Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  “You went there ’cause of that sign out front?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, that sign’s there all the time,” he said. “Don’t that tell you something?”

  “So you think this is a better place to work?” I asked.

  “Hell yeah!” he said. “Here you even get a free meal.”

  Heath convinced me. This was a better gig. In fact, maybe it was the best gig in town.

  I stayed.

  “How many buses there gonna be tonight?”

  That was the question on everybody’s lips in the dishpit. Instead of pondering the number of expected diners, the talk was about how many busloads of tourists would be rolling in. A waitress finally provided us with the number: forty-one.

  “Forty-one,” Phil said. “Shit, that’s like eight hundred people. We’re gonna be busy.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jason told him. “We’ve got a full crew now.”

  That night, I spent the shift as the dishpit’s “runner”—running the clean dishes back to the kitchen, which left my hands dry. I did get wet, though, when a tussle broke out between Dom and Heath. They were arguing over who’d be “sprayer”—the guy who sprayed down the racks of dishes before they were shoved in the machine. As the two wrestled with the spray hose, enough water shot around the room to soak us all.

  Later, when I asked Jason about my free meal, he led me into the kitchen.

  “Dude wants his free meal,” Jason said to a cook as he jabbed his thumb in my direction. For a couple seconds, the cook sized me up as if to assess my worthiness to eat. Then he put together a plate of fried chicken, sweet-potato fries and cornbread.

  I took my grub out back to the loading dock and sat among the lounging pearl divers. Was this the best place in town that any of them had dished? They all responded with resounding “Yeahs.”

  But when I then asked which other dinner theaters they’d dished in, they all answered that this was the only one. Because most of their previous employment had been at chain restaurants—Golden Corral, Western Sizzler, Cracker Barrel, Denny’s—I decided to hold off on awarding the Town’s Best Dish Gig title to Jimmie Rodgers’ just yet.

  At the end of the shift, Jason and two other dish dudes all commented to me about how smoothly the dishroom had run that night.

  Jason’s exact words to me: “You made the difference.”

  After work, on my way back to my room, I again saw The Sign at Golden Corral. This time the familiar words took on a very different meaning: they read as if an all-points-bulletin had been posted for me.

  “Be on the lookout for an at-large, disheveled dishwasher. He was last seen promising to return for an evening shift. Suspect considered lazy and harmless.”

  As Crescent and I passed The Sign, we sped up.

  That night, I climbed in bed feeling gratified with my experience as a resort-town disher. In the span of fourteen hours, I’d found a place to live, worked two jobs and moved up the dish-gig ladder. Maybe it was just a taste of what life in a place like this could be like on a permanent basis.

  But though the day’s events had been fulfilling, they weren’t enough to get me to sleep soundly on my new bed.

  I’d slept on a slew of floors, couches and chairs; on buses, ferries and backseats of cars; and even under bridges and in doorways, all without problems, fuss or complaints (well, with maybe the exception of the floor in Darryl’s Room). But this waterbed: each time I moved, it moved. The swells left me woozy. So I abandoned ship and slept comfortably on the shag carpeting.

  The next few nights, I remained the dishpit’s runner (or, more accurately, the walker). With thirty to forty busloads of customers each night, we stayed busy in the dishroom.

  Each day, I put off eating until my free dinner at work. Then I’d take a break, go to the kitchen and fill a plate high with chicken pot pie, mashed potatoes, fried chicken, chili and chicken fingers.

  On my fourth night, a cook asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Getting my dinner,” I said.

  He yanked the plate from my hand and growled, “You already had your free meal!”

  As he glowered at me, I thought, He can’t be serious. I expected him to smile and say, “I’m only foolin’.”

  But he didn’t. Instead he said, “You waitin’ for something?”

  I left the kitchen empty-handed. Out back, I related the incident to the pot-smoking dishers behind the dumpster.

  “Didn’t you already get your free meal?” Jason asked.

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  “But on your first night you did.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I’ve been getting my dinner every night.”

  My comrades laughed.

  “Dude, you just get one free meal,” Jason said. “Just one. That’s it!”

  This couldn’t possibly be true.

  “Hey, man, I was working here two weeks before any of these fags told me I had a free meal coming,” Dom said. “So consider yourself lucky.”

  But I didn’t consider myself lucky. I considered myself hungry.

  After the others finished their joint and filed back inside, I remained hidden behind the dumpster. Any place that didn’t feed its dish dogs couldn’t possibly be the best gig in town. Since the notion to quit had now struck, there was no way I could work another two weeks without eating on the job—even if leaving meant taking a pay cut.

  I made a beeline straight from the dumpster out to my van.

  On the way back to my room, I stopped by a convenience store and picked up a newspaper, a pint of cookie dough ice cream for dinner and a Creamsicle for dessert. Lying on the waterbed, I devoured my meal while reading the dish classifieds. Of the nine ads, one stood out: the Lawrence Welk Resort.

  The next morning, I applied to dish for Welk. Though the accordion-playing bandleader was dead, the legacy of his “champagne music” was doing swell judging by the immense size of the complex.

  “Oh great,” the receptionist said. “We’ve been looking for dishwashers.”

  “Well, you just found one,” I told her.

  Unlike Golden Corral or Jimmie Rodgers’, Welk’s wasn’t so needy for dish help that they asked me to start on the spot. Instead, I was asked to hold off for a few hours and then start a shift at three p.m.

  When I returned, I was met by the kitchen manager, who immediately ushered me over to the head chef. Who immediately ushered me over to the apparently ranking dishwasher. Who immediately ushered me over to another disher. I’d only been there three minutes and had already been passed around among four people.

  Mike—the dishman now stuck with showing me around—was busy running some clean pots to the kitchen. Thirty seconds into this training session, he had trouble figuring out where to put a certain 80-quart stock pot.

  “Sorry, I don’t really know where this stuff goes,” he said. “This is only my second day here.”

  Mike called over Rocky—the guy I’d assumed was the ranking disher. As Rocky approached us, he joked, “Do I have to do everything for you guys?”

  “Oh, like you know everything?” said a female cook who’d overheard him. “You’ve been here, what, a week?”

  “No,” our ranking dishman told her. “I’m in the middle of my second week.”

  Rocky showed me around the dishroom and the vast—but empty—dining area.

  “They can cram a thousand old geezers in here,” he said. “Tonight I heard we’ve got about thirty-eight, thirty-nine buses coming—about eight hundred people.”

  As we walked past the buffet setup, he said, “When the restaurant closes at eight o’clock, we take a break and can eat whatever we want from the buffet.”

  “For free?” I asked.

  “Of course, for free,” he said.

  I’d yet to touch a dish, but compared with Jimmie Rodgers’, this was already clearly a better gig—another step up.

  Though the food was as bland as Welk’s music and mushy enough
for the elderly patrons to gum it down, I appreciated its free-ness.

  Since I needed a decent paycheck to pay the rent in a few weeks, I stayed put at Welk’s. Usually we had anywhere between thirty and fifty busloads of his fans—the entire parking lot was essentially one massive handicapped zone. Back in my room, I learned to sleep on the edge of the waterbed, hanging an arm and leg over the side railing to anchor myself. I still bobbed up and down anytime I moved, but remained anchored enough to not get seasick.

  One afternoon, I picked up my paycheck, took it to the bank it was drawn from and cashed it. Then, on my way to work, the notion struck. Why return to Lawrence Welk’s? Now financially independent, I had the opportunity to leave that gig and find an even better one at any of the other dozens of dinner theaters in town.

  But which one would be better than Welk’s? The Osmonds’? The Oak Ridge Boys’? Dolly Parton’s? Whose dishpit topped them all?

  In a town packed with cheesy acts, I figured my best bet was to head straight to the cheesiest of them all: Wayne Newton’s.

  It was still early afternoon when I pulled into Newton’s nearly empty parking lot. At the ticket counter, I asked the saleslady for an application for a dishwashing job.

  “We don’t have dishwashers here,” she said.

  “You mean, you don’t have any openings?”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t have dishwashers.”

  “Who washes the dishes then?”

  “We don’t have dishes,” she said. “Just the concession stand.”

  Since I refused to believe her, she invited me to have a look in the lobby.

  Sure enough, in the lobby there was a concession stand. A peek inside the theater itself revealed rows of theater seating. I’d held an image of a dinner theater where people sat at tables around the stage as they ate steak and drank martinis while Newton performed his lounge act. Instead, the audience sat in theater seats as they popped popcorn and slurped sodas as if Newton were a circus act.

  When I expressed my surprise to the ticket lady, she told me that almost none of Branson’s theaters were dinner theaters.

  I couldn’t believe it. How could I work my way through the town’s dinner-theater dishpit circuit when one didn’t even exist? If I were to leave Welk’s and stay in town, my options would be limited to the loathsome chain joints.

  Back in the van, I started driving. But when I reached the entrance to Welk’s, I kept going. The notion had already struck. There could be no going back. Besides, no matter how many more places I worked at in Missouri, the state would always remain #28.

  At the country gift shop, I told the landlady I was moving out.

  “You didn’t give me much notice,” she said.

  I replied, “I didn’t know myself that I’d be leaving so soon.”

  On my way out of town, I again passed Golden Corral’s “Dishwasher Wanted” marquee. I hit the gas.

  Part III

  Quitting Time

  27

  Just Wandering

  After a few weeks of rambling, I landed in Boise to finally hit Idaho some six years after the state had first been targeted unsuccessfully during my Northwest Tour. Within twenty-four hours of my rolling into town, Idaho clocked in as state #29: a gig was landed in the cafeteria at Hewlett-Packard’s corporate campus.

  At 3:30 p.m. on my first day, the soon-to-be-former pot-scrubber who was training me said it was time to go.

  “What about the rest of this stuff?” I asked, pointing to the stacks of awaiting baking sheets and pots.

  “Just leave it for tomorrow,” he said.

  On my way out, the kitchen manager caught my attention by looking at me and stroking her jawbone.

  “Don’t forget,” she said.

  Earlier that day, at the daily kitchen staff safety meeting (the morning’s topic: Be careful—knives are sharp), she’d introduced me to the fifty-odd cooks, bakers, cashiers and dishwashers. Then she remarked that if I didn’t shave the scruff from my face by the following day, I’d be working in a beard net.

  Movie stars don’t shave for a couple days and they look chic. I don’t shave for a couple days and I look jobless—even when I have a job!

  Though I didn’t have a rule about not working in a beard net, it was only because it’d never occurred to me to establish one. Normally, something like a beard-net requirement would’ve provoked me to leave a sterile fluorescent-flooded kitchen and go snatch up a dish job someplace where I could be as whiskered as I wanted. But those places didn’t have what HP had: full-time pot scrubbing. With the opportunity to move “pot-scrubber” from my To Do list to do to my Done list, I had to suck it up and break the not-yet-established beard-net rule by not walking out.

  It was midwinter and my nights were spent parked in a dirt lot behind an apartment complex. Lying under my sleeping bag and seven thrift-store blankets, by flashlight I would read through the latest batch of mail, then write replies until falling asleep. At 6:30 a.m., I’d get up and smash the half-inch-thick layer of ice in my plastic water jug so I could shave—in the dark—with the frigid water and get to work by seven o’clock. Each morning, I’d trudge past a maze of office cubicles that covered an area the size of a football field (I’d walked off the measurements) on my way to my own cubicle—the pot cubicle—where I’d be greeted by the pots and pans I hadn’t finished the previous afternoon.

  Then I’d scrub all day, trying to finish the burnt pots and pans by the end of my shift. But come 3:30, when I’d finally drain the sinks, a stack of dirties would be left to await my cleaning the following day. I’d exit past the cubicle maze. Peering over the dividers, I’d see people sitting at their desks but had no idea what they were doing. In contrast, anyone who’d see me in action at work would automatically know I was a pot-scrubber. But they just sat at their desks—like professional desk-sitters.

  After work, it was back to hanging out by myself since I knew no one in Boise. Even HP’s dishwasher crew was anonymous to me because their cubicle was on the other side of the cafeteria from mine. So I tried to look up some of the locals from the thousands of names in my address book. At the first two addresses, the search resulted in awkward encounters, with me asking for people who no longer lived there. On the phone, though, I managed to reach a guy who’d regularly corresponded with me years before.

  “This is Pete,” I told him. “Dishwasher Pete.”

  “Dishwasher what?”

  “Dishwasher Pete,” I repeated. “I write that Dishwasher zine.”

  There was a long pause, then a slow, suspicious, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I’m in Boise, scrubbing pots out at the Hewlett-Packard plant.”

  “And?”

  “And I was calling to see if you wanted to go get some ice cream or something.”

  Another pause. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “I just thought, you know, maybe you would.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Aw right,” I said. “See ya.”

  After I hung up, I felt pathetic. Years before, this guy had probably gotten a kick out of corresponding with an itinerant dishman. But since then, he’d probably thrown out his zines, got married, bought a house, had kids…. When he hung up the phone, his wife probably asked, “Who was that?”

  “Nobody,” he’d have said to her. “Just some weirdo wanting me to eat ice cream with him.”

  People changed, I guessed. But somehow, I didn’t. I was still just wandering around, washing dishes as usual.

  I put away my address book and didn’t bother contacting anyone else.

  That night, in Crescent, I opened a letter from a Los Angeles filmmaker who’d written to ask if she could capture my quest on film. The request was hardly unique; it was the fourth query from a documentary filmmaker.

  Having a camera in my face held no appeal. But then, who knew? Maybe this woman would dig gallivanting around with me. After all, her letter was so enthusiastic, it boarded on being flirty. As
we traveled together in Crescent from state to state, maybe she’d fall for both my lifestyle and me. Maybe—just maybe—it could work between us as she turned my life into a movie.

  I could see it already on the big screen: scenes of camping out under a tent of blankets, shaving with ice water in the dark in the back of a customized 1973 van, calling up strangers looking for ice cream dates in the middle of winter….

  Wait a sec. What woman would want to stick around for that? This filmmaker lady would surely get sick of the bumming around. She’d bolt back to L.A. before she could say, “Cut!” And experience already showed that a mailbox full of postcards and letters from me wouldn’t be enough to tide her over until the next time I passed through town. In fact, every relationship I’d had always ended, in part, because of my foolish belief that I could keep traveling while still maintaining the romance.

  Certain it wouldn’t work out with the filmmaker, I wrote her one of my usual “thanks, but no thanks” replies.

  The next afternoon, I used my phone gizmo to call Jess and told him what a downer Boise was.

  “Yeah, but just think—you’re the world’s most famous dishwasher!” he said, trying to cheer me up.

  Jess had enjoyed saying this ever since he had a cush dish job handed to him in San Francisco merely because the restaurant owner was trying to get him to introduce me to her.

  “No I’m not,” I told him.

  “Well, if you’re not,” he said, “then who is?”

  Maybe he had a point. I couldn’t think of any other rightful claimants. Until the day an exceptional dish dog went straight from the sinks to either become president or assassinate one, I was probably stuck with the title. But little good that did me. I couldn’t even find someone to eat ice cream with me in Boise.

  So then, one Thursday night, I went by myself to an ice cream parlor. It was February 10, 2000, a date that seemed like it shouldn’t go unnoted. So I spoiled myself by ordering a banana split.