Dishwasher Read online

  One day, when I showed up at my parents’ place on my bike with my garbage bag and sleeping bag in tow, I told my dad about my new living arrangement. He was baffled.

  “What? You’re living like a turtle?” he asked.

  The remark was meant to be dismissive yet, actually, it was perfectly apt.

  “Yeah, exactly,” I said. “Like a turtle!”

  Then one afternoon, while the café’s other employees rushed to heap all the closing-time dishes on me, I was staring at the stacks. The boss walked up with my time card in hand. Rather rudely, he said, “What the hell are you doing that takes you so long to close up?”

  His grievance was legitimate; by then I was routinely clocking out much later than he’d said I should be. But he picked the worst time to gripe. After having slaved all day and dreading the dishes that awaited me, I snapped.

  “Look at all these dishes I’ve still got!” I said. “Then I gotta sweep and mop and hose the mats off and take out the trash. I’m doing everything you told me to do, so fuckin’ lay off!”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew what to expect. Mouthing off at bosses had gotten me fired from the boys club and from the campus bookstore. Working at a snail’s pace had gotten me fired from house painting and from UPS.

  Now, another job would be added to those lists.

  But he didn’t can my ass on the spot. Actually, he kind of cowered.

  “Uh, okay,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  A couple minutes later, after he’d left, I sat down with a beer and suspected there might be something to this dishwashing business. But I wasn’t completely sure. After all, why would he fire me when there were still stacks of dishes to be washed? If I was to be sacked, he’d be smart to wait until I’d finished out the day. Supposing that was the case, I sat around even longer after closing time and hardly swept or mopped.

  That night, I wrote a couple letters to pals who, coincidentally, had also fallen into dishwashing. Tony—my buddy from the paint crew—was dishing with his friends on a five-man crew at a large college cafeteria up in Davis, California. He’d written me a letter about his stubborn refusal to wear the requisite plastic apron because of his aversion to plastic clothing. My pal Dave was working two different dish jobs in Olympia, Washington. He wrote me about his struggles with the alcoholic owners at one of the restaurants.

  Reading and writing these letters about dish work gave me an idea: collect these tales and print them up in some sort of pamphlet. The other guys liked the idea, too. But the problem with starting a publication devoted to the work of laggards was that Tony and Dave were too damn lazy to send me their promised contributions. Then again, when it came to lethargy, I had them both beat.

  The morning after cussing out the boss, I wasn’t terribly motivated to go to the café. Not only did I presume I’d be canned upon my arrival, I was also hung over. But since I was hungry, maybe the cooks would slip me something to eat even if I was no longer an employee. So I peeled myself off the floor, rolled up the sleeping bag and biked down to the café.

  When I walked in more than an hour late, the place was already packed with customers. A waitress saw me and said, “Thank God you’re here!”

  When the boss-guy approached, I expected him to cuss me out and tell me to beat it. Instead, he looked relieved.

  Here I’d yelled at the boss, done a lousy job closing up, taken too long to clock out, helped myself to the forbidden beers, arrived late (unshaven, unbathed, unkempt and hung over)…. And what was the response? Relief that I’d shown up at all!

  As easy as this job had been to get, it appeared even harder to lose.

  That’s when I heard it, loud and clear. There was definitely something to this dishwashing business—something I liked. Quite possibly, this was my calling!

  There was one last appeal of the profession that didn’t reveal itself to me until the following week. Upon awakening on a morning that I was due at work, I rolled over on the couch and went back to sleep. That was that.

  I’d already routinely broken the boss-guy’s rule about drinking, so I couldn’t pass up breaking his other rule.

  Without notice, I’d just up and quit on him.

  5

  A Three-Day Soaker

  I took my stuff up to Davis, crashed on Tony’s floor and then applied for a job in the university cafeteria dishroom where he and his friends worked. Despite my getting hired, I was told there wouldn’t be an opening for me in the dishroom for another week. In the meantime, I was expected to work on the cafeteria floor as the “beverage person.”

  Early one morning, I was handed a kelly-green polyester knit shirt and matching baseball cap. It was my uniform to wear while keeping the soda, milk and juice dispensers stocked and cleaned. Then, at 7 a.m., the cafeteria doors opened and students began to stream in.

  Standing at attention at the drinks station, I saw my reflection in the window. There I was, looking like a damn clown in my kelly-green outfit.

  Then some girl whined to me, “The nonfat milk is warm.”

  This was no way to land a dish job—a job where I could wear my own grubby clothes and avoid the gabby customers. At 7:05 a.m., I grabbed my shirt and escaped with a vow to never again wear company garb.

  A couple days later, I studied dozens of three-by-five-inch index cards on the campus ride board. One read: “Two guys driving up to Alaska looking for a third person to help share the cost of gas.” I called them and was told they were heading up to find work in the oil spill cleanup. It was April 1989. A few weeks before, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez had struck a reef and dumped at least ten million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound. It sounded intriguing, so I bought a fifteen-dollar tent and left with Jack and Ali a couple days later.

  It was dusk when we arrived in Valdez—namesake for the doomed oil tanker and epicenter for the cleanup effort. The place was a madhouse. The town of four thousand residents was overrun with upward of ten thousand job seekers. Everywhere we looked, people were camped out in tents, cars and makeshift shacks. It was so crowded, we had to drive a mile out of the boomtown before we found a vacant patch for ourselves among the hordes.

  As I pitched my tent, a party atmosphere raged around me. Campfires and drinking were in full effect. The three middle-aged guys sitting around the nearest campfire invited me over to join them. One of them handed me a can of beer.

  They were down from Fairbanks, filled with enthusiasm and chatty. All they talked about, though, was the available work (cleaning the oil off coastlines) and the pay ($16.67 an hour).

  “They should have one of these spills every year!” one of them said. The others raised their cans in agreement.

  When I finished my beer, I got up and moseyed around. The conversations overheard at the other campfires echoed the sentiments of the Fairbanks trio. Witnessing all the boozy, charged anticipation was surreal. It seemed more fitting for a parking lot the night before a rock concert than for the site of an immense environmental disaster.

  The more I heard about the work, though, the less interested I became in doing it. Sure the wage was stratospheric. And using a high-pressure hose to wash oil off rocky shorelines could be fun. But what got me was the workplace location: isolated coastlines accessible only by boat. Inevitably, I’d grow sick of the job. And once that happened, how could I flee a job site on some remote island? I’d be left stuck, unable to leave—and absolutely miserable. No wage, no matter how astronomical, was worth tempting a fate like that.

  In the morning, I packed up my tent. Turned off by the town’s get-rich-quick vibe, I said so long to Jack and Ali and hit the road. On my way out of Valdez, a driver in a pickup picked me up. He was heading all the way to Anchorage—120 miles away. Now, so was I.

  “You just finished safety training, too?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “What’s that?”

  “It’s like boot camp for cleanup workers,” he said.

  The day before, he’d completed th
at final step in the hiring process and was now on his way home to Anchorage to await a call-up for duty. When he learned I had no interest in the work, he responded the same way the Fairbanks guys and Jack and Ali had: he was flabbergasted.

  “It’ll be cool,” he said. “You’ll see!”

  He wanted to turn around and take me back to Valdez. I told him not to.

  Then, he tried to pressure me: “Man, you’re really gonna regret this one day!”

  Finally, he got mad: “I can’t believe you’d shit on this golden opportunity!”

  It didn’t matter what tactic he used, my mind couldn’t be changed. Eventually he fell silent and I was left in peace to watch the passing parade of pine forests and snowcapped mountains.

  While I was traipsing around Anchorage, my garbage bag luggage fell apart. My crap had to be cradled in my arms for a couple hours until I came upon an army-navy surplus store. There, I broke down and blew seven of my thirty-two bucks on a secondhand duffel bag that was big enough to accommodate my sleeping bag, tent, T-shirts and books.

  My new duffel bag and I then headed south sixty miles to the town of Kenai, where I picked up work at a fish cannery and pitched my tent outside the plant. My job was to “slime” salmon by gutting them and slicing off their fins. That is, when there were fish to be processed. Despite our being far from where the tanker had struck the reef, the oil slick covered such a large area that “tar balls” were turning up in the local fishing grounds. Each time a tar ball washed up, the fishing ceased and the cannery shut down for a few days. After several weeks of working sporadically, I quit and hitchhiked another sixty miles down to the where the road dead-ended in Homer.

  Again, I got hired at a cannery. Again, the work was intermittent due to the oily waters. And again, I quit after a few weeks.

  While I was in Homer, a coworker told me that volunteers were needed at the place that treated spill-affected sea otters. When oil got into their fur, the animals would try to lick themselves clean. Swallowing the indigestible oil could be fatal. So they were captured and brought to a rescue center where their fur was cleaned by volunteers.

  I was fascinated. But not because I was any big animal nut. Rather, I was smitten with how otter fur was cleaned: washed by hand—using household dishwashing detergent!

  So I thumbed it the eighty miles to Seward and arrived in the evening. In the morning, I offered my services at the rescue center but was rejected—there was already a glut of otter washers. In the afternoon, on the edge of town, I caught a ride. The driver had just spent more than a month on a boat plucking the oiled otters from the sea. Now he was on his way home for a week of R & R. When he heard about my attempt at volunteering, he offered to get me a job on the boat he worked on.

  Me work on a boat? I explained to him how that wasn’t likely.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’ll wash otters for free. But you won’t go out on a boat and catch ’em for eighteen bucks an hour?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And you’ll wash dishes for a measly four bucks an hour but you won’t wash rocks for sixteen-sixty-seven an hour?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He looked at me cockeyed and said, “Something don’t add up.”

  “No,” I assured him. “It all adds up to me.”

  I caught rides around for another week and ended up back in Valdez. The town was now completely transformed. Gone were the encampments of job seekers. All those folks I’d seen weeks earlier were now scattered around the coastlines and islands of the Prince William Sound scrubbing those rocks and getting rich quick.

  From Valdez, I caught the overnight ferry (a five-and-a-half-hour trip) to the town of Cordova. There, I got hired to work on yet another slime line. But, like at the other canneries, there wasn’t much work for me to do due to oily local fishing grounds. Though I was hardly earning money, I was being housed and fed in exchange for barely working. One couldn’t complain—but I did. After four weeks of “working,” I quit and caught the ferry back to Valdez. Then I hitchhiked around for a couple weeks and made it to the town of Haines with my money budgeted perfectly: exactly enough dough to buy a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of raspberry jam and a $205 ferry ticket to Seattle.

  As a growing aficionado of ferries, I was excited to embark on America’s ultimate ferry service—a three-day, thousand-mile sail through the Inside Passage. As the ship weaved along mountainsides of rain forests that plunged down to the seas of southeast Alaska and British Columbia, I slept at night on the deck in a deck chair. By day, I spotted killer whales and humpback whales and porpoises and bald eagles. The scenery from the ship was absolutely amazing.

  The scenery on the ship was even more amazing; a Native-Alaskan passenger with long, wavy hair caught my eye three different times. On each occasion, I considered approaching her. But then I figured, if women had scant interest in me even when I had access to bathing and clothes-washing facilities, then why would one so gorgeous take interest now? I hadn’t shaved in months, bathed in weeks and was wearing the cleaner of my three filthy T-shirts (meaning whichever one I hadn’t worn the previous two days). So each time I saw her, I chickened out.

  Then, on the final night of the voyage, she cornered me.

  “Can I buy you a beer?” she asked, then proceeded to buy me a pitcher in the bar.

  In turn, to impress her, I pulled out my sandwich fixings and made her a PB&J so overstuffed, the fillings oozed out its sides.

  I didn’t know if it was the cuisine or my stench, but for the first time, a woman was interested in me. Actually, as we spoke, it seemed what attracted her most to me was simply that I was a traveling man.

  When we docked in Seattle, I was still as penniless as when I’d boarded the ship and didn’t know what to do next. Melanie, who’d just finished working the summer as a fisherwoman, was heading down to college in Arcata, California. When she offered me a ride, I didn’t hesitate to accept it. By the time we reached her destination a couple days later, we were like turtledoves. And when Melanie then invited me to stay with her, who was I to say no?

  Exxon sent me a check for $1,500 for the time I was employed at idled canneries. Those funds held me over for four months. When they ran out, I hoofed it all over town only to find every dishwashing position already filled. The newspaper’s want ads had no dish positions either. Looking through the ads that were listed made me ill, precisely as it had when I was a teenager. I still wasn’t qualified for any of the other jobs. But given my concern over losing Melanie if I couldn’t bring in some income, this time my lack of experience didn’t deter me from applying for any kind of work.

  I tried for not one, but two different seamstress jobs, figuring, how hard could it be to sew?

  Apparently, harder than I’d assumed. I was rejected at both places.

  I even applied for a job as a meter maid. When the chief of police interviewed me, he asked, “Have you ever been arrested?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but who hasn’t?”

  “Wrong answer,” he said.

  As my cash decreased, my stress increased. Without the allure of traveling, I feared Melanie would see me as worthless and dump me. She still had money from her summer of fishing. With it, she treated herself to frivolous things like eating out. I passed on each of her invitations to join her because I was clutching tight to my dwindling funds. Besides, I hated eating out. Restaurants cost money. Money meant working. And to offset the working part of the equation, I was perfectly content to subsist on a PB&J diet.

  For my twenty-third birthday, though, Melanie dragged me to a snazzy restaurant that had white starched tablecloths. Sitting there at the table while trying to act proper was enough to make me anxious. But my nervousness grew when Melanie pulled her napkin off the table and put it somewhere. The act seemed to be some mysterious custom. Eventually, I broke down and asked her, “What do I do with my napkin?”

  Melanie looked at me for a second, then said,
“You put it across your lap.”

  In his book Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowski—her favorite author—had scoffed, “What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?”

  At that moment, she was probably asking herself the same thing.

  Then one day, Melanie invited me to go to lunch. As usual, I declined. She went off to eat alone and I felt like a louse, wondering how much longer it’d be before she told me to hit the road.

  But then an hour later, she ran in excitedly.

  “They need a dishwasher at the place I just ate at!”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I watched them put up a sign in the window,” she said.

  I ran the eight blocks to the restaurant and saw the handwritten sign: “Dishwasher Wanted—Ask for Charlie.”

  I went in and asked for Charlie. A minute later, a white-clad old man stepped out of the kitchen and said, “I’m Charlie.”

  “I want the job,” I told him.

  “You washed dishes before?”

  I started to tell him about the café in San Francisco but he cut me off.

  “Can you work weekends?” he asked.

  “I can work anytime.”

  “Fine,” he said. “You start Saturday morning.”

  To think, I could’ve ended up running a sewing machine—or handing out parking tickets! The sinks were where I needed to be!

  My spirits lifted. And from the smile on Melanie’s face that greeted me when I got home, it was clear she was even more elated than I was about my new job.

  Saturday morning in the restaurant’s dishroom, I found a guy leaning against the counter, stooped over and eating a blueberry muffin. Upon seeing me, he held out the muffin and asked, “Hey man, you want the rest of this?”

  I liked him already.

  “Sure,” I said and took the offering.

  “New guy, right?” he asked.