Which Reminds Me...

During the summer between college and law school,  I worked for about two months at a realty company that rented beach houses by the week.  The office was about a half-hour from my parents' house in Virginia Beach, and the hours were pretty easy.  My job consisted of processing paperwork and going to beach houses between rental weeks (which were Monday to Monday) to make sure that the place was clean before it was handed over to the next renter.

So Mondays were great because I'd swing by the ten or fifteen houses on my list, quickly run through them making sure they were fairly presentable, and then I'd leave for the day. 

One Monday I went to a house on my list and opened the door and was immediately hit in the face with a pungent, sickly smell.  It was like rotten meat.  It was strong enough to make me stop and wince a little, and go back out into the driveway for air. 

I looked back at the house, deciding what the hell that smell could be, and whether I could stand to go in.

I braved it, and walked into the house.  Now, these beach houses typically are three or four stories, with the kitchen and main living area on the top floor.  And with each flight of stairs I went up in this house, the smell became more pungent and more powerful.

By the time I reached the kitchen level, my eyes literally were watering.  Something in that house was rank, and I half expected to see a rotting corpse on the top floor when I came up the stairs.  I opened every window and door on the top floor, and went out on the deck several times to catch my breath before going back into the house to figure out what the hell the smell was.

But the house was spotless.  Every trash can was free of debris, every closet was empty.  The smell, which I determined was coming from the kitchen, was untraceable.  The counters were speckless, and had you been able to breath and if you had the stomach to do so above the noxious stench, you could have eaten off the floor.  The house was immaculate.

I bent over to look under the sink, and that's when I realized the smell was coming from the dishwasher.  I put my hand on the dishwasher door and counted to three before opening it, having no earthly idea what was inside, or if anything would leap out at me. 

Scent is the sense tied most closely to memory, and there are days when I will walk past a heaping trash can at a fair grounds in the summer, or smell the breeze coming off the dump in Baltimore City, or drive with my windows open by an estuary off the Bay at low tide, and I will catch a frisson of something that vaguely reminds me of the malodorous death aroma that smacked me in the face when I opened that dishwasher.

It was like a vat of ammonia, vinegar, dog shit, rotting flesh, and infection had been simmered slowly, then shit into by a large man, then poured into trash bags and left out for a month in the sun, then slowly and lovingly slathered on the gangrenous open wounds on the foot of an elderly diabetic man, that you then had to suck on.

I slammed the dishwasher door shut and threw up immediately into the kitchen sink.  Then I ran out onto the house deck and dry heaved several times.  I found a beach towel hanging off the deck rail, and I took a deep breath and put it over my mouth and nose, and ran back into the house and opened the dishwasher and looked inside.

There is a modern tale about cooking fish that seems like urban legend, but is true.  If you take a fillet of fish--say, salmon--and wrap it in foil and put it on the top rack of a dishwasher, then you can cook the fish by running the dishwasher.

What the tenants discovered, however, is that you cannot do the same thing with other seafood. 

The tenants--probably in a drunken, last night celebration--decided that they were going to boil and steam a bushel of live crabs by putting them in the dishwasher.  Better still, they thought that the best way to season them would be to put Old Bay seasoning in the detergent tray of the dishwasher.

What happened was that the Old Bay clogged the detergent line, and the dishwasher water simply wasn't hot enough, and all of the crabs slowly suffocated and died.  The tenants must have realized the monumental mistake they made, but rather than remove the still-living (and probably pissed off) crabs, they simply shut the door and let the crabs stay where they were.

For over a week.

Not only did a cleaning crew charge double to clean the house and aerate it, but the dishwasher unit had to be replaced. 

I was given by my boss, as a joke, a gift certificate to John's Crab and Seafood House. 

I never used it.    

      

Comments

[cracow_couture]

That is fucking sick. You are a very brave man.

[Jason]

That's absolutely beautiful in it's own twisted way...