Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  “I’d be in a suit, too,” I told her. “But I’m a Mormon missionary and today’s my day off.”

  She turned her back on me. I stared at her cautiously while using both hands to stuff my mouth. I felt relaxed. After the chaos of the previous couple days, my life was now back to normal.

  A couple weeks later, I was talking to my dad on the phone. Apparently, the day after the broadcast, several well-meaning friends called the Letterman show demanding to know why they let an imposter pretend to be Dishwasher Pete.

  “You mean that wasn’t Pete?” came the response.

  Reports of our shenanigans were now being reported in various newspapers and magazines. Over the phone, my dad was antsy to read me the article that ran in the San Francisco Chronicle.

  “‘A spokesman for the Letterman show said they had no idea they were dealing with an ersatz Pete,’” he read. Then he asked, “You know what ersatz means?”

  “Nope,” I answered.

  “It means: cheap imitation,” he said. “They’re calling your friend a cheap imitation of you.”

  Then he laughed. He liked being in on the joke. And he even seemed proud of me.

  When Jess called the Letterman show collect to ask where his $500 appearance fee was, the talent coordinator told him, “I know you’re an imposter.” Before hanging up on him, she added that her job was “in jeopardy.”

  Right on time to pay Jess’s rent, the $500 check did arrive. But we never heard from Letterman again. The show made fun of the guests, audience members and regular people on the street, yet Letterman and his staff didn’t seem to laugh when the joke was on them.

  17

  Dishwashers, Unions and New York

  A couple weeks after Jess had left town, I was sitting on a street corner in Brooklyn eating pizza with two friends. A big brute covered in tough-guy tattoos approached us.

  “Is one of you Dishwasher Pete?” he asked.

  I didn’t know who he was, so I peeped not a word and just took another bite of my slice. My two friends, though, wasted no time in fingering me. Almost in unison, they announced, “He’s Pete.”

  Oh shit! I thought.

  Was he some rabid Letterman fan who couldn’t take a joke?

  When he stepped forward and thrust out his hand, I cringed, convinced he was going to sock me.

  Instead, he smiled and offered me his hand to shake.

  “My name’s Billy,” he said. “I heard you were in the neighborhood and wanted to meet you.”

  Oh.

  He said he was a lapsed dishman and urged me to come dish at the place where he was now cooking.

  I said okay.

  I followed Billy around the corner to a dinky, storefront Mexican restaurant where he introduced me to its charming owner, Suzy.

  “You need to hire this guy,” Billy told her, “’cause he’s the most famous dishwasher you’ll ever meet.”

  Being a famous dishwasher, she said, deserved a free burrito.

  While she made the burrito, we discussed the possibility of me busting her suds. I said that since I was busy devoting my time to roaming the city looking for The Sign, I wasn’t really in the market for a formal job. She said that since her restaurant was so small, she wasn’t really in the market to formally hire a dishwasher. So we struck a deal: I could drop in at any time on any night and wash some dishes in exchange for some cash and loads of food—no strings attached. In fact, the arrangement was so casual that I didn’t even consider counting it as my official New York job.

  After not eating all the next day, I showed up the following night famished from my walk. I was ready to scrub some dishes and eat loads of food.

  After I dished for half an hour, Suzy asked, “Hey, Pete, you want a beer?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good, then you have to go to the store to get it! Ha! Ha!”

  Billy and the waitress joined in the laughter as Suzy handed me a twenty and told me to buy a twelve-pack. Crossing the street to the corner bodega, I figured if being the butt of the joke meant taking breaks to go buy beer, then I’d like working there.

  And indeed, I had such a good time dishing there that even though my presence wasn’t mandatory, I stopped by every night. The boss usually bought the beer, the food always satisfied me and the dishes never piled too high. Before I started hanging around, Suzy or Billy or the waitress had to wash the dishes in addition to cooking and/or waiting. Now, with me running the sinks, the others enjoyed a surplus of free time unknown at most restaurants, where busyness was next to godliness. Suzy even let me display on the eatery’s walls my growing collection of laminated macaroni-and-cheese box covers (now numbering 127).

  One night, when the place was quiet, I looked around for something to wash. Lying atop a refrigerator was a grease filter—a screen that usually sat in the hood above the stove to catch grease. I had picked it up and started carrying it to the sink when a moving brown mosaic came to life on the screen. I’d interrupted a cockroach feast in progress and immediately dropped the screen. It hit the floor with a thud. Dozens of cockroaches bounced off the screen and landed across the kitchen floor. In shock, I looked at them. For a second, they looked back at me. Then they started to scatter. Without thinking, I grabbed a spatula, swung wildly and flattened cockroaches left and right. With every blow, I was betraying my neutrality in the vermin wars. But because the pests kept running, I kept chasing. Until Suzy grabbed my arm.

  Through clenched teeth, she said, “Not in front of the customers!”

  On the other side of the counter, several diners stared in disbelief.

  Meanwhile, those feisty little buggers were getting away! So I grabbed the grease filter, threw it in the dish sink and filled it up with scorching hot water. As dozens of roaches scurried out of the nooks of the screen, I watched with perverse satisfaction while they quietly succumbed.

  Afterwards, when my bloodlust dissipated, I granted immunity to the survivors and resumed my neutral stance.

  When not wandering or dishing, I was in the New York Public Library tracking leads on dishwashing history, culture and lore. Once, while poking through some issues of a 1930s communist newspaper, I came across an article about a strike. It was staged by a radical culinary union in New York in 1934; the strikers had attacked the hotels and restaurants that they were picketing. My curiosity piqued, I checked the New York Times for their version of the protest. A brief article described twenty-four-year-old Ramon Bolasquez, a striking dish dog from West 144th Street.

  On February 12, Bolasquez was one of 1,500 culinary workers who marched through midtown Manhattan and clashed with police in front of the picketed hotels. In the days before, windows had been smashed at some establishments. The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel installed shatter-proof windows on its ground floor. Bolasquez did the Waldorf-Astoria one better by using a slingshot to take out windows on the hotel’s upper floors. He also hit the windows of the Savarin Restaurant. While he was taking aim at the Hotel Lincoln at Eighth Avenue and 44th Street, the police nabbed him. A struggle ensued as the strikers tried to free the suds buster. In the end, the cops hauled him off and charged him with carrying concealed weapons.

  Mesmerized by the image of pearl divers taking to the streets to fight for their rights, I marched from the library up to the Waldorf. On its façade I taped a piece of paper that read:

  On this spot in 1934,

  dishwasher Ramon Bolasquez

  smashed the windows of the Waldorf-Astoria

  during a strike by culinary union workers.

  The Bolasquez story led me to think about the heritage of dishers in New York and their involvement in radical unions. I spent countless hours squinting at roll after roll of microfilm. By scouring these copies of old labor, anarchist, socialist, communist and mainstream newspapers, I learned about the various unions that had attempted to organize the “unskilled” restaurant workers that the mainstream Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union scoffed at.

  It
wasn’t surprising that dishers would take to the streets to fight to improve their pay and working conditions; the standards for both were horrendous. For instance, during World War I, dishman Walter MacGregor wrote to the anarchist journal Freedom about his job:

  I was walking along Sixth Avenue in the vicinity of Forty-Second Street when I espied the “banner” in the window. “Dishwasher Wanted,” it announced. Now I had often heard that dishwashers are the very lowest scum of humanity. I entertained at that moment the conviction that I, being jobless and hungry, belonged to that lowest scum; and beside that, I had a genuine curiosity to find out why dishwashing is considered so “low” a calling.

  …The heat and stink of that place on a warm day! The stench from the enormous garbage can mingled with the smell of grease, even the most acclimated old-timer stuck his nose to the door occasionally for a breath of fresh air.

  Thompson’s being both a popular and low-priced lunch room, there is never a let-up in the mountainous pile of dishes that comes pouring through the cubbyhole onto the dishwashing table. There is never a moment all day long to rest or sit down, and even if there were, one could not sit, for no convenience is provided for this purpose.

  When I went to wash dishes for Thompson, I expected hard work, but what stunned me was to learn the hours and the pay given as compensation. Thompson’s works its dishwashers twelve hours a day, seven days a week.

  I received eight dollars a week and I was told by a fellow worker that if I “stuck” I was “supposed” to get a half day off every other week.

  “But,” he added dryly, “there’s so many comin’ an’ goin’ all the time, y’ll be lucky if y’ ever sees a half day off.”

  In 1929, one dishwasher, working twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week at a large chain cafeteria, wrote of the conditions he endured:

  The dining room of this place is clean and white. We are forced to keep everything spotlessly clean. The menus and walls boast of cleanliness and service rendered the patrons. It is advertised as a place where everything is sanitary and the food wholesome—pure food health place. But if the customers took one look into the kitchen they would never come back. There, everything is as dirty as it is clean in the dining room. The floors are always sloppy. The shoes of the kitchen workers are always wet and most of us suffer from perpetual colds, catarrh, rheumatism and we all had the flu during the winter but did not stop working until forced to go to bed and returned to work long before we were well. And the health authorities wonder how these diseases spread so rapidly during an epidemic.

  Nothing is wasted. Any piece of food that can be used for hash, stews, pudding, etc. is fished out of the garbage and saved. If the boss or his lickspittle manager sees any of us throwing away a piece of meat, butter, or bread, we are bawled out and warned we will be fired if we do it again.

  In 1930, a few dishwashers took matters into their own hands. A radical culinary union newspaper reported on this protest:

  On 44th Street and 5th Avenue is located one of the biggest “Happiness Restaurants” of the Loft Corporation. But “Happiness” in that particular restaurant is only for the boss and not for the workers. In fact, the name of this restaurant should be “Happiness” for the bosses and “Misery” for the workers.

  The management of this restaurant was the first to introduce the wage cuts in the Dining Room as well as in the Kitchen Departments. But this was not enough, it went as far as to cut out the meals of the workers (the “left overs”) altogether.

  One bright morning the manager received an order from their central office to increase the profits and decrease the expenses. The efficient manager used and abused his “noggin” and finally found his way out. He posted an order notifying the workers that, from then on, all employees must get their meals from outside. Any employee caught eating on the premises of the Happiness restaurant would be discharged immediately.

  When the clock struck twelve, the dishwashers, the lowest paid of all the workers in the restaurant, who receive $12 a week for a 12-hour continuous grind a day, stopped the machines and left the restaurant in a body and went to get their lunch. The manager tried to stop them at the door but the workers told him they could not work the machines on an empty stomach.

  Twelve o’clock is the busiest hour of the place and if the waitresses and cooks would have followed the example set by the dishwashers and come out and come up to our union headquarters to organize for the fight, today the Happiness restaurant would be a union shop.

  After the waitresses and cooks practically scabbed on the dishwashers, when the dishwashers got back from their lunch, the management told them they could have their meals back.

  The bits of history that I was uncovering fascinated me. Decades before I ever picked up a scrub brush, pearl divers were in the streets battling for their rights and—intentionally or unintentionally—for the rights of the dishers of future generations. Absolutely remarkable! Their legacy needed to be honored. So to shed light on the suds busters’ participation within radical culinary unions, my poking around in the library eventually led me to write an eight-thousand-word article for the zine titled “Dishwashers, Unions and New York City: A History.”

  On the hottest day of the summer of 1995, while apartment-and cat-sitting in a non-air-conditioned residence, I found myself battling Koko the cat for the apartment’s lone cool spot: the chair that caught the breeze from the two fans.

  I lost that battle and fled the apartment.

  Out on the street, the humidity was so stifling, I couldn’t conduct my job search or even concentrate to scan the sidewalk for coins. So I hopped on the subway and rode in air-conditioned luxury for the rest of the afternoon. Come evening, I was on the L train as it headed toward the burrito joint’s station. When the train arrived at the stop, though, I didn’t budge. Even on cool nights, the restaurant’s kitchen sweltered. I couldn’t imagine how hot it’d be in this heat wave. And, frankly, I didn’t want to find out.

  Remaining on the subway, I realized that this was the first night I wouldn’t be dishing there since it’d become my hangout. At formal jobs with scheduled days and assigned hours, I was rarely on time, when I bothered to show up at all. Now, with this informal arrangement and its built-in freedom, I hadn’t missed a single night of work when I was in town.

  That’s why I liked the job so much. I could stroll away in the middle of a load of dishes and no one would complain. I could bop across the Hudson River to Hoboken, New Jersey (#17), to put in a few shifts at a Washington Street restaurant and Suzy wouldn’t feel like I was cheating on her. I could even leave town—go down to Philly or Baltimore, up to Connecticut or upstate New York. After a few weeks, I could hightail it back to New York City, step off the bus or train and ride the subway straight to the burrito joint. Showing up with an empty stomach, I could jump right back on the dishes while a meal was prepared for me.

  It was an awfully plush deal. So plush, it spoiled me. For a while, at least.

  That winter, after being out of town for several months, I showed up unannounced at the burrito joint. I had a hunger in my gut and a hankering to dish. With a line of customers out the door, the place was jumping like never before. Pushing my way through the crowd, I found Suzy busy in the kitchen. Business was good, she said. So good, in fact, she pointed to a guy at the sinks—my sinks.

  Immediately, I got the message. In my absence, the chore of washing dishes had become a formal job, which meant that I was out of an informal job.

  Feeling stupid for assuming that those dishes would always wait for me, I bumbled about Brooklyn, not sure what to do. I entered a subway station and walked to the far end of the platform. I watched a mob of rats rummaging through the debris along the tracks. Several trains passed. I stood there and realized it was time to finally work a formal job in New York—one with assigned hours, specified duties and a set wage.

  A couple days later, I found myself in the massive kitchen of a huge catering firm in the Financial District
. Employees bustled around me as I waited for the head chef to return so he could lead me to the dishroom and I could start my new gig. Not having worked in an operation as huge as this in a long time, I was disoriented by the blinding fluorescent lights and the shiny stainless steel surfaces. Dozens of kitchen workers hustled to and fro in their white shirts and salt-and-pepper pants, while I slouched in my street clothes, hands in pockets.

  When twenty minutes passed with still no sign of the chef, I presumed he’d forgotten about me. Setting out to find the pit myself, I ventured down corridors and peeked around corners. While failing to discover the dishpit, I succeeded in stumbling across the back exit.

  “Just leave,” a voice in my head urged.

  “No, stay,” the other voice argued. “I need a real job—and the money.”

  “But this place is giving me a headache.”

  “Come on, stick it out. It’s just an eight-hour shift.”

  “Eight hours? There are so many other things I could do for eight hours!”

  “Oh, don’t be such a quitter.”

  “Quitter? Quitter?! I’ll show you a quitter.”

  These internal debates were little more than formalities since the outcome was always the same.

  I slipped out the back door and made a break for it.

  A couple hours later, while I was resting on a bench in lower Manhattan, an office worker on his lunch break sat down. When he asked me what I was up to, I told him I’d just walked off a dishwashing job.

  “I quit a dishwashing job once,” he said.

  “Oh yeah? What happened?”

  “The owner came in the back and I said, ‘Git the fuck outta here!’ And then I walked outside and jumped in a cab.”

  I told him I liked his style.

  “Well, good luck on finding another job,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.