by Pete Jordan
Not wanting to work under such nepotistic conditions, I decided that once the night’s dishes were clean, I’d collect my pay and leave for good.
We worked our asses off but made little progress. No matter how much we attacked the stacks, they just wouldn’t shrink. I was baffled.
Then, from my post at the sinks, I happened to look over and see Bernard searching for a clear space to park a rack of clean dishes. All the counters were full, so he set the rack down beside the dishmachine. Then, apparently without thinking, he pushed the rack in the machine and washed it—again.
I assumed that he was suffering from dishpit battle fatigue. But minutes later, after the Hobart’s cycle finished, I watched him again searching for a place to set down that same rack of clean dishes. And again he just slid the thing back in the machine to be washed. He was more smashed than I’d suspected.
Though I now knew why the mountains of dishes weren’t eroding, I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Even if I could’ve magically sobered up Bernard, it would’ve still taken us hours to finish.
When Bernard grabbed a couple of beers from the bucket and stumbled up the stairs to the bathroom, I didn’t object. With Bernard holed up in the bathroom and the Colonel reading the newspaper in the bar, waiting for us to finish, I was now alone in the kitchen. It was time to act.
First, I needed order. I combed through the piles, pulling out the trash and the silverware. I stacked all the like-sized plates and dishes together. I gathered up the pots and pans and carried them back to the sinks. After twenty minutes of organizing, the dishcave was still a disaster area.
Since it was going to take hours just to clean the pots, I decided they’d have to wait for some other day to be scrubbed. I filled them with hot water and stashed them under a counter. With those out of the way, I started grabbing pans, utensils and other things that could wait.
I was crouched down on the floor, cramming dishes under a counter, when the Colonel walked in. Clueless as to what I was up to, he told me there was to be a large brunch in the morning.
“I expect you two to be here at eight a.m.,” he said.
Without waiting for my response, he returned to the bar and his newspaper.
Eight a.m.? It was now one-thirty in the morning. Did he really expect us to work even later, sleep a couple hours, then return?
I already knew that to really get a boss’s attention, it was best to jettison a job during peak hours like the Dish Mistress had done in New Hampshire or the Happiness Restaurant dish crew had done back in 1930. But since the Colonel’s place wouldn’t hit its peak for hours to come, I did the next best thing: continued stashing the dishes. After all the nooks under the counters in the dishcave were filled, I started hiding dirty dishware throughout the kitchen: under more counters, on shelves and—as a very last resort—in the ovens. After everything was stashed, I rinsed out the sinks, wiped down the counters and kissed the dishmachine. The dishcave sparkled when, right on cue, Bernard stumbled back in from his hour-long visit to the bathroom. It didn’t faze him in the least that we were suddenly “done.”
The Colonel took a quick glance in the dishcave.
“Well done,” he said. “You guys’ll be back at eight o’clock, right?”
“Yeah,” we both replied.
Out on the sidewalk, I told Bernard not to return in the morning because there were piles of dirty dishes hidden across the kitchen.
“Don’t I know it,” he said. “That place is just filled with dishes.”
For a moment I worried that he was too drunk to understand not to come back the next morning. But as I watched him weave his way down the block, I realized he was so shit-faced he didn’t even know he was expected to work at eight a.m. He’d be all right.
I departed picturing the next day’s scene. Chef Tantrum, while trying to prepare the big brunch, was going to uncover one cache of dirty dishes after another. He’d go ballistic. The Colonel would curse having hired a dishman with so much experience.
Oh, to have been a cockroach on the wall when all that went down! I enjoyed my walk.
It was almost three o’clock when I arrived at Cheryl’s. In need of a new job, I decided to stay awake and hit the day-labor office at five o’clock. But then it dawned on me: when the Colonel and/or Chef Tantrum discovered the devastation in the dishcave and their dearth of dishmen, what else could they do but make an emergency request to the day-labor office for on-call troubleshooting dishers?
It was obviously best that I steered clear.
Later that morning, Cheryl claimed that since I didn’t get paid at the Colonel’s, it shouldn’t count as my having held a job in Louisiana. She was as determined as ever to see me finally cross it off my list, and though I hated to admit it, she had a point. While I had no fixed rules about what constituted working in a state, the most basic requirement should’ve been at least to have received pay for my labor. After all, even at the job in Kentucky (#1), though I’d crashed and burned after only ninety minutes, the restaurant had mailed me a paycheck worth almost four bucks. So to properly proclaim Louisiana as #20, I had to either face the Colonel, Chef Tantrum and their wall of weapons to demand my pay—or find a new job altogether.
19
Seafaring
While hunting for a new job a few days later, I was offered one. The job wasn’t in New Orleans, though. Lara invited me to dish on the fishing boat she was working on in Alaska. The offer was tantalizing. It was a chance to return to Alaska, to watch Lara ply her trade as a fisherwoman and to fulfill a growing ambition to dish offshore.
For a couple of years, I’d been carrying around an application to dish on a paddleboat that sailed up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. I’d been also considering adding seafaring cruise-ship dishing to my To Do list. And while in Vancouver, British Columbia, I’d met a dish dog (or rather, a dish pig, as we’re known north of the border) who bragged about his sweet gig busting suds on the ferries that sailed between the mainland and Vancouver Island. His description of his lax position made me reconsider my pooh-poohing of offshore jobs.
But, of course, I hadn’t yet pursued any of these kinds of jobs due to the Fundamental Rule. That granddaddy of all my self-imposed work-related rules still prevented me from working gigs where I couldn’t leave the moment the notion struck. And if the notion struck while on Lara’s boat—and I deep-sixed the job while at sea—leaving would be difficult. I’d be at the mercy of the short-tempered skipper to be put ashore. For talking him into hiring a dud like me, the skipper would blow up at my gal. Things between Lara and me would be less than shipshape. Through all that anger and tension, I could be left stuck on the boat for days or weeks, pining for the mainland.
The job had major potential to be a massive disaster. Before I set foot on the boat, I had to know for sure that I could survive breaking the Fundamental Rule.
For a few days, I fretted about what to do. Then, while looking through the Times-Picayune for a New Orleans dish job, I found the answer. Dishwashers—or galley hands—were needed to work on oil rigs on the Gulf of Mexico. Working a job like that could serve a threefold purpose. I’d master Louisiana. I’d earn enough money to get me to Alaska. And, most important, I’d test the Fundamental Rule under circumstances with less dire consequences. If I couldn’t hack it on an oil rig, and the Fundamental Rule proved unbreakable, then I’d forget about the fishing boat. But if I survived, a whole new genre of dish work would open up to me: riverboats, cruise ships—and my sweetheart’s fishing vessel.
A couple miles upriver from New Orleans, in the town of Harahan, the company that supplied galley hands for oil rigs had its offices. I took a bus there and after filling out a bunch of paperwork was stunned to meet the interviewer. I couldn’t help but gawk at him. He was a dead ringer for Bill Clinton. In his office, the Clinton-clone said I needed to take an exam and then proceeded to quiz me about things like honesty and integrity and employee theft.
“If you knew a coworker was stea
ling from the company,” he said, “what would you do?”
Robotically, I replied, “I’d tell my supervisor immediately.”
The exam was a cinch. While I fed him the obvious answers (“All hail The Company! The Company is my friend! I shall not steal from The Company!”), I remained distracted by the Clinton-clone’s remarkable resemblance. He had those same puffy cheeks, that same dimpled chin and the same haircut. Hell, he even had that same shit-eating smirk Clinton had when he’d gut welfare, push NAFTA and increase military spending while musing to himself, “To think, liberals love voting for me!” Except this guy’s smirk seemed to say: “You think I look like Clinton and you’re just dying to ask me about it.”
He had me pegged. I was dying to ask. But how many thousands of times had he heard, “Did you know that you look exactly like Bill Clinton?” Even if I’d tried to be witty (“Hey, did you know that you look like Spiro Agnew?”), he probably would’ve heard it before. So I said nothing about it while I pondered why he was here, interrogating prospective galley hands, when he could’ve been shaking his ass in Vegas as a celebrity look-alike.
When the exam ended, the Clinton-clone tallied up my score.
“How’d I do?” I asked.
“Not so good,” he replied dourly.
Not good? He had to be kidding.
“In fact,” he added, “you flunked.”
Flunked?! How could I possibly flunk some asinine honesty exam?
“Can I see that?” I asked, reaching for the test sheet.
“I can’t let you do that,” he said. “But hang on, I’ll be back in a minute.”
He left the room with my test.
It made no sense. I couldn’t possibly have flunked. But then again, I hadn’t listened closely to many of the questions, being so distracted by the presidential resemblance and all.
That was it! It was all a ruse! The company employed this celebrity look-alike to administer the exam as a way to purposefully trip up applicants!
“It’ll be okay,” the Clinton-clone said when he returned. “See the receptionist to make an appointment for your physical.”
Huh? So I hadn’t flunked after all? What the hell?
As he ushered me out of his office, I wondered if he told all prospective galley hands they’d flunked. That way, the applicants—grateful to be hired at all—would tone down any possible on-the-job dishonesty.
Or maybe, I had flunked. But, as was the case with lots of employers, the desperation for a dishman made the Clinton-clone overlook my plongeur morality.
The next day’s physical exam was quite thorough. At a medical complex that specialized in job-related patients, I moved along—assembly-line style—from one room to the next. A dozen doctors and nurses took turns poking and prodding, X-raying and EKG-ing me, hammering me and having me look that way and cough. Evidently, the company wanted only the primest slabs of meat washing their dishes. And I proved a willing slab; I broke another of my rules by allowing myself to be drug-tested for a job.
At the company office the following day, the receptionist told me I’d passed the physical. Next hurdle: the orientation meeting, where a company representative explained life on an oil rig to a half-dozen prospective galley hands and cooks. He told us what we could expect and what to bring. Though there were no women in our group, he also gave a lengthy, apparently mandatory, speech about the procedures for female employees to file sexual harassment complaints.
The company rep then spent a good fifteen minutes trying to convince us what great jobs these were. The more he poured it on, the more I smelled B.S. Stuck on an oil rig for weeks at a time? Working twelve hours a day, seven days a week for minimum wage? Nothing worth boasting about. Though I had my own perverse reasons for doing this, I didn’t know why others would subject themselves to such punishment. But when the rep admitted that the annual turnover rate among galley hands was 90 percent, I felt better. For whatever reasons others were submitting themselves to this, it was extremely unlikely that they’d be doing it for very long.
When it finally was question time, I piped right up.
“So how do we go about quitting in the middle of our hitch?” I asked.
The rep fidgeted. We’d only just been rounded up and now he had to tell us how to split.
“I’m sure none of you will,” he said unconvincingly and then explained that if we did quit, we couldn’t leave the oil rig until a replacement arrived.
“How long would that be?” I asked.
“A day or two,” he said.
A day or two, I thought. When the notion struck, a day or two could be a long—a very long—time. I shouldn’t have been surprised that I trembled at the thought. After all, the Fundamental Rule existed for a reason.
After the meeting, the Clinton-clone called me into his office and said I hadn’t given the make and license plate number of my car on my application.
“I don’t have a car,” I said.
“You don’t? Why not?”
“I guess I don’t need one.”
“You need one for this job,” he said. “In fact, owning a car is the most important qualification for being a galley hand.”
“I have to own a car to wash dishes on an oil rig?”
“That’s right. When you’re on-call and the dispatcher tells you to be at the coast in three hours, you have to be there. We can’t wait for you to borrow a car or to find someone to drive you.”
“Well, in that case,” I said, “I do own a car.”
“Great. What kind?”
“It’s a…station wagon.”
“And what’s the license plate number?”
“Uh…I’m not sure.”
“You don’t know your own license plate number?”
“Well, I’d have to go outside and check.”
“You go do that then,” he said.
I stepped outside and wrote down the license plate number of a car that I hoped wasn’t his. He accepted it and, minutes later, I was issued a hard hat, safety glasses and two work shirts. Another rule—no company garb—fell by the wayside. I was now officially on-call.
I didn’t drive my imaginary car back to New Orleans. Didn’t even take the bus. Instead, the rest of the afternoon was spent meandering back to the city, soaking up my last fleeting moments of freedom. The Fundamental Rule was on the verge of being broken and I feared the worst.
When I finally reached Cheryl’s house, the phone was ringing. A booming Cajun voice on the other end of the line asked for me. I said I wasn’t home. Or rather, I said “he” wasn’t home. It was the dispatcher. He had a job for me and it was important that I called him as soon as I got in. I assured him that I would.
This was happening much too fast! I wasn’t ready to abandon the security of the mainland. For an hour, I paced around the house. The phone rang again. Again, it was the dispatcher. I still wasn’t in.
Before the phone could ring once more, I decamped to my friend Tanio’s house, where I sometimes stayed. It wasn’t long before Tanio’s phone also rang. It was a dispatcher. Somehow, I’d listed Cheryl’s phone number on one part of the paperwork and Tanio’s on another. They were calling both numbers. I couldn’t hide. That night and the next day, it was so torturous that I jumped every time a phone rang.
By the second night, the stress had worn down my resistance. I finally picked up the ringing phone and said I was good to go.
“That’s what I like to hear,” the dispatcher said. “Be at the heliport at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”
I woke up Cheryl in the middle of the night and she drove me to the coast. We left early enough to make the two-hour drive through the bayous in time for me to catch my flight. But when we arrived at the coast, we got lost. Even though there were only a couple of roads where the bayou met the Gulf, we couldn’t find the heliport. So we stuck our heads out the windows until we spotted a helicopter and followed it to the heliport. We finally arrived, over an hour late. I had no idea if my flight had been h
eld up for me or if it had departed, leaving me jobless.
While Cheryl waited in her car, I entered the heliport. A man at the counter handed me a clipboard and asked me to sign in. I wrote down my name, the name of the rig I was destined for (Shell149), and, like everyone else who’d signed in before me, I checked the Yes box beneath the question: “Have you flown in a helicopter before?”
Unlike an airport, the heliport didn’t have regularly scheduled flights. It operated more like a taxi service, taking passengers as they checked in. So I hadn’t missed my flight after all.
Outside I thanked Cheryl for the ride.
“I don’t want to see you for two weeks!” she said before driving off.
Because I was the only one headed for Shell149, and was nothing but a lowly galley hand, there was no rush to fly me out. So I did my waiting in the waiting room by pacing around. Some guys waited by sleeping in chairs; others slept on the floor. Out on the balcony, guys watched helicopters come and go. Every five or ten minutes, a helicopter would land and a couple guys would hop out, a couple others would hop in, and away the helicopter would go again. Everyone looked so suave, dashing in and out of the helicopters. It was as if they all possessed some inside knowledge about flying in copters—knowledge I didn’t have.
I marched straight back to the counter, grabbed the clipboard and changed my answer. No, I told the guy, I’d never flown in a helicopter.
“What happens now?” I asked.
He didn’t know. He conferred with the other two behind the counter. They weren’t sure either. As far as they knew, I was the first person who’d ever answered no to a question that was a mere formality. They discussed the issue among themselves and then led me into a back room. I sat on a couch while one of them put on a safety video and another made popcorn for me. As I watched the presentation—which focused largely on what to do if the helicopter plunged into the sea—the heliport employees looked on and added comments like “That’s news to me” and “I never heard that one before.”
