Somebody No Water Bamboo

TEN
(I heard this story on a bridge over La Honda Creek, in front of Ken Kesey's cabin.)

"Like, the sun was in late Leo/early Virgo the first time I saw San Francisco Bay. I came out of Denver in a drive-away four-door Buick, with my motorcycle took-to-pieces and wrapped in a tarp in the back seat. Everything else I owned was stuffed in the trunk and all around me in the front seat.
"The car was supposed to end up in The City, but I got a little too twisted out by Livermore somewhere and took the hundred mile longcut up and over Mount Hamilton. Anyway, 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, like, a full-tilt drag strip with, like, hundreds of far out cars and, I swear, right overhead are real gullwing gliders, man, cruising out over the Bay and landing beside the drag strip.
"So, before I turn in the car, I score a little house to rent in Menlo Park, by the cemetery. They'll rent right away to a Buick. I unload my stuff into the house, take the car into The City, put the motorcycle together, deliver the car to some Arab rental company, and putt back down the Bayshore to my happy little home.
"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, really, but I totally can not 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 Colorado, and can I please have my week's pay? This guy is so used to losing help that he, like, 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 and set up an appointment for an interview the next day at Lee Manor.
"Lee Manor is this 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, like, 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, like, church table, and he doesn't ask or say a thing, man, just stares at me, watches me eating pudding. I felt like a deer caught in headlights, man, until finally he says, like, 'Let us walk.'
"I walk, but he's like, ninety years old, and has those 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.
"So 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 it was that lived in Lee Manor. Nobody cares to meet a custodian. But, like, 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, man. I mean 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 of East Palo Alto with their damn hair spray cans and wads of Kleenex, then they barefoot it back to the apartment, man, and leave the mess for the servants. Litterers, man. 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 or something. Anyway, she was goofy, man, like 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, man. The first time I took apart her disposal and found all that fiber wrapped around the works, man, I seriously thought that this chick had, like, decided against hanging herself and had shoved the rope down the sink. The second time I ask her what she is putting down there, and she shows me, so we make a deal, man, and every Wednesday morning after that 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 Colorado. The aspens turn 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.'"