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Alan EmminsA DUDE GOT HIS FREAK ON"What we got? Oh looky here! Chicks with dicks. Dude brought his own DVD player. That shit’s a newer model than mine. Can you believe that shit?”  Neal surveyed the room while holding on to several DVD cases with covers for transvestite porn. On the bed the contents of a bag had been poured out. There were several porn magazines, the newest issue of Transformation, lots of un-opened bills and a single rubber breast implant. On the table by the wall were two coffee cups and an upturned vial that looked as if it had held cocaine. The table itself had a film of white dust over most of its surface. There was an empty carton of Parliament cigarettes and I noticed a packet of pills that had been half emptied. In one of the cups, floating in water, were many of the pills. While the bed looked like something left by an unruly teenager who couldn’t wait to get out and see his friends, the table showed sadness. A white dusty void of loneliness befitting a room where somebody had recently killed themselves. Of course there’s no telling why the occupant had decided to take his own life. Was it the unpaid bills? Or was it some deeper sexual turmoil? You and I will never know. You and I don’t need to know. The occupant’s name was James. “Fuck. Dude got his freak on! One last freaky blow out before he went. Fucking freak! You see the table there Alan, you know what that is?” asked Neal “Crack!” But Neal appeared somewhat confused as he paced around the room, searching. The initial phone call said there was lots of blood to clean up. Yet the room, while disheveled, was not bloody. “Maybe the fucker OD’d - I hate the bitches that OD. I can’t make any money off an OD!” said Neal as he pushed the bathroom door slowly open. “Oh I take it back, you weren’t a bitch. Come take a look at this Alan, this is ya typical bleeder.” I froze for a second. My only contact with death to date had been the death of my grandmother when I was sixteen. There was nothing visually disturbing about her death. Not for me, at least. It was clean. A wooden box and a set of sliding doors that closed behind her were all I had to deal with. Whatever was awaiting me in the bathroom of that motel was going to represent a death I knew nothing of. I wasn’t sure if it was a line I was ready to cross. The only certainty was that it would be easier to deal with it if Neal was not talking his talk as I tiptoed into the room. The bathroom had just twenty-four hours ago, been white. This was a national motel chain, meaning that while basic, it’s generally clean. The room would have been cleaned every day. This place couldn’t be more than a few years old. Looking at the fittings between all the splattered blood I got the impression that the room scrubbed up pretty well. It would take some scrubbing too; the blood went all the way to the top of the walls, not quite reaching the ceiling, but almost. Everything was covered, all the walls, the shower booth and all its fittings. The sink, the toilet and the floor were covered in blood. Most of it was just splashed around, except for the floor, which was covered with bloody footprints – patterns made with bare feet as in a child’s painting. Of all the absurd things there was a telephone mounted on the wall next to the toilet. What was this? I wondered. A special suicide suite? Had management learnt from experience that if you put a phone in the bathroom the suicides won’t walk out into the bedroom with their slit wrists bleeding all over the carpet? That they will remain contained on the easy–to-clean tiled floor? ..."Alan, if you want any of that porn you should take it. It's just going to get thrown otherwise"... “That’s pretty ain’t it? You see the phone?” Neal asked “That’s pretty typical, f***ers slit their wrists and as soon as they’ve done it they wanna call somebody up to tell them all about it. You gonna take any pictures or are you just gonna stand there?” asked the indelible Neal Smither.Neal is so harsh that once he has entered your head, you will remember him for the rest of your life. He himself is like a bad stain that you can’t scrub away. When the time comes to face your own death Neal, if you have met him, will no doubt be on your mind. I am certain he will be there at the forefront of my own mental commentary when I die. It will come as no surprise to me if Death himself wears a Crime Scene Cleaners Inc t-shirt. I moved into the bathroom, trying to skirt the blood as I took pictures. It was hard for me to work out what I felt about this loss of life. My ego was in the way. The answer was too dependent on what kind of person I was, or, more to the point, what kind of person I wanted to be. Did I feel for this wasted life? Was it a tragedy? Or was I simply indifferent to it? I looked through the lens and pondered as I snapped away, aware that I should care, slightly aware that I didn’t, but very aware that I wanted to switch to my wide-angle lens so that I could get more of the blood in the frame. Only now, looking back, can I honestly say I had no feeling at all. I knew nothing of this life. To me it wasn’t even a life, it was just blood on a wall, fingerprints on the phone – a guy called James who I had never met. It was an article I was being paid to write. But Neal’s crassness made me feel like I should care. If I didn’t, who would? Did someone like James have any loved ones? If he felt the need to lock himself in a strange room and cut his own wrists, he clearly didn’t think so. But without putting a face to the death, a body maybe, what can you feel? It’s just blood on a wall. “Alan if you want any of that porn you should just take it, it’s just gonna get thrown otherwise,” offered Neal. At this time my wife lay in an apartment in San Francisco, suffering the pangs of morning sickness. As sweet as the offer was, I didn’t think transgender porn stolen from a dead guy was a suitable gift for her. As I slowly edged nearer to fatherhood I wanted to celebrate life, not mock it. The motel room door clicked and opened. A tall, thin, well-groomed man in his mid thirties poked his head round the door. He was wearing a yellow tie with red dots that he stroked while he spoke. “Do you have any idea how long you guys are going to be? This room is booked out.”  Alan Emmins is the author of Mop Men: California's Crime Scene Cleaners which The Times descrived as, a "salty, sassy, non-stop running-off-at-the-mouth commentary," and The Independent as "a cautionary tale shot through with pus." Born in 1974, he's an author and freelance journalist who lives in Copenhagen with his wife and their child. This October Corvo will be publishing his second book 31 Days: A New York Street Diary, about his experiences living as a homeless person on the streets of New York.
7:13 PM - 14/6/2006 - post comment
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