Every morning I wake up, brush my teeth, take a shower and get ready for the day. Pretty much every morning I glance at a painting of the last supper that leans again the wall by my closet. It's framed by a cheap gold molding and lines of scotch tape hold together the fragments from where I punched through Jesus. I've thought about hanging it, but felt that besides the fact that I'm not religious, hanging it would give it value that I don't feel it deserves. It's nothing more than a reminder of how short life can be.
December 23rd, 2007, my birthday, is the day I got it. It was 8 in the morning and I was parked on a sketchy side street in East Los Angeles. Every house had barred windows, spiked fencing and little to no grass on the lawns. I had been parked for the last half hour outside an apartment building waiting for a team of crime scene cleaners to show up. Their company was owned by a former cop who ran his crime scene cleaning business with his flamboyantly gay son. They had been featured on MTV and in several magazines because of the novelty of their company. I had been following them around for the last month to produce a presentation for my company.
As I sat in the car watching neighbors going about their business, it occurred to me that none of these people knew the horrific events that played out only a couple hundred feet from them. Everything I had been witness to up until this point were suicides and the occasional gang execution. Men typically hang or shoot themselves, while women prefer the more poetic cutting of the wrists. Decomposed bodies and brain matter were the worst. I had one double execution gang shooting where midway through the family showed up not knowing what had happened. Their daughters were dating the guys that had been shot and no one had heard from them since. Not even the police knew they lived in the house. Odd are they were kidnapped, dead or in hiding. I didn't really care either way. Part of the reason I was put on this presentation was my complete disconnect with emotion and attachment to any other human being. Seeing the pools of blood and hysterical loved ones didn't affect me. I was told that we needed to make this a comedy, so I did. I shot around the sad stuff and concentrated on the fact that these crime scene cleaners have seen so much of this that the only way to cope was to have a sense of humor about it. They joked and played around as if it was your run of the mill mom and pop company. One even made a snow angel in the blood.
Their white trucks pulled up in front of me and it was time to get to business. Today's shoot was at the house of man that went insane. He was a Lebanese immigrant that lived with his father and sister in a small one-bedroom apartment. He worked as a security guard. His entire place was decorated with crosses and pictures of Jesus. Everywhere you looked there were stacks of notebooks where he would write down the stuff crazy people write down. I flipped through one of them and it was like reading a twisted version of Harriet the Spy. I could feel the crazy immediately. One day he decided he had taken enough shit and did something about it. After shooting to death his sister and father, he chopped them up. There wasn't nearly as much blood as I thought there would be. Once the heart stops beating, the blood spillage is minimal. He cut them up in the bathtub and then loaded them into two different suitcases. He drove one to Fresno and the other to San Diego. He made sure not to leave any fingerprints or DNA that could be tracked back to him. Since the family was immigrants, finding out who they were would be next to impossible. He was very calculating in every step he took. The problem was that he was too illiterate to realize that he had left the luggage tags with his address on the suitcases. The cops knocked on his door and he made a run for it. He broke both legs jumping from his third story window. Idiot. In situations like this, the family usually gives the crime scene cleaners permission to toss or donate everything. They knew it was going to be our last day of shooting and they wanted to give me a gift. On the wall with a stream of blood splatter across it was the picture of the last supper. Ironically, it was the last thing they saw before getting a bullet pushed through their heads by their religious fanatic of a family member. I told them I wanted it. Not as a homage, not as a trophy, but as a reminder of how horrible life can be. I've seen and experienced some horrible things in my life, most of which I'll never talk about, some of which I blocked out. I've found that facing something is usually the best way of keeping it from holding you back in the long run. It's my reminder to live every day to the fullest and as if it's my last. To do the things that bring me joy because it can all be over in a heartbeat. It's been one year to the day that I got that picture. I've stayed true to that belief and its been a pretty amazing year to say the least.