The Dead Janitors Club (41 page)

    The sea that day was serenely calm, and only a few straggling reporters remained down below to capture the action that they couldn't see. Standing out on that balcony in the early morning, basking in the solitude, I decided that I liked cleaning up rich people.

    I used the absence of a police presence to really explore the house. Several massive flat-screen TVs took up wall space throughout the home. I might have taken one or three to adorn the walls of my frat bedroom under the auspices that they'd "been contaminated," but Russ's anecdotes on the drive over about his good Christian values had put a halt to any large-scale thievery. I couldn't imagine that he'd last long in the job, with the way Dirk and I conducted business.

    Instead, I involved myself with a stack of bound manuscripts, heaped six high, on the edge of a nightstand. They were screenplays, all written by the father. Eagerly, I thumbed through the top one to get a feel for what Mr. Targus had to offer. It was an action pic, as seen through a sort of Bollywood-esque simplicity, kind of an Indiana Jones adventure with soap-opera melodrama packed in. I was not unsurprised to see that it hadn't sold, as had none of the others—all of a similar vein.

    But the title of that top screenplay, sitting there for weeks surrounded by a decomposing family, caught my eye: "Kill Me Last." I was certain that the father was trying to send a message of his own to a certain dashing and intuitive young crime scene cleaner who worked outside the law, solving cases no one else would touch. But as I was neither dashing nor intuitive, I got my fat, lazy ass back to work.

    After several hours of intensive labor, sweeping and vacuuming up many maggots, we finally had to address the issue in the closet. While Dirk and Russ had scrubbed laboriously the day before, they had simply been unable to get that vermillion stain out of the marble chunks.

    We weren't about to come in with jackhammers under the original bid (though I would have, just for the experience), so Dirk, against his better judgment, called Schmitty for advice. Schmitty was a bad call, because any project we worked on that Schmitty caught wind of meant he would want his cut. And I wasn't about to let him get a piece of our mass-suicide plum.

    Dirk finally came up with the idea of posing a hypothetical situation to Schmitty: if we ever had to scrub a dead woman's guts out of marble, what should we use? Schmitty suggested muriatic acid.

    Muriatic acid is pool acid, used to clean the decks and walls of swimming pools, and found only at the right swimming-pool stores. Fortunately, we were in the rich part of Southern California, which was a haven for swimming pools, so such a store was nearby.

    We bought a five-gallon bucket of the stuff and, not knowing any better (still don't), dumped a good measure of it in concentrated form on the affected tile. Instantly a thick, white, acrid cloud rose from the tile as chemicals reacted with one another in the poorly ventilated closet space.

    We beat feet out of there, fearing the long-term effects of that gas cloud. When the smoke finally cleared, the tile was as vermillion as ever, and we were in possession of a useless three remaining gallons of pool acid. The stain left by that lady wasn't coming out without that aforementioned jackhammer.

    I'm fairly sure she's still in that house to this day. Our saving grace was a line item in the contract: "Due to porous nature of the affected area, residual staining may occur."

The good times hadn't lasted at the frat house. In the time that I'd injured my back and stayed in my room for months recuperating, I'd gone from beloved housemate and dedicated fraternal bro to "that old guy who is past his expiration date and heavily in debt to the chapter."

    A new group of brothers had come into the house and taken over, and I was no longer part of the club. Sure, I still hung out and partied with the herd, but I was no longer an invited presence to outings away from the house. My time had passed, my legend had faded, and I was just another pathetic asshole trying to cling to his glory days.

    Even the cops took notice. One night during a bit of hard partying and beer ponging with the stereo blasting, we were rolled up on by the police. This was a regular occurrence, and I'd gotten to know most of the police officers through wisecracking and smart-ass comments that most of them good-naturedly endured. This night, though, I opened the front door of the house to encounter a police officer I'd never met before.

    "Aren't you a little old to be a frat boy?" the cop asked me with genuine shock. No "Hello," no "Keep it down, motherfuckers," just surprise at my age.

    I affected mock disgust for the benefit of my party mates and said something to the effect of, "Why, Officer! How old do you think I am?"

    "I don't know…twenty-three?" he responded, shrugging and guessing the oldest age he could imagine that some dickhead would still be hanging around a frat house. I was twenty-six.

    Chris had moved out in July of that year, in what had to be the hardest blow to my happiness. Finances finally had overwhelmed him, and, up to his throat in debt, he had loaded up his electric-blue El Camino, which was more lemon than automobile, and made his way back home to Mom and Dad. It was the best thing for him, really, but I was crushed to see him go. Through it all, he'd been my best friend, and we'd weathered many a storm together.

    Now I was alone in the frat house. Anthony, the guy who'd brought me in, had moved out; Christian, the cat-eating insane guy, had moved out; and most of the guys I'd come in with—or had really grown close to—were long gone. Even Donkey Kong was planning his exit to join the military. It had become a place I didn't recognize.

    The house was just coming off a massive probation that we'd incurred for underage drinking. (This means eighteen- and nineteenyear-olds, not eleven-year-olds, okay?) To celebrate, we decided to have a party. It would be the last one that house would ever see.

    The party started innocently enough with just the dedicated few whooping it up lightly in anticipation of the crowds. Some nights the house was so clogged with people that you could hardly get through the maze of grinding girls, wrestling guys, nerds, drunks, and other revelers. That night's party wasn't expected to be any different.

    We'd hung a black tarp across the front entrance to the house, giving us a "reasonable expectation of privacy" per police standards, and there were still beer cans hanging off strands of Christmas lights from our last shindig. Everything was gearing up for the hordes to come charging in and breathe life into the house.

    A little after nine, a ripple went through the few in attendance, noting that the cops were outside and that we were to keep it down. It wasn't a real concern, because cops lived on the row on Fridays and Saturdays, and it wasn't unusual for them to run random checkups.

    That night, though, the police decided that we had in excess of three hundred people at our house, when in fact there weren't more than thirty. The cops never exited their car to make this determination; instead, they ballparked it horribly and shut us down early as a result.

    Since most everyone there was a bro or girlfriend of a bro, we didn't ask anyone to leave but instead turned away most would-be partiers as they arrived. I stayed up for a while having a cigar and being "that weird old guy who keeps trying to look down girl's shirts." Kerry was tired and went up to my room to fall asleep. An hour later, I went upstairs and joined her.

    Sometime after 4:00 a.m., Donkey Kong's brother, Napoleon, who was visiting, came and woke me. "Jeff, it's bad," he slurred, sounding alarmed. "There's some guys downstairs starting trouble, and Dan punched one of them and they won't leave."

    I knew it had to be bad for tough Ernie to come and wake me, so I ran downstairs. I was usually the guy contacted for such emergencies, as I'd been in the midst of a few of them before.

    When I got on scene, I saw two things: 1. Donkey Kong stalking back and forth in a state of severe frustration, and 2. three frat guys holding back a stranger whose face was gushing blood. I didn't know what the stranger had been thinking, because Donkey Kong had at least fifty pounds of hard muscle on the guy and a whole heap of wrestling knowledge.

    While this was a surprising matchup, it wasn't a surprising situation—when you're in a fraternity, drunk people often show up looking for a fight. We're sort of a proving grounds for those goddamned townies.

    I knew we had to get the stranger separated from the group, several of whom were beginning to get less interested in restraining the frothing bleeder and more interested in pounding his ass. Also being restrained in the scrum was the bleeder's friend, a loudmouthed guy who kept screaming, "Don't hurt my friend," at anyone who would listen. I had size on everyone there, so I stepped in and put my arm around the bleeding guy, leading him politely but firmly off the property.

    "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you," he screamed in my face, spitting blood across my cheeks. He tried punching me, but I was used to handling drunks from my club days and kept him away. His friend followed behind us, now almost crying and begging me not to hurt him.

    I yelled back that I wouldn't clobber the guy, but that he had to leave the frat house or he would get hurt. The friend was sober enough to comprehend that and attempted to plead with his blood-soaked friend, whom I'd marched out to the sidewalk.

    Not being happy with a forced exit, the bleeder jumped back on our lawn and charged me, calling me a faggot and trying to entice me to fight. I could have beaten him to the ground—not because I'm a badass, but because he was drunk and I was sober. The upper hand was easily mine. Instead, I pulled out my phone and called the police.

    In the past, I never would have done such a thing. But life had taught me that it was simply easier and smarter to just call the police and save myself the headache. Maybe I was too old to be in a frat after all.

    Explaining to the dispatcher that a bleeding drunk was trespassing on our property and making threats, I started to give her the house information when the bleeder came to his senses and allowed his friend to take him off the lawn. I canceled the cops and hung up. Down the block, we could hear the guy punching car windows as he was dragged away.

    "He was in my face," Donkey later confided. "He was screaming at me, and he wouldn't leave. I kept pushing him away, and he kept coming back and talking shit to me…Finally, I hit him."

    "How many times did you hit him?" I asked, the guy's blood still spattered across my face.

    "Just once."

    Several months beforehand, I'd had Donkey Kong punch me as hard as he could, just to see how hard he could hit. It fucking hurt a lot, and that was in the arm. The bleeder's senses were probably dulled by liquor that night, but I had to bet he'd be in agony the next morning.

    Calm settled over the inhabitants of the house, so I showered and went back to bed, chalking it up to just another night on Frat Row.

    On Monday the events started coming back to haunt us. In the beginning it was only the party, which hadn't been "cleared" with the school. Then it was the cops showing up and "finding three hundred people milling around." The actual story didn't matter to the Greek liaison (a school-hired intermediary between the Greek system and the campus), a prick who was new to the job.

    He was still deliberating our punishment when a call came later in the week from the bleeder's mom. Furious that her son was now missing his two front teeth and had a broken nose (that sounded about right), she was thinking about suing the fraternity for medical damages and going after Donkey Kong personally.

    When the frat leaders had initially told their side of the story to the Greek liaison, they'd neglected to mention the punching incident. They figured that it was an isolated event and that hopefully the bleeder would be man enough to accept that he'd gotten drunk in a place where he had no allies. (He was a friend of a friend of a bro, but neither the bro nor the friend was at the party.)

     In a different frat house and without my intervention, he could have gotten a lot worse. Instead, he whined to his mom, who whined to the school, and a lot of fuel got added to our fire. The Greek liaison, in his determination to make a statement about how he wouldn't tolerate such conduct, immediately decided to come down hard on us.

    It was a dark time around the frat house. Already morale was at a low from our previous suspension, and we were certain to get the book thrown at us. We figured it couldn't get much worse…and then came the allegations of hazing.

    Sigma Nu was founded as a non-hazing fraternity, a place where men behaved like men. We didn't force guys to consume dangerous amounts of water, alcohol, or anything else. All the activities we engaged in were silly, harmless, and mostly non-degrading.

    There is a difference between "hazing," which puts people in challenging situations to foster brotherhood while building respect for the institution, and harassing, which makes naked men walk in single-file lines each grabbing the cock of the guy ahead of him through the guy's legs (that "elephant walk" I told you about earlier). Or leaving people out in the desert to walk home with no shoes on. Shit like that is just mean and sometimes deadly.