JW

I wrote this a couple years ago and posted it on another board. I ran across it a few minutes ago and it got me thinking about life... Funny how things stack up sometimes.

Speaking of janitors:

The first time I saw the man, I was on the way to my office. I thought an errant 60s Hippy had gotten caught in a time warp. From the unkempt gray-brown mop that spilled carelessly out from under the dirty leather flop hat he wore, down to the peace symbol crudely stitched onto the breast pocket of his well used jeans jacket, on down to the holey blue jeans and protruding knees, he was a sight to behold.

The almost toothless grin he approached me with was more menacing that pleasant. I was certain he wanted to say something but he strode past me as if I had not even been there. A nervous shudder shook my body as he passed.

A few days later, I ran into him (literally) coming around a corner in that same hallway of the building where I have my office. I was taken completely by surprise. It was almost midnight and I had expected the corridor to be empty... and apparently he had as well. We both stopped dead in our tracks.

"Sorry," said I.

"No. It's my fault," said he, and that was that.

I don't really remember how the next few steps in our relationship were covered but after a week or so of terse mutual acknowledgements he invited himself into my office to introduce himself to Sam, my office cat.

Sam is a pretty fair judge of character and his dash for cover upon seeing the intruder served to confirm my own growing apprehension. The janitor remained undaunted and in repeat performances of that first approach to Sam, finally, after doffing that hideous chapeau, he began to make inroads into Sam's heart; ultimately becoming one of Sam's favorites.

It became an office ritual that he would knock, enter, sit down in the chair I have by the coffee table next to the door, and begin to talk... and talk... and talk.

He went endlessly on about his conversation with Kris Kristopherson; all, apparently, two lines of it; one line his, one Kristopherson's. The hand shake was spoken of as if it were the high point in his life.

Oh, and he knew every detail of the lives of Lennon and McCartney, had every Grateful Dead recording ever offered to the public, worshipped the likes of Janis Joplin, Arlo Guthrie, and, I think, but I'm no expert, knew every word of the dialogue for Alice's Restaurant.. and all of the backstory as well.

After a couple of months, his 20 minute visits had stretched into 90 minutes and his affection for Sam became overly obvious. That relationship with my cat freed him of whatever other inhibitions he might have had and I was treated to all of the personal details of his life.

Seems he had been married three times. His most intense memories were of his first wife and their vagabond life in their VW bus. He had a daughter with her but she took that little girl and abandoned him. He never understood why.

Most of the women he knew along the road of his life wanted to crawl into bed with him, to hear him tell it.

His wives were always being mean to him... until they left him and his current wife, a Mexican immigrant, abused him regularly while she carried on a long distance love affair with an imprisoned Minnesota-Mexican drug pusher.

He was going to leave her. She clearly didn't deserve a man like him and soon, she would learn the pain of losing him. Well, maybe not real soon. I heard that same lament, every night for a year and a half. As it turned out, the abuses he suffered in life were to be his most persistent topic of conversation.

He and his Mexican bride shared a one room, third floor apartment until the day she woke the entire place up screaming Spanish insults at him. Their landlord kicked her out and he let her go. It had finally happened, she was learning the pain of life without him. Only she didn't seem to be suffering all that much. He knew, because he saw her almost every day when he went to her rented trailer to fix this that or the other thing, or when he cajoled the lot manager into not throwing her out for lack of rent payments, which he promised to make for her, and did so.

In his misery, he would sit in my chair and vacillate between anger and tears while I did my very best to get some work done.

One day, he proudly announced that he would be moving into the trailer. He and his wife were going to become the proud owners of that fine home. It was apparently abandoned by the last owner and some obscure law entitled him to claim title to it for fixing up some of its deficits... and catching up on the lot rent which was some 6 months behind when his wife moved in.

He told me of his brother-in-law breaking into the trailer, stealing their refrigerator and leaving him and Carmelita with a cupboard full of rotting veggies. As it happened, I had a small used refrigerator that I no longer needed and I gave that to him. He, of course, had no means to transport it to the trailer. The beat up 20 year old Ford Escort wagon he drove had side doors too small and the rear hatch wouldn't open at all. I did have the means to deliver it so I volunteered to haul it for him just before last Christmas. He was giving it to his wife as a Christmas present.

He had told me of their wedding night when she went home with her parents and he went home alone. She told him that it was a longstanding Mexican custom that the groom was not to consummate the marriage for several days after the wedding. Days, he reported, that had turned into weeks and then months. His fondness for her physical attentions was not hidden when he declared the high likelihood that the refrigerator would gain him at least one night of connubial bliss.

When we got to his trailer, I helped him carry the fridge into their kitchen. I tried not to look around, thinking the decayed state of his home might prove to be an embarrassment to him. Far from it, he insisted on giving me the grand tour. I can only suggest that had I subjected my cat to such an environment, the SPCA could rightfully have arrested me for animal abuse.

Cupboards were broken with doors half hinged and hanging. The carpeting reeked of someone's last motorcycle oil change. There was no actual furniture to speak of but some large pillows and disheveled blankets on the floor of what must have passed for a bedroom. The master bedroom was being used as a storage room for every possible artifact from an old spare tire to a guitar with only one string.

Worst of all, it was December in Minnesota and they had no furnace so he had fired up the oven, propped the door open and set a fan on it to blow the heat to the back of the trailer. Also, he couldn't close the front door because the lock had been damaged when the refrigerator was stolen. I took the lock apart and repaired it. It only needed a little pressure here and there to make the pieces move freely again and a bit of grease would have made everything like new... but he had no grease and neither did I. At least, not in my Jeep.

As I left, I warned him that what he was doing with the oven was extremely dangerous. He was filling the house with CO and would wake up dead one morning... It was a thought that didn't seem to disturb him all that much since his desire for an impending death was a frequent topic of his laments as well.

Over the next couple of weeks, he was becoming obviously ill. I suggested that he go to the emergency room at a local hospital. Finally, he did just that. They did all the usual tests they do on medical assistance patients, gave him a vial of pain pills and sent him home.

He grew steadily more morose and began doubling and tripling his meds. The last day I saw him, he was barely functioning. He just never showed up for work again and we all got used to a series of new janitors. I had expected him to stop by and see Sam. They had a pretty strong bond after more than a year of daily visits. That, and how he still cried over the loss of his kids, two young cats that he lost at the hands of his sister some 15 years earlier.

Last night, actually a couple days ago now, I was informed that he had died. No details were forthcoming but it was definite. He had died.

This story has no moral. We all do what we can and that man claimed to have done the same. If there was ever an object lesson for failure, Lou was it. He was a nice man, loved cats, incessantly complained about how the world chewed him up and spat him out. Had not a single realistic concept of what life was all about and finally, faded from life to a pauper's grave without so much as a notification to those who regarded him as a friend... and Sam and I both did.

MarvinSussman

Interesting character. Thanks for the description.

You don't give his age but he must have been on Social Security. Sounds like an intelligent man who absorbed too much of the drugs that made life exciting for him.

I knew a few of that type. Life itself was never exciting enough. They needed chemicals to add zing. Then they find that it didn't add enough zing so they needed more chemicals. Finally they get enough or run out of ability to search for more.

Why is just trying to make it through life not exciting enough? Short vision? Lack of curiosity about Nature?

Apparently, a large portion of humanity needs the chemicals. The worst crime is Nixon's drug war!