I Kill for Money
Tommy Hart swings a dead mouse back and forth by its tail and grins.
“Ooo, a corpus delicti, how deeelectable,” he coos, popping up from under the sink and licking his lips. “Rodent à la carte anyone?” Tommy bursts into laughter at his own joke, his blue eyes bulging with excitement as he examines the recently trap-squashed mouse. It’s 9:30 in the morning at Larry’s Lakeside Diner in Chicago, and with three dead mice already stiffly huddled in his black pouch, Tommy is in a good mood. “And this, my friends,” he proclaims to the four young chefs crowded near him, “is why they call me Dr. Death.” He pauses, glances around, then begins to hum the theme song from Jaws. Even for a sixty-three-year-old exterminator, Thomas H. Hart is a bit odd.
“I don’t know whether to be happy you’re catching ’em, or pissed ’cause you keep finding more,” says a tall, unshaven man with a stamped nametag that reads HEAD CHEF. He watches with baffled amusement as his exterminator prowls the kitchen floor on hands and knees. For the past year, Larry’s Diner has been “having a bit of a problem” with mice. Larry called Tommy about two months ago, and he’s been coming every week since.
“Larry, Larry,” replies Tommy, pulling his old jeans up with one hand as he glances toward him, “your kitchen will be squeaky clean in no time.” Tommy’s head falls back down as he lets out a stream of wheezy laughter.
Despite the early hour, the cluttered kitchen of Larry’s Diner is somewhat dim. A stream of yellow light pours out of Tommy’s foot-long metallic flashlight as he jerks it between economy-size jars of mayonnaise to check the rest of his prelaid mousetraps. The floor is in desperate need of a mop. A sour marshy smell creeping in from the nearby lake hovers in the air and provides a fitting environment for Tommy’s somewhat nautical appearance. Tommy chooses to wear a Greek fisherman’s hat with a metal bonefish pinned to the front simply because it “feels right.” His gray curly hair crawls out from the edges of his hat, framing his face—a by-product of thousands of laugh lines. He’s tan, and he has deep-set eyes, bushy gray eyebrows, and a walrus mustache. A red, yellow, blue, and green striped sweater is visible under his black windbreaker jacket with the word BEEFEATER printed across the left breast.
Tommy’s been in the exterminating business for about forty years. “Bugs, mice, rats, squirrels, birds; you name it, I’ll kill it.” Tommy beams. “Why stop?” He shrugs. “I just love it.” Although he used to work for a pest control company in Evanston, when the building was seized by the Internal Revenue Service, he decided to start his own business with one of his coworkers, Chris O’Leary. “We split up our accounts and took everything fifty-fifty. Real nice guy, O’Leary. Starting that up was the best thing that has ever happened to me.” Tommy’s face sags out of his smile as he adds, “My partner died a few years ago, though.” Less comfortable in a serious atmosphere, Tommy quickly changes the mood. “He died of hemorrhagic pneumonia. It’s a virus, you know, so a bug finally got him back.” He grins broadly, but the smile doesn’t quite make it into his eyes.
“Hey, Tommy, I’m going to go shovel the walkway,” yells Larry from the customer section of the restaurant. “Call me if you need the key to the maintenance closet.”
“Si, se?or,” Tommy shouts back, opening up his dark green toolbox, where he keeps supplies. Holding the flashlight in his teeth, Tommy takes out a series of new Victor mousetraps and sticky paper-baiting sheets. He hums unmelodiously to himself as his rough hands open and set a mousetrap with one swift and fearless motion. “Here’s my card,” he jokes, holding out the rectangular trap and speaking in a sleazy car-salesman voice. “I run a real snappy business.” Tommy cracks up again as he opens a different compartment of the toolbox and retrieves his secret mouse bait: Slim Jims. He explains that the pungent odor and sticky texture are perfect for the traps; he laughs, “Hell, why not give those suckers high cholesterol while we’re at it?” Crawling on his hands and knees, Tommy checks under shelves and behind the giant ovens, peering wide-eyed for any signs of “black rice,” his euphemism for mouse and rat poop.
The pest control industry has changed a lot since Tommy started into it some forty years ago. “A lot of the chemicals and equipment and stuff that we use and the way we approach pest control is completely different now.” Tommy squints, peers under the giant refrigerator, and bends closer to the concrete floor. “Another little guy, Jesus! They must love Larry’s cooking,” he proclaims, leaning down to unclasp the dead gray mouse. With his purple latex surgeon’s gloves (which he finds more exciting than clear ones), Tommy examines the body of his victim with glowing eyes before plopping him into his bag. “Anyway,” he continues, “the buzzword now is IPM: Integrated Pest Management. IPM is basically a way of approaching pest control which utilizes chemical treatment as a last resort; in other words, educating people on how to seal things”—he pauses for a moment as he wipes the dried blood off the used trap—“how to do things in a more environmentally friendly manner, how to use sanitation and block holes. It’s all about not creating situations conducive to animals and insects entering into homes.”
Tommy, however, probably wouldn’t mind rodents or beetles wandering into his house. His interest in extermination harks back to a childhood fascination with bugs and the natural world. “That stuff doesn’t scare me at all. I was introduced to the outdoors at an early age and was very interested by everything. I used to collect bugs and put them in little jars.” Tommy wrinkles his mustache up and down and widens his eyes. “At summer camp my friends and I used to play with snakes. We used to catch frogs in the pond and watch the snakes eat them alive headfirst.”
Actually dealing with the creatures and doing the real grungy physical work is what Tommy loves most about his job. “When I started in the business, I worked as an exterminator for about six months and then they promoted me inside the office to do paperwork and other things. I mean, I got more money for it, but I just couldn’t take it. Some people are money driven; some aren’t.” Tommy pauses and resets the trap. “I like the satisfaction of solving people’s problems. That’s the most rewarding thing by far.”
Tommy pushes himself up onto his feet. He breathes in deeply, then exhales in a quick burst as he straightens his sailor’s hat and brings his left hand up to salute. “On to My Lai!” Tommy orders. “The enemy lies ahead!” He marches over to the maintenance closet door and sets his green toolbox down with a clank. “Hmm, hmm, hmm,” he hums, tilting his head back and forth, “door key, shmore key.” With a swift motion he flicks open the blade of a rusted Swiss Army Knife and slides it through the crack between the door and wall. “Voilà,” Tommy beams, and the door clicks open instantly.
“I tend to use sticky paper bait pads in closets,” he explains as he makes his way into the shelf-lined room. “When people walk in, it’s usually pretty dark, and we wouldn’t want their toes getting snapped off, now would we?” He grins. “The mice wander onto the pad, and their noses and feet get stuck. After break-dancing for about ten minutes they settle down and suffocate to death, ’cause they can’t breathe.” He shuts the closet door behind him and switches on his flashlight, eerily illuminating his face from below. “Do youuu like to break-dance, my dear?” Tommy flicks on the closet bulb, his laughter echoing in the small room.
Tommy acknowledges that most people are very uncomfortable with bugs and vermin and knows that his humor serves to calm them down, claiming that “his lighthearted nature helps his business.” However, Tommy’s sense of humor has not always been an asset. “See, I almost got kicked out of the first company I worked for. I was assigned to give a thirty-to forty-five-minute discussion on bat control, and as I approached the podium, I had a wooden hammer, three wooden stakes, a black cloak, and a copy of the Old Testament.” He wheezes, then stops to collect himself. “God, I thought that was just hilarious. Too bad my boss didn’t.”
Although Tommy’s customers all agree that he’s a funny guy, some of them admit he sometimes takes it too far in mocking himself. “Tommy’s a riot,” Larry says, “but sometimes I feel like he’s laughing at his own profession so that others won’t. I mean, he’s great, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I get the feeling he’s a bit embarrassed.” Larry looks over both his shoulders before continuing in a hushed voice. “I mean, look at his truck. No markings, nothing. Just plain white. He’ll joke about it, but there’s no giant cockroach painted on the back.”
Even Tommy understands that he sometimes hides behind his jokes. “For the most part people perceive me as I perceive myself, but there are times when people have been rude to me.” He pauses, starts to say something different, then stops. His body tenses up and he begins to rub his hands as if washing them in invisible water. “I mean, I guess you could say I sometimes use humor as a defense mechanism.” He stops again, as if thinking over whether or not he really does. “There are all different types of people and issues that you have to deal with when you work in a job like this. Some people approach you very nicely. Some people, well, some people don’t.” He shrugs and shakes his head, averting his eyes. “Some people are different, very judgmental.”
Tommy fingers the fish pin on his cap, then awkwardly laughs. “Well, the roach coach is calling!” he proclaims, referencing his nickname for his truck. “I got a nasty case of bedbugs to deal with over in Washington Heights and this kitchen is squeaky clean for now.” He guffaws, apparently unaware of his joke’s repetition. Although Tommy seems clueless, Larry admits his repertoire of jokes is like “a sitcom on rerun.” Gathering his stuff, Tommy trudges out the back door of the diner and into the cold Chicago air.
Tommy’s old unlabeled truck is parked perfectly in one of the many open spaces. Despite its white, spotless shell, the inside of Tommy’s vehicle is a reflection of his unique personality. The back of the truck serves as a storage room for traps, nets, gloves, structural repair items, sticky boards, pheromone traps, sprays, and more than twelve different kinds of poison. The front is subject to a series of bumper stickers stuck to the inside walls for only Tommy to see. Ironically, most of them seem to shout things at other drivers. HORN BROKEN. WATCH FOR FINGER, one reads. BEWARE: RED GREEN COLOR CONFUSION, boasts another. A small stuffed parrot hangs from the rearview mirror, squawking things like “Let me see your tits!” and “Polly wants a fucking cracker!” when squeezed. On the driver’s side, the decor is more serious. THE SERVICE INDUSTRY MEANS SERVICE reads one sticker. A 1/20/09: BUSH’S FINAL DAY sticker is stuck just inches away from one that reads NOT ANOTHER VIETNAM: STOP WAR IN IRAQ.
As a liberal Democrat, Tommy has always been against war. However, in the winter of 1967, at the age of twenty-two, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. Up until then, Tommy had had a difficult time finding his place in society. He attended four different schools: North Shore Country Day, Notre Dame, Deerfield High School, and Culver Academy in Indiana—one for each year of high school. “Magna cum laude were three words I never heard in my education,” he chuckles. “I wasn’t the world’s greatest student.” After graduating, Tommy attended college in San Francisco, where he was introduced to the “whole sixties thing.” He explains, “When I was living out in California, I became pretty friendly with this hippie colony that lived near campus. I remember telling one of the guys there that I had just got drafted. I mean, I could have run to Canada and hidden out, but that’s just not me. I just couldn’t do it.”
Although he served in the army from 1967 to 1970, Tommy never actually had to go to Vietnam. As one of only two hundred enlisted men to avoid the war, Tommy was deployed to a small town in Germany where he was assigned to watch over things as a ski patrolman. “I’m a Vietnam era vet, not an actual Vietnam vet. Some guy in a computer punching numbers, that’s all it was. I was damn lucky, that’s for sure. I just got to ski around. Hah! Pretty good way to spend my duty.” Tommy breathes in deeply and sighs. “Anyway, that’s the past. Unimportant now for the most part, other than the fact that they made me cut off my hair. I had an Afro back then. I mean, I still have a lot of hair. I’m sixty-three, and look at all this shit.” Tommy grabs two clumps of his gray curls and pulls them outward. “I don’t look sixty-three, I don’t feel sixty-three, I don’t act sixty-three, and I don’t care. Age is but a state of mind, my dear.” After a long pause, Tommy becomes uncomfortable in his own seriousness and jerks his head quickly to the left, breaking eye contact. “Ha! Did I ever tell you my friends call me Dr. Death? That’s more important. Write that down, my dear, write that down.”
Tommy starts up his truck and begins to drive away from the windy harbor and south toward Washington Heights. On an average day, Tommy makes about five or six stops, which usually take somewhere between six and ten hours. His customers include big businesses, office buildings, schools, restaurants, and residential homes. He likes to organize his day so that he starts in the city and works his way back out to the suburbs and toward his home, where he raised his two children and now lives alone with his wife, Janice.
Tommy’s wife admires his passion for small creatures. However, she admits that he can be “a bit obsessive” at times. “I’ll come downstairs to get some water at like one in the morning, and he’ll be sitting there all excited over some Nova program on the Discovery Channel about spider mating, or cockroach burrowing techniques.” She stops, smiles slightly, and fingers a wine-colored birthmark on her left cheek. “It’s not so much the bug obsession as it is all those jokes. Oh, Lord, day in and day out, and he’s his own biggest fan when it comes to humor. Cracks himself up nearly every minute.”
Tommy has a different perspective on his marriage. “The insect society is matriarchal. That is, the queen is the supreme ruler.” He chuckles. “That’s different in my house, though. My philosophy towards my wife is: ‘The daily beatings will continue until morale improves.’ ” He cracks his knuckles by pressing his hands together but then quickly holds them up on either side of his head in a gesture of surrender. “I’m joking, I’m joking,” he laughs. “Oh, man, I could tell you a million jokes, a hundred million jokes if you wanted. Hey, so what do you get when you cross a centipede and a parrot? . . . A walkie-talkie!” He throws his head back and lets out a loud wheeze.
Tommy takes a sip from a Mister Donut coffee as he flicks on the radio and starts swaying his head back and forth to a smooth jazz song. He takes a sharp left and pulls up next to a run-down concrete apartment complex of about five stories. Colorful graffiti surrounds the lower level of the building and a large white banner hangs over the entrance that reads APARTMENTS FOR RENT: CALL 773-555-0962 FOR MORE INFORMATION. Tommy takes one last sip of his coffee, and with a twist of his wrist, the car turns off and the music goes silent. “Welcome to the derelict city,” Tommy says in a mock low voice. “Gateway to downtown ghetto.”
The landlord called Tommy a few days ago, desperately begging him to come “as soon as he possibly could” to deal with a bedbug problem in one of the apartments he’s trying to rent. “Bedbugs are becoming more and more of an issue these days,” Tommy explains as he retrieves his supplies from the back of the truck. They resemble little black ticks that live in the cracks and springs of mattresses and rely on human blood for food. The key to knowing you have a problem, Tommy describes, is seeing little red spots all over the bed. “It’s their feces,” he laughs harshly. “Disgusting, huh?” He walks over piles of brown snow toward the back door of the complex and knocks.