Dishwasher Read online

  DISHWASHER

  One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States

  Pete Jordan

  Dedication

  For Amy Joy,

  and in memory of my dad

  Epigraph

  “[Dishwashers] are quintessential dirty workers, necessary for operating the establishment, but functionally non-persons.”

  —Gary Alan Fine,

  Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work

  “And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kind of pride.”

  —George Orwell,

  Down and Out in Paris and London

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Initiation

  1

  Wine O’Clock

  2

  Maps

  3

  A Date with the Dishes

  4

  Fragile

  5

  A Three-Day Soaker

  Part II

  “Dishwasher Pete”

  6

  The Dish Master

  7

  It’s Journalism

  8

  The Fundamental Rule

  9

  If You’ve Got Time to Lean…

  10

  A Dishwasher for All Your Needs

  11

  Snowed In

  12

  Biscuits, Hush Puppies and Deep-Fried Everything

  13

  Head Dishwasher?

  14

  Fumes

  15

  Plenty of Crumbs

  16

  Letterman Jumped Back

  17

  Dishwashers, Unions and New York

  18

  Unconquered Territory

  19

  Seafaring

  20

  Pearl Divers Who Passed Before

  21

  Sure You Can Wear Pants

  22

  Darryl’s Room

  23

  Kosherized

  24

  We Never Forget

  25

  Utopian Dishwashery

  26

  Dude Wants His Free Meal

  Part III

  Quitting Time

  27

  Just Wandering

  28

  Cheap Houses, Cheap Dishman

  29

  The Blue-Rimmed Plate

  30

  Hell Train

  31

  In a Lather

  32

  Kiss the Dishmachine Good-Bye

  Epilogue

  Three days later, I was eight hundred miles away, back…

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  An Excerpt from In the City of Bikes

  Chapter One

  Copyright

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  Initiation

  1

  Wine O’Clock

  A bead of sweat rolled from my forehead, down my nose and into the greasy orange sink water. I wiped my face with my apron, lifted my baseball cap to cool my head and sighed. As I picked at the food dregs that had coagulated from the sink water onto my arm hairs, I surveyed my domain—the dishpit. It was a mess. The counters were covered with the remains of what, not long before, had been meals. But the dishmachine stood empty. No dirty dishes were in sight. No one yelled: “More plates!” or “Silver! We need silverware!” For the first time in hours, a calm settled over my dishroom. Having successfully beaten back the bulk of the dinner rush, I was caught up and it felt good.

  Time for another go-round. On my way to the waitress station, I grabbed an empty bus tub and twirled it on my middle finger—a trick I’d perfected while working at a bagel shop in New Mexico. I lowered the spinning tub from my finger to my cap—a new trick I’d yet to perfect. The tub sputtered from my head and plummeted into the full bus tub that awaited me. A couple plates smashed to the floor.

  The crash rang throughout the restaurant and was followed by a shocked hush from employees and customers alike. I, too, observed the moment of silence for the departed plates. But I wasn’t sad to see them go. If dishes had to break—and they did have to—then it was best to break the dirty ones rather than the plates I’d already worked to clean.

  In some Illinois cemetery, Josephine Cochrane was spinning in her grave. She was the 1880s socialite who’d grown fed up by her servants breaking her precious china as they washed it by hand. Cochrane presumed that by reducing the handling, there’d be far less breakage. So she invented the motorized dishwashing machine. Her contraption became an instant hit with large restaurants and hotels in Chicago. Even the machine I was using at this place—a Hobart—was a direct descendent of Cochrane’s. But now, more than a century since the introduction of her innovation, human dishwashers—particularly this one—were just as cavalier about dish breakage as they’d been back in Cochrane’s day.

  As I looked down at the wreckage at my feet, the boss-guy charged around the corner wide-eyed with his hand clutched to his chest as if he’d been shot.

  “Plates fell,” I said.

  “Again?” he sighed. “Try to be more careful, Dave.”

  Six weeks earlier, when a fellow dish dog had tipped me off about this gig—an Austrian-themed inn at a ski area in Vermont’s Green Mountains that came complete with room and board—I was immediately intrigued. I’d pictured myself isolated in the mountains and hibernating through the winter at this job while getting caught up with my reading, saving up some money and crossing yet another American state off my list. When I called about the job from Wisconsin, the boss-guy assumed that if I wanted to come all that way to dish in a ski area, then I must’ve been a ski nut.

  “No,” I told him. “Actually I don’t ski.”

  That made him suspicious. He then asked, “Do you have long hair?”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you can get here by next week, the job’s yours.”

  I rode the bus most of the way and hitchhiked the rest and when I arrived, the boss was no longer suspicious. I was willing to dish and that was enough for him. In fact, he gave so little thought to me that by the second day, he started calling me by the wrong name.

  “And Dave, clean it up,” he said, looking at the broken plates on the floor.

  I’d never bothered to correct him.

  “All right,” I said.

  When he turned and walked back to the dining room, I kicked the debris under the counter and headed back to the dishpit with the full bus tub.

  While unloading the dirty dishes, I mined for treasure in the Bus Tub Buffet. The first find was fool’s gold—a half-eaten schnitzel. I couldn’t blame the diner who’d left the second half uneaten. It was the place’s specialty, but it wasn’t very special. I snobbishly passed on it as well and continued excavating.

  I unearthed more dishes and then struck pay dirt: some garlic bread and remnants of crème brulée. I smeared the crème brulée on the garlic bread and scarfed it down. Scrumptious, said my taste buds. Queasy, countered my stomach. The gut had a point. Bus Tub Buffet? More like Bus Tub Roulette: you win some, you lose some. So far I was losing.

  As I was guzzling water from the tap, the call went up in the adjacent kitchen: “Wine o’clock! Wine o’clock!”

  I looked at the clock. Indeed, it was already wine o’clock.

  Dick, one of the cooks, entered the dishpit with a grin on his face and a jar in each hand. He handed me a jar and held up the other in a toast.

  “Wine o’clock,” he said.

  “Wine o’clock,” I repeated.

  We clinked jars and th
en downed their cooking sherry contents. Wine o’clock was eight o’clock—an hour before closing time and an occasion observed by the cooks with rounds of sherry. Closing time—nine o’clock—was celebrated in a similar fashion except with shouts of “Five o’clock! Five o’clock!” and the consumption of Five O’Clock brand vodka.

  A couple of weeks earlier, the inevitable cook/waitress tension had come to a head here over the question of how the waitresses should place their orders. The waitresses wanted to just give the ticket—the food order—to the salad cook, who in turn would relay it to the line cooks and then to the dessert cook. The cooks argued it’d be better if the waitresses wrote their tickets in triplicate and distributed copies to each of the three cooking stations. The waitresses were less than thrilled.

  From the dishpit doorway, while consuming Bus Tub Buffet strudel and wine o’clock sherry, I watched the two groups bicker. The cooks had their clique and the waitresses theirs. But as the dishman, I kept to myself and labored alone—the way I liked it.

  But then a cook suddenly shouted, “Let’s ask the dishwasher then!”

  Looks from all twenty or so eyes darted my way. I quickly averted them all. I looked down at my hands, down at the strudel, down at…the cooking sherry. Wine o’clock. I’d been accepting the wine o’clock sherry from the cooks. The waitresses never gave me any sherry.

  I cleared my throat and then announced, “Triplicates sounds better.”

  The scales tipped. From then on, the order placing was done the cooks’ way.

  But that’d been a couple weeks earlier. Now wine o’clock had struck once again. I emptied my jar and dove back into the sinks. As my stomach settled, I sweated out several more rounds of clean dishes. Then someone behind me said, “Hon?”

  In the doorway stood the waitress who’d never before uttered a word to me. Now that I was “Hon,” she probably wanted me to do some part of her job like empty the waitress station trash can.

  I hesitated before answering, “Yeah?”

  “Is it true what Linda just told me?” she said. “That you go all over washing dishes?”

  Of course it was true. It was my life’s mission, after all. But that didn’t mean I wanted my cover to be blown.

  I hesitated again. “Um…”

  I now regretted having cracked under the intense questioning from that nosy Linda. My anonymity had been compromised.

  “Uh, yeah,” I finally stammered as I nervously picked at my arm hair boogers. “I guess it’s true.”

  “Wow!” she said. “So, you like, go all over?”

  She was hooked. I’d seen it so many times before: a waitress who barely notices a quiet dopey dishman suddenly gets interested once she finds out that he’s a traveling quiet dopey dishman.

  “Yeah, sure,” I answered.

  “That’s so cool!” she said, entering the dishpit. “I wish I could do that.”

  I shrugged and asked, “Why don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Seems hard.”

  “Hard?” I asked. “No, staying in one place is hard.”

  “You think?”

  For the first time, I realized how cute she was. Tall, bobbed dark hair, glasses, requisite black skirt and white blouse. If only she’d flirted with me like this weeks earlier, I would’ve sided with the waitresses in the order-placing debate. That would’ve scored me some points. Who knows, maybe she’d have started dropping by my basement room behind the inn after work. If so, I wondered, could I stay indefinitely at this job? Could I hack coming to it every day? Could I handle living in the mountains of Vermont for good—or would she lose interest if her quiet dopey dishman shed the mystique of being a traveler?

  She had other ideas in mind.

  “Maybe I can tag along with you,” she said.

  Could she be serious?

  “Yeah, sure, tag along,” I said. “You can wait the tables and I’ll wash the dishes.”

  “Ha! That’d be a blast!” she said, squeezing my arm.

  Looking down at her delicate hand on my grungy arm hair, I took a deep breath and then asked, “So, what are you doing after work?”

  She let go of my arm.

  “After work? My boyfriend’s picking me up.”

  “Boyfriend, huh?”

  What had I been thinking? Of course she had a boyfriend! Of course I couldn’t stay at this job—or in these mountains—forever.

  “Hey, you should come out with us!” she said. “He’d really get a kick out of meeting the guy who washes dishes all over.”

  “Nah,” I said, pulling some plates from the bus tub. “No thanks.”

  I never could anticipate what it would be—that one thing that’d made me crack. But once that notion of quitting entered my head, there was no use fighting it. The whim could strike at any time: on an ordinary morning, waking up to see it snowing outside, just like it had in Pittsburgh. Or the idea could hit mid-shift when someone tried to boss me around, like what happened in Reno. The feeling could even overcome me when I learned a friend was leaving town and that I could catch a ride with her, as it had in Seattle. Whatever the case, once the notion hit, I was powerless. And now, just hearing mention of this flirty waitress’s boyfriend, I knew it was time to go.

  Six weeks earlier, upon my arrival, I sincerely thought I’d last the whole winter. Then again, I sincerely believed all my grandiose plans would pan out despite a lengthy track record that proved otherwise.

  My chat with the waitress was interrupted by Dick.

  “Five o’clock,” he said, handing me a jar of vodka.

  “Five o’clock,” I repeated.

  Vermont was the twenty-third state I’d conquered. By the time I was due at work the following day, I was already seeking out my next dish job in another state.

  2

  Maps

  If, indeed, I was born to wash dishes, no one had ever bothered to tell me that it was my calling. I didn’t grow up dreaming about becoming a dishwasher. I never yearned for the prestige of being an unskilled laborer. I never craved the glory of scrubbing the crap off America’s pots and pans. If I had, though, having such fantasies could’ve saved me a lot of time trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

  I thought I had figured it out early on. In fifth grade, for a “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” essay, my classmates followed the nun’s prodding by writing that they’d grow up to be lawyers and doctors and presidents. When called upon, I read aloud my essay about a dream life as a house painter.

  “Peter Jordan,” the teacher, Sister Peter John, interrupted, “you can be anything you want.”

  “What?” I said. “I wanna paint houses.”

  “A house painter?” she scoffed.

  She pointed at the future lawmakers and doctors and presidents around the room as proof that my goal should be loftier.

  I didn’t buy it. We were all immigrants or children of immigrants or African Americans. And I couldn’t see any of us rising out of that decaying school (that’d be shut down within a few years) and attaining any lofty goals. Sure I wanted encouragement—I didn’t exactly want the nuns to tell us we were losers and would always be losers. But I wanted realistic encouragement.

  Growing up in a family of seven in what was built as a one-bedroom apartment in the pre-yuppified Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1970s, I figured I was destined for a life of drudgery. My father had grown up in an impoverished family of eight living in a two-room tenement apartment in Glasgow, Scotland. He was still living in those two rooms when, at nearly forty, he married and emigrated to San Francisco in pursuit of a more prosperous life. For decades, he held a steady job at a customs office. He always arrived on time, worked without complaining and was the model employee. But those who got ahead, it seemed, were the bullshitters and the backstabbers. Being the good employee counted for little. He was passed over for promotions and raises…and he remained poor.

  As the youngest of five kids, I came along at a time
when my dad seemed bitter about his lot in the world, as if he’d realized that the American Dream was a sham. Watching him trudge up the street after work and then collapse on the couch in frustration, I learned very early on how one could start out poor, work hard all his life—and still end up poor. Since I was going to start out poor and most likely end up poor, I decided not to waste time in between. Climb the career ladder? Hope to be patted on the head by bosses while trying to get rich in the American Dream scam? I decided, instead, to start out on the bottom rung—and stay there.

  Months before writing the fifth grade essay, I’d no aspirations for an adult occupation. I only knew that, whatever it’d be, I didn’t want to work hard doing it. Then, when a house painter spent weeks working on a building across the street from our apartment, I took notice. Every day he sat on the scaffolding planks with his lunch pail on one side of him and his transistor radio on the other. As he hummed along to the music, one hand dragged a paintbrush up and down against the building while the other hand stuffed sandwiches into his mouth.

  Awed, I thought, I could do that!

  But Sister Peter John thought otherwise.

  “Look at Felicitas,” she said. “She’s going to be a nun! I think she’ll make a wonderful nun.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “Then she can yell at kids for wanting to be house painters.”

  That’s the quip that got me sent to the principal’s office.