Mostly forgotten, you steer out of the store, pushing your cart away and feeling better now that you are almost finished with your day and had the chance to do a little venting at some moron's expense. Really you aren't a bad person, or even a mean person, but sometimes life doesn't go your way and you have to let someone know it.

  If you can picture that scenario perfectly, then know that I, Jeff Klima, hate you. I more than hate you, in fact. If you had tried that scenario outside of that retail environment, I would have beaten you to death. I still might. You see, for two and a half years I was that clerk at a Beverages & More, an upscale chain of wine shops in Orange County, California.

  You mistakenly thought that the clerk, me, was responsible for the corporate policy that understaffed the store and required that the glassware bought by the customers preceding you had to be wrapped nicely in bubble wrap or paper bags to avoid breakage.

  Know that while you had to stand there inconveniently for ten minutes or less, I had been standing there for five hours. And the bullshit amount that they called my paycheck didn't make it any more pleasurable or tolerable. And believe me, I was trying to do something about my situation.

  But I didn't have an SUV—I was in debt up to my ears from rent and school tuition that didn't come anywhere near getting paid on what I made in a month or a year, and it wasn't easy trying to be responsible and stay alive free of mom and dad while driving around in a beat-up Chevy Cavalier that I paid for myself.

  And you didn't make it any easier on me when you were buying Bordeaux that you didn't need to add to your collection. You made me feel on the outside what you must feel like on the inside: a real miserable son of a bitch.

  If, on the other hand, you can't picture that little scenario, then welcome aboard. You seem like a friendly, cheerful person, and I can definitely deal with more of that in the world of the living. So if you're interested in blood, guts, funny stories, and the crazy couple of years I had going from being a shat-upon liquor store clerk to becoming a bad-ass crime scene cleanup guy, then hang the fuck on, because I've got a hell of a tale to tell you.

  CHAPTER 2

  so you want to be a crime scene cleaner

  All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. —Aristotle

  The number-one question I get asked about the crime scene business is "how can you do it?" Typically I give the polite, short answer: "Someone has to," accompanied by a wan shrug. But in truth, that isn't even the tip of the iceberg. I do it for two very good reasons, and though I can't pretend they are the main reasons, they definitely are part of it.

  I was born on September 11, 1981, the son of a magician and a psychologist. My father was a stage performer, and my mother was a school psychologist who analyzed the inner workings of children's minds, so it was no surprise that I wound up a bit odd.

  In fact, my whole family is a bit odd. Everyone is on medication for a myriad of very real disorders, with the exception of me. And I probably should be, too, but I'm terrified that medication will dull the spark that makes me the individual that I want to be. Or at the very least, I'm worried that medication will shrink my penis.

  There are six people in my immediate family: my parents, who are still happily married; my older sister, Shaine, one of those religious types with a bipolar disorder; me; and my younger brothers, Chris and Ben, both creative types like me, who are prone to bouts of depression, anger, and attention deficit disorder. We're probably bipolar-lite, the lot of us.

  We grew up in Sun Valley, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, in a house my mother inherited when her parents died. While it had been an ideal place for my mom to grow up with her brothers and sisters, the neighborhood had long since been seized by gangs, and I don't mean those crazy-fun dancing gangs from West Side Story.

  By the time we were born, the area had become a dangerous place to live, a ghetto, where bullets zinged down alleys in pursuit of victims and street brawls with chains and bats were commonplace.

  My parents once told me a story of how my sister Shaine and I, roughly aged three and four, were playing in the backyard of our little house on Haley Street. They say I walked into the house asking my parents where the kitty cat was. My mom wanted to know why.

  "Because a man out back wants to see Shaine's pussy," I said.

  My dad flew outside in time to chase some creep back over our six-foot concrete wall. It wasn't the last straw, but it was damn close.

  In January 1990 we packed our bags and moved north to the very top of California. Eureka was a charming little burg, nestled between the mountains and the bay, with a population somewhere around twenty-eight thousand. My mom had visited Eureka in her youth and had always wanted to move there. For better or worse, it was the polar opposite of Los Angeles.

  In Los Angeles I had been a popular kid on the playground, funny and well liked by the ethnic mix of low-income urchins who attended Canterbury Elementary School. But those Eureka kids were different. To them I was just another poor, big-city kid from far away, looking to get invited to their birthdays and clog up the dodgeball court with my presence. The elementary school in Eureka already had plenty of well-liked, funny kids and didn't seem to want to welcome another one, so I switched to the second most natural role for me, the quiet loner.

  Ricky Moses was one of my first friends in town. We met at a Mormon church. We were just five days apart in age, but we truly bonded over religion…or, rather, our dislike of it. Both of us were raised Mormon, and our parents made the two of us attend the church services, which was an absolute ruin of a beautiful Sunday. So naturally we clicked in thinking up methods to find our way out of the church and into the redwood forest surrounding it.

  Ricky was a bad kid in a good way. His round face, overloaded with freckles that ran clear up to his curly red hair, always reflected the fact that Ricky didn't give a damn about authority, which was something that impressed me immensely. I instantly became the Tom Sawyer to his Huck Finn.

  Religion hadn't been a problem for me in Sun Valley, because none of my school buddies' parents allowed them to come over to my house, thanks to its ghetto location. So church was where I went to be with kids my own age. I didn't like getting dressed up every Sunday morning, but I didn't know any other reality.

  When I moved to Eureka, though, my eyes were opened to the splendor that was a Sunday afternoon. Kids were out riding bikes, exploring, signing up for peewee football, or just lounging and basking in their freedom. At the Klima house, however, Sunday was "family day," a day when we all hung out with each other, couldn't have friends over, and couldn't leave the house, other than to go play among ourselves in the backyard.

  Church evolved from my social life into my social prison. Worse, with the exception of Ricky, all of the other kids at church whom I could socialize with were feebs and wieners.

  But Ricky was like a twelve-step program for me that combated my naturally shy disposition, a personality trait that I inherited from my mother's side of the family, one that hadn't yet formed while I was living in Sun Valley. My brothers and sister were all performers, taking after my father, so they had all adapted and made
friends easily in Eureka. Ricky was all I had. So when Ricky joined Boy Scouts, I joined Boy Scouts, too, even though my heart wasn't in camping or tying knots or earning merit badges. Eventually scout campouts became cathartic for me while giving Ricky all the more opportunity to get into trouble through such activities as pooping where we shouldn't or stealing other troops' tents. Fishing poles were another frequently heist-worthy item, made easier by the fact that they could easily be thrown away after use. Ricky was a hell of a friend and got me into some crazy (and scatological!) adventures that, left to my shyness, I would otherwise not have known.

  Ricky got into drugs at a ridiculously young age, though, which was an adventure that I was too afraid to join him on. When I was just out of the sixth grade and just through my school's anti-drug D.A.R.E. program (which had made perfect sense to me), Ricky brought a bag of marijuana along on a campout.

  He was insistent that we smoke it, but I only knew enough about marijuana to know that smoking it at age eleven was pretty much the last thing we should do. Instead, I coerced Ricky into selling it to the two teenagers who ran the campsite where we were staying. Needless to say, they were all too delighted to indulge in what was probably mostly just stems and trim.

  The end of our friendship pretty much came when we were about thirteen and Ricky's dad accused me of breaking into his garage and four other garages along the six-block span between our houses. It was a fair assumption at the time, because I had turned into a pretty reckless kid with a sneering attitude toward any authority figures in the church. His parents and my parents forbade us from seeing each other, and apparently I was still just enough of a mama's boy to obey.

  Ricky and I fell out of contact, although I occasionally ran into him when we both had the small-town good fortune to attend the same high school. He had been held back in first grade or kindergarten at the elementary school he attended, so I was already established by a year in high school when I ran into him again.

  He had made further exploration into the drug world, and we had become two vastly different people, as I was still happily drug free and writing for the school newspaper. Still, we always said hi to each other when we passed in the halls.

  By the time Ricky's sophomore year rolled around, he was trying to get back with his ex-girlfriend and kick the drugs, which seemed like a pretty good move for him. So it was an enormous surprise for me to arrive at school one morning and find out that Ricky was dead.

  The previous day, he had called the fire department, where his father worked as a volunteer fireman, and asked them to come clean up his body before his mom got home and found it. Then he shot himself. He was sixteen years old, younger than me by five days no longer.

  After the funeral, his father and I talked for the first time since he had accused me of B&E all those years before, and we made everything as right as it could possibly be under the circumstances. Now every time I go up to visit my parents, who still live in Eureka, I stop by Ricky's grave and marvel about all the wonderful things that I have seen and done and learned in the years since his death, and that I wish he could have experienced as well.

  Ricky made a choice, though. Christopher Simons never even got to do that much.

  * * *

  Finally having decided that small-town life was too small for me, I moved down to Santa Clarita, a northern suburb of Los Angeles. For the nineteen-year-old man that I was, full of piss and Fritos, Southern California had always felt just a bit more like home. All my aunts and uncles lived there, and besides, I knew that if I was going to become a bigwig in advertising, like I planned to, I'd have to be in a major metropolitan area.

  The move also completely freed me from the indoctrination of the church, which was, in hindsight, the sweetest part of all. Once I had turned eighteen, I was no longer required to go to church by my parents, who hoped that by my eighteenth birthday I would have discovered my spiritual side and would want to go willingly. Nope, I was a non-Mormon on midnight of September 10.

  By the morning of the 11th, I had practically forgotten what a Mormon looked like. I escaped before they could get their "secret underwear" on me. Mormons are friendly people who mean well, but I smoke cigars, drink whiskey, and cuss like a shit farmer with a sore dick. I like to think I was rejecting them before they could reject me.

  The first opportunity I had upon moving back to Los Angeles, I got a job at a porn shop. My parents weren't all that happy about it and chalked it up to petty defiance, but they were seven-hundred-plus miles away and I was looking to sow my wild oats.

  Porn fascinates me. My relationship with porn is one-sided (as most relationships with porn usually are, ba-dum-chee). Strangely, I'm not that interested in actually looking at the porn itself. Watching some party girl get anally reamed from multiple angles by a bunch of well-hung meatheads, I just end up thinking about whether or not that girl will have to wear a diaper when she gets older.

  It's just the idea of porn and the world of people who watch or participate in it, or both, that I love. I don't know whether it is the effect of porn's forbidden aspect on my force-fed religious soul, or whether it is that I have always been shy and awkward around girls and am shocked to witness folks who had no shyness or inhibitions whatsoever.

  At the porn shop, we had a DVD player beneath the counter to make sure that the DVDs people were returning were really defective and not just boring. The other employees used to sit and watch porn on it for hours. On my shifts, I would smuggle in Disney musicals.

  Don't get me wrong; I've happily watched far more than my fair share of porn and have seen some shit that would make you want to wash your eyes while viewing it. But for me it was always enough to just be around naked people getting fucked. I didn't have to watch them. I knew they were there.

  The store was a really nice place, surprisingly. It was nestled in a little strip mall between a tattoo parlor and a bunch of auto part stores, and the clientele was mostly comprised of upper-middle-class types, both male and female.

  Doctors, lawyers, Hollywood laypeople, and some of those auto part store employees made up the customer base. Frequently, they were more than happy to oblige me, solicited or not, with tales of their sexual misdeeds and fantasies that they probably wouldn't even tell their psychiatrists.

  Average couples came in frequently, and on several occasions normal people in the throes of an affair would frequent the place with their lovers one week and their husbands or wives the next, throwing me a pleading glance not to betray their secrets. It was a high-dollar place, and I sold many women of all ages their very first vibrator, patiently, calmly explaining the sizes and shapes and functions of each, doing my damnedest to make sure their first porn-shop experience was a pleasant porn-shop experience.

  "Dirty Pete," the owner and my boss, was something else entirely. He was an ex-rocker from the eighties whose band had opened for some really huge acts, though he himself had never made it big. With longish, dirty-blond hair that looked like it had been washed with beer more times than with shampoo and a small hoop earring to let the "youngsters" know he was still "with it," Pete had the sad scowl and chubby cheeks of a party animal gone stale. He had drifted into porn and, somewhere along the way, opened up a shop of his own in Santa Clarita.

  Between the drugs he doubtlessly still indulged in and his creepy and constantly suspicious Asian girlfriend, Dirty Pete was an increasingly paranoid individual. On the day after he hired me, he installed closed-circuit video cameras throughout the store that he alone could watch from a briefcase monitor. He somehow "forgot" to tell everyone that the cameras also secretly recorded audio. In addition to being paranoid, Pete was scummy, anal retentive, and prone to yelling at everyone and then apologizing to their faces before talking bad shit about them behind their backs. He was one of those people who would promote you the day before he fired you, just to keep you guessing.

  He was also incredibly secretive and instructed that if anyone called or came in the store looking for "Dirty Pete," I w
as to say I had never heard of him. I'm sure he was in trouble, but I didn't want to guess what kind. I worked for him for two years and never even learned his real last name. But I guess he trusted me somewhat; Dirty Pete had plans to one day run a porno empire and promised me that if I stuck with him and remained loyal, he would make me a millionaire.

  I had other plans, though.

  * * *

  After two years of dually managing Dirty Pete's Santa Clarita shop and another one that he owned down on Melrose Avenue in the heart of Hollywood, I was burned out on the porn industry. If you let it be, porn and hanging out with the porno crowd is a twenty-four-hour party that would have thrown even Ricky Moses for a loop. Everyone parties with everyone, and almost everyone fucks everyone else and does drugs. Fortunately, AIDS was a nonissue because of tight regulations created out of the industry having learned its lesson in years past.

  During those two years, though, even just existing on the fringe of things, I met porn stars, got high, saw many uninhibited customers naked, and learned to use the word "cunt" in a casual conversation about fucking.