Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Jeff,” he said. “I’m supposed to train you—but man, I’m so hung over.”

  He rolled his eyes and shook his head to express his misery.

  “You don’t need to train me,” I told him. “I’ve washed dishes before.”

  “What? A dish dog?” He straightened and then looked me up and down. “Hell, a pearl diver like you could probably train me.”

  “‘Pearl diver?’” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s an old sailors’ term for dudes like us,” he said.

  I was flattered.

  While Jeff was showing me where some of the pots were stored in the back room, he had to sit down. He looked horrible.

  “You can take off,” I said. “Doesn’t matter to me.”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I can handle it.”

  “Yeah, I can’t tell you anything that you don’t already know.”

  Jeff crossed to the kitchen and said something to Charlie while pointing back in my direction. Then he grinned at me as he pulled off his apron and slipped out the back door.

  Not much later, the brunch crowd flooded the dining room. In turn, the busboys, like pallbearers, hauled in the dirty dishes and dumped their corpses across my counters. Though the concept here was the same as at my old job in San Francisco—resuscitate the dishes—the rhythm was drastically different. If the old job’s beat had been a steady waltz, here it was some sort of Brazilian speed metal or bluegrass-funk fusion. Whatever it was, I couldn’t find my rhythm.

  As brunch turned to lunch, I could no longer keep the kitchen stocked with clean plates. The worrying started: if I fell any further behind, I’d get sacked. Then I’d be back to worrying again about finding a job. And as an unemployed dishwasher, I’d surely stir up doubts in Melanie about me. Yet even with so much fear to motivate me, I couldn’t keep pace with the work.

  What I’d forgotten, though, was that it was impossible to get the heave-ho from a dish gig. Instead of showing me to the door, Charlie phoned Jeff. When Jeff walked in ten minutes later, I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  “Pearl diver,” he sighed. “I thought you said you had it covered.”

  “I thought so too,” I said. “But there’s just too many dishes.”

  “Ah, the dish dog’s lament: too many dishes.”

  Jeff stepped to the sinks and saw the burnt enchilada pan I’d been scrubbing.

  “Why are you bothering with that?” he asked. “That’s a three-day soaker.”

  I handed him the baking pan that I’d just labored over for five minutes. He filled it with hot, soapy water and exiled it to a corner of the counter.

  “You need some music in here,” he said as he hit Play on a cassette recorder. A cacophony of noise spilled out of the little speaker.

  “You into Sun Ra?” Jeff asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “You should be,” he said. “It’s the perfect music for the dishpit.”

  As the vibrant sounds of free jazz echoed through the room, I realized he was right. It did sound perfect.

  “You into Charlie Parker?” he asked.

  “No,” I had to say again.

  “Well, Bird was a dishwasher just like me and you,” he said. “Worked at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack in New York. You can hear it in his sax.”

  Jeff advised me on the soaking time of the other burnt cookware, warned me about the worst offenders among the cooks for burning pots and pointed out the waitress to be wary of on the days when she forgot to take her medication. He was a wealth of information and I immediately fell under his spell.

  Like me, he wasn’t spry. Though his movements were as slothful as my own, a gracefulness to his sluggishness allowed him to somehow get more work done without exerting much effort. If he left the dishroom to take clean plates to the kitchen, for instance, he always carried dirty pans back to the sinks.

  “Dishwashing is like chess—you always gotta think six moves ahead,” he said. “But you probably already knew that.”

  When the restaurant closed in the afternoon, one of the cooks—Brad—came and helped us finish up.

  As the two of them razzed me about my less-than-stellar first-day performance, they told some of their own first-day-on-the-dishwashing-job tales.

  Brad was once christened at a job by being thrown into a dumpster by two other dishers. He had to work the rest of his shift in his garbage-stained clothes.

  On Jeff’s first night as a teen dishwasher, the restaurant’s other disher mixed all the leftover drinks into a single concoction and made Jeff drink it. He got so sick that the cook had to dunk his head under the faucet to sober him up.

  The two described other dish jobs they’d had around the country. Then Brad asked me, “You ever busted suds down in Texas?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “How about in Michigan?” Jeff asked. “There’s some places around Ypsilanti that don’t pay so bad.”

  Ypsilanti? One of those thousands of places I’d dreamt of going to while studying my maps? I didn’t even know how to pronounce it let alone claim to have washed dishes there.

  Oh, how I would’ve loved to be able to answer Jeff, “Ypsilanti? Sure, I busted suds there” or to have told Brad, “Texas? An easier question: where in Texas haven’t I dished?”

  But I couldn’t say that. So I stood off to the side and listened to their dishwashing testimonials—while longing to join in.

  Then it hit me.

  I could envision it so clearly. Traveling the country, seeking out intriguing workplaces in exotic locales, enjoying the freedom of living a life consciously devoted to a lack of responsibility…And as I picked up and dropped dish jobs left and right, if anyone was to ever ask if I’d dished in this state or that, I’d always be able to answer, “Yes!”

  The idea had only just come to me, but within seconds I was sold on it. Interrupting my two colleagues, I blurted out my plan.

  “I’m gonna wash dishes in all fifty states!”

  “That’s great, new guy,” Jeff said. “Just remember: A good pearl diver never wears underwear—it slows you down.”

  After that first day, I found my dishpit rhythm while working the less busy weekdays. Jeff would come in afternoons to do a brief janitorial shift that involved helping me to finish the dishes and take out the trash. As much as possible, I patterned myself after him and the way he budgeted his movements yet made each one count.

  Even more than Jeff’s actions, I absorbed his attitudes about work.

  “Dishwashers are the least-respected restaurant workers,” he told me, “yet the most important.”

  If the dishes didn’t get washed, the whole operation broke down. No food could be served. The customers didn’t eat.

  According to Jeff, cooking was too much responsibility. But as employees with massive egos, cooks needed constant flattery. Anytime a cook offered him something to eat or taste, Jeff always gave the food the highest of marks—regardless of what he really thought. A rave review boosted egos and kept the eats coming.

  On the other hand, the busboys, Jeff said, were the Uncle Toms of the restaurant world. Refilling water glasses and doling out bread sticks, bussers were really only waiters in waiting. They ached for the day when they could climb another rung on the career ladder to become servile waiters who smiled widely as they delivered a lousy plate of food with hopes for a pat on the head in the form of a tip.

  The fact that the busboys were the ones who continuously brought us more work in the form of dirty dishes didn’t help their cause.

  “Take that!” one busser said as he slammed down another load on our counter.

  “Argh,” Jeff growled at him. “When the revolution comes, these wannabe servants will be the first to the guillotines.”

  “As if a revolution will be led by a dishwasher,” said the busboy.

  “Dish man,” Jeff corrected him. “Unlike a bus boy, I’m a dish man!”

  One da
y, I finally got up the nerve to ask Jeff if he’d contribute something to the little dishwashing publication I still hoped to put together.

  “It’s a zine?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a zine?”

  Jeff explained that they were small, self-published magazines, often with offbeat contents.

  “There’s thousands of ’em,” he said. “Come over to my place after work and I’ll give you one.”

  Later, at his basement pad, Jeff handed me a copy of Fact-sheet Five, a zine from upstate New York that listed brief reviews of hundreds of other zines.

  “You should read this, too,” Jeff said. “The man tells it like it is.”

  He handed me a copy of George Orwell’s first book—Down and Out in Paris and London—and then sent me on my way.

  That night, completely enthralled, I read the book cover to cover in one sitting. In it, Orwell recounted the couple of months he spent in Paris in the autumn of 1929 as a twenty-six-year-old plongeur (that’s French talk for dishwasher). After all his money is stolen from his room, Orwell finds himself desperate for any kind of work. So his Russian buddy Boris lines up jobs for the two of them—dishwashing for Orwell, waiting tables for Boris—at a Russian restaurant that is to open in a couple weeks.

  In the meantime, Orwell takes on a one-day dish stint at a large five-star hotel. But as luxurious as the accommodations and food are for the guests, behind the scenes, for the dishwasher, slaving in the hot and humid basements is grueling. At the end of a fourteen-hour shift, Orwell is tired and drenched in sweat. He’s also surprised to be offered a one-month contract. He needs the money, so he’d like to accept the offer. But, ultimately, he feels it’d be dishonest to sign on for a month seeing as he’d have to leave in two weeks to go work at the Russian place.

  Boris is unhappy to hear that Orwell has turned down the contract.

  “Idiot!” he yells. “Who ever heard of a plongeur being honest?…[Y]ou have worked here all day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you think a plongeur can afford a sense of honor?”

  Boris tells him to ask to be paid by the day, sign the contract and then bail when the Russian place opens. But Orwell remains worried about the dishonesty of signing a contract he knows he’ll break.

  “Do you suppose they would prosecute a plongeur for breaking his contract?” a stupefied Boris asks. “A plongeur is too low to be prosecuted.”

  Finally, Orwell gets it.

  “This was my first lesson in plongeur morality,” he writes.

  After Orwell signs the contract, he works six days a week, eleven to fourteen hours a day. During this time, he’s able to pick up on other aspects of the dishwasher world.

  “The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two liters of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two liters he will steal three.”

  When Orwell gets dragged into work on what’s supposed to be his day off, he worries that he’s too hung over to get the job done. But after working merely an hour in the basement, he realizes that his worries are fruitless:

  “It seemed that in the heat of those cellars, as in a Turkish bath, one could sweat out almost any quantity of drink. Plongeurs know this, and count on it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and then sweating it out before it can do much damage, is one of the compensations of their life.”

  After a couple months at the hotel, Orwell puts in a few weeks of dishing at the Russian restaurant before he ditches that job as well and hightails it back to England. Orwell’s conclusion about the profession was it shouldn’t exist in the first place. He felt that restaurant dining—the cause for such crap work—was an unnecessary luxury that should’ve been done away with. His message: Get rid of dish soilers and set the dishwashers free. On some mornings—when I found myself unable to sweat it all out and my head was still pounding from the night before—I concurred heartily.

  In the spring of 1990, Melanie planned to return to Alaska to fish as her family had done for generations. She asked me to come along and work with her. Returning to Alaska sounded great. But working on a fishing boat sounded like too much responsibility. If working on a remote island had been a dreadful thought, then working on a boat at sea definitely remained out of the question.

  I accepted Melanie’s offer to tag along to Alaska but told her I’d pass on any boat work. Instead, I’d stick to my newfound love: plongeuring.

  When I quit my job, I bade farewell to Jeff.

  “You’re gonna dish in Alaska?” my guru asked. “Dude, I’m impressed.”

  “Keep in touch, pearl diver,” I told him.

  Part II

  “Dishwasher Pete”

  6

  The Dish Master

  Alaska—the Last Frontier—was, for me, the First Frontier in my new traveling dishwasher adventure. Along the three-thousand-mile drive up there, I pondered where to dish. In Fairbanks? At a national park? Maybe in some one-diner town where I could pitch my tent behind the place?

  My endless fantasies were all for naught; the job found me. When we arrived in Anchorage, Melanie heard that the cannery that she sold her fish to was looking for a mess hall dishman. I called immediately and told the mess hall boss, Levon, that I was the dishwasher he was looking for. He told me to be on the next day’s flight out to a fishing village in the southwest part of the state.

  The only ways to reach that area were by air or by sea. No roads connected it to the outside world. That sounded awfully isolated but Melanie assured me not to worry. The town even had a pizza place, she said. Besides, she’d be out there in a couple weeks herself.

  The following day, I flew on a tiny plane that seated only eight people—the pilot and stewardess included—on the one-hour flight. As instructed by my new employer, I caught a taxi-van from the airport.

  “What brings you out here?” the taxi-van driver asked.

  “Dishwashing.”

  “Yeah?” she said. “It takes all kinds, I guess.”

  As we crossed the tundra toward the sea, we bumped up and down and swerved back and forth for fifteen miles along a potholed road. I felt antsy. Maybe this wasn’t an island, but it was definitely remote.

  At the cannery, with my duffel bag slung over my shoulder, I stepped inside the mess hall kitchen. A big black guy stepped forward and gripped my hand with one of his own. With his other hand, he swatted me “hello” so hard it knocked me off balance.

  “Welcome, Pete,” he said.

  Not until my hand loosened from his grip was I able to tell him, “Thanks.”

  “I’m Levon,” he said. He pointed to three cooks clad in white and introduced me to each of them.

  Then he asked the cooks, “Where’s Sonny?”

  No one knew.

  Levon walked over to a wall, banged on it and yelled, “Yo Sonny! Your new dishman is here!”

  Thirty seconds later, a bleary-eyed guy entered with his baseball cap on sideways.

  “Pete, this is my nephew Sonny,” Levon said. Then to Sonny, he added, “Give your new dishman a tour.”

  Sonny walked me over to the “Pantry” adjacent to the mess hall bakery where he, Charlie the baker and Dave the cook—and now me—each had a simple bedroom and shared a small bathroom. I dropped my duffel and sleeping bags on the bed. My own bedroom? Already I felt less claustrophobic about my new job.

  Then he led me through several long bunkhouses that were lined with dozens of unoccupied bedrooms and hundreds of beds. Sonny showed me the fishing boats that were waiting atop wooden blocks for the coming salmon season. He took me through the sprawling waterside cannery where, in a few weeks, the salmon would be canned or frozen. The only people in view were the dozen or so men prepping the boats and readying the cannery machinery.

  Back at the mess hall, Sonny guided me through that building’s maze of rooms, each of which had been tacked on through the decades as the operation grew. One room was the dining area for t
he office staff and tradesmen (electricians, mechanics, plumbers, etc.); another was where the college-student cannery crew ate. A third room was the domain of the Filipino workers, and the fourth dining room was a melting pot for the Japanese employees (who processed the salmon roe), the Italian-American and Native-Alaskan fishermen, as well as the Native-Alaskan cannery workers.

  Sonny explained that the Filipinos and the Japanese used to eat in the same room until one meal, when the Filipinos ran out of rice. One of them grabbed a bowl off a Japanese table, which ignited a huge interracial free-for-all. Since then, the Filipinos were obliged to dine in a separate room.

  The hour-long tour ended in the middle of the mess hall complex—at the dishroom. Behind stainless steel counters stood the sinks and a decades-old Hobart dishmachine. As I approached the sinks, the floorboards sagged beneath my weight as if I were walking to the end of a diving board. As I bounced up and down, Sonny warned, “Careful, lotta water been splashed on these boards over the years.”

  According to Sonny, this was reportedly the last cannery mess hall in Alaska that served its meals “family style.” Unlike “cafeteria style”—where diners walked though a serving line—here, waitresses brought the food to the dining rooms in large serving dishes, which were then passed around each table. Throughout the meal, each waitress—responsible for four or five tables—continued refilling the serving dishes and drink pitchers. After the meal, the waitresses would clear the tables and haul all the soiled ware back to the dishpit.

  I was eager to see how it went down. But first, we mess hall workers had our own dinner to eat.

  We sat with Levon, Charlie the baker, the cooks and the waitresses; I plopped some salmon on my plate.

  “You actually like that stuff?” Sonny asked.

  Free salmon?

  “Love it,” I said.

  “You in the right place then,” he said. “We got baked salmon, fried salmon, boiled salmon, steamed salmon, grilled salmon, raw salmon—you name it.”

  “Really?” The canneries where I’d worked before served spaghetti and meatballs most dinners.