Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  “Chilly?” My interest piqued. “So I can wear pants up there?”

  “Sure you can wear pants,” he said. “You can wear whatever you want.”

  It was a deal. Maine was history and I set off for the camp.

  Echo Lake Camp sat perched on a pine-covered ridge, seventy-three hundred feet above sea level. Jon explained that the city of Berkeley had started the camp for its residents in 1922. Now, it was a place to send the city’s eight-to twelve-year-olds, to get them off the streets during the summer. Jon led me to my tent-cabin—a wooden floor and frame covered by a canvas roof and walls. I threw my duffel bag and sleeping bag on a bunk. Seeing the cabin’s four beds, I was glad to hear I had it all to myself. Even more thrilling was that the cabin sat nestled on a cliff. If a rock was thrown from the porch, it wouldn’t have landed till it first dropped two hundred feet. And the view was incredible. The sparkling blue waters of Lake Tahoe shone twenty miles in the distance, a thousand feet below.

  Jon showed me around. It was a pretty low-budget operation. Instead of horseback riding, there was a horseshoe pit. Instead of canoeing, there was a small swimming pool. But what the camp lacked in luxury, it made up for in natural beauty.

  That first night, after downing my hot-dog-and-watermelon dinner, I got started with the dishes. After the others finished their meals and exited the dining hall, one of the teen employees lingered behind. As he watched me work, he introduced himself as Robert and asked, “So how many dishes can you wash in an hour?”

  “In an hour?” I said. “I have no idea.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be really fast or something.”

  “I’m not very fast,” I said, being more honest than modest. “But I think I’m a pretty good dishwasher.”

  Robert said nothing else and left the kitchen looking dejected. Later that night, I learned why. The week before, Dan—the camp director—had been browbeating Robert. If the teen didn’t shape up, Dan threatened, he’d replace him with a “top-notch professional.” However, Dan knew of no such dedicated dishman. It was supposed to be just a scare tactic. But after Robert failed to be spooked into working harder, via Jon’s recommendation, Dan happened to hire me. What the camp director didn’t know, though, was how well he’d made good on his threat. He actually had hired a dishwashing mercenary.

  The first few days, this mercenary had to get used to life in the mountains. In the early evening, since the tent-cabins had no electricity, I had to write letters and read in bed by flashlight. In the late evening, with the flashlight off and the front tent-flaps open, I’d lie in bed and watch the meteorites and satellites cross the black sky. Sometimes in the middle of the night, the eerie silence was disrupted by an owl hooting or a coyote howling. And in the morning, the rising sun would peek over the opposite mountaintops and shine directly in my face to wake me up.

  Washing dishes in the woods proved not so different from washing dishes in a city. Rats and mice running around the kitchen were replaced by chipmunks and squirrels. Cockroaches were replaced by mosquitoes. And rather than a homeless person picking through the trash out back, there was a black bear who’d get into the dumpster and strew garbage for yours truly to clean up the next morning.

  The hardest adjustment for me was being cut off from tried-and-true sidewalks lined with change. According to my detailed records, in the twelve months prior—in nineteen states—I’d found 1,362 coins and 8 bills (1,089 pennies, 79 nickels, 151 dimes, 43 quarters, 6 ones and 2 fives). I’d even arrived at the camp in the midst of a record run. Through seven states, I’d found change forty-seven days straight!

  But on my first full day in the mountains, despite all my eagle-eyed effort while wandering the dirt paths, I spied not a single coin—not one thin dime, not one red cent. I couldn’t even find a quarter-resembling squashed bottle cap to give me false hope. With one record ended, another began: number of straight days without finding change.

  Though it wasn’t the Virgin Islands, it was certainly the cushy, easygoing summer job I’d desired. I had my own pad, had twenty-four-hour access to free food and the weather was so crisp I wore pants not only every day, but also as I slept through each of the even chillier nights.

  For years, the camp had employed teen dishers like Robert who were working their first job. Away from home for the first time, they’d dilly-dally with the dishes as they goofed off or flirted with teenage counselors of the opposite sex. Sometimes they’d rush out of the dining hall, leaving a mess behind in the dishpit. Other times they didn’t show up at all for their shifts.

  As the camp’s first “top-notch professional,” it was easy to impress the camp director. Even while working half-assed by my standards, this thirty-year-old was cleaning the dishes better and faster than any whole-assed teenager. And by doing the little things without being asked to (like picking up the mess after a visit from a bear), I wowed Dan. This made my job even cushier and easier-going because then no one ever challenged me for leaving the dining hall mid-shift. I could slip back to my tent-cabin for a nap or follow the path along the mountainside to the general store to mail letters or treat myself to ice cream cones.

  Actually, postage stamps and ice cream were the only things that required my cash. I didn’t even have to pay for beer. My drinks were earned via the teen counselors. A couple times a week, they’d send over to my cabin a representative with a shopping list for booze and cigarettes. My fee was a straight six-pack of beer for each booze-and-cigarettes run.

  Since I was spending almost no money, I hadn’t thought much about my paycheck until payday arrived and there was no check with my name on it. Despite having worked for weeks, I’d never filled out an application and thus, wasn’t yet officially on the payroll. So I marched straight to the camp office to become official. Among the usual paperwork to be filled out was a pledge I’d never seen before. Its lone paragraph read:

  I, _________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am to enter.

  “What is this?” I asked Dan, waving the sheet at him.

  “Oh, that?” he said. “That’s the loyalty oath.”

  A loyalty oath? From—of all places—the city of Berkeley? I’d thought loyalty oaths had died out with Joe McCarthy decades earlier.

  What did supporting the U.S. Constitution have to do with busting suds? If I signed it and then a camper leapt onto a dining table shouting, “Fuck the U.S. Constitution!” how was I supposed to support and defend the Constitution against domestic enemies? By running from the sinks to go smack the kid? Or was I expected to support and defend his constitutional right to free speech by protecting him from getting smacked?

  It sounded like much more responsibility than I was willing to take on for a cushy, easygoing gig. Even Sidney Poitier—the actor with a storied dishwashing past—had once proclaimed, “I would far rather wash dishes…than sign a loyalty oath I considered repugnant.” I considered this oath repugnant and—like Poitier—preferred to wash dishes than sign it. Then again, in order to wash dishes, I was expected to sign it.

  “I’m not signing this,” I told Dan.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “I have a rule about signing loyalty oaths.”

  A minute before, I didn’t. Now I did.

  “What happens now?” I asked. “Am I fired?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re the first person in my eight years here who’s ever refused to sign it.”

  Dan sent my unsigned oath and the rest of my paperwork down to Berkeley. In the meantime, I was left to hope that my lack of sworn loyalty wouldn’t work against me. The
goal remained: get hired officially, get a paycheck for all the weeks I’d worked, keep wearing pants.

  Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time reading on my cabin porch. From there, I could just make out the casinos across the border in Stateline, Nevada. So close, yet so far away, dishes awaited in the many buffets and restaurants that littered those buildings in a state where I’d never worked before. To top it off, I could only sit and daydream about all the loose change that drunk gamblers dropped on the floors around the slot machines. (And dream I did. One night’s sleeping fantasy: finding three dimes, two pennies and a nickel.) If the camp’s higher-ups deemed me too un-American or too un-Californian to be officially hired, then I’d allow myself to be drawn down to the bright lights of the casinos instead.

  The teenage counselors did their best to hasten my departure in the way they punished the delinquent campers. They dragged every pain-in-the-ass troublemaker into the kitchen and made them wash the dishes. The counselors assumed I’d appreciate the forced labor. I didn’t. Playing detention monitor wasn’t my thing. Plus, the camp hooligans only created bigger messes than they cleaned. And since the only one punished by their punishment was the dolt merely trying to do his cakewalk job, the notion to leave stirred.

  Then one day I received a package containing several weeks of my post-office-box mail. Among the dozens of letters was one from Kevin in Michigan, who complained that on the first day of his latest dishwashing job—at a swanky waterfront restaurant—he was forced to work nine hours straight without a single break. Susan in Missouri wrote to update me on her latest dish gig, where a surveillance camera in the kitchen was part of an inconsistently enforced two-dollar fine policy on consuming any food—even the garbage off the dirty plates. And Allen wrote from a state prison in Arizona, where recently he’d been happy with having scored a dish job in the kitchen. But after he’d spent only two days in the suds, the authorities recalled that he had an attempted escape on his record. So they considered him a flight risk in the kitchen—and he was fired.

  Working without breaks? Fined for Bus Tub Buffeting? And fired in prison?! Man, if my worst gripe was that I didn’t care for the quality of the help sent my way, then I really was spoiled with a cinchy job.

  So I stopped bellyaching about the delinquents. For a few days, at least. But they remained underfoot. They continued to splash water everywhere. And I still had to rewash the dishes they’d “cleaned.”

  Finally, I cracked. I told Dan that it was the delinquents or me. He could have one or the other in the dishpit, but not both. Not wanting to lose his hotshot, Dan relented. The kids were pulled off dish duty and I resumed dishing solo.

  Apparently, my loyalty to the dishes impressed the city of Berkeley more than my disloyalty to the American and Californian Constitutions. The evidence of this came in the form of a paycheck with my name on it. Jon drove me down to a casino on the state line to cash it. My intrigue with casino dishing grew when I learned that the joints not only willingly cashed paychecks, but garnished each cashed paycheck with a free drink!

  Now that I was getting paid, any notion to quit remained at bay and I was able to enjoy my stay. The best part of the job were the days in between sessions when the camp was free of campers. There was less work to be done. The placid setting became even more placid. And with no kids present, the facilities were for the exclusive enjoyment of the employees.

  So when Dan asked me to stay on into the autumn to break down the camp and prepare it for the twenty to thirty feet of winter snow, the proposition was alluring. Not only would the campers be gone, so would everyone else. Jon and Dan and all the other employees would be back at their “real” jobs or back at college—and the whole place would be mine.

  When that last day of camp finally arrived and everyone was leaving, no one was more excited than I was. To see them off, I took a front-row seat on a picnic table and watched with satisfaction as the kids boarded the school buses.

  But as the buses drove away, I started feeling kind of funny. And, as the procession of cars full of counselors drove past, the feeling sharpened.

  “Good-bye, Pete!” the counselors yelled out.

  Even though I’d rarely talked to the counselors (and had trouble telling them apart from the campers), watching them depart, I grew melancholy. For some reason, I missed them already.

  Sitting there, I realized that throughout my life, if leaving was to be done, then it was always I who did the leaving. If good-byes were to be made at a bus station, then it was always I who was getting on that bus. If farewells were made at a job site, then it was always I who was walking out that door. But now, I was the one being left behind—and I didn’t like it.

  Within twenty-four hours, the population of the camp plunged from one hundred to one. I had the solitude I’d desired but didn’t know what to do with it.

  Aimlessly, I tramped around the camp’s grounds. I roamed the empty dining hall, across the empty basketball court, past the empty swimming pool to the empty cabins. I examined the interior of each cabin as if to assure myself that I really was alone. Halfway through my inspection of the forty-odd cabins, I saw a quarter and some pennies on the floor.

  Ooh! It’d been so long, I almost didn’t recognize the li’l fellers.

  As I bent down to pick them up, I was grateful they hadn’t fallen through the half-inch gaps between the floorboards. Then again, who was to say coins hadn’t fallen through the floorboards?

  I rushed outside and peered under the cabin. A dime lay on the ground. I wormed my way into the eighteen-inch-high crawl space and grabbed it. Through the cobwebs and the dirt, I found more change. Coins had been falling through these floorboards for years—decades even—without anyone ever retrieving them. There was no telling how much fake-silver and copper lay beneath the cabins.

  As I eagerly plundered below one cabin after another, the feeling of melancholy slowly dissipated. An hour later, I finished quarrying, covered in dirt and cobwebs. I raced back to my cabin, spilled my bonanza across my sleeping bag and counted: 38 quarters, 49 dimes, 26 nickels and 91 pennies. In total: $16.61!

  I slept well that night. But the euphoria proved temporary. Over the next few days, as I removed the canvas coverings from the cabins and broke down the bunk beds, I realized that living alone up in the mountains wasn’t for me. Wandering around through the woods amidst wildflowers and wildlife was an interesting change, but I was still homesick for wandering through city streets filled with crowds of people. And with it now autumn, it was safe again to descend from the hills and wear pants anywhere in the country.

  When Dan stopped by that next weekend, I proved my disloyalty—or better yet—proved my plongeur morality. I left him in the lurch by bailing on the camp and rambling onward.

  I hitchhiked down to Reno to get myself a casino job, but flush with almost a thousand bucks I’d saved while at the camp, I had second thoughts on working just yet. Casinos were put off for the time being. The cash held me over through the fall of 1997 while I hung out in Colorado, Kansas and Wisconsin. Come winter, when the money finally did run out, I holed up at a ski resort in Vermont (#23). The spring of 1998 saw more nationwide moseying and then—amazingly—I was invited back to the camp. After another summer stint at the camp, I bused it up to Portland and slept on the floor of the Reading Frenzy office as I put together Dishwasher #15.

  One day while I was in town, Amy Joy asked me to stop by Reading Frenzy at five o’clock. She said she had a present to give me for my thirty-second birthday. When I arrived, I was late. It was six o’clock—and she was sullen.

  “Forget it,” she grumbled.

  “What? Can’t you just hand me the present?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “We have to go somewhere for it—and now it’s too late.”

  “Nah,” I said, trying to cheer her up about my birthday. “C’mon, let’s go!”

  After further coaxing, she relented. She blindfolded me, sat me in her car and told me I’d never guess where we
were going. But with my keen mental map of the city, each time we turned, I pictured our location. Even when she circled a block or two in an apparent attempt to throw me off, I knew right where we were.

  When Amy Joy finally parked, she said, “Guess where we are!”

  “Mount Tabor Park!” I blurted out and lifted the eye mask.

  My correct answer had apparently spoiled the surprise. She looked disappointed.

  We got out of the car. Amy Joy spread a sheet on the grass and opened a bottle of red wine.

  “I made these myself,” she said as she handed me a large Ziploc bag of chocolate-chip cookies.

  Watching her sit down on the sheet, I wondered, Is there something more to this than just a birthday present?

  She patted the spot beside her and invited me to sit down.

  “I thought we could sit and watch the sun set over the city,” she said, pointing to the skyline before us. The view was magnificent, except that, in the distance, the last sliver of sun was now disappearing behind the West Hills.

  I didn’t even get a chance to sit down before a park ranger drove up.

  “You have to leave,” he said. The park closed at sunset.

  We packed up and left. Back downtown, Amy Joy dropped me off on Oak Street. She handed me the bag of cookies and then drove off in such a hurry that I didn’t get a chance to thank her for them.

  But the cookies were delicious.

  22

  Darryl’s Room

  A week later, the call of the casino became too strong to resist. I made it to Reno, Nevada (#24), and promptly got hired at Harrah’s—the large downtown casino and hotel.

  When I arrived at the personnel office for my first day, a guy in a navy-blue jumpsuit walked up and asked, “You Pete?”