by Pete Jordan
My health insurance from work was still a couple weeks away from kicking in. And an ambulance ride was nothing but a thousand-dollar taxi ride and—for someone too cheap to even take a regular taxi—out of the question.
The cops then got a call over their radio and had to go.
Slumped over the handlebars, as I pushed myself home on my bike, the bloody bandage began to unravel and trail in the wind behind my bloody face. Judging from the leeway motorists gave me at intersections, it must’ve made for a gruesome sight,
Once home, I didn’t first inspect my injuries or even lie down. Instead, I did something that would’ve made the old Dishwasher Pete puke: Mr. Reliable called work.
“Hey,” I told the baker, “I won’t be in tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I fell off my bike and don’t feel so good.”
Amy Joy wasn’t home, so a friend picked me up and drove me to the emergency room.
As a doctor stood over me and tweezed the gravel out of my head and sewed up the gash, I lay there in a daze. With the lamp shining in my face, I admired his work. It must be nice to be skilled, I thought. If someone had come to me with a nasty head wound and asked me to help him, I’d be confounded. If he’d bloodied his dishes in the process, then I could wash those. Otherwise, he’d be shit out of luck.
During my hours in the emergency room, I admired the work of all the nurses and doctors that treated me. Maybe it was the concussion, maybe it was the Percocet, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how these people were using their skills to do valuable work. They were actually making a difference in the world. Meanwhile, what was I doing with my life? Over and over, I was just washing the same dishes (blue-rimmed or not) that only ended up dirty again within minutes.
I’d always joked that there was no hurry for me to complete my mission because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself afterwards. Now, I wanted to know.
With a broken arm, two sprained wrists and a mangled knee, there wasn’t much else I could do but lounge around the apartment to convalesce. I lay in bed and thought about the speed bump I’d hit. Whoever had designed it or installed it doubtlessly had done so without cyclists in mind. The angle of the bump was so severe, it could’ve been deadly for someone on a bike. But that wasn’t surprising. There seemed to be a lot of road infrastructure intended for cyclists in Pittsburgh that didn’t make sense—as if they’d been designed by someone who didn’t ride a bike on a regular basis. There were too many civil servants who only drove their cars yet were responsible for dealing with the way cyclists, pedestrians and public transit users navigated their ways through cities. There needed to be more people in such jobs who viewed transportation from a nonmotorist’s perspective. As I lay around, I realized that one of those someones should be me.
After all the cycling and walking and public transit riding I’d done throughout the nation, it seemed like I could put my knowledge to use to help produce better means of travel. It’d sure beat producing temporarily clean dishes. In order to get the skills to attain some sort of desk-sitting job in that field, I wanted to return to college and finally pursue a degree in something I was interested in: urban planning.
After mulling it over the whole week after my tumble, I told Amy Joy about my idea of returning to college. I’d first pursue a degree and then a desk-sitting job as some sort of transportation planner for a municipal agency or a nonprofit advocacy group.
She liked the idea.
First though: my mission.
When Jess had told Letterman that he (meaning: I) didn’t want to finish the states before he/I was thirty-five, I was only twenty-eight. Now, on my next birthday, I’d turn thirty-five. And before that date hit, I wanted my apron to be hung up for good; the quest achieved once and for all.
To do so would mean racing to tackle the remaining twenty-one states while crossing off lingering items from my To Do list: dude-ranch dishing in Wyoming; working in Shelbyville, Illinois, where Josephine Cochrane had invented the motorized dishwashing machine; visiting my pals at the Champion dishmachine company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to work as an official test disher on their new models; and pearl diving in Pierre, South Dakota—one of only two state capitals I’d never been to.
In addition, I still wanted to dish on a riverboat and at a state fair and on a train and in a restaurant atop a skyscraper and in a catering firm’s mobile dishwashing trailer.
And, of course, it would all culminate in Honolulu—the other state capital I’d never been to—where I’d finally enact the whole final dishmachine smooch and beer-on-the-beach Hawaiian grand finale.
To accomplish all this, a thorough, comprehensive push was required. It would call for an unprecedented Herculean effort. Thus, the Farewell to Dishwashing Tour was born.
With the buying-a-house-in-Pittsburgh project now dead, Amy Joy returned to Portland. I stored three thousand of the remaining seven thousand Dishwasher #16 covers in a friend’s attic in Pittsburgh and loaded the rest in the van. Since orders were still coming in for the issue, I figured somewhere along the way, I’d finally get around to publishing it.
Then I set out on the Farewell Tour.
30
Hell Train
The Tour’s first stop: Rhode Island.
I’d always wanted to bust suds on a moving train like Malcolm X had when he worked on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in the 1940s. In his autobiography, he recalled making the run between Boston and Washington, D.C.: “Against the sound of the train clacking along, the waiters were jabbering the customers’ orders, the cooks operated like machines, and five hundred miles of dirty pots and dishes and silverware rattled back to me.” Aah, traveling while dishing. Or was it dishing while traveling? Either way, I wanted to do it too.
The Amtrak application I’d toted around was now worthless to me. While I was busy being too lazy to send it in, Amtrak had gone and replaced its dishes with disposables. The few pots that needed scrubbing were done by the train’s lowest-ranking cooks. The dishwashing crew was laid off.
After spending a couple years thinking I’d blown my chance, I rejoiced when I read a newspaper article about a Rhode Island dinner train. Maybe I had a shot, after all. So I called the outfit’s owner and told him I wanted to dish on his train.
“I’ve already got a dishwasher,” he replied.
Normally, as a job applicant, I remained extremely low-key, never wanting to present myself as a hotshot pearl diver—a Dish Master—lest anyone ever expect me to actually work like one. However, this was now not only the Farewell Tour but, very likely, my only chance to ever dish on a train.
I took a deep breath and then poured it on.
“I’m trying to wash dishes in all fifty states,” I admitted. “And for Rhode Island, I wanna work on your train.”
There was a long pause on his end of the line before he asked, “You writing about this or something?”
I didn’t know what answer he wanted to hear. Would my owning up to dishwashing journalism scare him off or would it win him over? The odds seemed fifty-fifty.
“Yeah,” I answered cautiously. “Yeah, I am.”
“Great!” he said. “We’ll get you all set up!”
Wow, I thought. Who knew that being honest when applying for a job could actually be beneficial?
A few days later, on a Saturday morning, I boarded the train in Portsmouth, Rhode Island (#30). In the cook car, John—the head cook—introduced himself to me. As the train started rolling, John explained our itinerary. In Newport, we’d pick up 125 passengers and feed them lunch while we traveled up the coast and back down again. Then, a couple hours later, we’d drop off the group and retrace our route with another 100 passengers.
John showed me the dishpit in the middle of the car. It had a sink, a sprayer and a Hobart machine. Aside from the railings that lined the counters to prevent the dishes from sliding onto the floor, it wasn’t unlike dozens of d
ishpits I’d toiled in. Well, there was one major difference, which was made obvious as the train picked up speed. This was a pit on the move. It could take a dish dog places.
Since we wouldn’t pick up passengers for another hour, there wasn’t yet much for me to do, so John welcomed me to look around. The cook car was sandwiched between the first-class dining car in front of us and the coach dining car behind us. While the two cooks prepared meals, waitresses set the tables.
I stepped out onto the platform behind the cook car and took in the view of the passing Narragansett Bay.
A waitress stepped outside smoking a cigarette and said to me, “Welcome to the Hell Train.”
“Hell Train?” I asked. “You mean we’re bound for hell?”
“No,” she said. “I mean we’re in hell.”
Hell? We were restaurant workers riding the rails with the wind in our hair and without a care in the world!
“I always thought working on a train would be fun,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she snorted, then flicked her cigarette off the train and stepped back inside.
An hour after I boarded, we rolled into the Newport train depot. As our senior citizen passengers boarded, a very jittery older guy in a suit rushed up to me. He introduced himself as Bob—the owner of the train—and shook my hand frantically.
“Pete, we’re glad to have you aboard,” he said.
Then, just as suddenly, he hurried away.
When we were rolling again, the cooks dashed back and forth as they served up the food. The waitresses squeezed past me at my dishpit as they ran the salads and drinks out to the passengers.
Minutes later, the first wave of dirty dishes reached the dishpit and started sliding across the counter. I had to swiftly adapt to high-speed dishing. The trembling, wavering stacks of dishes had to be steadied lest they topple onto the floor. When the train hit curves, I had to brace myself by hooking my toes under the counter. The greatest challenge was carrying stacks of plates though the car’s narrow passageway while dodging cooks and waitresses as the fun-house floor bounced and swayed beneath me. Having admitted I was a hotshot, I now had to back up the claim by not dropping any dishes under these adverse conditions.
After I ran a few racks of salad plates through the dishmachine, the water pressure in the sink’s sprayer suddenly died. Without the sprayer, I couldn’t rinse off the plates. In turn, loads of food scraps from the plates ended up in the Hobart and quickly turned its water dark and grungy. So I drained the water, cleaned the inside of the machine, then hit the Fill button.
After the machine had filled for a few minutes, I peeked inside and saw only a trace of water across its bottom. I hit the Fill button again.
As Bob scurried by, I asked him, “Is there a trick to filling this machine?”
He saw the Fill button was on and said, “It’s filling.”
“But there’s no water.”
“No, listen.”
Together we paused and—over the rumbling of the train—listened to the machine’s pathetic gurgling.
“See,” he said. “It’s filling.”
Bob ran off again. He had a calamity to tend to. On this 90-degree day, the air-conditioner in Coach had gone down.
“Whoever knows CPR better get in Coach!” a waitress shouted. “These old farts are gonna start droppin’ like flies!”
“This is horrible!” Bob exclaimed. “Free drinks for Coach! Everyone hear that? Coach gets free drinks!”
While still waiting for the dishmachine to fill, I tried to wash the dishes by hand. But without water pressure in my taps, I didn’t get far. So I grabbed a bucket, stuck it in the sink at the bar and turned on the hot-water tap. Out dribbled cold water the color of iced tea.
I asked the “Hell Train” waitress, “Does the water always look like this?”
She looked in the bucket. Then she looked up at me, chuckled and walked away. If this really was part of some attempt to test the Dish Master, I was impressed.
I told John that the taps were providing only a trickle of cold brown water.
“Yeah, I think the engineer fucked up and forgot to fill the water tank,” he said. “The brown is probably sediment from the bottom of the tank.”
His suggestion was to boil the water and then add it to the machine. He took my bucket of water, poured it in a pot and set the pot on the stove. In the meantime, as the dirty dishes piled higher and the train rocked side to side, I spent my time steadying the teetering stacks to prevent them from crashing to the floor.
After ten minutes on the stove, the pot of water only managed to reach a tepid temperature. I couldn’t wait any longer for it to boil so I dumped the lukewarm brown liquid in the machine and then sent the dishes through. There was no fresh water for the machine’s rinse cycle. The same food-laden lukewarm brown water was splashing around inside. Thus, the dishes were soon coming out nastier than when they went in.
When Bob again asked how it was going, as the hotshot dishman, I reluctantly showed him the “clean” plates. Still, he didn’t flinch.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “That’s great.”
The dishwashing fiasco was overshadowed by yet another, more pressing, calamity.
Because more people had ordered fish entrées than were available, some emergency chicken breast had been pulled out of the freezer and pressed into service as the non-red-meat entrée. Now these same chicken breasts were being sent back from the dining cars, their insides still frozen.
Bob was frantic.
“I’m gonna have to refund everyone in Coach,” he said. “This is terrible. A disaster!”
Since, in a half hour, the dishes would be needed to feed another hundred people, I had little choice but to continue “washing” them regardless of how filthy they remained. This wasn’t exactly how I’d fantasized train dishing. Surely Malcolm X—despite whatever primitive conditions he’d dished under a half century earlier—had, at the very least, running water.
I managed to finish the first group’s dishes by the time the second group boarded. The second time around ran much smoother. By then, I was sending the used glasses back to the bar without making them suffer their fate in the Hobart. As for the plates, I was wiping them clean with a towel as best as I could do.
Bob walked by again.
“How’s it going, Pete?” he asked. “Is the water running again?”
“No,” I replied.
“Aw right,” he said, still unconcerned. “You’re doing a fantastic job!”
When we pulled into Newport for the third time, right before disembarking with the rest of the passengers, Bob stopped by the dishpit one last time.
“Sorry about all the problems,” he said. “It’s not usually like this.”
“Well, thanks for letting me work on your train.”
He then handed me a wad of cash and said, “I hope you write a good story about us.”
After he stepped off the train, I locked myself in the bathroom and counted my take: $110! For less than seven hours’ work, he’d paid me nearly sixteen bucks an hour. Was this a bribe? Hush money to keep me quiet? If so, instead of being offended, I was impressed to discover that dishwashing journalism could literally pay off.
When I finished the dishes fifteen minutes before we were due to arrive back in Portsmouth—the train’s final destination—the head cook handed me a beer.
“Man, you’re the best dishwasher I’ve seen in my four years here!” he said. “Usually guys don’t finish until twenty minutes after we arrive.”
“That was nothing,” I said. “You should see me when I’ve got some running water.”
I did feel smug, though. Even if the dishes weren’t really all that clean, I’d survived all the train’s rocking and bucking without letting a single dish hit the floor.
Just before I stepped off the Hell Train, though it needed a whole lot more affection than I could provide, I kissed the poor dishmachine farewell.
31
In a Lath
er
After Rhode Island, I hit a seafood place on a dock along the coast of Connecticut (#31), which finished off the last of the northeastern states. The Farewell Tour then turned south to the remaining southern states. In Gainesville, Florida (#32), for a few weeks I filled in for a dish dog buddy at his job at an Italian place while he took a vacation.
In Gulf Shores, Alabama (#33), I plied my trade at another coastal seafood place. One evening, after work, I was driving along looking for a place to park for the night when a truck pulled even with me. Its driver signaled for me to pull over. It was Cheryl’s boyfriend, Jake.
On the side of the road, Jake explained he was driving from Florida back to New Orleans. He was amazed that we’d run into each other at night on a road in Alabama. Wasn’t I amazed too?
“I guess so,” I said, so frazzled from a long day of work, I wasn’t sure. Then, while admiring Crescent, Jake said that if I ever wanted to sell it, he’d consider buying it. But for now, I had to put this amazing van’s bed to use, so I said so long to Jake and was parked and sleeping within ten minutes.
A couple days later, while passing back through Georgia—state #5 from some ten years earlier—I stopped in Decatur to fulfill another long-standing goal: to work at the same bus station diner where, in the 1950s, Little Richard had dished. According to the singer, the boss would say to him, “When are you going to wash those dishes, boy?”
Little Richard would reply, “A wop-bop-a-loo-mop, a lop-bam-boom!”
His way of cussing out the boss without getting axed became the basis for the song he wrote while dishing—“Tutti Frutti.”
But the bus station on Broadway where Little Richard had worked was gone. A few blocks away, the closest thing the new bus station had to a diner was a candy vending machine. The site of the old bus station was now but a tiny grassy square overshadowed by a large parking garage. Since I was unable to pay proper homage by dishing on the very same spot, I did the next best thing: I commemorated the site sacred not only to dishwashing history, but to rock ’n’ roll history as well. Christening the square “Little Richard’s Dishwashing Days Memorial Park,” on sheets of paper that I posted around the square, I wrote the new name of the park along with a quote from the man himself:
