After a violent death, there is no US government agency that comes to clean up the blood, sparing property owners or family the sight of gore. When the body is in the van, the statements have been recorded, the fingerprints lifted and the police tape taken down, you are left with the mess and the quiet. ‘Families, friends, nobody,’ was who took care of it, the professional crime scene cleaner tells me. Neal Smither has a kind of California stoner, that’s-just-the-way-shit-is-man quality to everything he says. Prior to his current job he had been really good at ‘getting laid, smoking weed and sitting on the beach’. He’s been cleaning death and crime scenes for the last twenty-two years, on call twenty-four hours a day. Now he sits by a stack of white napkins in a greasy diner wearing a crisp blue denim work shirt with a biohazard symbol embroidered on the breast pocket, and I ask him – because he would have seen it – what is the worst way to die.
‘Unprepared.’
Most of the people he cleans up after were unprepared: didn’t expect to be murdered, didn’t expect to die in their sleep and decompose unnoticed until the rent was due, didn’t expect life to go so wrong. Every couple of minutes, his phone beeps and vibrates with a new job. He ignores it. He is short, his hair neatly cut, his glasses smudge-free – he cleans them several times during our conversation. He asks the waitress for another stack of paper napkins, and she gives him maybe ten. Twice he will lean over and take more napkins to mop up invisible mess. He’s loud and brash, but the sizzle off the grill obscures some of his words and he has to repeat them. People glance over shoulders. ‘Decomposition,’ he says, louder. ‘Brains,’ he repeats in the plural. ‘Dildo.’
Around us, chrome stools on black metal stems support the wide, blue-jeaned butts of Americans served by a waitress clutching a coffee pot in fingers extended by an inch of teal acrylic nail. A man with one eye and a limp leans on the Formica counter. An old couple wipe burger grease on each other’s shirts – a side-effect of unconscious, reassuring back pats. There’s a checkerboard floor, a jar of twenty-five-cent mint patties. A small TV plays nothing.
‘There are three things that are almost always there at the scene of a murder,’ he says, holding up fingers, casually knocking them down like faces in Guess Who. ‘Porno or some kind of porn paraphernalia – from the tame to the, uh, you know. An inebriant of some kind, from gas, to chronic, to whatever your choice. And a weapon. The only thing that will really vary is the sexual aspect. Not everyone’s leaving a dildo out on the dresser, but it’s there somewhere. I’ll find it.’ I figure he’s exaggerating, there can’t possibly be a dildo at every murder scene. He gives me a look like I’m either underestimating or overestimating people. ‘Life has stopped when we arrive,’ he says. ‘But they didn’t clean up.’
Neal’s company, Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc., is the line between looking normal and an atrocity exhibition – he’s the reset button that allows you to put the house on the market after the murder or sell the impounded car at the police auction. Before companies like his existed, you personally got on your hands and knees and scrubbed the blood as best you could. Now, you can phone Neal. He will have a truck at your place within the hour. You can look the other way, go for coffee. Leave. When you return, it will look like nothing happened.
I’m talking to Neal partly because of what he does, but mostly because of how I found him. He markets his business the way anyone does: the internet. He has merch – hoodies, T-shirts, beanies – all bearing the same Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. logo that he has tattooed on his forearm in a nest of skulls surrounded by the company’s tagline: HOMICIDE – SUICIDE – ACCIDENTAL DEATH. Under the handle @crimescenecleanersinc on Instagram, where he has almost half a million followers and his bio says, ‘IF YOU BITCH I BLOCK’, he posts pictures of jobs before and after they have been deep-cleaned. In idle scrolls I have seen the fine spray of blood and brain reaching the upper limits of a room, hitting the smoke detector and the light fitting after a shotgun suicide. Near the crushed vehicle in a catastrophic car crash, shattered pieces of skull, a brain stem on the tarmac. Teeth. When I found Neal, I was doing what I’ve always done: I was looking for pictures of death on the internet. I have followed his account for years.
I grew up as part of the generation that were the last to experience childhood without the internet, and the first to experience it as teenagers. Back then, there were no safe searches: we could explore anything the online world was offering, anything that we could think of. Some went for pop stars and porno, others went for death. Plug ‘rotten.com’ into the URL bar now and nothing comes up, the website is defunct. But once upon a time it was there, programmed in the stripped-back, basic html any teenager taught themselves when starting a GeoCities website in the 1990s. It was a collection of disease, violence, torture, death, human depravity and cruelty in one grainy jpeg after another. There were the famous, and there were the nobodies: the unidentified, the unidentifiable. There was Saturday Night Live star Chris Farley, overdosed and purple-faced, dead on the floor of his apartment. Click. A young blonde woman in the early stages of decomposition, her green and yellow skin starting to slip. Click. A series of pictures sent in by a policeman of a ninety-something-year-old man who had died and inadvertently slow-cooked himself for two weeks with the filament of a kettle submerged in the bathwater. Click. Another comedian, Lenny Bruce, in the Celebrity Morgue offshoot site. In September 1997, a year after the site began, its founder – a thirty-year-old computer programmer for Apple and Netscape named Thomas Dell, who ran the site anonymously under the pseudonym Soylent – posted a photo of Princess Diana’s corpse. Though the photo was a fake, the sheer fact that he dared to publish it blew up in the global press, and Rotten.com became infamous: a popular destination for voyeurs, lawsuits, teenagers, me.
My impulse to look came from wanting to see the kind of everyday death that I could reckon with and understand, but all the internet could offer me was horror – I wasn’t getting any further than I did when I was small, looking up at those Ripper crime scenes. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone who died a natural death: they were mutilated, dismembered, exploded. They were a series of violent, unusual tragedies. Probably the closest to ordinary death was the mortuary photograph of Marilyn Monroe’s blotchy face, comparatively serene. None of it ever felt like real death, or like something that even happened in my city. Plus, we were teenagers; we were immortal, even though my dead friend told me we were not.
I was ten when the website began, thirteen when I found it – about a year after Harriet’s funeral. It was, to many of us who grew up in the early days of the internet (a/s/l?), formative. These are the things I was looking at in the one hour of dial-up I was allowed because more would cost another phone call. In another window I was chatting to kids from school on MSN Messenger, changing my display name to inside jokes and quotes from Coen brothers movies. The back of JFK’s head, hair soaked with brain and blood, a click away from a chat about a boy. Teenage banality and horrific mortality side by side. ‘The gruesome invites us to be either spectators or cowards, unable to look,’ wrote Susan Sontag in her last published book before her death, Regarding the Pain of Others, an analysis of our response to images of horror. You picked a team: spectator or coward. It was compulsive, this need to see. It became something in itself. Once you had seen and could stand something terrible, you kept looking for the next worst thing. Through the struggling 56K modem, the pixels would load line by line, and your mind would race them to the bottom of the screen: were the things you saw worse or not as bad as you’d imagined? Sometimes the mess was so specific your mind could never have come up with it alone. You would never think a skull could crack like an egg, that brain could puddle like yolk. The teachers in the computer lab were not yet wise to us, pornography was not yet blocked. You could see anything you wanted, and we went there to feel the buzz of unease and bravery that came with these images of death. Click enough and eventually you lost that buzz. You became numb.
It’s this numbness I keep thinking about when I’m talking to Neal the crime scene cleaner. He’s been the subject of a couple of documentaries and a reality TV show called True Grime; he’s featured in an episode of Mythbusters and has done a string of YouTube guest spots. In reviews of his appearances, viewers often say he’s cold-hearted – and sitting across from him, hearing about his career in sentences that could easily be voiceovers on late-night trash TV, I can see what they mean. Purely from his Instagram account I can see what they mean. But I wonder how much of that was already there, or whether it came with the job.
Like a lot of stoned twenty-something high-school dropouts watching Pulp Fiction in the mid-nineties, Neal had an epiphany about his life. Others went on to write derivative film scripts, Neal took a less obvious path. The scene that changed everything for him was when Harvey Keitel turns up as Winston Wolfe: he arrives in the early morning wearing a tuxedo, ready to solve the problem of John Travolta’s Vincent Vega accidentally shooting Marvin’s head off in the back of the car. ‘You got a corpse in a car minus a head in the garage,’ says the Wolf. ‘Take me to it.’ He directs Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson to shift the body to the trunk, take the cleaning products from under the sink and clean the car as fast as possible. He gets specific while Travolta and Jackson stand awkwardly in the kitchen in their blood-splattered suits and skinny black ties, Quentin Tarantino as Jimmie hovering in his dressing gown, dreading the imminent return of his wife. ‘You gotta go in the back seat – scoop up all those little pieces of brain and skull, get it outta there. Wipe down the upholstery. Now, when it comes to upholstery, it don’t need to be spick and span – you don’t need to eat off it, just give it a good once over. What you need to take care of are the really messy parts – the pools of blood that have collected, you’ve gotta soak that shit up.’ Travolta and Jackson trudged their way to the garage; Neal put his joint down and started a business.
He did some research into janitorial companies and found a couple of guys already on this bloody patch of turf, but they were so ‘insultingly expensive’ that he saw them as no threat. He took fifty bucks he couldn’t afford, got himself a business licence and started hitting the pavement, shoving his flyers in the face of anyone who could use his services. He was doorstepping mortuaries and property management firms, and bribing cops in the Bay Area with doughnuts. ‘It got to the point where the cops would see me coming, they’d hit the buzzer, I’d go right through. I’m inside the department; I’m going right down to homicide, I’m going to patrol, whatever. Back then, pre-9/11, you could do that. I’d bring Subway sandwiches and say, “Hey, motherfucker, when you gonna give me some work?” I just had great timing, and I was relentless. Every time you turned around, you were going to hear about me.’ He says his grandmother, then in her eighties, got a volunteer gig at the Santa Cruz Police Department. From there she would write letters pretending she was a customer lauding his performance. She’d send letters to coroners, police sergeants, anyone they could think of who might have some sway in how a death scene disappears.
The diner we’re in is the Red Onion on San Pablo Avenue in Richmond, north of San Francisco across the bay. ‘This place is owned by a very stereotypical, old-school sergeant of Richmond Police Department,’ says Neal, looking over his glasses at the Coca-Cola wallpaper and the ancient coffee machine. ‘He was around when they’d club the shit out of you and nothing was gonna happen to them. He was one of the first guys I sold to.’
When the taxi dropped me off here an hour ago, the driver surveyed the place through squinted eyes and asked if I was sure. I got out, the car lingered. We both looked at the half-naked drugged man dragging a duvet through the parking lot of the Dollar Tree (‘Everything’s $1!’) and past the drive-through Walgreens pharmacy. The small diner sat like an island in the middle of its own parking lot, looking like it teleported from the 1950s. Only months prior to this, a Swedish journalist named Kim Wall had been murdered on a submarine, her body dismembered and thrown in the sea between Denmark and Sweden. I didn’t know her, but I knew her work, and at the time of her death we were writing for the same magazine. Had I found a man making his own submarine, I would have pitched that story too. I thought of her then, as I stood by the side of the road, about to meet a man whose job is to make murders disappear. The taxi driver looked up at me, and asked if I was absolutely sure I wanted to be left there. I nodded. ‘OK, lady,’ he said, and turned the car back onto the road without me.
‘This is the place where shit goes down,’ says Neal, motioning out the window, not making me feel any better about my choice. ‘This is a magical market that I have control of. This is a very densely populated, small area. I’ve got millions of people available to me within a sixty-mile radius.’ People, he says, are territorial animals. The more people you have, the more likely they’re going to kill each other or themselves. Tensions rise in proximity.
This diner was where shit went down in April 2007 when the then-owner was shot in a botched robbery by four masked assailants. The detective in charge at the time described it to the East Bay Times as ‘a takeover robbery, a real violent one’. They beat up a cook, cowed the other employees, and when Alfredo Figueroa appeared from the back office they shot him in the upper torso. They fled empty-handed. Figueroa died in the emergency room, his red Toyota 4Runner still parked days later in the cordoned-off parking lot. The men were never caught, and Captain Robert De La Campa of the El Cerrito Police Department told me that, as of 2019, the case remains under investigation. In the weeks following the incident, the family gave free burgers to anyone who donated $25 or more to the reward fund for information, cooked right here on the grill at the scene of the crime.
Neal has personal experience of cleaning a crime scene as a non-professional: the job fell to him aged twelve, when a neighbour committed suicide. The rifle bullet shot through his neighbour’s head, broke the window, and splattered his brain up the side of the house where Neal was spending the summer with his grandparents. He took a steel scrubbing brush and a hose, and got to work. ‘It was gross, but I didn’t fucking care. I was more, “Whoa, that dude blew his fucking head off!” That tripped me out more. It just needed to be done. My grandparents couldn’t do it, they were old. It was my job.’ He got to it early, soon after the crack of the gun. Had he left it, he would have learned what he found out years later: that exploded brain dries like marble. It is still the hardest thing to clean.
If you can stay your gag reflex you can clean a death scene yourself, but hiring a professional depends on how much you care about the things you cannot see, and if you can afford to. Neal tells me to picture a house where a person has died and started to decompose. The body has been removed, so now you’ve just got the room with the mattress soaked in human fluid, the maggots, the stained floor. You remove the mattress, drench the scene in bleach, the place is visually spotless, and you think you’re done. But you’re not: you forgot about the microscopic feet of the flies. ‘It took me a long time to realise the flies will walk in the door and track the mess all over everything,’ he says. ‘Unless you know that’s happening, you don’t even know where to look because you really can’t see it until you get right up on the wall, or you touch the wall and the spot smears. You can pull the source, but it’s all over the fucking walls.’ His eyes widen. ‘You gotta scrub everything down. You have to show the customers ’cause they don’t believe you – and I wouldn’t have either. I learned as I went, there wasn’t an instruction manual. You know, fuck! Who knew?’
The majority of jobs Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. take on – divvied up among the eight full-time staff, all men – are hoarding, rat infestations or blood-related. As to how that spills, it varies, and puddles of blood are another thing families underestimate. ‘A bloody stain on the carpet is four times that size underneath the carpet. It’s like an upside-down mushroom: you’re looking at the end of the stem, underneath is the yummy cap. You have a plate-sized stain, but you’re gonna have to cut four feet out of this carpet. Because blood separates. The white cells separate from the whatever the fuck it is, the plasma, and it makes a big, fat stain. It’s the little shit like that they miss.’
At the end of each job, Neal will jump in the shower at the house and leave the scene clean and changed, because despite what Harvey Keitel’s tuxedo might have you believe, the actual job is extreme manual labour. ‘It’s unglamorous and miserable,’ Neal says. ‘You’re in a hazmat suit that you immediately start sweating in, you’re soaked and you’re in a fucking face mask. It’s terrible.’ I picture Terry back in the Mayo Clinic with his embalming fluid and sealed flooring, and ask Neal if the smell sticks with him despite the shower. ‘Oh, yeah. But you don’t really go in without a respirator on. The test is when you’re done and you take your respirator off: can you smell it? If you can, there’s a problem. You’re not done. It’s airborne, and it’s not your airborne particulate, it’s someone else’s. You don’t wanna ingest that, whether by breathing it or eating it or any other way of ingesting it.’
An eavesdropping customer turns mutely back to his milkshake.
As teenagers in the 1990s and early 2000s, looking at Rotten.com was deliberate. You had to mean it. It wasn’t something you stumbled across on social media, where now you might see an image that has escaped the net of brand-protecting censorship, something you wish you could mentally erase. Back then, we had to go hunting. The website may be gone now, trapped in amber on the Wayback Machine, but similar ones have risen in its wake. The Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Instagram offers its own brand of horror for a new generation of death voyeurs: one that exists on a platform and in a timeline, with everything else. Sometimes, in the scroll, you can forget to consciously think about what it is you’re seeing. Presented this way, slotted in among the rest of your curated life, there’s a danger of the horror becoming mundane.
Images of death can be all around us, but we no longer process them as such because of their ubiquity. We are so accustomed to their presence, we become numb to them. You walk into a church and do not think anew that this is a tortured man, dead on a cross. The crucifixion is one of the most revisited moments in the history of art, but it is no longer shocking; it is a story you’ve heard again and again. You might have the image hanging around your neck but never notice it in the mirror: a public execution, a crime scene in twenty-four-carat gold. Through twelve years of Catholic school I was surrounded by the Stages of the Cross and Jesus’s death. It was there in the elaborate stained-glass windows that blazed in the sun, it was there in the statues looming in the corner of every classroom, blood trickling out of his side. During Lent, when I was a child and this story was new, I knelt behind hard pews and listened to the priest tell us how many days Jesus lay in his tomb before he was resurrected, wondering what kind of state his corpse would be in, whether he was green when the stone rolled back. If he died on a Friday, what did he smell like on a Sunday? How hot does it get on Golgotha? Send your children to Catholic school. They’ll have a great time.
Andy Warhol was brought up a Catholic and was obsessed with images of death. How could he not be – it’s a religion built on them. According to those who were there at the time, Warhol’s hang-up became particularly acute in the early 1960s when he was in his mid-thirties – my age. In June 1962, his friend and curator Henry Geldzahler handed him a copy of the New York Mirror over lunch. The headline screamed ‘129 DIE IN JET’; the text said the dead were from the art world. Warhol hand-painted the image of the plane wreck onto canvas. Two months later, Marilyn Monroe died. Only days after someone took the black-and-white photograph for the morgue file that would later turn up on the internet, Warhol made the first silkscreens of her famous, smiling face. The following months brought more additions to what he called his Death and Disaster series: suicide victims, car crashes, atomic bomb explosions, civil rights protesters attacked by dogs, two housewives poisoned by contaminated tins of tuna, and image after image of the electric chair in Sing Sing Correctional Facility thirty miles north of New York City. With every print and every repetition of the image, some duplicated over and over in a grid on the same canvas, Warhol got further and further away from the feeling the scene provoked, creating more distance between him and the reality – almost as if he had learned from church that repetition mutes the story.
I recognise this same effect in the Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. Instagram account. Another grid, three across, dozens down – it’s an amateur death and disaster series. They are images of tragedy, pain and violence, but taken in their hundreds, I am numb to them. It’s Rotten.com all over again. ‘The more you look at the same exact thing,’ said Warhol, ‘the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.’
It was always this series by Warhol that I lingered on as a teenager, in the pages of art books. He was interested in the same stuff I was. I never questioned why he might look for images of death, and it was only later that I realised our motivations were different: I was looking to understand death; he was trying to escape from it.
It never occurred to me that he was frightened. I thought he was just being provocative. He spoke of his fears to Geldzahler in phone calls late at night, small cries for help in the dark. ‘Sometimes he would say that he was scared of dying if he went to sleep,’ said Geldzahler. ‘So he’d lie in bed and listen to his heart beat.’ Warhol’s brothers, John and Paul, believe that his crippling fear of death started with the death of their father, when Andy was thirteen. The body was brought home and laid out in the living room for three days. Andy hid under a bed, cried and begged his mother to let him stay at his aunt’s house, and she – afraid that his nervous condition, Sydenham chorea, also known as St Vitus Dance, might come back – let him go.
Warhol never saw real death with his own eyes, he only saw what ran in the newspapers, through the lens of a photographer. At thirteen he – unlike me – had been given the option to see death up close, and he said no. It wasn’t until the seventies, on the other side of Valerie Solanas’s near-fatal bullet, that he started exploring his own mortality in self-portraits and skulls. But his fear remained throughout his life: Warhol never went to funerals or wakes, refusing to attend even his mother’s burial in 1972. He was a victim of images that held the power to haunt him, and through his art he tried to fight against that power, rather than seize real-life opportunities to see death as anything other than horrifying. His beautiful avoidance behaviour hangs in galleries around the world.
‘Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death,’ wrote Sontag. The reasons for taking these photographs are numerous, as varied as the motivations of the people who look. Victorians mounted cameras on tripods to take pictures of the dying and the dead – sometimes the only photograph they would ever have of their child, nestled there in the thick fabric that concealed a mother holding her dead baby, or maybe it was laid out in its tiny coffin, devastated parents posed stiffly beside it while they waited for the exposure. Then there were the crime scene and autopsy photos, taken for police purposes, like the ones in 1888 of the five dead women that I knew so well: Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Kelly. Decades later, a photographer called Weegee (real name Arthur Fellig) helped sell newspapers using death as a sensationalist attraction, recording the violence of the 1930s: the end of the Depression, the repeal of Prohibition and the governmental crackdown on organised crime that resulted in a surge of murders across New York City. He never photographed the action, just the immediate aftermath – thanks to his police radio (he was the only freelance newspaper photographer with a permit to have one) he’d get there in time to snap the body in the pool of blood and the gangster’s hat upturned on the pavement before the white sheet came down. His photographs would be splashed across the front pages: hundreds of bodies, hundreds of stories, all of them ripped out and pinned to the walls of his dingy studio apartment across the road from the New York City Police Department, like trophies. Victims lined the room. ‘Murder,’ he said, ‘is my business.’
Far apart from the ethically shaky world of tabloid newspapers, photojournalism serves a vital role in documentary proof, where eyesight and testimony are fallible. In 1945, Margaret Bourke-White – the first American female war photojournalist and the first woman allowed to work in combat zones – travelled through a collapsing Germany with General Patton’s Third Army. Her photos of Nazi atrocities, taken when she would have been forty years old, are unflinching, important records that she was only able to mentally process later, in the dark room. ‘I kept telling myself that I would believe the indescribably horrible sight in the courtyard before me only when I had a chance to look at my own photographs,’ she wrote in her memoir the following year, of the scenes at Buchenwald. ‘Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier between myself and the white horror in front of me.’ Her photographs, published in LIFE magazine, were some of the first reports to show the reality of the death camps to a largely disbelieving public.
A photojournalist sits on the line between record and action: their work is essential for the world to know what’s happening, but it can come at great personal cost. Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer prize for his 1993 photograph of a starving, collapsed child in Sudan being watched over by a vulture. When it ran in the paper, readers wrote in to the New York Times wanting to know what had happened to her, wanting to know if the photographer had helped. Days later, the paper ran a notice saying the vulture was shooed away and the child continued her journey, though it was not known if she made it to the food tent. Three months after winning the Pulitzer, at the age of thirty-three, Carter gassed himself in his pickup truck, leaving a note behind. It said, in part, ‘I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.’
As a viewer of images of death, the crucial element is context: we need to know what happened or they float loose in our memories as unmoored horror, the effects of which might be accumulative fear or numbness, depending on who you are. Pictures of crime scenes, as they appear on Neal’s Instagram, are none of the above. They are not a call to arms, and they are not a story that elicits empathy or a deeper understanding. They don’t even sell newspapers. They are just meaningless gore. Mostly this is because we do not know the story at all: though he is usually given an explanation by police dispatch as a way of estimating the length of the job, Neal says the captions he writes are never the actual truth – he’ll change the narrative to something unrelated as a way of masking identities, though occasional family members still find the posts and rage at him in the comments. There isn’t really a point to these images at all, other than voyeurism and the promotion of his business, but it’s more of a performance piece than a display of what your money can buy. He began the account to show people what his job is like, and though he doesn’t actually get many customers through the feed, the vague nature of the posts creates a buzz around the business: in the comments, in the absence of details, followers construct a narrative of their own, piecing together things glimpsed through the partially obscured window that Neal has allowed them into these private death scenes.
The only part of the story we know to be true is that the crime scene cleaner is arriving at scenes that have already played out, the crime already committed, the wrist already slit – the story he cannot change. I wonder if any of this weighs on him. It doesn’t appear to. ‘I think it’s none of my business, really,’ he says. I ask about images that stick in his mind, and Neal struggles to find one. A toddler’s footprints down a hallway in her parents’ blood, maybe. But mostly nothing. ‘Everyone starts out wanting to know the stories – your first fifty jobs or so – and then you don’t care, you don’t even see it,’ he says. ‘You’ve forgotten it, in most cases, by the time you leave the house.’
Towards the end of her analysis of the effect horrific images have on us, Sontag wrote that ‘compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers … One starts to get bored,’ she says, ‘cynical, apathetic.’ Whether or not the unstable emotion of compassion was ever there, cynicism now appears to reign supreme in Neal. It is there in the way he talks about his work, to me, in the diner. It is there in the blunt captions on photographs he hashtags ‘#p4d’: pray for death, because death equals cash (murder is his business too). Some of the things he says to me I have heard almost verbatim in other places, on TV, on YouTube. ‘If I wasn’t out there pissing everyone off on TV and giving great soundbites, the company wouldn’t be near where it’s at now,’ he says. It’s all part of the performance of being the internet’s crime scene cleaner. I am struggling to have any real sense of how he feels about anything, or even how I feel about Neal. I have been another audience to a well-practised show, polished until it shines.
But there are some moments where I get flashes of something true.
Neal doesn’t go out on cleaning jobs much any more. His staff send him the photographs to post online. He’s fifty now, and says his imperfect eyesight lessens his ability to get the microscopic fly prints off the walls, but mostly he stays out of it because he can no longer hide his feelings. ‘I’m not sympathetic to the customer any more, and I think that probably reflects more than I want it to. They just disgust me,’ he says. ‘I don’t explicitly tell them I think they’re assholes, but they can feel it.’
It’s this disgust for the customer that keeps coming up – towards both their attitude and their filthy houses. It wasn’t always present, but after twenty-two years of cleaning up horror and tragedy, he sees only the worst of us. ‘I think everyone’s just kind of opportunistic, and looking out for themselves,’ says Neal, before telling me there is no such thing as loyalty. In cases where a person has died and been left undiscovered for months, families will turn up to go through the stuff in the house, trawling it for treasure they can sell. ‘I’m cleaning and they’re picking through the drawers, looking for items that they can keep like it’s their birthright. I hate that.’
Neal went into this job with cold, capitalist intentions and, to him, this job is still just cleaning and money. ‘I’m not here to be your friend, I’m not here to be your shrink,’ he says, the last bites of his burger disappearing. ‘I’m your janitor, you know? What do you care what I think of you?’ In his work, he doesn’t have any sense of making the world a better place or giving the dead person their dignity; his job is to remove all traces of a person from the scene, to literally dehumanise the situation in order to make the house sellable for the third cousin going through the drawers in the other room. But they are both in the house for the same reason, and maybe that’s the root of Neal’s disgust. They are the vultures, and they are paying him.
He tells me he has a place in Idaho where he and his wife are going to retire, a clean oasis where he will go off the grid and leave all the murders, suicides, rats and forgotten people behind. He grabs his phone, swipes the dozens of job notifications away and shows me a countdown clock, the numbers ticking over second by second. ‘The day I go black is 1,542 days from now. Four years and two months and twenty days.’ He can’t wait to get there. ‘That’s where I’m dying,’ he says. He’s prepared: he has all of his affairs in order, and before he can’t physically do it any more, he wants to hike up into the mountains and get eaten by a bear. He doesn’t want to end up as someone else’s cleaning job.
‘Are you afraid of death?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. I don’t wanna die.’
He asks if we’re done, picks his keys up off the table and talks to the staff on the way out. The waitress leans on the counter, order pad tucked into a cocked hand at her waist, asks him if he’s busy. He says he’s always busy. His phone pings again. He tells me to wait for my ride inside the diner, says it’s not safe out there. I watch him drive off in his immaculate Ram pickup truck, spotless and white, glinting in the sun; every other car in sight matte with dirt, absorbing light like black holes. His number plate says HMOGLBN. Instagram tells me he recently bought a new truck for an employee. It says BLUDBBL.
I tuck myself back into the booth and wait for a cab to pick me up. I take out my phone and I scroll. There, nestled between the dogs and selfies and houseplants in rose-gold pots, are fresh crime scenes.