Somebody No Water Bamboo

     The sun was in late Leo/early Virgo the first time I saw San Francisco Bay. I came out of Chicago in a pickup truck, with my motorcycle took-to-pieces and wrapped in a tarp in the back. Everything else I owned was stuffed all around me in the front seat.
     I start coming up the east side of the Bay, and I know that this is where my home is going to be because I hit Fremont on a Sunday afternoon and right there by the freeway is a full-tilt drag strip with hundreds of far out cars and right overhead are real gullwing gliders cruising out over the Bay and landing beside the drag strip.

     I score a little house to rent in Menlo Park, by the cemetery. I unload my stuff into the house, put the motorcycle together. In just a couple of days, I score a job as veterinarian's assistant for a crusty old dude on El Camino in Mountain View. It turns out I don't mind shoveling dog manure, but I totally cannot handle holding the dogs down while the Doc shoots them up to put them away. Something about their eyes.
     So I pull this trip where I tell the vet that California is just too much for me, that I miss my family and I'm headed back to Somewhere, and can I please have my week's pay? This guy is so used to losing help that he just writes the check. No deductions, no goodbyes, no nothing.

    There used to be jobs around every corner. On the way back to Menlo Park I see a Help Wanted sign. I park the bike and go over and read the fine print that says "Janitor needed, easy work, low pay", and gives this phone number, which I call from a pay phone and set up an appointment for an interview the next day at Lee Manor.
     Lee Manor is s hundred-unit, three-story, singles' cinderblock studio apartment thing, down by Bayshore in Palo Alto, shaped like a horseshoe, with a swimming pool in the middle and a rec room wedged into the open end. I stash the bike a couple of blocks away. You never know.

    The job interview was the strangest of trips. This liver-spotted Chinese dude, Mr. Lee himself, is dressed like some kind of Sicilian gangster with a diamond stick pin and big gold pinky ring, sitting in the rec room. When I come in, he offers me a little plastic cup of chocolate pudding and we sit there eating pudding at this plastic table, and he doesn't ask or say a thing just stares at me, watches me eating pudding. I felt like a deer in headlights until finally he says 'Let us walk.'
      I walk, but he's ninety years old, and has metal taps on the heels and toes of his wingtips, so he shuffles, and it is fingernails on the blackboard stuff. Sounds like somebody is dragging a refrigerator down the hall. 
    We are standing out by the pool, and he is waving his arms around his empire and telling me to watch the garbage, and skim the pool, and water the bamboo, (which are these little teenage bushes all around the pool) and paint the rooms every time somebody moves, and buff the

hallways, and get three hundred dollars a month. Then he scrapes over to a Lincoln Town Car and peels out toward downtown Palo Alto. I'm hired.

     I never really figured out who lived in Lee Manor. Nobody cares to meet a custodian. But the first floor was mostly big brown guys from junior colleges being fattened by Stanford as their football team of the future. Big guys produce big garbage.
     And the second floor was a crash pad for stewardesses working out of SFO. They were slobs. Flight attendants may be the super-tidiest of human beings when they are at work, but you put a couple of them in lounge chairs by the pool and they trash all East Palo Alto with their hair spray cans and wads of Kleenex then barefoot it back to the apartment and leave the mess for the servants. Litterers. Get out of the airplane and think the outside world is so big they don't need to deal with their trash.
     And then there was the Artichoke Woman on the third floor. I never saw her wearing anything but a pink chenille housecoat. I think she worked nights at Stanford Hospital. Anyway, she lived on some weird schedule where every Tuesday night she came home, ate artichokes, then tried to run the leaves through the garbage disposal. You can't do that.
     I didn't even know what an artichoke was. The first time I took her disposal apart and found all that fiber wrapped around the works, I thought that she had decided against hanging herself and shoved the rope down the sink. The second time I asked her what she is putting down there, and she shows me, so we make a deal and every Wednesday morning I pick up a little plastic sack of artichoke leaves from in front of door 329.
     First of October I come to work and there is Mr. Lee standing out by the pool and staring at the pool plants, which are nice and gold, like everything should be by the first of October, right? I'm from Nebraska. What leaves there are fall in September. 
     Mr. Lee looks me up and down, looks at the plants, looks back at me, back at the plants, then reaches into the breast pocket of his Taiwan suit coat, peels off three one-hundred-dollar bills, hands them to me, and dismisses me from his employ, right there. Says 'You are fired, Sir. Somebody no water bamboo.'

     A week later I was working for the City of Palo Alto, running a chipper on their tree crew.