Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  “You work in the mess hall now,” Sonny said. “You can eat whatever you want, whenever you want.”

  Watching me add yet more salmon to my plate, Sonny bragged about the other fringe benefits of my new unionized job: free lodging, year-round health insurance, free air travel between Seattle and the fishing village, and—after we were laid off at the end of the summer—unemployment pay. I felt even less isolated.

  When we finished eating, Sonny flipped a switch that blasted a loud horn from the roof of the mess hall. Suddenly, the doors flew open and a couple dozen men poured in. Dinner was on, so I fled to the dishroom.

  I stood at the sinks for a couple minutes before Sonny came along.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Waiting for the dishes.”

  “Aw, man, don’t worry about no dishes. There’s hardly anyone here yet,” he said. “In a couple weeks, there’ll be four or five hundred people at every meal. You’ll be seeing so many dishes, you’ll be dreaming about ’em.”

  So I sat and waited. A half hour later, Sonny finally gave me a nod. He washed the couple dozen plates, the couple dozen bowls and a few racks of drinking glasses and coffee mugs. I put them away. After he ran the silverware through the machine, as instructed, I dumped the hot, wet utensils on a bedsheet Sonny had laid out on a counter. We rubbed the spoons, knives and forks dry and separated them. After we put them away, we were done.

  “Told you there ain’t shit to do yet,” he said.

  What little we did do was gratifying enough for me. Back in the Pantry, I lay on my bed, stoked to have gotten my hands on some dishes in another state. After Kentucky and California, Alaska now made it three. Only forty-seven more states to go.

  The next morning at 6:30, it was back to the dishroom. I washed a few dishes the cooks had dirtied while preparing breakfast. Then I stood at the sinks waiting for more.

  Sonny shuffled in, sleepy-eyed and in slippers.

  “Dude, go sit down,” he said. “Breakfast dishes don’t even come in for another hour.”

  He didn’t have to tell me a third time to sit. I slipped back to my room and grabbed a book. Then, in the Filipino Room, I sat and ate pancakes while I read. An hour later, I turned on the taps to fill a sink. Sonny stuck his hand in the water and shook his head.

  “This ain’t gonna clean no dishes,” he proclaimed. “Water’s cold!”

  He pulled the plug and then refilled the sink using water from only the hot tap.

  “This is dishwashing water,” he said. “Feel it.”

  I watched the thick steam waft upward from the sink and thought, Is he hazing me? What next? Will he throw me in the dumpster or make me drink a concoction of all the leftover drinks?

  I didn’t bite.

  “You put your hand in the water,” I told him.

  Without a word, he dipped his hand through the steam and into the water.

  I waited for him to rip his welting hand out again like Timmy had done in Kentucky. But he didn’t.

  “Leave it in there,” I said.

  Without breaking eye contact with me, he pushed his arm deeper in the water.

  “When this mess hall’s full and we’re working round the clock, we gotta clean the dishes in a hurry,” he said. “We ain’t got time for lukewarm water.”

  Sonny filled the rest of the sink with cold water and told me to stick my hand in it. I wanted to tell him that I’d do the dishes my own way. But I’d be working alongside him all summer and didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

  Reluctantly, my hand went in. The water was still scorching.

  “Soon you’ll get your arms in the hot stuff like a real dishwasher,” he said.

  A real dishwasher? Was he putting me on?

  Later, after the water cooled, I was reaching for some plates at the bottom of the sink.

  “You’re all hunched over,” Sonny said. “You’re gonna hurt your back.”

  He pushed me aside, assumed my place at the sinks and spread his legs until his feet were about a yard and a half apart. His height dropped dramatically.

  “The sink’s low, so you gotta get low,” he said. “See how I’m doin’? I’m gettin’ lower without bending my back.”

  He looked ridiculous—but I didn’t know him well enough to tell him so.

  “Now you try,” he said.

  I stepped up to the sinks and spread my legs.

  Sonny laughed. “Dude, you can’t be serious.”

  “What? I’m spreading my legs.”

  “C’mon, man,” he said. Then he kicked at my feet like a cop readying a suspect to be frisked.

  My legs barely budged.

  “If you can’t get no lower, then your back is gonna be broke by the end of the summer,” he said. “Serious as a heart attack.”

  I spread my legs till the muscles strained. Still, I didn’t get much lower.

  After we finished the breakfast dishes, Sonny took me to the food warehouse where all the mess hall’s dry goods—cans of vegetables, jars of condiments, boxes of paper napkins, etc.—were stacked high on rows of pallets. At the beginning of spring, when only Sonny and Levon and a couple others were at the plant, a ship had arrived from Seattle with all these goods. Now, we were expected to spend time each morning bringing the supplies into the mess hall as needed and making room in the warehouse for the arrival of later shipments.

  “See all that stuff by the back doors?” Sonny asked. “We need to bring it up front here.”

  “So where do we start?” I asked.

  “We’ll worry about that later,” he said.

  He laid a sheet of cardboard over a pallet of canned pineapple juice and asked, “You play bones?”

  He then proceeded to teach me how to play dominoes.

  As we played, Sonny explained that his Uncle Levon had been running the mess hall for seventeen years. Not even twenty years old himself, this was Sonny’s third summer in the cannery’s dishpit. He came from a world very different from that of an Alaskan fishing village—a slummy part of Louisiana where he’d already fathered four children by three different women. Levon started bringing Sonny up to Alaska to provide him with an income unavailable to him in his home state.

  Those first few days were mellow. In lieu of the nonstop dishing that Sonny kept warning me was in store for us, we had plenty of time to kill. When we weren’t working, Sonny and I sat in the warehouse playing dominoes or hiding in one of the mess hall’s many nooks, where I read my books and Sonny read his hot-rod magazines—all on the clock.

  Over the following weeks, the plant accepted new arrivals every day. The fishing village counted just two general stores, three bars, that one pizza restaurant and 500 winter residents. But during the peak of the salmon season, it swelled into a boomtown of 5,000 people. By that time, the dishroom was rocking as the mess hall fed almost 500 cannery workers and fishermen each meal.

  The great thing about living on-site was that I had only a thirty-second commute to work. Most mornings I was up at 6:28 a.m., had my clothes on by 6:29 and was in the mess hall by 6:30. The downside was that I could never blow off work or even stroll in late. On those mornings when the alarm couldn’t rouse me, I was jolted awake at 6:35 by Levon’s pounding his massive fists against the bakery wall just inches from my sleeping head.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  “Pete-O!” he’d shout. “Let’s go!”

  Two minutes later, I’d drag myself into the mess hall.

  Before the breakfast dishes, Sonny and I would stretch like athletes to limber up for our roles as the “Pusher” and the “Puller.” The Pusher manned the sinks, rinsed off the dishes, loaded them in racks and then pushed a rack into the machine every 82 seconds. While the Pusher slammed a rack in one end of the machine, the Puller pulled another rack out, unloaded the piping-hot clean dishes and carried them off to the kitchen.

  Our lives revolved around that 82-second cycle. We hustled to keep the machine running continuously. If it sat idle for just
one second, it was one second less we’d have on our next break. While working nearly around the clock, every nanosecond of break time was vital. So if the Puller didn’t return from the kitchen fast enough, at the 82-second mark, the Pusher was left barking, “PULL! PULL!” Conversely, if the Pusher was bogged down in the sinks and missed his cue, the Puller screamed, “PUSH! PUSH!”

  Sonny and I were perfect dishpit dancing partners. With the 82-second cycle, we were always aware of what the other one was doing—even while our backs were turned. The trampoline-like floorboards enabled the Pusher to always know just when the Puller was about to throw one of the metal dish racks back his way. In turn, the Puller always knew when the Pusher was going to brush behind to grab the rack of dirty drinking glasses.

  All the while, Sonny was converting me to the church of scalding waters. Each day, he’d increased the temperature of my dishwater, acclimating my poor hands to hotter and hotter water. Sure it fried the flesh, but damn if it didn’t get those dishes rinsed.

  My leg-stretching also progressed, enabling me to spread my legs wider and wider apart. Each new inch gained in width between my feet meant another tiny drop in height. Down low, I could work the sinks without bending my back.

  Tossing the old metal dish racks and carrying the tall stacks of the thick plates strengthened my biceps so much that Sonny and I often had pull-up contests in the dishpit doorway: fastest to do a hundred pull-ups had bragging rights for the day.

  When the work hours grew to be really long, Sonny and I skipped our morning chores. Instead, we turned off the warehouse lights and napped. Sonny liked snoozing on the stiff, flat fifty-pound sacks of flour, while I preferred crashing on the malleable hundred-pound sacks of rice.

  Once, when Levon walked in and flipped on the lights, I jumped up and groggily pretended to have been shifting the sacks of rice—in the dark. Levon looked at me, laughed and cut the lights on his way out. After that, anytime he found the warehouse door unlocked but the inside unlit, he courteously left the lights off and quietly closed the door behind him.

  It took me some getting used to—an authority figure who was on my side. Levon especially gained my respect because, while Sonny and I dished, he often jumped in and scrubbed the pots and pans. He seemed more dish man than boss man.

  One morning, Levon wiped some dust off the Hobart dishmachine and said that I wasn’t taking proper care of it.

  “Ya gotta love your baby,” he said. “Ya gotta keep her shiny and happy.”

  Behind him, Sonny nodded in agreement.

  Levon laid his arm atop the machine and added, “Ya gotta caress Baby and give her a kiss.”

  He leaned over and kissed the Hobart. Sonny did the same and then said, “Go on, kiss Baby.”

  I looked at these two fools and told them, “I ain’t kissin’ no dishmachine!”

  A week later, the dishmachine went down during lunch. The pipes were clogged, a direct result of my shoddy record of cleaning the traps. With the machine incapacitated, stacks of dirty dishes streamed into the dishpit, but few clean ones left. Chaos ensued. We were backed up for hours and missed our afternoon break.

  After the cannery’s plumber repaired the Hobart, I was so grateful to have my Baby back that I swore to love and adore her. From then on, each day I broke down all of her parts to meticulously remove bits of debris from all forty-eight spout holes on her four spray arms. I polished her stainless steel panels with a good rubdown. And, at the end of each shift, I followed Levon’s advice by honoring Baby with a kiss.

  During peak season, the fishermen and cannery workers couldn’t all fit into the mess hall at the same time. So if we served a second meal exclusively for the fishermen, union rules stipulated that we earned an extra ninety minutes of premium pay. And when the cannery was running around the clock and forced us to serve a “midnight meal,” we received more premium pay. Sonny and I also treated ourselves to our own premium pay by adding bonus hours to the time books we kept. For example, if we finished the dinner dishes at 9:30 p.m., we wrote down 10:30 p.m.

  Levon, who had to sign our time books, took weeks to discover our added phantom hours. But when he did, he just shook his head, laughed and signed off on them. The combination of the many hours we actually worked, the union-stipulated premium pay and our own phantom bonuses meant that some weeks we were logging 110 hours of—mostly overtime—pay. It totaled over a thousand bucks a week—more than five times the typical dish wage of the time.

  There couldn’t have been many—if any—dishwashers in America who earned more in a month than I had that July. Still, it was a lot of work. Probably even harder than doing the work itself was enduring the claustrophobia of never being farther than a few feet away from the dishes. At around 1:30 a.m., when the last spotless dish from the midnight meal had been put away and Baby had been kissed good night, I’d charge to my room, yank off my clothes and jump in bed. If it took longer than sixty seconds to go from kissing Baby to kissing my pillow, I was dragging ass. I’d fall asleep listening to Charlie sing old show tunes as he baked through the a.m. hours. And, as Sonny had warned, a chorus line of dishes danced through my dreams all night.

  When the salmon finished their run from the ocean to their spawning grounds, the employees were cut loose by the hundreds. As the plant’s population dwindled, the number of brown bears in the area increased. From the back door of the mess hall, Sonny and I watched the bears migrate down from the Aleutian Range, loping along the riverbanks and scavenging for dead salmon washed ashore.

  My own summer ended less gloriously than it had even for all those spawned salmon. Melanie and I had talked about using our summer earnings to make a cross-country trip together. But her born-again Christian parents had other plans. They wanted her to finish college. And seeing me as nothing but a dishwashing bum, they urged Melanie to break up with me.

  Dishwashing bum? I had a job! A good-paying one, no less! Plus my skills were at their absolute peak! My hands and arms were impervious to the heat of the sink water. My bulging biceps tossed the heavy metal dish racks around like they were made of Styrofoam. And my hardened, cracked fingertips could carry the clean, still-piping-hot stacks of dishes effortlessly.

  When I’d arrived in Alaska, I hadn’t realized that I was still little more than a dish novice. But after a couple months of working every day under those grueling conditions, I no longer felt like a novice. I wasn’t even a dish bum. I was now Dishwasher Pete—a full-fledged Dish Master!

  Even so, that didn’t help my cause. Melanie’s parents were convinced that I was a lowlife who was leading her astray. Yet she was the one who’d picked me up. She was the one who’d taken me in. And she was the one who’d turned me on to my last two dish jobs. If I was indeed a dish bum, then they should’ve been pointing their fingers at her, not me!

  But bum or no bum, I got the bum’s rush. At the end of the summer, Melanie dumped me. I left Alaska—alone.

  Though I might have lost the girl, I definitely had found my calling.

  7

  It’s Journalism

  A snag: Now that I’d been laid off, I was eligible to collect unemployment pay from the state of Alaska. And since those weekly $186 checks flowed in as long as I remained officially jobless, in effect, I was paid to stay away from the sinks. It was a beautiful concept, but one that put a crimp on my quest.

  In downtown San Francisco, I took a couple of my paychecks to a branch of the bank they were drawn from and exchanged them for more than four thousand bucks in cash. I hadn’t realized how wealthy this made me until I took a seat in the bank, peeled off my right shoe and sock and tried to lay the stack of hundreds and fifties between my sweat-covered foot and sweat-encrusted sock. The stack was so high, my foot couldn’t fit back in the shoe. So the left foot/sock storage unit had to be employed to help carry the load.

  Now bloated with loot, I splurged by spending five of those sweaty hundred-dollar bills on a white, rusted 1971 Volkswagen camper van. The road maps that I’d ca
refully studied for years could now be put to practical use. Those places I’d known for so long only as dots and lines and colorings on paper, I could now see in person.

  I was always curious about what was down the next road or around the next street corner. And staring at a map only heightened that curiosity.

  Sure, I did touristy crap—sat atop the five-hundred-foot-high Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah, rode to the top of the Gateway Arch in Saint Louis, watched the space shuttle Discovery launch from Cape Canaveral. But far more captivating was simply walking the streets of Los Angeles or Denver or Atlanta.

  It was exciting to wake up in the van, stare at the ceiling and struggle to figure out where in the nation I was. Even more thrilling was to then recall that I was in, say, Meridian, Mississippi. I’d step out of the van and think, Imagine, a dolt like me from San Francisco, here in Meridian! Then it was off to see what was at the end of the block and around the next corner. I was constantly exploring, my curiosity never satiated.

  What was more was discovering all the regional brands of cheap, boxed macaroni-and-cheese. I bought all that I could find and—after consuming their contents—cut out the covers so I could someday display them like big-game trophies.

  Attracted by their many used-book stores, pizza-by-the-slice places and bike-and pedestrian-friendly campuses, I gravitated to a number of college towns. If I sauntered around a campus long enough, I was always bound to stumble into some meeting or reception where free food was to be had.

  The lure of the suds was hard to withstand, though. In both the college towns of Austin, Texas (state #4), and Athens, Georgia (#5), I took on under-the-table dish work. But I soon discovered that working with greenbacks already in my pocket was like buying a beer while already blotto: pointless. Each job was abandoned within a week.

  While passing through Kansas, the van pooped out in the town of Colby. A mechanic told me it needed a new fuel pump but it’d take days for that part to arrive from Wichita, 230 miles away. There was no choice but to wait. To pass the hours, I poked around town.