Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  In the window of a realtor’s office, local houses were listed for sale. Some homes were priced as low as $12,000. Though my knowledge of real estate was minimal, those numbers didn’t sound right. What little I did know was that in my hometown, housing prices were so high—and rising so rapidly—that it wasn’t just an impossibility for a dishman to buy a house there, but even renting was out of the question. In fact, not long before, as a result of the explosion in San Francisco’s housing prices, my parents had been evicted from their own rent-controlled apartment of twenty-three years.

  Yet each time I counted the zeros of the listed housing prices in Colby, unbelievably, the figures came out the same. It got me thinking. Between Kansan prices and Alaskan wages, maybe I could get a place of my own.

  Sitting smack in the middle of America, a house in Kansas could be used as a base of operations. It could be a hideaway to retreat to after dishwashing sprees up to Alaska or around the country. It could be a place where I’d finally get around to putting together my shoestring publication of dishwashing stories. And since at some point everyone passes through Kansas, it’d be in a perfect location to host friends—whether I was home or not.

  After the new fuel pump was installed in the van, I drove out of Colby with a vow to one day return from Alaska with enough cash stuffed in my socks to purchase me one of those houses. When the van died for good in front of my friend Floater’s apartment in Oakland, California, I gave it to him in exchange for letting me crash on his couch for a few weeks.

  In San Francisco, my dad told me that he didn’t know what to tell people about me when he was asked about his kids. For my older siblings, who all still lived in San Francisco, he could rattle off their occupations: nurse, airplane mechanic, physician, store manager. But when he got to me, he couldn’t explain what I was doing with my life.

  “Just tell them I’m a dishwasher,” I said.

  “I can’t do that,” he said.

  I guess he was worried that dishwashing would be considered too low class. After all, in an opinion survey of 1,166 adults who were asked to rate the status of 740 occupations, dishwasher ranked #735. Only envelope stuffer, prostitute, street corner drug dealer, fortune-teller and—#740—panhandler rated lower. What appealed to me about the job—that low status—was the very thing that embarrassed my dad.

  On my way to Alaska, I stopped in Arcata and tracked down Jeff at his new dish job. After his coworkers left, I helped him finish up. He’d switched restaurants, he said, because on his one-year anniversary at the old place, the owner had rewarded him with a ten-cent-an-hour raise. Jeff found the puny increase more offensive than if he’d received no raise.

  “Till then, I hadn’t even realized I’d been stuck at that place a full year,” he told me. “So I quit.”

  I got to Alaska in the spring of 1991 and spent the summer switching off with Sonny as the Pusher and Puller. When the season was over, I stayed until the bitter end. After the hundreds of cannery workers and fishermen left, the plant’s population counted only me, Levon and a couple of plumbers who were flushing antifreeze into the cannery’s water pipes for the winter. Even Sonny had departed. He left after his five-year-old son had been wounded by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting.

  Before I departed, I put the stacks of dishes to sleep for the winter by covering them with bedsheets. Then, before laying a white sheet over her, I gave Baby a year-end kiss.

  Again, I was flush with cash and could work or not work, as desired, which really meant not working. In Arcata, while walking down the street, I ran into a guy I knew, John, and his friend, Jess. John told me about his dish job at the Uniontown coffee shop, where a cook often smoked pot in the walk-in fridge. After one recent smoke-out, the clueless boss had asked John to clean out the fridge, because, he claimed, it smelled like something was rotting in there.

  We happened to be standing next to a little park with a jungle gym. As we talked, I grabbed hold of the pull-up bar and, just as Sonny and I had done all summer, I rattled off the pull-ups.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but a couple years later I’d end up dishing at Uniontown myself (but by then the cook was smoking pot at some other job). I also didn’t realize that I’d become good pals with Jess, John’s silent friend. Jess later admitted that he hadn’t uttered a word that day due to being in awe of me casually chatting while doing pull-ups. I believe his exact words were “I thought you were Superman.”

  I got to know Jess better when I learned that he’d picked up a dish gig of his own. It was the closing shift at the same restaurant where Jeff had dished the previous year. From having hung out there with Jeff, I already knew my way around that restaurant’s sinks. So I showed up with cookies for Jess’s first solo night and helped him close up.

  This time, instead of Superman, he called me a dishwashing saint. Afterwards, we walked around town. When I saw a penny on the sidewalk, instinctively I stopped and bent down. As my fingers stretched to grasp the loot, Jess’s own fingers swooped in and snatched the coin. I was dumbfounded. In all my years of coin-finding, I’d never had competition for pennies.

  “Oh, hey man, sorry ’bout that,” he said. “Here, you take it.”

  He handed me the penny.

  “No, you take it,” I said. But he wouldn’t take it back.

  Jess was truly a kindred soul.

  I bought another 1971 Volkswagen camper van that was almost identical to the one I had the year before. It too was white, rusty and broke down at regular intervals.

  Three years had now passed since I’d first proposed to my pearl-diving pals that we gather dish tales in a publication. Though everyone whom I’d proposed this to thought it was a good idea, none of their lazy asses had yet written a word for it. I decided I needed to just do it myself.

  So one afternoon in a Phoenix, Arizona, photocopy shop, I was ready to put aside my procrastination and finally put together my long-envisioned zine. But first, I had to suffer a crash course in handling a photocopier. Nothing seemed to go right. Photos reproduced too light or too dark. The back sides of pages came out upside down in relation to the front sides. The paper repeatedly jammed in the machine. But through several frustrating hours, I slowly got the hang of it. The result was four sheets of paper folded over and stapled into a sixteen-page booklet. Most of the text was handwritten in ballpoint pen. And it was titled simply, Dishwasher.

  That first issue of the zine contained the story of my attempt to interview the dish dog at the El Tovar Lodge on the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. That endeavor was thwarted by three park rangers who accosted me as I tried to locate the lodge’s dishroom. They saw that among the list of questions I’d prepared for the interview was: “Is your boss a prick?”

  “This your idea of a joke?” one ranger asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s journalism.”

  The lodge’s dishman lived in a national park and worked barely a stone’s throw from one of the world’s most amazing views. Maybe he could even see the canyon from his dishpit. But did such perks outweigh having some prick squawking about spotty glassware? What was the downside to the job? I needed to know.

  Claiming to have never heard of “dishwashing journalism,” the rangers threw me out of the park. If I ever returned, they threatened, I’d be arrested.

  I photocopied a grand total of twenty-five copies of Dishwasher #1. Fifteen of them were mailed to dish comrades I knew like Jeff, Jess and Sonny. The rest were passed out through the back doors of Phoenix’s restaurants to dish comrades I didn’t know. The zine was nothing fancy, just a meager attempt to entertain a few cronies.

  In Texas, I put out a second issue. This time, I photocopied fifty copies and again mailed them off to friends and passed out the rest to at-work pearl divers. Then I traveled to northern Louisiana, and turned up unannounced at the housing project address Sonny had given me the summer before. He wasn’t home, so the two women at the apartment dispatched some of the children present to find my friend. As t
he kids fanned out across the neighborhood, the women called around town. A small crowd gathered on the sidewalk in front of the apartment.

  “What’s goin’ on?” someone would ask.

  “Some white boy’s lookin’ for Sonny.”

  “You work for Sonny?” one man asked me.

  “Not for him,” I laughed, picturing Sonny telling his friends he was some kind of dishroom foreman. “We wash dishes together.”

  “Wash dishes?” he said. “I thought Sammy was the boss of, like, twenty or thirty people in a kitchen up there.”

  “No, me and Sonny—” I started to say, then caught myself. “Uh, yeah, you’re right. I do work for Sonny.”

  For the next twenty minutes, as a growing number of people joined in the wait, I was asked several more times if it was true that Sonny was a big shot in Alaska. I couldn’t blow my friend’s cover. So I lied each time and said, indeed, he was.

  The crowd had grown to a couple dozen people when, after having been tracked down in a pool hall, Sonny finally arrived.

  “Someone came running in saying a white boy was looking for me. They said it wasn’t a cop, so I knew it had to be your crazy ass,” he said. “I left in the middle of a hundred-dollar game.”

  “You shoulda finished your game,” I told him.

  “Couldn’t do that,” he said. “I was worried you’d get scared being surrounded by all these black folk.”

  As surprised and glad as he was to see me, he seemed even more nervous about my presence. It was as if he didn’t want me knowing he’d been misrepresenting himself as the mess hall honcho while, at the same time, didn’t want his friends finding out the truth from me. So after he treated me to a chili-dog-and-root-beer-float dinner at a drive-in, he said he’d see me back in Alaska. And I was on my way again.

  I put out Dishwasher #3 while in Virginia and rambled all the way up to Maine. When the van died by the side of the road in southern Indiana, I didn’t bother to try to revive it. I grabbed my bags and started hitchhiking.

  8

  The Fundamental Rule

  Throughout that winter, I repeatedly phoned Levon. I was lobbying for him to bring me up to the cannery as early as possible, even though he wouldn’t really need me till weeks later. My plan was to work from the absolute first day possible to the absolute last one and earn enough money that year to buy a cheap house in Kansas. The pestering worked: when I arrived in early April 1992, the only people inhabiting the plant were Levon and the winter watchman.

  Despite my lofty ambitions, I ran into trouble right away. As I pulled the bedsheets off the stacks of dishes and off of Baby, it felt like I had put them on only the day before. During the first two years at that job, the desire for the end of salmon season slowly mounted as the weeks passed. Now, by the end of the first day, I was already aching to go. And yet, I’d have to wait through another three and a half months of working every day until I could say my good-byes again.

  I’d hoped Sonny’s arrival would help distract me. But when he showed up a couple days later, his presence only fueled my yearning to leave.

  “Man, I’m ready to go home already,” he said before he’d even unpacked his bags. He was so serious about the latest mother-to-be in his life that he almost hadn’t come to the cannery.

  I, too, had left a gal behind in the lower forty-eight. I’d met K. J. in Arcata and now she was to spend the summer in Colorado with friends. In fact, every letter I received in Alaska seemed to be an outline of all the fun things various friends would be doing while I was bogged down at this job again.

  For weeks, Sonny and I egged each other on by moaning and griping about missing our ladies and being stuck at the cannery.

  At any other job, I would’ve bolted. But I couldn’t stiff a boss who allowed me to sleep on the clock and pad my time book—especially after I’d badgered him to let me arrive weeks before he needed me. He’d consented in order to keep me appeased all season. But though I had only stepped off the plane, I was already unhappy.

  The days eked by. No matter what we did, whether it was dishing or reading or playing dominoes at a dollar a game, Sonny and I ended up whining.

  Five weeks in—when we were still weeks away from the beginning of salmon season, let alone its end—I got a letter from Jess.

  He wrote: “Here’s the scene: 2:59 p.m. I finish washing a knife and reach over to get another. I begin scrubbing—it’s slippery—hard to clean—next thing I know I see stars, then blackness for a second. I look down. ‘Shit!’ I’m covered in blood. It’s gushing all over my white apron and everything else.”

  The gist of the tale: He’s now kicking back while nursing the five-inch gash in his hand and collecting disability pay.

  Lucky bastard, I thought. Getting paid to not work! I wished a malady would get me out of working. Sure, grasping and turning plates tens of thousands of times made my hands and arms ache. Though the carpal tunnel syndrome may have been severe, I didn’t figure a doctor would warrant it a disability.

  Then, a couple of days later, one of the bouncy floorboards in front of the sinks cracked and started to give way.

  “Better watch out,” Sonny said. “Fall through that floor and you’ll bust your leg.”

  I avoided the broken plank throughout lunch. Then, during the afternoon break, while lying on my bed and thinking yet again about how much I wanted to leave, it all came together: broken floorboard = broken leg = freedom!

  If I jumped hard enough on that floorboard, I was sure to fall through. And if I didn’t bust a leg, at the least I’d hurt an ankle, a toe—something!—and be on the next flight out.

  I returned early from my break, eager to stomp through the floor. But when I stepped into the dishroom, my ticket to freedom was snatched from my hand. The cannery carpenter was on his hands and knees before me, nailing a sheet of plywood over the brittle floorboards.

  He looked up at me and said, “These planks were so weak I’m surprised you guys never fell through ’em.”

  “Yeah,” I said, deflated. “Me too.”

  The next morning, after breakfast, Levon sent Sonny and me around to the bunkhouses to check which rooms still needed pillows. As we exited the second floor of one bunkhouse, Sonny was ahead of me, descending the outdoor stairs in the rain. Looking down at the steep, wet stairwell of about twenty-five wooden steps, I figured, Here’s my chance.

  If I slipped on that first step and fell forward, I could bounce down the stairs and onto disability pay. The stairwell’s steepness and length assured that at least one bone would break. Maybe it’d be an arm, but I’d take a broken leg, too. There was just no telling what it’d be. Heck, I could even break my back or bust open my skull.

  That gave me pause. Was it worth the risk? After all, a broken back could put a chill on my whole summer.

  “You coming or what?” Sonny shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

  What the hell was I thinking? I suddenly realized the lunacy of such an act—and realized it was obvious I had to leave, despite everything Levon had done for me.

  After lunch, I told Levon, “I have to go.”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure,” I told him.

  He tried to talk me into staying. I could pad even more phantom hours onto my time book, he said. But money wasn’t the issue. He even offered to fly up K. J. and employ her as a waitress. But I knew it wouldn’t help. I wanted to be elsewhere.

  No matter what Levon said, it did him no good. The notion to split had hit.

  But there was a hitch: The earliest date for an affordable flight out of town wasn’t for another seven days. In the meantime, Levon asked me, would I not say anything about my quitting to anyone—meaning Sonny—until my day of departure? Apparently, he didn’t want my abandoning the ship to give his nephew any ideas about jumping in the lifeboat with me.

  I agreed to keep mum.

  In the meantime, while I worked alongside Sonny, our minds were in completely different places. Whil
e he continued whining about wanting to leave, I was silently overjoyed—and feeling like a traitor for being overjoyed.

  The guilt even haunted me in my sleep. The night after my conversation with Levon, I dreamt not of the chorus line of dishes, but of Sonny being sentenced to death. He was to be executed by a dishmachine—trapped inside until the scalding water disintegrated his flesh. And I stood by powerless to prevent his execution. Awaking in a sweat, I wanted to grab my stuff and flee. But that couldn’t happen. I was still trapped.

  This was exactly the scenario I’d always feared. I knew I never should’ve gotten myself stuck in an isolated job situation like this. So, then and there, a pledge was made not to let it happen ever again. Any future gigs would have to conform to a new rule—the fundamental rule: never work at a place where I couldn’t just up and leave.

  With four days to go, while standing in the dishroom waiting for the first lunch dishes to roll in, I imagined the letters I’d send to Sonny to cheer him up after I’d left.

  Sonny noticed the contented look on my face.

  “Hey, don’t you go quitting on me and sending me letters from wherever you go,” he said. “’Cause if you quit, I’m going with you.”

  That floored me.

  “No, no,” I stammered. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  Unable to face him, I grabbed a couple of plates and made for the sinks.

  Finally, my last day arrived. My flight to freedom was due to leave in the afternoon. After Sonny pushed and I pulled the lunch dishes, he walked to the Pantry and I kissed Baby good-bye forever. I grabbed my duffel and sleeping bags from my room and then stepped next door to Sonny’s room to say so long. But, for some reason, his door was padlocked. How could that be? He always spent the afternoon break napping in his room. I checked the bathroom, the mess hall and all around outside. He was nowhere to be found.