The Brief Reign of the Crypt-Sweepers: A Tale of Custodial Terror

This town was once so normal: small, mostly white and middle-class.  However, the changes that happened had nothing to do with race or economic standing.  At least, that’s the way I have always seen it.

            It all started a couple of years ago.  Maybe I noticed the first one, or maybe it wasn’t until the group had grown that the oddity became perceptible.  One day, with no explanation at all, and on no particular date that anyone can now possibly recall, one young man, an early twenty-something local, picked up a broom and starting walking randomly about the town.  In the beginning, I imagine he was only spotted sporadically, leading those that observed him to simply assume that some guy was innocently, and purposefully, carrying his broom from one location to another.  Perhaps some spring cleaning, perhaps loaning it to a friend, hell, a good son sweeping up his mama’s place.  “Nothing to see here,” Jimmy ‘Less Than Three Standard Deviations From The Mean’ would say, “let’s pull over and grab some high-octane fuel and some food in equally high-octane packaging at a store with a name consisting of two verbs spelled phonetically in an annoying and creative manner, which are broken up by an “and” altered in the only manner known to humankind, i.e., the now infamous ‘n’.”

            It continued perpetually, days became weeks, weeks became months, and, more importantly, one became two became three.  Three young men, with no apparent source of social cohesion, walking about the town, each carrying their own personal sweeping device.  Sometime around the third month an article appeared in the local Manfringinsonton City Bugle:  An interview with the Crypt-Sweepers, with the ringleader, Bryant Spleen, offering his take.

            “Well, we’d heard many local authorities, both in this town and elsewhere, communities both small and large, comment that we ‘need to clean up the streets’.  So, we decided to take it as our own personal responsibility.”

            A bland and safe answer, a politician in the making, perhaps?  Or was there something more sinister at work here?  We would never know, as the article continued on that way without significantly deviating from the initial facade.  Journalists once again asking the hard-hitting questions from which society craves answers.

            Case in point: for all this time I’ve never once seen any of the “Crypt-Sweepers” actually use their brooms.  Excepting, of course, their occasional Jedi light saber fight pantomimes, and frequently they are seen shaking them over their heads to scare local children and elderly.  Furthermore, the only time they have ever set foot near crypts is when they trade in their brooms for tumblers of Jack Daniels.

            After the article, there was little said for some time, but the group continued to grow.  One day they began to wear the same attire as well.  Specifically, they created matching blue leather jackets with the “Crypt-Sweepers^tm” official emblem on the back: a poorly designed effigy of a half-rotten lich or skeleton (quite possibly based in a very plagiaristic manner on the old Bozo the Clown face), also wearing said jacket, in tatters of course (as rotting would surely affect the quality blue leather), and diligently sweeping up the dust and spiders and whatnot around the crypt, as any good undead janitor should.

            So, by this time, rain or shine, throughout the daylight hours and often well into the night, these apparently unemployed shiftless young men traipsed about the town wielding brooms and leather jackets that frightened the elderly and easily excitable yuppies with their semblance to some local Hell’s Angels facsimile.  How did they do it?  Who supported them?  Did they have far more members who alternated between their regular jobs and their shifts ‘keeping the streets clean’?

            However, long before such questions could reach conclusive answers, our simple town conjured up yet another peculiarity.  Not as unique as the original strangeness, but somehow all the more bizarre because of its perceptibly repetitive nature, and the evident lack of foresight, at least on the part of the individual who christened their name: The Sucking Decedent.  Oh yeah, a whole lot of vocabulary amongst these gents, walking thesauruses, really…and yet, they somehow missed the double meaning of the word ‘sucking’ in today’s parlance.  Yes, that’s ‘double meaning’, as the whole gang, equal in size and demeanor to their predecessors, walked around town carrying VACUUMS.  Indeed, from dust-busters on up to the large industrial wet-dry vacs.

            Perhaps this was not an oversight, perhaps it was a play on themselves or, certainly, on the other gang.  This assertion was further strengthened by their growing rivalry with the Crypt-Sweepers.  And, though second in chronology, they grappled for power on an equal footing given their ability to instill fear in the populace by revving up the vacuum motors.  This clearly had its own downside, taking into account that the conveyors of larger appliances had to stop and find a plug end before the terrorizing could begin.  Meanwhile, the holders of dust busters had to buy them time and disregard their own feelings of inadequacy at wielding such a weapon, on par with men of medieval times incapable of handling the cumbersome two-handed broadswords, parrying with invaders using a wooden pole or some such feeble instrument, until the knights could lumber up with their excessive armor intact and repel the assailants.

            But then, that was long ago, nowadays only the legends remain.  It is written that in the ides of march, on a crisp spring evening, with the moon in the phase of waxing gibbous, the two squads met, armed to the teeth with sanitary tools.  The screams were heard three towns over, and many of the old folk still swear that “the will-o-wisps lured them to the swamps and carried off their foul souls”.  The truth, of course, is indisputably more complicated than that.  Asked for comment, the local will-o-wisps claimed, flashing their lights in morse code, that they had nothing to do with the incident, and were, in fact, doing their laundry and watching reruns of ‘COPS’ at the time of the alleged wrongdoing.

The real cause of their disappearance may never be known, but in due respect, the townspeople have designated March 15^th the official spring cleaning day, and all the locals get together their brooms, vacuums, dustpans, and the occasional Roomba^tm, and drink themselves stupid, in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day as much as in reverence for the departed gangs.  It’s during these celebrations, in particular after several bottles of Canadian Hunter whiskey, that my mop appears to me like an apparition of ancestral tidings.  I consider donning the jacket long since hidden away in my utility closet, and carrying on the lost arts of the Janitore people of ancient Mongolia, the bloodline of myself and much of the genetic pool of our beloved town.  Then, as it does every year, my atavistic senses fade away, I lock the utility closet for another year, and I pass out watching midget porn.