by Pete Jordan
I was back to using the pushcart.
The next morning, I found three Hispanic-looking guys lounging in the pit. Upon seeing me, they jumped up and bustled around the sinks though there was nothing yet to wash.
“Hey, what’s up?” I asked.
No reply. Since none of them spoke English, I tried to assure them that they didn’t have to do any busywork in my presence. I wasn’t The Man. But my message was lost on them. So I sat down and indicated they should do the same. They wouldn’t fall for that one either.
In New Orleans, I’d rejected the head dishwasher position because I didn’t want any power of authority. But this was even worse. I wasn’t even the head dishwasher. Yet, no matter how hard I tried, they acted as if I had authority—power that I couldn’t turn off!
Then, in a curious development, Ephrem popped in cheerfully pushing a cart full of pans. If Ephrem was shuttling the goods, and more than enough pearl divers were manning the sinks, then what work was I supposed to do?
I ventured over to the cook tent to get a bite and nose around. While I was talking with one of the cooks, he asked me to stir the vat of boiling sauerkraut. I politely declined. Another asked me to help tend the hundreds of brats on the grill. I responded by excusing myself from the cook tent.
It wasn’t yet noon, and I was scheduled to work past midnight. How was I going to fill the time? I wasn’t needed in the dishroom and didn’t want to be needed in the cook tent. Worst of all, I had no book with me. Wandering around, watching the crowds, the oompah bands and the damn chicken-dancing would have to do.
A couple of times, I stumbled across Country Boy. Each time he saw me, he spat and then said, “Sucker!” I followed him once to see what new job he held. But all he did was traipse about. Then again, that’s all I ever did. So technically, he still might’ve been a dishwasher.
Wanting to go on the rides but having no money, I rummaged through the confetti of torn tickets on the ground for an unused one. While the search did kill an hour, I failed to turn up a single ticket. So I decided instead to barter. In the cook tent, I loaded up a paper plate with brats, sauerkraut and a giant pretzel, then offered it to the ticket-sales girl in exchange for ride tickets.
“Can’t do it,” she said.
“Oh well,” I said and handed her the food anyway.
That gave me an idea. Many of the employees were working twelve-to sixteen-hour stints, yet they were issued only one meal ticket per shift. These folks were in need of free eats. So I loaded plates of grub in the cook tent and then handed them out to the old man sweeping up cigarette butts, the guy checking IDs at the beer garden, the girls selling T-shirts and so on. Everyone appreciated the free food. But more important, the hours passed so fast that it was almost possible to forget that I was being paid to wash dishes.
When I brought food over to the dishpit crew, none of them would sit down and eat in my presence. So I left them to chow down in private and walked. I walked around until my feet were sore. Then I sat. I sat around until my ass was sore. Then I walked again, to the cook tent. I fixed another huge meal for myself and retired with it to some stairs hidden behind a dumpster. I stretched out and shoved one last oversized pretzel in my mouth. Ahhh…
When I awoke, the stars were out and pretzel dough was pasted to the inside of my mouth. Groggy, I had no idea how long I’d slept. I dragged myself into the cook tent, where I was again asked to stir the vat of sauerkraut. So I dragged myself over to the dishroom, where I was again treated like a boss. So I just shuffled around the park some more, unsure of where to go or what to do. I had already spent over ten hours doing no work. Trying to occupy myself turned out to be far more exhausting than actually washing dishes.
When a costumed chicken came up and tried to teach me the freakin’ chicken dance, without thinking, I barked, “Get away from me!” Then, through the chicken’s beak, I saw a dejected teenage girl. What a jerk I am, I thought, and apologized to her. Despite the fact that there were still more hours of pay to earn by doing nothing, yelling at six-foot chickens was a clear indication that it was time to go.
I searched for Ephrem to say adios but couldn’t find him anywhere. Hoping he’d found a choice hiding spot of his own, I headed for the exit. To cheer myself up about knocking off early, I reported my morning arrival time a few hours earlier than it actually was and then rode my bike aimlessly through the night, still unsure of where to go or what to do, but with a smile on my face.
Portland was a comfortable town, a place where bus drivers actually waited until riders were seated before lunging forward. A place where old men lingered in the parks, looking for opponents in rounds of horseshoes (I was always happy to oblige). A place where more floors and couches were put at my disposal than I was able to accept.
It was also a place where I received numerous invitations from dishwashers, bartenders and wait staff to stop by their workplaces. Sometimes the invites were for me to use the front door; sometimes the back door. Sometimes it was for during open hours; sometimes for after hours. Regardless, the result was always the same: free food and/or free beer were pushed my way.
And everywhere I roamed, pennies—if not fancier denominations of coins—awaited my discovery. The coin-finding record was absolutely shattered here as I booked success on thirty-three days straight! On one of those days, in twelve different finds, I plucked from the ground a total of thirty pennies! The streets of Portland were truly paved with copper.
Portland was unmistakably a dishwasher’s town. Indeed, when the city’s eccentric previous mayor—Bud Clark—had retired from politics, he’d proclaimed, “I could wash dishes the rest of my life and still be happy.”
In Portland, I felt the same way.
My friend Melody, the hostess of the Dish Fest, asked me to come work where she’d been dishing for years—at an exclusive women’s club for the crustiest of Portland’s upper-crust old ladies. When Melody ran this idea by her boss, he was open to it on one condition: he wanted to meet me first.
On my way to the meeting, I grew suspicious. Melody casually mentioned that the boss had read her copies of Dishwasher. If he knew of my tales of slothful work habits, sticky fingers and contempt for authority figures, then why would he want me anywhere near his establishment? Maybe he was setting me up. In the name of employers nationwide—bosses who were sick of lazy, thieving malcontent dishers—was he going to ambush me? Would it be verbal abuse or could I also expect fisticuffs?
As it turned out, neither. The guy actually just wanted to regale me with tales of his own swashbuckling days. He, too, had once been a young, lazy, malcontent dish stud. And because he couldn’t regale his wife with such stories, he did what increasingly more dish alumni were doing via letters: he shared them with the one person he figured could appreciate them—me.
Since the boss-guy knew what he was getting into when he hired me, he shouldn’t have been surprised when I called in sick. So what if it was supposed to be my first shift? The day before, a friend had snuck me into a wine-and-cheese distributors’ convention. Eight hours of guzzling free wine and gobbling free cheese had left me unable to work. The boss suggested I come in late. No, I told him. There’d be no working for me that day, just lying in the park and resting my head.
A few nights later, I finally did arrive at the ivy-covered mansion where, after playing rounds of bridge, the club members ate their meals. At least that’s what I was told. I never actually saw any of the society gals myself, owing to the fact that, when I wasn’t in the dishpit, I always stuck to the servants’ lounge, the servants’ corridors and the servants’ entrance. It was through that very same servants’ entrance that each night I snuck out pieces of the fancy china. By the time I quit—a few weeks after I began—I had a complete, four-person set to ship to my buddy Colleen in Montana for her birthday.
The boss, I figured, would’ve been proud.
The Northwest Tour’s next stop in Portland was at a seafood restaurant. When I first asked about work t
here, the cook said he already had dishwashers, but took my name and number anyway.
“’Cause you never know,” he said.
A few days later, he came a-calling to say his night disher had arrived drunk, then disappeared. The cook found him slumped out back, just conscious enough to announce his two-week notice. The pearl diver stumbled to the dishroom and then, a few minutes later, out the front door. The cook caught up to him down the street and asked what was up.
“I can’t wait those two weeks,” the boozehound replied. “I quit now.”
And now, here I was. Easily the best thing about the place was that the dishpit was completely sealed off from the kitchen, the dining area and the bar—a sanctuary where I could turn up the radio and dish in peace.
In peace, that is, with the exception of the odd shrieking noise that came from beneath the sink. At first, I figured it was simply the groaning of the garbage disposal or moaning of some pipes. But when the noise persisted, I turned down the radio and investigated. Beneath the counter, behind the garbage can, I located the source: a shoebox-sized mousetrap. I picked up the metal box. Through the cracks, some mice could be seen frantically looking for a way out.
Though I was officially neutral in the vermin battles, I had no desire to dish to the death throes of these prisoners of war. If anyone had a beef with the mice, or vice versa, then they all could hash out their differences after I was no longer at the helm of this pit.
I grabbed a knife and pried open the trap. Three mice scampered out and disappeared among the room’s clutter. I broke the trap’s spring mechanism and, while I was at it, also replaced the lethal pellets on the floor with croutons and fresh shrimp. (Judging by how often I would need to replace the shrimp, mice really dig shellfish!) For my remaining weeks at that job, the only sounds in the dishroom were the drone of the dishmachine, the screech of the disposal and the hum of the oldies station on the radio.
In one nightspot that I wandered into to ask for work, the waitress told me that since lunch was pretty slow there, they had no day dishwasher—she did the dishes herself. I proposed to her that I wash her lunch dishes and she feed me lunch. She was game. From then on, I’d stop by afternoons, dish for an hour and then eat my lunch. She was working less, I was eating more—and everyone was satisfied.
When I happened to ask the waitress about herself, she told me that she was a writer.
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Hey, I’m a dishwasher who happens to write.”
“What do you write about?” she asked.
“Dishwashing,” I said.
My answer killed the conversation. She left the kitchen and said little more to me that day—or in the days that followed.
Then, one afternoon, I stopped by after having just received a couple weeks’ worth of mail forwarded by a friend from my post office box. When I was done washing, I sat down to eat my lunch and open envelopes. There were the usual requests for copies of Dishwasher from, among others: a grandmother in Kansas; a self-described Minneapolis “gutter punk”; a University of Georgia college student; a policeman in Denton, Texas; a disher-turned-lawyer in Ithaca, New York; a Puget Sound housewife; and a teenage Mexican dish dude from Tucson. There were letters from comrades updating me on their latest on-the-job exploits and also mail containing clippings about dish dogs in the news and references to dishers in pop culture. And, inexplicably, there were even a couple of letters from restaurant owners inviting me to work for them. (The boss from the women’s club apparently hadn’t gotten word out to them yet.)
Standing over me and surveying the envelopes, the waitress asked, “What’s all this?”
“My Dishwasher mail.”
I tried to convince her that people like a good dish tale. But she failed to comprehend why so many folks would write to me. After all, she was the writer and I was just the dishpit dipshit who worked for food.
Then she pulled an envelope from the pile and recognized the name on the return address.
“You know him?” I asked.
“He’s only my favorite author,” she said.
“What, he writes books?”
“Yeah,” she said and then stared at me. “So why’s he writing you?”
I shrugged and said, “Lotsa people write me.”
She studied me for a moment longer before asking, “You want to come over to my house and read some of my writing?”
I liked to read, among other things, so I said sure.
When her shift was done, we caught the bus out to her place. I sat on the couch and opened more mail while she changed out of her work clothes (black top and black skirt) and into her nonwork clothes (black top and black skirt). She sat down beside me on the couch and asked if she could open some envelopes.
The more mail she opened, the closer she inched toward me. By the time she asked if she could keep the letter from her favorite author, we were sitting thigh-to-thigh. My heart was racing.
“Sure,” I answered, thinking, Dishwashing can really pay off.
Then I noticed the photos scattered around the room—photos of her with a guy.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Him?” she replied as she inched away from me.
It took another few minutes of persistent questioning before she admitted that he was her boyfriend.
I left, never having read her writing.
I ditched that gig a couple weeks later and then worked more jobs around Portland—a couple of days here, a few shifts there. I covered some shifts for friends and dropped in on others to lend a helping hand.
My friend Kerry told me I could pick up some of his shifts at a diner. While showing me around the pit, Kerry introduced me to the diner owner.
“He’s the one I told you about,” Kerry said to him.
“You that guy who writes that dishwashing thing?” he asked.
“Yep,” I said.
“No, no, no, no, no,” he said. “You’re not working here.”
Over Kerry’s protestations, the boss-guy ushered me to the front door. I took no offense in being fired before I even began. Finally, a boss who was familiar with my work had an appropriate reaction.
Though he didn’t care for the likes of me, others did. Several times strangers singled me out of the crowd—while I sat on a park bench, on the bus, on my bike—and asked if I wanted a job. Why me? ’Cause I looked penniless? Or because I looked gullible? Whatever the case, the offered jobs and their descriptions of heavy lifting and lengthy hours were always rejected.
One offer, though—made while I waited for a bus on SW Sixth—was for a dish job. I accepted without hesitation. But then the guy mentioned something about uniforms.
“Uniforms?” I asked.
“Yeah, but don’t worry,” he said. “They’re nice uniforms, with tasteful colors.”
Uniforms might have been handy when uniformity was necessary—like for knowing who to shoot on a battlefield. But I didn’t need to be uniformed—I flew solo.
“Sorry,” I said, explaining another rule of mine: “The company colors don’t fly on my back.”
When the Northwest Tour finally moved beyond Portland’s city limits, I went up to Seattle, Washington (#16), and worked at the old anarchist Black Cat Café. It was owned and operated by a seven-member collective. Everyone was the boss, or, better yet, no one was the boss. They solicited volunteers to do the dishes in exchange for hefty amounts of tasty grub, a share of the winnings from the tip jar and veto power over the music selection. To spread the opportunity around, one was only supposed to volunteer a couple of times a month. But since the collective members figured out who I was, they allowed me to abuse the system. I worked every day.
Well, “work” is too strong a word. With the laid-back atmosphere, no boss pushing me around and shifts that lasted only three hours—it hardly felt like work. Even so, it wasn’t enough to keep me in Seattle.
The Washington leg of the Northwest Tour was cut short when I got sucked away by the continued allure of Portland
. I tried to take the Tour back up to the Rocky Mountains of Montana. But once there, I immediately remembered how I hated being trapped atop a snowcapped mountain and, within twenty-four hours, retreated back to Portland. As for Idaho, I never even tried.
The weeks and months passed in Portland. I hadn’t stayed in one place for so long in years. Constantly spoiled by all the couches and floors and food and beer at my disposal, it was hard for me to leave. It’s like the legend that’s told of an old Seattle restaurant. The place was so filthy the cockroaches that got stuck to the sticky trap paper grew fat where they lay—that’s how many crumbs fell their way. Plenty of crumbs fell my way in Portland. I grew fat. But that’s not bad. I liked crumbs. I loved crumbs. I just had to unstick myself, once and for all, and resume my mission.
16
Letterman Jumped Back
The cross-country bus trip was typical of how I liked to travel. I’d arrive in cities early in the morning, run errands and wander around all day, then get back on a bus that night. In Salt Lake City, I drank a couple beers with an old retired dishman who’d often sent me letters about his dish days of decades past. In Omaha, I hand-delivered zines to three people who’d each sent me orders for them. One of them worked at a copy shop and stuffed my duffel bag with freshly photocopied Dishwashers—on the house. In turn, I lightened my load in Chicago by dropping off a few hundred zines at Quimby’s and a couple other book and record stores. In Cleveland, I had no specific errands to run, so I hawked zines to passersby on the downtown streets. In total, I sold twenty-one copies to strangers that day. And for years afterwards, I received letters that began with something like, “You probably don’t remember me, but I once bought a copy of Dishwasher from you on the streets of Cleveland….”
