It's a dirty job, but they want to do it.
WHO ARE YOU going to call?
When a homicidal maniac's shotgun blasts a victim's flesh on walls and windows? When a sickly suicidal fillets his arteries in bed, drowning mattress and carpet in hemoglobin laced with hepatitis? When a weird recluse expires and decomposes for two weeks in a disheveled dwelling that's waist-deep in fetid debris and the feces of nine generations of cats?
Crime Scene Cleaners! trauma-scene disposal is gobbling up its competition like hungry maggots on a fresh cadaver. with sturdy solvents, helmeted in full-face filter respirators, costumed in white nonporous disposable suits –
"Gore sells," says the owner who has franchised his bloody business to nine other cities in the United States, with an additional six in negotiations. "We play on fear." Smithers brazenly promotes his scrub-the-blood service with large crimson letters.What's the job like? Gross, nauseating, depressing? Smithers seems stupefied by the public's wimpy reaction to his necrotic vocation. "Emotionally, I don't have a problem with this work at all. Human tragedy? I swim in this crap; it doesn't bother me,
Eee-yuck! Brains splattered everywhere – how do you clean that? "Brain dries like cement," the Crime Scene Cleaners tycoon sighs. "Solidifies like superglue. We use putty knives to knock down the high parts, then firm-bristled brushes to scrub it. If that doesn't work, we bring in a giant truck-mounted steam-injection machine that melts the dried brains and blood and sucks it up into a chemical treatment tank. And if a carpet is too gore-soaked to save, we cut out the stained chunks with razor blades."
Smithers explains. "Last month we cleaned up a murder-suicide in Union City, after a guy used a shotgun on his wife and himself. He totaled two different bedrooms, and he ruined all the furniture. Cleaning it required moving three truckloads of waste and seven hours of scrubbing – it was one of the most exhausting jobs I've ever done."
"After Travolta and Jackson wasted the dude in the car, they brought in 'the Wolf,' played by Harvey Keitel, who cleaned up the mess, and I realized, that's it! That's what I'll do! I started soon after that, working out of my El Sobrante home with just Simple Green and a scrub brush. I did the first 700 jobs by myself." Smithers believed that he could compete because "frankly, the competition didn't know how to do marketing. I hit the pavement hard, talking death. I bought lots of addresses, and I mailed out trifolds to any business that might have a bloody problem someday."
Smithers explains that his price tag for cleaning up a mortal mess "depends on severity. It's more gruesomely tedious to repaint a room that has blood showered on the ceiling from a gun blast than it is to simply wash out a bathtub." Generally his bill runs from $100 to $575. A peculiarly ghastly budget item is the expense of burning gore in Oakland's medical waste incinerator: although it costs only $3 to $7 a pound to inflame bloody gunk, the oven operators demand an accumulated minimum of 100 pounds. Sixty percent of Crime Scene Cleaners' business is suicide, highest demographic being men in their late 30s and early 40s who snuff themselves with a gunshot or a wrist slashing. But, he adds, "There's always also old people, sick people, and alone people." An additional 33 to 37 percent are accidents, with homicide accounting for the final 3 to 7 percent.