Charlie Huston: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

I dropped the empty creamer in the bag.

He drove us a couple blocks up Mansfield, past several two-story apartment buildings stacked like stucco cakeboxes in pink, aqua, terracotta, yellow and mint. Across Fountain the street gentrified slightly into a sprinkle of trendified craftsmans and renovated 1930s Spanish revival apartment blocks that were going to be squeezing out the drifters at the BHS Hollywood Recovery Center in due course. He stopped at the corner next to the Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse, and I watched some skater kids across the street working the steps of the Liberal & Household Arts Building at Hollywood High. He found a hole in the commute traffic and turned right, the Hollywood Hills rising just north of us, early summer smog settled on their tops. We started and stopped our way down past a few motels and strip clubs and stopped for the light at Highland.

A school bus crossed the intersection.

I closed my eyes for a moment, when I opened them it was gone. I looked down the street, knowing it must have just turned the corner, but unable to keep myself from thinking other thoughts. Thinking about the Flying Dutchman. Ghost ships. Haunted freighters, lost souls that manifest and dissolve, unbidden. Just the usual.

The light changed and I sipped my coffee.

– So where we headed?

Gabe glanced at his right blind spot and changed lanes.

– Koreatown. Code enforcement. Second day. Guy had stuff piled floor to ceiling. No egress. Blocked himself out of his own bathroom. Been filling gallon milk jugs with piss. Shitting in little individual ziplock bags.

– Ah, man, Po Sin said it wasn't a real shit job!

He looked at me, my face reflected in the mirrored lenses below the deep, horizontally scored forehead and cropped graying hair.

He looked back at Sunset.

– He lied.

Po Sin was waiting when we got there, studying several large red splotches of paint on the back and sides of his Clean Team van.

He watched us get out of Gabe's wheels and pointed at the van.

– Motherfucker.

Gabe walked over, pulling the tie from his neck and folding it into a neat roll that he tucked in his pocket. He touched the paint with the tip of his finger, leaving a slight imprint.

– Couple hours after midnight. Maybe three or four AM.

Po Sin kicked one of the van's tires.

– Motherfucker.

I took a look. The paint covered the name of the company on both sides of the van and dripped down over the phone number and web address.

– That sucks.

Po Sin turned his face to the sky.

– Motherfucker!

Gabe picked a scrap of yellow rubber that was stuck in the paint.

– Water balloon.

– Motherfucking water balloon!

– Where was it parked?

Po Sin pointed north.

– At the shop. Around back. They didn't just drive by and heave one out the window, they parked, got out, walked around, and pelted it. Only reason they didn't get the windshield was because I had it nosed in against the fence back there.

– No one at the shop?

Po Sin walked to the back of the van, taking a set of keys from his pocket.

– Someone was supposed to be at the shop. Someone was sure as hell supposed to be at the motherfucking shop!

He pointed a finger at the sky.

– They're asking for it. There is no denying they are asking for it! And they are going to fucking get it!

Gabe hooked a thumb in a belt loop of his black slacks.

– How you want to go about it?

Po Sin looked down from the sky.

– Eye for an eye.

Gabe took the sunglasses from his face. Crease-cornered eyes, the faded black outline of a tear tattooed beneath the left. He nodded.

– OK, I'll make some calls.

Po Sin looked again at the van.

– Motherfucker.

He unlocked the van and opened the rear doors.

– Let's get to work.

He pulled out three white packets and handed one to me and one to Gabe. I watched them shake theirs out until they unfolded into paper jumpsuits. Po Sin's the size of a mainsail, Gabe's meant for a normal human. I did the same and stepped into mine and watched how they tied the flaps on theirs. I was tying mine closed when I heard a long loud rip and watched Po Sin pull a huge roll of duct tape around and around his ankle, sealing the leg of the Tyvek suit to the top of the plastic shoe cover he'd slipped over his boot. He did the same with his other ankle. And then both wrists. And then the neck. He passed the tape to Gabe who did likewise.

Gabe offered me the tape.

– Do it yourself, or need a hand?

I got taped up and hooded and Gabe showed me how to fit the goggled filter mask over my mouth and nose and I followed him into the hotel, Po Sin trailing behind us, glancing back at his vandalized van.

– Motherfucker.

The roaches swarmed me. The first bag I shifted disturbed their routine and they swarmed me, simultaneously revealing what my feet had been crunching on when I walked into the dark apartment, and what the constant background rustling sound was caused by.

So I freaked a little.

A couple hundred cockroaches come spilling out of the shit-encrusted nooks and crannies of a dead shut-in's festering den and start racing each other up your legs to see which can be the first to crawl in your facial orifices and see if you don't freak.

Po Sin watched the freaking. Stood there with his arms folded, framed by towers of piled trash and bundled newspapers and plastic gallon milk jugs filled with urine, and watched all the cockroaches in creation crawling on me trying to find holes they could climb into.

– Can't handle this, you can't handle the job.

He stood in front of me, his torso being populated by swarms of roaches combining into continents, pieces breaking off and drifting and forming with other masses. The geophysical history of the earth enacted by roaches on a globe of a man.

He extended an arm and elegantly brushed a few from the sleeve of his Tyvek.

– Worse things to be covered in, man. Let me tell you.

Gabe walked past me, edging down the open corridor between the piles of refuse, making for the dim light at the back of the place where they'd excavated a couple windows the day before.

– Lots worse things.

He disappeared, lost in bugs and towering waste.

Po Sin watched me.

And, not wanting to at all, I thought about worse things.

Po Sin crunched over.

– OK?

The legs of one of the roaches tickled the exposed rim of skin running between my filter mask and the edge of the Tyvek hood. I flicked it to the floor and stomped on it. And, incidentally, about a dozen more.

– Yeah, I'm fine. You're a dick, but I'm fine.

He nodded and pointed toward the back of the apartment.

– Then head back there. Gabe is bagging the shit. Start hauling it down to the service elevator.

I started down the hall, the smell of rancid crap already seeping through the mask.

– You suck, Po Sin!

Appearing in front of me, Gabe shook his head.

– Here's the thing. You don't want to yell like that. It will break the seal of your mask around your chin and jaw. They'll get in. You take off the mask to get them off and they'll be all over your face. Be in your nostrils.

Roaches in your nostrils. Pretty bad. But still, like I say, there are worse things.

So I got to work.

I hauled shitbags. A lot of them. The shut-in who lived in the place, he must have shit like a dozen times a day. He must have eaten nothing but beans and broccoli and topped it off with Müeslix.

Hauling the big black garbage bags filled with little bags filled with shit between the teetering masses of putrefying garbage, the smell of fermenting waste in my nose hairs, I tried to do some math. I tried to figure out how many years the guy must have been shitting in bags to create this kind of poundage.