Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  “I’m a dishwasher,” I told the guy, “who happens to write.”

  “Well, mister-dishwasher-not-a-writer,” he said, “where do you wash dishes?”

  “Nowhere right now,” I said. “This is a tough town for a dishman.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re too white for the job,” he said. He claimed that at every place in New Orleans that he’d worked as a waiter, whites waited and blacks dished.

  “That’s a myth,” I said. “Any place that needs its dishes washed will hire any willing dope to do it—regardless of race.”

  He claimed it was racist of me to want to dish in New Orleans.

  “You’re taking a job away from a black person,” he said.

  If, according to his theory, certain jobs were for whites and certain ones for blacks, by eschewing my “white job” (as a banker or lawyer or whatever) to work a “black job,” wouldn’t I be freeing up my “white job” for a black person?

  Racism, I told him, was assuming that shitty jobs should be reserved for blacks.

  Regardless, it would take more than rumors about racism to keep me out of the sinks. After canvassing the town proved fruitless, I stooped to combing the newspaper classifieds. But each time I answered an ad, I found two or three other (usually black) job seekers already there, filling out applications. I never got hired.

  There were other classified ads for dish jobs out in Metairie, the suburb bordering New Orleans to the west. Not long before, Metairie had distinguished itself by electing the ass-wipe David Duke—former Ku Klux Klan grand poobah—to a seat in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Oddly enough, it was dishwashing that turned Duke into a racist. In his autobiography, he described watching a dishwasher at a coffeehouse in Delhi, India, in 1971:

  Cleanliness was not one of his finer points, for he looked as though he moonlighted as a gravedigger. Crusty black dirt trimmed the tips of his long fingernails; the lighter spots on his face and neck, on closer inspection, turned out to be streaks where sweat had washed off some layers of muck. After hundreds of swabbings from the same filthy water, his dishrag resembled what I imagined were mummy wrappings.

  Duke’s dainty sensibilities were so offended that by the end of the day, he had a revelation: “It was at that point that I realized who I am. I am an Aryan.”

  Looking at all the openings listed in Metairie, I had to wonder, Did I really want to try to dish out in a place that had elected a well-known bigot to office?

  Well, the question was moot; I didn’t want a job located farther than I could comfortably commute by foot or by bike. And there was no way I was walking or cycling out to Metairie every day. Especially since I was already within walking distance of hundreds of New Orleans restaurants.

  Besides, I remained confident I could find a job in town. After all, when Levon Helm, drummer of The Band, quit Bob Dylan’s first electric tour in 1965 because he was tired of the audiences’ booing, he fled to New Orleans and got a job dishing at The Court of Two Sisters restaurant. (Never mind that he was fired after a day and a half when he was caught eating an entrée.) And when Alex Chilton (of the Box Tops and Big Star fame) dropped out of the music scene, he also wound up dishing in the Quarter. If those two white boys could do it, why couldn’t I?

  My faith began to waver. After all, there was that time in San Diego several years before when I had searched high and low for dish work. At a couple restaurants that flew The Sign, the managers wouldn’t even give me an application. In fact, they both offered me instead a position as a waiter! And not one, but two boss-guys straight out told me they only hired Mexicans to wash their dishes. One explained he had “less trouble with them”—meaning it was easier to keep them in their place. Raises and promotions were neither asked for nor offered. But because I was white, it was assumed I’d skip out on them within weeks, when a better opportunity came along.

  Well, it was true—I would’ve skipped out within weeks. But it wouldn’t have had anything to do with better opportunities, just the same opportunity in some other restaurant in some other town.

  Then it happened. I got a call from a chef at a restaurant in the French Quarter. When I’d handed him an application the week before, he’d shown no interest in hiring me, despite my concerted effort to not yawn or scratch (the slouching was unavoidable). Now he was saying to come in, that he had a job for me.

  As I trekked down to Decatur Street, I was pumped with excitement. The naysayers and myth-perpetuators were going to be proven wrong. A white man could find a dish job in New Orleans.

  In his office at the huge restaurant, the chef grinned as if he was as thrilled as I was about the job.

  “You’ll be in charge of the other dishwashers—six to ten of them on any given night,” he said.

  I didn’t understand.

  “You’ll be head dishwasher,” he explained.

  Head dishwasher? Me? I barely managed to be the head of myself, let alone heading anyone else. Besides, as a suds buster who hated authority, was I really expected to push around my fellow workers?

  I was stunned silent.

  The shock continued as he gave me a brief tour of the dishrooms located on two different floors. Indeed, all the other dishers were black. Why hadn’t he promoted one of them? They obviously knew the setup better than I did. Instead, he hired a white guy to be the head of a bunch of black guys.

  “Yeah, this’ll work out great,” he said as he glanced at my application again. “You say you’re a hard worker, so this’ll be a good job for you.”

  That socked me like a punch in the gut. Never in my life—not in the deepest darkest moments of sarcasm, not as a practical joke and especially not as a story line on an application—had I ever called myself “a hard worker.” If anything, I took great pains to never sell myself as a hard worker. This dude was clearly delusional.

  Still, it was a dish job. Deeply confused, I said nothing. As I left, the chef told me to return the next afternoon at five o’clock to begin head-dishwashing.

  The following day was spent agonizing over what to do. Still desperate to dish in New Orleans—to make Louisiana state #14 in my quest—and in need of cash to get traveling again, here was my opportunity. As five o’clock approached, I started walking—not to the Quarter, though. Instead, I wandered through Mid-City, resuming my search for the all-important window signs. And it was a good walk. That liberating feeling of discarding a job, I discovered, could be achieved without even ever gaining it. Then, to top it off, in three different spots along a one-block stretch of South Carrollton Avenue, I picked up nine coins—37 cents total. Not too shabby!

  A couple days later, a listing appeared in the want ads of the Times-Picayune:

  Dishwashers wanted for one-day jobs

  Cash $$$ paid per day

  Now that was the gig for me. I was so impatient to get started that instead of hoofing it, I bummed a ride from Cheryl. When we pulled up to the listed address, Cheryl looked at the seedy characters in front of the building. They were lounging on the sidewalk and drinking brown-bagged booze.

  “You’re not about to sell your plasma, are you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “At least I don’t think so.”

  I got out, skirted the sidewalk loafers and reached through a steel gate to knock on the door. A rough-looking mug opened the door and gruffly asked, “Yeah? What d’ya want?”

  The whole scene felt clandestine, so I said, “The newspaper ad sent me.”

  “Oh, all right.” His scowl softened. “C’mon in.”

  He unlocked the gate, introduced himself as Terry and led me into the office. He explained that this was where companies involved in shady work like asbestos removal found their cheap labor. Now the operation was expanding its labor pool to crack the dishwashing market. Since us dishers often shook off our jobs without notice, this place was assembling a crew of dishmen. Now jilted employers would have a place to pick up last-minute replacements. As the hopeful laborers waited for job assignments, the
y hung around in the hiring hall and out on the curb.

  The plan was captivating. I could already see my role: the on-call, troubleshooting pearl diver—wherever and whenever dishes needed washing, I’d be there (though, inevitably, I’d be late).

  It reminded me of the scene in Charles Bukowski’s book Factotum. The author’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, gets hired at a downtown Los Angeles employment office to answer the phone and hire the dishwashers. On his first day, he needs four dishwashers from among the forty bums waiting outside the office. So he throws four pennies in the air. Whoever retrieves a penny, gets a job. Then, as Bukowski writes:

  Bodies jumped and fell, clothing ripped, there were curses, one man screamed, there were several fistfights. Then the lucky four came forward, one at a time, breathing heavily, each with a penny.

  “Where do you need me today?” I asked.

  “Nowhere,” Terry said. “We need to sign on the dishwashers first before we can start offering to hire them out.”

  In the meantime, he said, he could assign me other jobs. I gave Terry—word for word—the same reply I’d overheard another dishing applicant give only minutes earlier:

  “Nah, none of that heavy labor stuff for me, just dishwashing.”

  The next morning, I awoke full of confidence from having found a job. But the thought of sitting around a hiring hall wasn’t nearly as enticing as the prospect of poking around a place I hadn’t yet explored. While considering whether New Orleans could ever serve as my permanent home, I figured—if so—it’d be fun to live near a ferry route. So I caught the Jackson Avenue ferry across the Mississippi River to Gretna. The town, with its runty cottages, was pleasant. But it was too quaint to justify living in just to ride a ferry every day. I didn’t get around to calling the hiring hall until late in the afternoon. Terry answered and reminded me that in order to be hired out, I had to either be at the hall in person or I had to call in the morning.

  “And no,” he said. “There ain’t no dishwashing jobs yet.”

  The next morning I caught the Algiers ferry across to the neighborhood of Algiers. Though it was sleepier than even the most drowsy of New Orleans neighborhoods, its ferry sailed straight to the French Quarter. So it won my vote for most-likely-place-for-me-to-live-in-New-Orleans because it was just a short ferry ride from so many potential dish jobs.

  After my venture into Algiers, I called Terry. He yelled at me, “Look! You ain’t gonna get any jobs by calling in the afternoon!”

  My morning-time strolls and late-afternoon check-ins persisted one more day. That last time I called, Terry didn’t bother answering my question. Upon hearing my voice, he hung up. My career as the on-call, troubleshooting pearl diver was over before I was ever called upon to shoot a single trouble.

  Now I was really in a pickle. As summer neared and the punishing New Orleans humidity increased, I became hell-bent to get out of town. But I had no money for a bus ticket. So, to pick up some cash lickety-split, I guinea-pigged it. At a research clinic, drugs were put in my mouth and in my veins as doctors and nurses sat around to see if I’d get a fever. I was one of the lucky ones; there were no reactions to note. I survived the placebo with enough dough to get myself moving.

  Cheryl, her boyfriend and everyone else I knew in town rubbed it in. This white boy still hadn’t dished in New Orleans. Louisiana wouldn’t be conquered state #14 after all.

  I left town defeated.

  14

  Fumes

  I stepped off the bus in Little Rock, Arkansas, walked out of the bus station and found the house rented by Jim, a dish dog I’d met briefly in California. Jim had told me to look him up if I ever passed through Little Rock. Because it was only six in the morning, I decided to wait a couple more hours before officially looking him up. In the meantime, I crashed on a beat-up couch on his porch.

  When Jim woke me a few hours later, practically the first words out of his mouth were: “Have you found a job yet?”

  Of course I hadn’t. Not only had I been in town for just a couple of hours, I still had a few dollars in my pocket from the New Orleans drug study. I usually didn’t look for work until I was flat busted. Knowing more dishing loomed once I hit that no-money mark, I could stretch those final few bucks for weeks. But, like surrogate parents constantly wondering when I’d get off my ass and get a job, well-meaning friends often suggested places for me to work. Actually, it was helpful. Otherwise I would’ve ended up broke and cadging money from them. My parents would’ve been happy, had they only known that so many people were out there trying to keep my butt in line.

  “Let’s get some beer,” Jim said, “and go find you a job.”

  Several hours and miles and a couple of six-packs later, while we were walking up Kavanaugh Boulevard, Jim struck gold—The Sign in a restaurant window that’d been so elusive in New Orleans: “Dishwasher Wanted.”

  “Perfect!” he said.

  “Great,” I muttered.

  Jim pushed me into the restaurant. I asked for the job and was hired.

  “Two things,” the chef said. “Don’t show up to work drunk and don’t drink on the job.”

  Apparently he didn’t smell the fumes, because he then asked me to start right away.

  Since I knew all too well how painfully slow the work hours dragged whenever I started a shift plastered—and since I was already close to that state—I told him, “I’ll come back in an hour.”

  That was now another rule of mine: Never start drinking until at least halfway through a shift, when the end was in sight (a rule I’d adhere to every night at that job).

  An hour later and slightly more sober, I returned. A few minutes behind me, Lonnie—the other disher—arrived and trained me.

  “Chef Dumb hired you?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why’s he called Chef Dumb?”

  “’Cause he’s dumb.”

  Four minutes after it began, the training was complete.

  “Now you just find yourself a chair,” Lonnie said, “and make yourself comfortable.”

  He pulled a chair for himself into the tiny dishroom. I slapped together a makeshift seat by placing a new mop head atop a five-gallon bucket.

  Sitting was a familiar position for us here. Despite its efforts to be an upscale eatery, even on the busiest weekend nights, the place attracted mostly yuppies-in-training who drank at the bar and ordered little from the kitchen. The upshot: few dirty dishes. Everyone else—bartenders, barbacks, wait staff, bussers and even the cooks—were constantly busy, but there was barely enough work in the dishpit for a lone dishwasher, let alone a two-man crew. So I sat on my ass and read my book while Lonnie sat on his ass and listened to the radio.

  Arkansas was now #14.

  During that first night, while I was standing over the sink and scrubbing a few pots and pans, Lonnie pulled down his pants and showed me all the entry and exit wounds from when he’d been shot in both legs. As he told the story, I started to feel dizzy, as if still plastered from the beers of hours earlier.

  Lonnie then pointed his forefinger and fist at my face to describe the revenge he’d exact on his nemesis: “I’m gonna blow his head off.”

  My own head was now clouded and felt like it could blow away.

  “Yeah, but won’t prison suck?” I asked.

  “I’m not gonna get caught,” he said. “You know why? ’Cause no one will know who did it.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Queasy, I looked at the steamy fumes I was inhaling from the sink and asked, “Hey, man, what’d you put in this water?”

  “All that stuff,” he said, pointing to several plastic jugs beneath the sink. They were the very cleansers, detergents and bleaches whose labels warned against mixing them with other cleansers, detergents and bleaches.

  On the verge of passing out, I tore through the kitchen, through the dining area and out the front door. On the sidewalk, I finally breathed fresh air.

  Over the next few nig
hts, though I was able to convince Lonnie to be less ambitious with the cleaning agents, the air in the dishroom remained acrid. Sniffing around, I figured out that some sort of noxious fumes were emanating from the locked utility closet adjacent to the dishpit. What the gas was—or what it was used for—I had no idea. All I knew was that it made me teary-eyed and nauseated. When I complained about it to Chef Dumb, he vowed to look into it.

  Lonnie dealt with the gas issue by hanging out in the kitchen and bullshitting with the cooks or by hanging out at the bar and bullshitting with the bartenders. Preferring reading to bullshitting, I’d remain in the dishpit with my book until my concentration dulled or my vision blurred. Hanging out elsewhere in the restaurant may have meant breathing cleaner air, but it also meant encountering Chef Dumb and his empty promises. Or worse, encountering the customers.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t completely avoid the creepy patrons. Employees and customers used the same bathrooms. There, I had to endure lushes in suits practicing their dance moves, suggesting pickup lines and pissing on the floor. It was enough to make a dishman stay in the pit and whiz in the empty sink.

  Though I never ran into Little Rock’s very own Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, while in town I did meet a native named Chip. He told me about the time when Hillary and Chelsea came into a place where he was working. Hillary ordered a sandwich. Chip plucked a booger and added it to her dish. Hillary ate the sandwich.

  The Bus Tub Buffet paid off well at this place. At cheap diners where the portions were larger, very few leftovers made it to the dishroom. But at fancy places, customers paid bundles for puny portions and then often left much of their meal untouched. This restaurant was no exception.