Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  It’s not that I was merely a lazy kid who didn’t want to work hard later in life. If anything, I wanted to work less when I grew up. Throughout my childhood, I held lots of jobs: passed out flyers for several restaurants, folded pizza boxes at a pizza joint, sold stationery sets and seed packets door to door. Every week I used to clean the dog shit out of one neighbor’s backyard and take out the garbage for the old lady next door. And every day, from when I was eight until I was fifteen, I delivered newspapers.

  On many mornings, my routine was to rise at five a.m., deliver one paper route (if not more), go home and eat breakfast, go to Saint Agnes’s Church on Masonic Avenue to serve mass as an altar boy, go to Saint Agnes’s School on Ashbury Street to work in the cafeteria in exchange for eating whatever I wanted (which really meant drinking cartons of chocolate milk throughout the schoolday), and then finally, go to class to try—often unsuccessfully—to stay awake.

  I worked the paperboy gig till the summer that I signed up with a municipal program designed to get poor teens off the streets and into jobs. Two of my friends had already been hired through the program to hang out in city parks and paint park benches green. Upon signing up, I expressed my desire for the bench-painting dream job. Apparently, my passion for bench painting was overshadowed by the program’s need for lifeguards. I was assigned to the swimming pool at the neighborhood boys club—even though I didn’t know how to swim.

  At the beginning of each shift, I stood poolside in my street clothes and announced to the kids in the water that if any of them planned to drown, they’d be better off waiting till my shift ended. If need be, I could throw in a Styrofoam lifesaver but I wouldn’t be getting in the water no matter what the emergency.

  It took a few weeks of me refusing to get in the pool before I was transferred upstairs to the crafts room. The crafts room coordinator wasn’t happy to have a deadbeat from the pool foisted on her; she already had more “employees” from the jobs program than she knew what to do with. Since there wasn’t much for me to do, I favored sitting around. But she always dreamt up some pointless task for me that involved lifting and moving things. One day, after she had me haul all the supplies out of a closet, I became frustrated when she then told me to simply put it all back. I went and sat down and said, “Do it your fuckin’ self!”

  Fired from the boys club and dropped from the jobs program, I turned to the “Help Wanted” section of the newspaper’s classified ads to find a new job. The hundreds of listings all seemed to say something about needing experience. Without experience, or even a desire to have experience for any job that required it, I remained jobless the rest of that summer.

  My time, instead, was spent riding buses. One thing I’d inherited from my dad was his passion for maps. When I was eight years old, I used to study his atlas of the fifty states and have him quiz me on the capitals. Later, as a teen, I’d buy road maps from the Rand McNally shop on Market Street and pore over them as I envisioned traveling the nation. I wanted to see the rivers, mountains and towns in person. I wanted to walk the endless number of streets I saw in the street maps of America’s big cities, and know people in all those places, have friends from coast to coast—and maybe even have a girlfriend somewhere.

  In the meantime, though, I carried around a map of San Francisco and traveled as much as I could within its borders by attempting to walk the city’s every street and ride the entire length of every bus line. It was thrilling to travel through neighborhoods that were—in my small world—far-flung. Less thrilling, though, was being singled out in those areas for no other reason than for being a kid from another neighborhood. Whether it was white kids at the end of the L-Taravel line in the Sunset District or black kids in Visitation Valley while waiting for the 15-Third, the local teens didn’t discriminate when it came to singling me out and kicking my ass.

  When I wasn’t busy worrying about being assaulted, I was worrying about getting arrested. My being on the streets was reason enough for cops to stop and search me and my friends. Of the score of times I was picked up, it was usually for legitimately dumb stuff like trespassing or stealing booze from liquor stores or crowbarring open laundromat coin boxes. But there were also plenty of cockamamie arrests—for malicious mischief (I was waiting for a streetcar) or male prostitution (I was standing on a corner waiting for a friend).

  Still, in my circle of friends, I was the angel. As petty criminals, my cohorts were in and out of detention centers and group home facilities. Bragging rights went to those who could boast of their latest crimes or stints of imprisonment. And to those with the bragging rights flocked the girls in my neighborhood. The girls also went for guys with capacities for heavy drug usage—another realm in which I was a lightweight.

  When three of my friends took to shooting up—first speed, then heavier stuff—not only did I pass each time the syringe was passed around, I was even square enough to try to get them to kick their habits. It wasn’t out of a concern for their health or well-being, though. They’d just become so boring. There was nothing more tedious than loafing around a basement with them as they zoned out or worried about their next fix.

  One afternoon, in their dealer’s apartment, I implored them to give it up. Apparently, such sentiments were bad for business. First, the dealer threw a beer bottle that just missed me. Then he pulled out a gun and threatened to pull the trigger if I didn’t shut up about the lameness of shooting up. So I got up and left. He followed me out. When I reached the sidewalk, he stood on the building’s front steps and waved his gun around menacingly. Two guys I knew, Kevin and Baldwin—both recently released from juvenile facilities—walked up. When they saw what was happening, they started yelling at the drug dealer, “You wanna play with guns? Okay, then we’ll go get our guns!”

  As the three of them crowed about who would shoot who, I stood to the side—my hands in my pockets—unimpressed. My three junkie friends inside all had girlfriends. Kevin and Baldwin both had girlfriends. And the lunatic waving around the gun? Even he had a girl. And then there was me: not an addict, not a criminal—seemingly a nice guy. That was just the problem, though. As my friends often told me, to the girls in my neighborhood, I was too nice.

  After the standoff ended with no one shooting anyone and no one quitting shooting up, I went and jumped on the streetcar alone and rode it to the end of the line.

  When I was sixteen and my friend Jimmy told his dad that he was dropping out of high school, his father appealed to me.

  “C’mon, Pete, you go to school,” he pleaded. “Tell Jimmy not to drop out.”

  But dropping out of school was hardly unusual. In fact, I named twenty-one of our friends who’d already dumped school. Of those who still bothered to attend, I could only come up with three names—mine included.

  My dad had also dropped out of high school—but that was because he had to work to help support his mom and siblings. To me, he always pushed going to college, as if it were an elixir against a life of drudgery. And I did see college as an elixir, though not because I had any grand career aspirations. Rather, I figured it could help me to achieve my goal of simply getting out of San Francisco. Away from my prison-bound, drug-addled friends. Away from the pesky neighborhood cops.

  So I went to high school and did as well as one could who’d never participated in a single activity or even brought a book home. Just before graduation, I applied to a Catholic liberal-arts college that was twenty-five miles east of San Francisco. I didn’t know much about the school other than it was far enough away from my neighborhood that I’d have to move out of the city, but near enough that I could easily scramble back if need be. I was accepted and, fortunately, was poor enough that much of the tuition and expenses was covered by grants from the college and the state. A $2,500 loan paid for more.

  I was on my way.

  3

  A Date with the Dishes

  Within minutes of my arrival, my new dorm roommate, Tom, complained about his Chevy Camaro. It’d been brand-new when h
is parents gave it to him for his sixteenth birthday. Now the car was getting too old for his liking.

  “What do you drive?” he asked me.

  Not only did I not possess a car or even a driver’s license, I’d never before met a teen who owned a car. Sure, a few times I’d gone joyriding as a passenger in vehicles friends had stolen. But a teenager owning a car—a new car at that? This was my first clue that I’d landed in a foreign world.

  As Tom unpacked, he lined our sink and medicine cabinet with all kinds of shampoos, conditioners, gels and sprays for his hair. He apologized for taking up so much shelf space. It wasn’t a problem, though. I didn’t have much to contribute—not even a bottle of shampoo. My lone hair-care product—given to me a few years before by my sister after she’d complained about all the knots while cutting my hair—was a plastic brush.

  Tom found this strange, as he did my clothing. I was wearing the going-off-to-college shirt my mom had bought me the week before. It had a little turtle on it. Tom’s shirts had little alligators.

  “You can’t possibly wear that,” he said.

  He claimed my shirt was a cheap imitation of his and that it’d be foolish to be seen in it. I didn’t get it. A shirt was a shirt. Why would anyone care what tiny creature inhabited its breast? But, as stupid as his comment sounded, Tom was right. That first week, several other students also took the effort to point out that my shirt was a shoddy excuse for whatever was cool.

  Located in a wealthy suburb, the school was populated with suburban students from well-off families. I found myself in the land of mid-1980s preppies—without even knowing such creatures existed. Unlike my overly groomed male classmates, who were decked out in Top-Sider boat shoes and pastel Izod shirts, I had long, greasy hair, a scruffy face and wore whatever clothes fit me from the all-you-can-fit-in-a-bag-for-five-dollars thrift store. And while the girls in my neighborhood had thought I was too nice to garner their attention, now the pendulum swung far in the opposite direction. The rich, blond, ponytailed coeds in their convertible VW Rabbits gave me a wide berth.

  Judging by how often I was asked what the hell was I doing at this college, it became obvious that I looked and acted out of place. At first, I took offense at being singled out. The implication was that everyone else belonged there and I didn’t. But then again, everyone else was there to get a career-inducing education. I, on the other hand, was only there because it was somewhere other than my old neighborhood.

  During those first weeks of school, whenever I was walking down the street with any of my new classmates, I’d look around nervously for approaching cop cars.

  “Cops coming!” I once said to Tom. Then I turned my back to the street and pretended to look in a shop window.

  “Yeah?” Tom said. “So what?”

  “In case you’ve got warrants or are on probation or you’re carrying something.”

  “Why would the cops bother with us?” he asked. “We’re just going to the store.”

  “That’s plenty enough reason,” I said.

  But, it wasn’t. Here, remarkably, cops drove right past me without even slowing down. And even when I’d mosey along sidewalk-less, six-lane suburban boulevards, carloads of teens might yell, “Loser!” But they never bothered to beat me up. Though I found this rich-kid environment bizarre, at the same time, I kind of liked it. I was able to stop worrying about being assaulted or arrested for merely being in public. I relaxed. College felt like vacation.

  While my goal to escape the city had been achieved, I was now stuck trying to figure out what to make of my education. I didn’t know what to study. Unlike my classmates, I had no major, let alone a career path.

  Tom was going to be a lawyer. Other classmates talked about becoming lawyers. Still others aspired to being accountants and dentists. When asked of my own plans, I always said the future didn’t include a professional career. What I wanted was to be free of a job; to travel the country and have friends nationwide whom I’d visit. So my standard answer was, “I’m just gonna come crash on your floor when you’re a successful lawyer/accountant/dentist.”

  It was a claim many took as a joke. Years later, they’d discover firsthand that I wasn’t kidding.

  Though my financial aid grants and loan paid for most of my schooling, to cover the rest, I had to work. Through the school’s job placement center, I got hired to unload boxes at the campus bookstore. The work went well the first six weeks. Then, one quiet afternoon while I was unpacking, a customer—who happened to be in one of my classes—asked for help finding a particular book. As I searched the shelves with him, the assistant manager yelled across the store, “Pete, get back to work!”

  Work? I was working.

  “I’m helping this customer!” I shouted back.

  “You’re just talking to your friend,” came the reply. “Now get back to work!”

  As I returned to the box I’d been unpacking, I began to fume. What was I expected to do if a customer asked for my help? Then, conscious not to cuss, I screamed my answer across the store.

  “The next time a customer asks for my help, I’ll tell them to go to hell!”

  When I arrived the following day, the store manager called me into her office and told me she had to let me go.

  “But I didn’t even swear!” I protested.

  That didn’t matter.

  But I’d no time to dwell on the injustice. My college plan depended on me working. So I marched straight from the bookstore back to the job placement center.

  “I need a job,” I told the lady behind the counter.

  “What kind of work are you interested in?” she asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just as long as they’ll hire me.”

  “Then you should go to Jack in the Box,” she said. “They’re always asking us for applicants.”

  I caught the bus to Jack in the Box, filled out the application and was told to start the next day.

  Less than 24 hours after I got the axe from the bookstore, I stood wearing a paper hat and a polyester knit shirt sizing up the vats of hot grease. As fry cook, I was responsible for deep-frying French fries, fruit pies and tacos—scutwork that any simpleton could do. Except for this one. The tacos just weren’t my forte. I’d stuff the taco shells with so much lettuce and cheese that they’d crack. Customers would complain. So to prevent the shells from busting, I’d then put almost no lettuce or cheese inside. Again complaints. So then I’d cram the damn stuff in again until the shell broke.

  My ineptness quickly earned me a new assignment. As cashier, I faced the even trickier responsibility of handling customers. Again, a seemingly straightforward task. Again, I was the exception. Some customers were actually polite and patient. To them, I was courteous in kind by sliding them large orders of fries in place of the small ones they’d paid for or by giving them two cheeseburgers for the price of one. That was easy.

  Much more challenging was trying to remain courteous to the many jerk-off customers. If I’d been on the other side of the counter and out of uniform, these same people would’ve been courteous enough to hold a door open for me. But because I stood behind the counter, I was nothing more than a shooting-gallery target to them. The five bucks they spent on crappy eats was the price of admission for them to take shots at the sitting duck in the paper hat.

  But this duck shot back.

  Once, while I was making a milkshake, a customer called in my direction, “Shawanda! Shawanda!”

  I looked at him and wondered why he was yelling at me.

  “Sha-wan-da!!”

  Oh yeah, I remembered. Customers actually read the requisite nametags. I’d promptly thrown away each Pete nametag issued to me. But I still complied with Jack in the Box’s rules by digging through the collection of old nametags and choosing one with a name least like my own: Tawasha, Shondrella, Shawanda.

  “Shawanda! Can you move any fuckin’ slower?”

  “Yep,” I said, then shuffled in half-inch steps toward him with his mi
lkshake. “See, I can move a lot slower.”

  “Just gimme my food, asshole!”

  “Wait, you haven’t seen how slow I can move.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  “Gimme my food!”

  The manager rushed over, grabbed the milkshake and handed it to the customer. Then he turned to me and scowled, “You just earned yourself a date with the dishes!”

  Since the place employed no dishwasher, the manager would try to recruit a cook or a cashier to hit the sinks. My coworkers—who considered the task filthy and degrading—all balked at those requests. Foolishly, without any firsthand experience, I’d done the same.

  And if no volunteer came forward, then the chore was meted out as punishment.

  “Aw, you’re fucked,” one cashier said to me as I trudged toward the back with my head down.

  Crap, I thought, I don’t want to do this.

  In the rear—out of sight of both customers and my coworkers—I found a sink full of dirty spatulas, trays, food storage containers, French fry racks and the like. I wanted to slip out the back door and split. But then what? Slink back to the job placement office to ask them, now that I’d blown a second job, could I please have a third?

  As I stood at the sinks, a cook sidled up to me. He looked over his shoulder, then slipped me a burger.

  “That’s a raw deal you got,” he said.

  I thanked him for the free grub.

  After filling the sinks with soapy, warm water, I sunk my teeth into the bacon cheeseburger and made a stab at the dishes. Without much conviction, I dragged a scrub brush back and forth across a French fry rack.

  Meanwhile, the bustle of the operation echoed around me: the frying food sizzling, the employees barking out orders, the customers whining…. It was a relief to be out of the food ordering/preparation/serving loop and away from the constant pressure that accompanied those jobs.