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Jun. 18, 2007
You missed some over there," Lee Johnson tells me, pointing to a barely perceptible depression in a patch of tall grass. I take a lot of crap on the job, but never have I filled a five-gallon bucket with it. "You can't miss any or they'll call and ask you to come back," Johnson warns me. This morning I've stepped into the smelly shoes of a 59-year-old Las Vegan who roams backyards, six mornings a week, picking up where Fido left off. "When I tell people I'm a pooper-scooper, they go, 'What?' " says Johnson, who works for Poo Snatchers, one of at least four valley companies providing the same revolting service. "People look at the truck and laugh and point," he says. (The Poo-mobile, a 2003 Nissan Frontier, displays the company logo and the license plate 0 POOP.) "They'll take pictures. They'll say, 'I have never heard of anything like this before in my life!' "Then they'll think about it for a moment," Johnson continues, "and the next thing out of their mouth is usually, 'Can you do my yard?' " Tall grass is not what we pooper-scoopers like to see, by the way. It tends to seal in moisture. And I don't know what they feed Max the mastiff in that house off Charleston Boulevard and Palmhurst Drive, but it creates a lot of moisture. Oh, did I mention that we use our hands for this job? "It would take too long to use a device," Johnson says. "When you have 40 yards to do in a day, you have to do each in seven minutes." Of course, we wear gloves. But the disturbingly discernible sensation of squirming maggots makes me wonder why I can only register texture this well through rubber when it's on my hand. (Oh, come on. You didn't want the rest of those pancakes anyway.) Much like employees of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, we pooper-scoopers prefer to see a backyard with desert landscaping. Sun-heated rocks act like charcoal briquettes, baking our targets to cheese-puff consistency. A dry heave hits as I place Max's present in my bucket. This may actually qualify me to join a college fraternity. Most of the time, Johnson admits, he doesn't even wear a glove. "I'll use one on two or three houses," he says. "You can always wash your hands, that's how I look at it." And I shook this guy's hand hello. Johnson, who moved here in 1989 from San Diego, is a former construction superintendent who built airplane hangars at McCarran International Airport. "But I just got sick of it and kind of semiretired," he says. A friend who worked for Poo Snatchers asked Johnson if he wanted a job. At first, he didn't. "I said, 'Are you kidding me?' " Johnson remembers. Then Johnson heard the pay: $660 a week. "It's not more money than construction," he says. "But in construction, I was working 16 hours a day. Here, I have to work a maximum of seven hours a day. I leave between 5:30 and 6 a.m. and I'm home by 1 p.m. "That's my favorite part of the job," he says. My favorite part is the drive between houses -- although the Poo-mobile could use one of those Little Tree air fresheners. Poo Snatchers, whose motto is "making Las Vegas a little less crappy," was founded in 1997 by one-time wedding planner Andrea Burton and her husband, Chris. "We went to someone's house who used another service like this," Andrea says. "We thought it was strange, because we thought that homeowners' kids should be picking up their own dog poop. "But they don't," she says. "So we added up the numbers." Poo Snatchers charges $40 a month to clean up weekly after one dog. (Additional dogs are $5 extra each.) Johnson and the company's other pooper-scooper visit 260 clients each week. At first, Burton says, she and her husband "would throw up in the yards." "It doesn't bother me, though," Johnson says. "You just get used to it. It's like anything else. If you worked in a meat-packing plant, you'd get used to the smell of that." Still, there are moments that get to even him. "You can get a little queasy when you get some real good stuff," he says. Danger also is an element. Johnson showed me the scars. The biggest is on his right leg, below the bullet wound he received while serving as a Marine in Vietnam, and above his '95 Thunderbird tattoo. There are two bite marks, one marking the entry of the boxer's canines and one the exit. "But the one that hurt the worst was through the fingernail," he says, identifying the culprit as a Henderson-based bulldog named Tank. "As I was walking out of the yard, I had my arm down, and he jumped up and bit me on the finger," Johnson recalls. YIP! YIP! YIP! A brown dachshund leads a welcoming committee of four little dogs at our fourth -- and my final -- house. I love wiener dogs. My fiancee and I have one named Sammie. "Little dogs are the worst," Johnson says. Although they don't bite as hard, he says, they bite more often. "They're cantankerous," Johnson says. Indeed, it is not Danger the pit bull mix but Bandit the dachshund who provides the biggest obstacle to my responsibilities today. "He's harmless," says owner Stephany Radke. If harmless means baring teeth and coiling to attack whenever I bend down to scoop up his business, then this is an accurate statement. "It's not a real fun job, is it?" Johnson asks. The answer becomes even more obvious when I look down at my de-pooping glove. There's a hole in it. Fear and Loafing appears every Monday in the Living section. Levitan's previous adventures can be found at www.fearandloafing.com.
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