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{Bob Malone cleaned up bodies for money. } josh byer From the horse’s mouth: “Not murder victims, or police shootouts. Old people. The homeless. We’d go into an apartment, someone would ascertain that the victim had died of natural causes, and we’d clean the mess up. I used to go home and shower with bleach to get the smell out. Working in an office is worse though. Once we had an old man who had been rotting in his apartment, almost two months. His fatty tissues had broken down, leaking out his face pores and melting into a futon couch. His features were pancaked on the cushion beneath him. It looked like someone had let the air out of his head. He had shrunk. He smelled of dead human. The first time I smelled corpse, I threw up, off and on, for a week. I couldn't keep anything down. If it wasn’t for vitamins and water, I would have died of malnutrition. I threw up so much it didn’t even bother me. I threw up like most people spit out the window of their car. You want a recipe? I got a recipe -- (i)Take bananas and wet garbage, and mash them into snot. (ii) Add malt vinegar. And shit. Any kind of shit is fine. (iii) Leave the mixture in the sun for a week. (iv) Your concoction should smell like the freshly dead. We called the corpse room the cream. We’d walk in a house and ask where’s the cream? People turn into rancid dairy goo when they die (see above recipe). Thomas Gallo, he was this twenty-five year old kid taking “painting” in “college” -- took the job because he thought it would be a good study in human anatomy. On his first night, he ran out of the cream and cried his tear ducts dry. Then he gagged on his own lack of moisture. Crying out dry really destroys the sinuses. It causes terrible headaches, so Tom took speed. Speed causes headaches too, but they come and go faster. There was one crazy guy, big guy, who I liked a lot. We drove the cream-wagon together for almost six months. Stone we all called him -- not because he was tough, but because he always had weed. He really needed weed. He’d light joints at work, in front of the cops. They’d just turn around. Sometimes they’d get high with him. Sometimes they had their own weed. Theirs was always better than his. They never shared. Eventually, Stone lost it. A dead child in a locked bedroom. It was too much truth for him. It broke his mind. I’m retching in the backyard flower garden of this duplex complex when Stone bursts out of the cream and starts tearing the place up. Ripping fistfuls of drywall out. He throws a bookcase through a door. Sixty thousand dollars of damage. He used a couch to break a TV, man. Think about that. It was like watching the Hulk. I quit a week later, while we were mopping up corpse out in North Vancouver. Some Fortune 500 suit had gotten pinned under his own garage door. He screamed and screamed, this one -- but his estate was so big and walled off that no one was within earshot. He looked like me. A lot like me. Like a brother or a first cousin. Fuck this shit, I thought, Fuck this shit forever. People used to ask me to tell them dead people stories. All the time. Clubs. Bars. Parties. Family dinners. So I would, I’d tell them everything. I was familiar with death. I accepted it. I needed to. I had rent to pay and steaks to buy. But these people with their fun questions, they’d get all huffy-puffy. Call me a sick fuck. Stare. Stop returning my phone calls. Word got around. I had a birthday party and the only people who showed up were popo and bag-and-taggers. Enough was enough. These days, I work drive-thru at a burger joint, but at least I can laid.” |
