It’s going to take all night to clean this up. The band was loud tonight, but I’m used to it by now. The vibration and the bass reverberating in my stomach and chest. The stomping feet and the screams of excitement that I have never understood. How can anyone be that hysterical over a band who doesn’t even know what town they’re in?
I’ve seen it over and over. They roll into town in buses, trailers in tow, and take over the whole place. The local news is all over it. Their mere presence brings people downtown. Restaurants and bars are overflowing. It’s the perk of having a concert venue in town. The fans take selfies in front of the tour buses with a two finger V and post them online. “So close I can touch it” or “Groupie life” with a pound sign in front of it. They don’t know that the buses they see are for the crew. They’ll never get that close to the real stars.
The mess they make depends on who is playing that night. A pop star, I can’t even remember her name, came through about a year ago. She left backstage covered in sequins, empty bottles of vodka, and cigarette butts. Menthols. And a huge table of food, bigger than any dining room table I’ve ever sat at, completely untouched. Most people have no idea how hard it is to clean up individual pieces of sequins from a tile floor. A few months ago a punk rock band came through. They were boy scouts in comparison. I think they left backstage cleaner when they left. Pack it in, pack it out I guess.
Tonight was different.
The band and some crew were still hovering around backstage, some crying, sobbing, and others talking louder than they realized about how to “handle this shit”. There were liquor bottles and pills and powder in all the usual places. A lawyer was there, I still don’t know how he arrived so fast. Maybe they’re on retainer and tour with the band, which raises questions that will be left unanswered tonight.
I’ve been cleaning up behind the stage for years. I’m a professional, so I do my best to act the part. That often includes feigning deafness.
But I couldn’t be blind to what I saw when the crowd finally parted. No one seemed to notice me until a large man dressed in all black and wearing an earpiece grabbed my arm. My eyes were locked on the back of the room as he yanked me back and said, “You’ll clean this up?”. This was beyond anything in my job description. I clean floors, toilets, and occasionally walls when a performer gets high and wants to practice their graffiti skills. I didn’t even know if I had the right supplies to clean this one up. The brut of a man squeezed my arm tighter. “You WILL clean this up, yes?” I got a heavy-handed pat on the back and then they were gone, all of them. The band, the lawyer, the muscle.
It was just me and her.
She couldn’t be more than 15 years old. The teeth they didn’t knock out looked like they had seen an orthodontist. Nice and straight the way everyone seems to prefer. Her hair was a bleached out blonde if I had to guess, but it was hard to tell with all the blood. She had long hair. That I knew for sure from the strands that I wiped off the wall. I covered her face with a dirty rag I had on me. Partly to give her some dignity but mostly because I couldn’t bring myself to keep cleaning with the one eye she still had looking at me. I moved her legs together, so they weren’t so far apart. I try to not think about why they were spread apart like that. I found her jacket, a nice leather jacket that she probably got for a birthday, on the back of a chair. I put it over her lap, though it didn’t cover everything. There was a shoe on the floor, across the room. It matched the one on her right foot. I grabbed it in a daze and put it on her left foot where it belonged. Her shoes were platform heels that I don’t even know how people can walk around in. Her skirt was torn but I could tell it had been short. I thought, “Why would her parents let her go out dressed like this?”. Then I remembered being a 15-year-old girl and I knew that what her parents said or did only made her more rebellious.
I found a paint splattered drop cloth in my closet that I had kept after one of my graffiti covering jobs. I laid it out on the floor next the last couch she would rest on. Rolling her down onto it was easy, she must have weighed less than 100 pounds. I took care not to break her body any more than they already had. I used my work cart to take the bundle out the back doors, making sure that no one noticed. But the place was already cleared out. No one ever pays attention to the janitor anyway. I made sure to put the bundle in a dumpster several buildings down and covered it with the contents in it that were already rotting and stinking.
It’s going to take all night to clean this up. I drag my cart back trying to figure the right amount of bleach to water I’ll need. And I still feel the vibration of the music in my chest.