Two Memos About Hans the Night Janitor

From: Curt Hopkins

Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 1999 2:27 PM

To: Everybody at Ask Jeeves

Subject: for the new folks

Let’s not forget Hans, the recently paroled weird old janitor guy who’s recently jumped on the Jeeves team!  Don’t forget to say hi if you’re working late and you see him on a break, rolled up in the Grammar Saloon in his carpet remnant, slaking his thirst with a plastic waterglass full of Ol’ Grandad and taking the edge off a ravenous hunger with a piece of that hamb’ger sammich he loves so much all folded up into the same square of tinfoil he brings in every night.  Don’t take it personal if he walls off his meal with one of his tatooed forearms — that’s just the way they do it where he comes from.  Hans told me he looks forward to meeting all of you, providing of course you give him his proper respect as a long-timer and don’t make him hafta meathook you the way they done it back home that one time when he was out with Jimmy and they never caught Jimmy and they caught him though and made him go to Walla Walla and that on the eve of his prom and him with a date with Iva and he was there 30 years and he never even did nothing ‘cept drive. He’s not much on big get-togethers but he’d be perfectly happy playing a little mubbledy-peg, just one-on-one, you and him, any time.  If you’d like to leave a message for Hans, there’s a Quaker Oats tube he keeps shoved into the crack between the kitchen wall and David Warthen’s office full of Top and rolling papers and some pictures and articles out of “Boys Life” and stuff and you’re welcome to leave a message in there.  Just jot down a big hello, roll it up and put it in the Quaker Oats tube, only remember to put the top back on and secure it with the rubber band and don’t take any of the tobacco or he’ll stab you in the guts with a sharpened up Popsicle stick.

***

From: Curt Hopkins

Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 1999 2:12 PM

To: Everybody at Ask Jeeves

Subject: Hans Says Adios, Space Food & Monorails, Asspants &Gunpowder

Hans wanted to tell you folks good-bye.  See, Hans is a little too emotional for good-byes.  He’s currently loading up the camper.  See, him and his buddy Timmy J. Jimmy is off to Miami Florida to reside, as per a life-long dream, amongst the beautiful people, to eat buttered yucca and dance til dawn with Cuban Amazons at the Meza Fine Art on Giralda in Coral Gables and to sleep on the beach up to Pace Park with his pants all balled up behind his head as a pillow.

He wanted you all to know how deeply rewarding it was to clean your toilets, pick up accidental print-outs of porno sites and vacuum up the dried vomit after one or other of the programmers got excited installing the latest Quake patch and lauched Red Bull-and-Cornuts slurry all over the plywood dividers. It was not worse than prison.  Not at all.  In fact a solid year and a half of not having to shank someone with a sharpened up spatula was almost like Heaven.  Almost.  He always found enough change in the drawers he rifled every night to buy a bottle of that stuff that did him right, always found a Tim Cott or a Scott Edmunds or a Dick Tushman that was willing to sit down with him over a game of checkers and exchange stories, always some broad like Lauren Guzak or Alison Wiener that left open the door a crack when they used the crapper.

Yeah.  It was alright.  Got him on his feet again.  But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.  And what Hans gotta do is follow that dream.  So whether he’s half-way to permanent nightfall on cheap rum in the alley behind Centro Vasco on SW 8th or sunk over a table across from some old Bautista partisan playing dominos at 13th and 8th in Little Havana, leading a one-man pro-Castro rally down the middle of Biscayne boulevard, or hanging around outside 821 on Lincoln Road down in South Beach screaming at celebrities, he’s always going to have a moment to rush through a hasty prayer for all the folks he left behind in Berkeley, CA.

He ain’t gonna miss the yuppies, though.