Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  I took another bite of the burger.

  A little radio sat above the sink. I flipped it on.

  Another bite, another swabbing.

  Then I looked around. No one could see what I was up to. So I set the scrub brush down, finished the burger and fiddled with the radio dial.

  Why the others despised this chore was beyond me.

  Filthy? Manning the vats of hot grease was far filthier. Degrading? Kowtowing to the customers was far more degrading.

  This ain’t so bad, I thought. Not bad at all!

  When the manager approached, I grabbed the scrub brush again.

  “You learning your lesson?” he asked. “See what happens when you’re a smart-ass?”

  I most surely did!

  After that, I never missed an opportunity to clash with a customer. If a woman paid by throwing her money on the counter, then I threw back her change. If a guy bawled at me about having given him the wrong size soda, then I gave him the correct size—of the wrong soda. The result—spending a couple hours away from the bastards—hardly felt punitive. In the back, out of the limelight, I could lollygag to my heart’s content. Freed from the shackles of responsibility, I’d listen to the oldies station and drink chocolate milk-shakes while dragging out the chore for hours on end. The boss—relieved that the chore was being done at all—never complained.

  Eventually, I chose to forgo the customer confrontations and just volunteered outright for dish duty. But I had to do so grudgingly. I feared that if the manager discovered my affection for the loathed chore, then he might punish my slack work with the dishes by forcing me instead to cook food or, ugh, ring up customers.

  But if dishwashing was my calling, I wasn’t listening. I soon quit Jack in the Box to take a job as a church janitor—a plum position that involved plenty of pew-napping.

  Since accepting that initial $2,500 loan, I’d resisted borrowing any more money for school. The idea behind the loans was that a student could rack up a bunch of debt and then pay it off when he had a degree-required high-paying job. But in my case, I had no desire for a job like that. So taking on any more debt was a scary thought. That twenty-five hundred bucks was already giving me enough worries.

  But the janitorial gig didn’t pay nearly enough to cover my school costs. So when the tuition for the approaching semester was due in the middle of my third year, I was at a loss about what to do. Then, a couple days before the semester began, I drunkenly destroyed the furniture in my campus apartment for little more reason than because it was fun to do so. The dean of students—who’d once chastised me for having “a complete lack of respect for authority”—booted me out.

  So, sprung from school sooner than expected, I kept my word to my classmates: I slept on their dorm room floors. In the meantime, dreams of finally seeing the rest of the country filled my head. To save up money, I fulfilled my fifth grade fantasy by picking up work on some house-painting crews.

  My childhood fantasy of idly painting while listening to the radio and munching on sandwiches wasn’t one shared by my employers. My first paint-job boss often complained of me being the straggler on the crew. The boss of the second crew echoed that sentiment. The boss-guy of the third outfit was even worse. He was so ambitious about working at a breakneck pace that he had us painting three different houses simultaneously—even though the whole crew totaled only him, me and my friend Tony.

  When this boss first complained about my tempo, he said, “This is what you need.”

  He held out to me the secret of his own speediness: a palmful of amphetamines.

  Pick-me-ups still put me off. I passed on the pills.

  Then, one day, I spent hours sitting on a roof with my transistor radio and my sandwiches while painting some eaves. That afternoon, Tony came over from the house he’d been painting. He said he was sick of trying to keep up with the job’s manic pace and was going to quit as soon as the speed freak arrived with our pay. If Tony was leaving, then there was no way I was going to be left behind to paint three houses with that fiend.

  When the fiend in question arrived, Tony quit and was paid in full. When the boss then noticed that I hadn’t come close to finishing the eaves, he said to me, “You’re the worst employee I’ve ever had.”

  “Yeah?” I replied. “Well, I quit too.”

  “You can’t quit,” he said, “’cause you’re fired.”

  How pathetic, I thought.

  “I already quit,” I said. “You can’t fire me.”

  “Yeah I can.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “Yeah I can.”

  He then proceeded to count out exactly half the cash he owed me for the week.

  “Where’s the rest?” I asked.

  “That’s all your slow ass deserves,” he said with a wild glint in his drugged eyes.

  Though I was pissed, he had me.

  I left with my half-pay.

  4

  Fragile

  School had already gotten me a few miles out of San Francisco. So I used the experience as a springboard to get me even farther away to see other parts of the country. After scouring a college guidebook for a school that was both cheap and in an enticing locale, I found one—in Kentucky. A state university there was so desperate to attract students that it had a wide-open enrollment. Out-of-state students were charged the same low tuition as Kentucky residents.

  Weeks after being canned from the paint crew, I was in Kentucky and in need of a job again. I meandered around town one Friday morning until I saw the marquee sign of one of the Perkins chain restaurants: “Dishwasher Wanted.” The sign didn’t necessarily call out to me. But, remembering Jack in the Box and how I’d enjoyed the dishes, it didn’t sound half bad.

  I went in and filled out an application. When the manager asked if I could start the next day, I told her no. My buddy Phil—only one of two friends I still had from my teen years in San Francisco—would be passing through town that weekend.

  “I can start Monday, though.”

  “Come in Monday at eight a.m.,” she said.

  That weekend, Phil and I went on a bender. Monday morning, hung over, I dragged my sore body and aching head over to Perkins, managing to arrive only twenty minutes late. When I entered through the back door, the lone person in sight was a guy washing the dishes. He explained that, with my arrival, he was now the old dishwasher. Timmy handed me an apron and described the operation step by step. When the training ended five minutes later, Timmy embarked on his new prep cook job and I embarked on my new dishwasher job.

  From the pile of dirty dishes, I grabbed a couple of plates. Now what? In my muddled state, I hadn’t followed Timmy’s instructions. I called him back over. Again he explained what to wash and where to put things once they were clean. This time, I concentrated.

  Waitresses—whose faces I couldn’t see, only their hands—would shove the dirty dishes through a waist-high hole in one wall. I was to wash the dishes and then shove them through a waist-high hole in another wall to the cooks—whose faces I also couldn’t see, just their hands. The only person ever in view was Timmy, who—content in his new position—whistled cheerfully as he chopped vegetables.

  Each time I cleaned all the awaiting dishes, my queasiness subsided. But then the waitresses would shove through another load and I’d feel ill all over again. As the minutes passed with agonizing slowness, a longing for a well-earned meal break kept me going. In the meantime, I scrounged through the meager food scraps and snacked on toast crusts and fatty bacon remains.

  After an hour, it was an accomplishment that I hadn’t passed out. But then the faceless waitresses suddenly started yelling, “More silverware! We need more silverware out here!”

  As instructed by Timmy, I’d been dumping the dirty silverware into a large metal container to let it all soak. The cutlery lay at the bottom of the container, under about eighteen inches of hot water. The water was too scorching for my bare hands so I donned some gloves. But the gloves were too shor
t to reach all the way down; tongs weren’t long enough either. I tried to pour the water out, but the container was somehow affixed to the wall. Then I tried to bail the water out, but the container was too narrow for a soup ladle.

  After ten minutes of futile attempts at problem solving, I called Timmy over.

  “How d’ya get the silverware out?” I asked.

  “You pull it out,” he said and then plunged his arm into the hot water. His face lit up, his mouth popped opened and his arm shot back out. He shook it around wildly to numb the pain and when he finally stopped, I was horrified to see his beet-red arm. It looked like it was starting to welt.

  When he caught his breath, Timmy calmly said, “Somebody musta put hot water in there.”

  Then he returned to his vegetables.

  “Where’s the silverware?!” cried the faceless waitresses, their hands waving frantically through the little waist-high hole. “We need more silverware!”

  I was at a complete loss.

  During the time I’d spent trying to recover the silverware, I’d washed nothing else. So then the faceless cooks poked their hands through the other hole.

  “Plates! We need plates now!”

  It felt like all the menacing waitresses and cooks were going to crawl through their holes to get me. When the room began to spin, I knew there was no way I could survive until a meal break.

  My calling? This?

  I pulled off my apron and laid it like a shroud over the stack of dishes.

  “I gotta go,” I told Timmy.

  “Shit,” he sighed. “Guess I’m back to dishing.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  As I stumbled home, I vomited up the bacon and toast scraps into some bushes.

  A couple of days later, I was hired to work in a warehouse that stored the university’s old desks, chairs, typewriters and other supplies. My lack of qualifications perfectly prepared me for the job; almost all I ever did was sit at a counter and read. Once a week, a truck would drop off some old desks and I’d find space for them in the warehouse. Then I’d resume my reading. If anything, this seemed like a calling.

  Though I was able to use the four months at the warehouse job to read twenty-six Mark Twain books in a row, I made no friends and got lonely. Before long, I was back in San Francisco, living in my friend Karl’s basement apartment—less than a hundred feet from the apartment I grew up in.

  So much for traveling and seeing the nation. I made the most of my circumstances by pulling out my old marked-up map of San Francisco and reviving my attempt to cover every street in the city by foot.

  Karl got me hired at the UPS warehouse on Potrero Hill, where he was working loading trucks in the middle of the night. My new job was simple, yet bewildering. As the packages wound their way through the building on a series of chutes and conveyor belts, they’d pass the rear of the parked trucks. Loaders would pull off the packages to place them in the proper trucks. If the packages on one particular conveyor belt had found their way onto the wrong belt or had been missed by a preoccupied loader, then they’d reach the end of the conveyor belt and plunge six feet to the floor.

  My sole task was to pluck these forlorn packages from the floor, wheel them on a cart to the head of the conveyor belt and place them back on for another go-round. By the time I’d return to the far end of the conveyor belt, a new pyramid of fallen parcels would be awaiting me on the floor. If a fallen box was damaged, I was expected to try to smooth out its dented sides. Though I wasn’t asked to shake each package to listen for broken contents, I took it upon myself to do so anyway. The packages that rattled most were usually those that looked to have been most carefully wrapped with FRAGILE written innocently on the outside.

  So why couldn’t a table at the end of the conveyor belt catch the packages? Or better yet, why not a little slide installed to glide the packages down to the cart? Or, best yet, a circular conveyor belt that sent the parcels around and around like an airport baggage carousel?!

  Well, UPS didn’t pay me to think. It paid me to plod back and forth with the dented packages—grunt work any numbskull could handle. Or so I thought.

  One night, at three a.m., I arrived to start my shift. On my way to the conveyor belt, I was called into the supervisor’s office.

  “We need to talk about your work performance,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, you’re not cut out for working here,” he said. “You have a lack of enthusiasm for your work.”

  Enthusiasm? I picked up smooshed boxes off the floor. What was there to be excited about?

  Well, I never found out because as an ex-employee, I didn’t stick around to meet my more enthusiastic replacement.

  A couple of weeks later Karl asked for my half of the rent. I was flat broke and unemployed. He was pretty pissed to hear that I couldn’t pay up.

  “Take it easy,” I told him. “I’m gonna find a job right now.”

  I left the apartment intending to wander around the neighborhood long enough for Karl to cool off.

  I had no clue how an unskilled, unkempt and unmotivated man was to find work. By looking through the newspaper classifieds? If I wasn’t even qualified to pick up packages off a floor, then I definitely wasn’t qualified for any of those jobs that demanded “experience.” By sending out a resume? What employer wouldn’t love to read a resume from someone kicked out of college, fired from several shit jobs and with a peculiar talent for sitting and reading for hours on end without complaint?

  After I had strolled three blocks from Karl’s apartment, a sign in a café window caught my attention: “Dishwasher Wanted.”

  I stepped inside and inquired about the position. The boss-guy asked if I could start in the morning. I could.

  That was it. I was hired.

  “There’s just two things,” he said. “First, you can eat or drink whatever you want—except the beer and wine.”

  “Okay.”

  “And second, don’t just up and quit on me.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Back at the apartment, no matter how much he wanted to, Karl refused to believe that I’d found work in only ten minutes.

  Early the next morning, I showed up at the café—a brunchy place that was open from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. The boss-guy showed me how to clock in, where to put the clean dishes and then his brief tour ended at the dishwashing station: a sink with a spray hose and an under-the-counter dishmachine.

  While rinsing the first few dishes, I bumped my head on the low, slanted ceiling that sliced diagonally across the dish station. And then I bumped into a customer who was on her way to the bathroom. Wedged in under the stairs and in the pathway to the toilet, the dishwashing area was obviously an afterthought to whoever had laid out the café.

  After I rinsed a few more dishes, one of the cooks reached over and handed me a plate of French toast.

  “You want ’em?” he asked. “I screwed up an order.”

  Ten minutes into the shift and I was already being fed. This was a good sign.

  Throughout the morning, the cooks sent other food my way. Poached eggs, bacon, oatmeal. They got a charge out of offering me more and more grub since I refused nothing. Buttermilk pancakes, bagels with lox, burgers. I’d taken the job for the cash. The chow was an unexpected bonus.

  Come three o’clock, the cooks and waitresses raced through their closing chores and then split. The boss-guy guided me through my own closing chores. After I finally finished the dishes, I was then to sweep and mop the whole place, hose off the kitchen mats out back and drag all the garbage cans out to the sidewalk. When I was done, I was to lock up and then push the key back through the mail slot.

  “One last thing,” he said. He showed me the reach-in fridge. “The waitresses fully restocked the beer so I’ll know tomorrow morning if there’s any missing.”

  As he was leaving, the boss-guy said it should take me an hour to close up.

  An hour later, I’d only managed to finish the dishes. Then
, while searching for the broom in the upstairs storage area, I noticed the cases of unrefrigerated beer.

  Hmmm.

  I grabbed a bottle of warm Anchor Steam, took it downstairs and swapped it for a cold one.

  The next morning, I arrived at work with an empty stomach and big plans for what I could eat that day.

  “You came back!” a waitress remarked upon seeing me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Lotta dishwashers never come back after that first day.”

  When the boss-guy walked by, he said nothing about the missing beer or the fact I’d clocked out an hour later than he’d predicted.

  When I was left alone to finish up that second afternoon, again I sat and rewarded myself with a beer upon finishing the dishes. Another reward came after the sweeping was done. It was even later when I clocked out that day.

  Every afternoon after that, I spent increasingly more time sitting and drinking congratulatory beers. Eventually, the damn closing chores started to get in the way of my sitting around. So if I pulled a dish from the bus tub that didn’t look too dirty, then I just reshelved it with the clean ones. I stopped hosing off the kitchen mats. The sweeping went half-assed. Mopping? Why bother? Before long, Karl was even stopping by to partake in the sitting-around and beer-drinking.

  Eating so much while at work and taking home enough leftovers from the kitchen to see me through my off days fell right in line with my ongoing plan to simplify my life: now I didn’t have to grocery shop or even pay for food. By then I’d been paring down my belongings—not that I ever had many to begin with: mostly just books, LPs and maps. But after giving away more stuff, I wondered why I needed to live in an apartment. I didn’t need it for storage or for cooking. In fact, since most nights I was crashing on floors and couches around town anyway, I decided to once and for all pare my belongings to the point where I could fit everything in a large plastic garbage bag. I could cycle to work with all my stuff and then over to a friend’s apartment for a night on the floor in my sleeping bag.