Making a Living in Dead Zone

Eloisa Decker of San Gabriel had tried to kill the smell with Lysol. But after several days, she realized that even the jasmine she had blooming in the yard couldn’t mask the odor.

“It smelled like it does at funerals, but it didn’t go away,” Decker said, screwing up her nose as if she would sneeze, but instead letting an agonized “EEWWWWW!” sound escape. “The smell followed me to the car. I thought I was going crazy.”

A few days earlier, she and her husband, Robert, had heard skunks scratching beneath the floorboards of their kitchen, apparently trying to find their way out. In frustration, the skunks started spraying, and the pungency had mixed with the dampness caused by recent rains. The smell was potent, but neither Decker wanted to crawl under the house to fish out its source.

Mark Hecht knows his phone will ring on days like this. “I can feel it in the air,” he says. “It’s hot, there’s a second-stage smog alert. Something died.”

Hecht operates Under the House, a dead-animal removal and disposal service in Eagle Rock. “We deodorize, disinfect, take the darn thing to the pound.” He services the greater Los Angeles area, from the San Fernando Valley to Orange County.

Today Hecht, 32, is on his way out to the Deckers’ home. In these hard times, death, he says, carries with it the promise of employment.

For $75, Hecht will crawl under your house and take the offensive dead things to the pound, whether it be a skunk or an opossum, a raccoon, or an errant squirrel or neighborhood cat.

“It’s usually your garden-variety cat or possum,’ ” says Hecht, who, at 5-feet-4 and 115 pounds would seem to have a knack for crawling around in spaces meant for little more than air to circulate.

He has everything he needs in his yellow hatchback: plastic bags, deodorizers, disinfectants, various old rags with telltale stains, respirators, a hoe and a piece of a broom handle with a tape sculpture sticking to the end of it. “It’s my hoe extension,” he says, “for those hard-to-reach jobs.

“It’s a necrosis zoo back there,” says Hecht. “I run a sort of mobile Dante’s Inferno.” Hecht’s brand-new robin’s egg blue boat sneakers (“99 cents at Pic ‘N’ Save”) would seem to contradict everything about his line of work. “This job is purgatory,” he says. “It’s pretty much all gross.

“I’m the type of guy who will gag at blood and sewage, so I keep my mask on tight.”

En route, he stops for lunch at Carl’s Jr.--two cheeseburgers, fried zucchini, strawberry cheesecake, chocolate shake. “You can’t do the job on an empty stomach,” he says.

Hecht grew up in Fullerton and Anaheim, where his parents bred poodles and boxers. “But my pets were always other peoples’ pets,” he says. “I like all animals. They’re more fun when they’re alive. But they serve my purposes better when they’re dead.”

A few weeks ago, Hecht went out on a call in Compton. It seems the family dog, a 50-pound shepherd mix with dreadlocks, had crawled under the house and died. “Rasta Dog was too (disgusting) for me to take to the pound,” Hecht admits. “So I called the county. I try to be fair.”

The Decker household is landscaped with flowering bulbs--perfect fodder for such intrepids as the skunk, which likes to dig them up, or the opossum, which likes to simply wander among them. Robert Decker had tried before to set traps and to narrow the gaps in the ventilation screens with bricks.

Hecht advises against bricking up after the animal is heard under the house--because the animal can get trapped--though he admits that’s good for business.

Respirator in place, Hecht squirrels through the crawl space opening, with a battery of lights and extension cords trailing behind. It’s hot and muggy, and he’s down there for 45 minutes. “One time a possum died in our trash can,” says Eloisa Decker, watching the blue sneakers disappear under the house. “We just wheeled him to the curb. So convenient.”

A swarm of flies near the vent has her thinking. “We shouldn’t be afraid if it’s dead,” Decker reasons. “We should be afraid if it’s still alive.”

Hecht gags. He’s found something peculiar: both a skunk and an opossum in some subterranean rendezvous. “A suicide pact,” he says. “Right out of ‘West Side Story.’ ”

After disinfecting the area with cherry hydrosol, Hecht re-emerges with the two plastic bags and he’s singing: “Maria . . . I just met a skunk named Maria . . .

“I’m a ghost,” says Hecht, the dust rising off his clothes as he removes his respirator. “I’m also a technician and the Southland village leper. This is something that has to be done, but nobody wants to do it.”

There would seem to be a certain valor in that. He leaves the Deckers half a bottle of Zap to control any residual odors.

“Sometimes I wonder if I am ever going to grow up and join the real world,” says Hecht. “Or am I doing a heroic public service for those who’d rather not go under the house?”