I used to drive a limousine for this guy named Lyndell. This was years ago back in Louisville, Kentucky. He ran his own company called Infectious Disease Control. Anyway the company was just him, and he operated out of this shitty little shotgun house down in the ghetto by Churchill Downs. For security he had a big, bronze boxer named Copper — mean looking son-of-a-bitch. Every time I pulled the limo into that driveway Copper would bark like hell trying to get to me. I was always afraid he’d break through the flimsy chicken-wire and rip my balls off.

What was the company? Well, let’s just say that Infectious Disease Control could provide you and your loved ones with a certain kind of cleaning service. See, when someone blows their brains out with a shotgun, or puts their face into a combine — the cops don’t clean it up. They show up to ask questions and fill out their clipboards. They take pictures and carry off the body, but they don’t bring mops — not the cops. So when they’re done with their investigation they hand Lyndell’s business card to the bereaved. He’s the only one providing the service. So you call the number and Lyndell shows up in his yellow biohazard suit and spends the next five to ten hours cleaning up what’s left of your former husband or daughter, etc. He had quite a monopoly going, because who the fuck wants to clean up the remnants of their own family members? And who else are you going to call besides Lyndell? Certainly not Stanley Steamer: “Yeah hello? You guys do carpet cleaning right? Great, uh well we’ve got like a hell of a stain. Um, well here’s the thing — can you guys like clean up intestines? See my Aunt Caroline disemboweled herself in the living room and the cops won’t clean it up, so like we want you guys to maybe come clean the carpet for us. . . hello?”

Lyndell had some stories. He told me some crazy shit as I chauffeured him around. He told me he once spent ten hours cleaning up a shotgun suicide.

“Ten hours?,” I said incredulously.

“Yeah, this guy blew his brains out with a twelve gauge and he was sitting on top of a washing machine when he did it. Do you know how hard it is to find all those skull slivers?”

I figured it was a rhetorical question, but he paused awaiting my response. “Um, no. I’ve never found myself in that situation,” I said lamely as I drove the limo through the thick Kentucky night.

He went on: “The fucking brains too were everywhere, all down in the parts of the washing machine. I had to get all that shit out of there.”

“Wow, ten hours,” I said again in disbelief.

“Well, for the first seven hours it’s like you ain’t even there,” Lyndell philosophized. “You gotta just try to focus on getting it done. At the same time you try to think about something else, like pussy or something. You gotta trick your mind into it.”

Lyndell used to muse about the motives behind messy suicides: “See, nobody wants to kill themselves by going off and disappearing in a cave or something. There’s no fun in that. See, when you off yourself you want to make as big a mess as possible. It’s your last chance to say ‘fuck you — pay attention to me’. So, you put a shotgun in your mouth or you slit your wrists on your parents bed, or you jump off a ten story building to land on your cheating wife’s car. See, that’s going out in style, and if everybody just sissied out and took sleeping pills I’d be out of a job.”

One of his other more horrific stories involved a suitcase: “Well, this was way out in Bullet County and the cops there had had all these reports about this smell off the county road there. They had located this suitcase that was out in the middle of this field, but none of them could get close to it on account of the powerful stench. They were all throwing up within a hundred yards of the thing. So they called me in and I had to go out there and open it up.”

His face shriveled at the memory of the smell. “I can’t even describe it to you. It was a smell not of this earth. In all my years of doing this shit that was the worst. Anyway, I put on my mask, but even then I’m feeling sick, and I go out there to the middle of this field and there’s this old suitcase sitting there.”

He paused for several seconds reliving the horrid moment. Finally he continued: “I didn’t want to open it, but I did and it was a dead baby inside — been there for a couple weeks I guess, and this was summertime.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” was all I could say to that. The image haunted me. For a moment I thought I could almost smell the horrific stench right there in the car.

Lyndell also told me he had a file cabinet full of pictures of every dead body he had ever cleaned up. “I shoot a roll every time. You’re studying photography, right?”, he asked me, “Maybe one of these times I’ll have you come along to photograph the scene for me. You any good with a camera?”

I glanced into the rearview mirror: Who is this guy? Why am I driving him around in a limo? This is madness.

Lyndell had a perverted sense of style. He owned the limo because it made him feel really important. He wanted everyone to think he was some rich entrepreneur. He entertained many strange fantasies and that limousine was the perfect incubator for his delusions. In reality it was just an old stretched Cadillac. A powerful car, but it only looked good at night. It had some age on it, and in the harsh light of day it didn’t seem so important. So we only took it out in the evenings. I guess with the morbid nature of his job, Lyndell really needed to take it easy and unwind at night. He needed someone to drive him around to strange redneck corners of the state, and he needed a servant to make him feel big-time. The guy wasn’t rich. It was all just a facade to impress his degenerate friends and business associates.

Many nights he’d have me drive him down to this roadhouse outside of Bardstown. The Boot and Buckle was the name of the place. It was a redneck paradise, like something out of a Patrick Swayze movie. I hated going there because I had to sit in the parked limo while drunken inbreds pawed the car and drooled on the windshield as if they had never seen a limo before. It was like I had just landed in a fucking spaceship. I never wanted to roll down the window to talk to them. My only hope was to park the car way out of sight and keep a low profile.

It was a rowdy place and as a voyeur I saw many a drunken fight in that parking lot. Those fights almost made sitting there worthwhile, but some nights I’d see guys beating up on their women between the parked cars. I hated this. There was really nothing I could do to help them. Once though, I honked the horn and flashed the lights a few times to distract the drunken misogynist. It gave the woman enough time to kick him in the balls and escape his clutches. That made my day.

When Lyndell wanted to be picked up he’d page me. He had worked out this whole system of pages. A “1″ meant for me to drive up to the door of whatever establishment he was in and wait. “911″ meant I was supposed to actually enter the restaurant or bar, find his table and walk up to him. I was supposed to say, “Sir, it’s important. You’re needed immediately.” I’m not making this shit up. This guy wanted everybody to think he was the fucking president. There were a couple other numeric pages with ridiculous instructions. He gave me a printout. I was supposed to memorize it like it was the Pledge of Allegiance or something.

When I’d pull up to the door of the bar to pick him up, he wouldn’t come out for awhile. No, he’d make me wait until a crowd of fawning idiots gathered around the car. Lyndell shamelessly loved to make a spectacle out of the situation. He wanted everybody to know that he was the guy who was going to get into that big black car. But first he always made the rednecks wait and wonder.

“Look at that!”

“It’s a limo!”

“Maybe it’s a rock star!”

“Dude, I heard Steven Seagal is in town, maybe it’s him!”

Then some big-haired country girl with a Bon-Jovi tank-top would knock on the glass. I’d try to ignore her and she’d knock again, bending forward to spill her corn-fed cleavage into my face. I’d reluctantly roll down the window. With a two year-old’s smile on her lips she’d say: “Who’s car is this? Is it an actor’s or somethin’?”

And I’d say, “No, my dear. This car belongs to Death’s Janitor.”

Some nights Lyndell would just have me drive him around for hours all over the state. We’d cruise through the darkness and he’d sit back there and listen to one of two cassette tapes: John Cougar’s Scarecrow, or Bob Segar’s Turn the Page. Those were the only choices. That was it. Needless to say, this is not my kind of music. Sometimes it bordered on torture to have to hear that cocksucker Bob Segar sing “Like a Rock” over and over again. It made me want to just drive that limo off the road and right into a tree. I came close to doing it a couple times. Lyndell also had a VCR back there. The only tape he owned was a recorded business seminar featuring the founder of Papa John’s Pizza. He watched this tape over and over again ad nauseum. This was Lyndell’s idol — John Schnotter, the discount delivery pizza baron. Lyndell really thought he was going to find some way to strike it rich. I’ve never seen someone so in love with the illusion of being wealthy. He wanted to be an important man, but he realized all you had to do was act important and simple people would be interested in you.

Some nights we’d pick up his drunk friends. Lyndell always had a stocked bar back there even though he himself never drank. (”Too many suicides involve alcohol,” he told me. “To do this job you have to have a personal relationship with Jesus.”) But his friends loved to drink. They always drank Jose Cuervo. I think they just liked saying it: “Cuervo — Cuervo.” That used to drive me nuts hearing these rednecks say “Cuervo” all goddamn night. They’d send me to the liquor store for ice: “Yeah, and get some Cuervo,” they’d slur. I hated these people. I’d drive them way out to some country subdivision and they’d all go skinny dipping in somebody’s above ground pool. And I’d just sit there in the limo rolling cigarettes, and leafing through the HELP WANTED section of the paper. “Fuck this. I’m better than these country idiots,” I’d mumble to myself.

At some point, Lyndell started dating this girl. I don’t remember her name because he always referred to her as his “squaw.” Yeah, I’m serious; that’s the word he used. “We gotta go pick up the squaw,” he’d say when he got in the car. He loved to use that word. She was mostly Cherokee or something. I’m not sure what she was. I do know she lived way the fuck out in boondock county Indiana. We’d have to go all the way out there to pick her up and then I’d have to drive them all the way back to Kentucky to this restaurant out on the Ohio River called Captain’s Quarters. I hated those nights because I knew I wouldn’t get off work until the early morning. I’d be brain dead in class the next day. Lyndell and I had an agreement that he wouldn’t keep me out insanely late on weekdays, but he always broke his word. I also hated those nights because I knew he’d be fucking “the squaw” in the back seat. It just made me uncomfortable driving around while they screwed, and there was no way in hell I’d be cleaning out the back seat at the end of the night. No fucking way, boss. You’re the janitor after all.

Lyndell also suffered from the delusion that he was going to be elected governor of Kentucky. He seriously believed this. He told me he knew the former governor, Wallace Wilkinson. “We’ve got a master plan set up to put me in the governor’s seat in about five years,” he’d say with a straight face, looking me in the eye. He really believed it.

I wanted to say: “Uh, Lyndell I think maybe you need to hold some kind of public office first. I don’t think you can just go from mopping up brains to being the governor. I know you already have the limo and chauffeur, but still you might want to think about running for something smaller first, like county clerk — or dogcatcher.”

All in all, I worked for Lyndell for about six months. When I told him I was quitting, he offered me a raise. I was becoming valuable to him because I had finally mastered the obscure country roads that led to his midnight destinations.

“I was thinking it was time you got a raise,” he pleaded.

“Thanks Lyndell, but no thanks,” I said as I shook his pale hand goodbye. I was just tired of wearing black outfits and playing servant to his misguided ego. I was tired of rednecks and late, late nights, my eyelids closing on their own as I powered the big black car through the rural darkness. I was tired of crawling into my sleeping girlfriend’s bed at four in the morning. I was tired of “cuervo” and “squaw.” I was tired of The Boot and Buckle, and I was really, really fucking tired of Bob Segar. So I turned the page.