Hurrah—A Janitor’s Job At Last

Tucson, Arizona
1974

Back at university! I enrolled in Zoology, Ethics, Existentialism,
Philosophy of Literature, and 19th Century Philosophy. I earned a 3.5
GPA my first semester back, but the following semester the problems started.
I didn't get very far into that semester before I moved out of my
apartment and down to Arizona. As might be expected, once I started
school, C.S. and I got back together. I was in my second semester
when I found out she had a second boyfriend that I knew nothing about.
Home on vacation from working in an Arizona copper mine, my old friend
Mike, told me that his copper mine was always hiring. That’s all I needed
to hear, so I left school and went with Mike back to Arizona hoping to score a job.

In Tucson, we went over to Vicky’s (the same Vicky that I had hitched
out west with) and Javier's trailer (Javier being Vicky's boyfriend).
On weekends, Mike parked his van in their driveway; otherwise he slept
in his van out in the desert, closer to where he worked. Vicky and Denise
(a mutual friend of everybody), had just got back from a month long tour of
Mexico in Denise's van. The three of us, Denise, Mike and I, pooled
our monies and rented an apartment in Tucson. It was a twenty-five
mile drive out to the mine, but Mike said, "No problem; the
apartment's air conditioning and showers made it all worthwhile."

After getting settled in, I applied for a job at the copper mine. I had to
make three long trips out to the desert mine before I finally got the news that they
wouldn’t hire me. The doctor said, "It sounds like a heart murmur;" and that
was that; I got lucky, though, because, eventually, I got a job at the University
of Arizona. I worked on the night shift cleaning the Language and Arts building.
I had finally scored my long sought after university janitor’s job! Hurrah!