Portrait of the Dishwasher as a Young Man

My first brush with the world of employment occurred when I was fifteen. I was "hired" as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, notorious not only for exploiting the services of under-aged kids wanting to scrub plates for a few measly bucks but also for serving those pre-pubescent schnooks alcoholic beverages after hours. My internment in this particularly soul-draining job lasted only twelve hours. And I didn’t even get the celebrated illegal beer that had been promised.

I had been in desperate need of money. I was tired of the embarrassment that came every time I would be out at the mall or at some comic book shop with friends and I needed to borrow a couple of bucks for the latest Spiderman issue or Metallica cassette. See, my friends still got allowances from their parents and would lavishly spend their “earnings” in front of me while I counted the change I’d scrounged from the family room sofa. My parents didn’t really believe in giving allowances. At least not the twenty dollars a week my friends pulled down. I’d be lucky to walk away with a five spot for doing chores that I was expected to perform for free anyway. Guilt was my main bargaining tool. But that didn’t work every week and I would have to ration my guilt trips for special events like concerts or ski trips. No, in order to enjoy my weekends at the mall with friends I would have to find some sort of job.

My father for one was always talking about my siblings and I one day getting jobs. He would boast about the many things you could do if you had your own source of income. A source of income that wasn’t him, that is. With each passing birthday my father would remind us of how closer we were to being of legal working age. Those child labor laws must have been a thorn in his side, but there was always that worker’s permit shining on the horizon. The permit, it was well known in my household, could be obtained at the age of fifteen with a simple trip to the school’s office.

It was a rite of passage I was never too keen on, so I held off as long as I could. But my early teenage financial straits coupled with my interest in buying a videocamera (my friend Matt and I had been toying around with his grandparents’ old VHS camera and I was convinced I would be the next Steven Spielberg) led me to discuss my employment options with my friend Danny Matthews.

Danny Matthews and I had known each other since elementary school. We’d been best friends between kindergarten and third grade and spent most of our time reenacting scenes from “The Incredible Hulk” and/or listening to KISS. Danny had an older sister who got us hooked on the song “Beth” and it was downhill from there. Over the years Danny and I drifted apart. I hung out with guys who never grew out of comic books and read Fangoria magazine, while Danny started hanging out with “the stoners”. Most of the kids Danny hung out with had worked under the table jobs since they were twelve or younger. Danny himself was employed as a dishwasher at this local restaurant The Clam Joint.

When I told Danny I was interested in getting a job he excitedly started telling me about how much money he made. Four dollars and twenty five cents an hour seemed like the Holy Grail of wages to a kid of fifteen. Hell, I'd been raking leaves and mowing the lawn for five bucks a week! I was eager to join him if I could. He said there was actually an opening for another dishwasher, as the other guy had quit the night before. What a coincidence.

"Problem though is," I told Danny. "I don’t have a worker’s permit."

"Oh, fuck that shit," Danny replied. "You don’t need one of those to work here. You just gotta be willing to work."

Oh, that could be a problem. See, as much as I wanted to start getting a paycheck, I wasn’t fully resigned to having to actually work for it. I thought about the situation in a little more detail. I had washed dishes at home after dinner a few times and didn’t find the work all that pleasurable. But then I wasn’t making four dollars and twenty five cents an hour doing it, was I? What a quandary I had found myself in!

After a bit more goading from Danny, I decided to take him up on it. He talked to his boss at work and they said I could start that weekend. I was given Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon. Danny would be working with me the first night but had the rest of the weekend off. I would be on my own Saturday and Sunday. I immediately started to rethink this decision. Danny assured me it would be no problem and since I’d be working by myself those days I would get more money because it wouold take longer for me to clean up the place.

When I arrived at The Clam Joint at four in the afternoon on Friday to start my shift Danny was already there to meet me. He was standing outside the kitchen door smoking a cigarette. He asked if I wanted one and I declined. (I never felt any peer pressure to smoke when I was a kid and it wasn’t until I was 24 that I decided to take it up. A melancholic disposition coupled with a touch of nihilism led me to make up for lost time and I chain-smoked for about five years straight.) We bullshitted for a few minutes, then he took me inside to meet the cooks.

The cooks seemed like nice enough guys, a little rough around the edges, but nice. They ranged in age between 20 and 32. There were four of them. Kyle, Steve, Randy, and Brian. They were listening to Iron Maiden and making fun of each other. I thought I’d fit in just fine.

Then Danny took me around as we prepared for the evening, fetching ice, arranging tables and chairs, emptying trashcans from the daytime shift. Mundane menial tasks. No back-breaking work, but work nonetheless.

Around six o’clock the first rush of used dishes came back and we began the process of cleaning them. There were two sinks, each equipped with a high pressure water sprayer, which could shoot varying streams of burning water. Danny dug in and I followed suit, scrubbing the remnants of once-glorious meals from the ceramic plates.

The cooks continued their insulting banter back and forth and eventually incorporated Danny and I in to their fun. Scalding cheese was flung in our direction, along with an assortment of vegetables and leafy greens. A small skirmish began to unfold and Danny and I equipped ourselves with trays to use as shields. Danny seemed to enjoy the camaraderie he shared with the cooks, but I just wanted to scrub dishes in peace and get the hell out of there. I politely laughed as grapes occasionally bounced of my head. It was, after all, part of my job as a new dishwasher to be tormented.

One of the restaurant’s specialties it appeared was French onion soup, because I had to clean a steady flow of bowls whose edges were caked with a thick crust of burnt provolone cheese. These were the most difficult ones to clean, a fact that Danny pointed out when the first wave of them arrived. And he made haste when cleaning them because they were the most crucial he said.

Much of my night was spent scraping the cheese off with my fingernails, which I had chewed down to being almost non-existent (a fact I regretted, because it made the process even more toilsome). The need to constantly shuck these bowls of their protective layer of cheese made the idea of wearing gloves, to protect my hands from the blistering water we used to wash dishes, an impossibility.

The night dragged on.

From six to about 12:30, we never once had a break. The work was interminable. Occasionally a particularly attractive waitress named Carla would come back into the kitchen to pick up her orders and it was as if the sun had broken through, if only briefly. I would watch as she dodged flying plates (Danny was adept at tossing the cleaned plates over to the cooks, a skill which both impressed and frightened me, as I would have to duck as I walked my stack of plates over to the prep table) and traded innocuous flirtations with the cooking staff.

The clean-up officially began at two in the morning, after the last of the patrons had left the premises. It was then that I discovered that the cleaning of the restaurant rested entirely on the dishwasher’s shoulders. The cooks and wait-staff packed up their things and left for the night.

Danny took me on our rounds, emptying trashcans and scrubbing the floors. The smell of quickly rotting food clung to my nostrils. I asked if we could have a beer as reward for our hard work. Danny was reluctant to fetch one from the beer cooler, even though we were the only ones left in the building. He said it was frowned upon and someone might notice. I scoffed at this and Danny saved face by producing a tightly rolled joint from his jeans pocket.

As we dragged the trashcans to the dumpster out back he lit the joint and we smoked. It was then that I decided I would not return for work tomorrow. My first night as a manual laborer had been a complete disaster in my mind. Dishwashing was not my vocation-to-be.

I got home at about 4:30 in the morning and jumped into the shower, scrubbing the filth from my pores. I slept until 3 or so the next day. My mother woke me up and told me it was time to get ready for work.

I began a litany of complaints and reasons why I would not be going in that evening. I had not laid a guilt trip on my mother in over a month and was using this as the grand-daddy of all guilt trips. How could she make me go to work tonight? I had descended into hell for twelve hours the night before and had escaped with only a few minor abrasions. She couldn’t possibly let her first-borne degrade himself further!

After a good twenty minutes describing the horrors I had witnessed she agreed to let me stay home. I went to my room and took a nap. At about six o’clock the phone rang and I was called to answer it. It was the mess sergeant of the restaurant, Randy.

"Where the fuck are you, man?" he scolded.

"Oh, ah, I’m not coming in," I said. "I’m, ah, not feeling well."

"You could’ve fucking called jackass!"

"Sorry."

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he demanded.

"I think I’ve got a sore throat and the beginnings of a fever."

"No. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Excuse me?"

"You’re a pussy, that’s what’s wrong with you!"

"What are you..."

"You couldn’t handle it, you faggot."

"No, I just..."

And he hung up the phone.

Wow. I felt really bad and considered going in and actually started to get dressed. I left them hanging and that wasn’t cool. I would just go in late, and stay late if I had to, and

Did he just call me a pussy faggot?

And then I reflected on the ridicule and derision I had endured the night before. The patter of the grapes hitting my head throughout the night. The long walks to the dumpster to empty leaking sacks of garbage. The tedious work of removing cheese from ceramic bowls.

There was no way in hell I was going back.

And then the phone rang again.

"Hello?" I answered.

"Stop sucking your boyfriend’s cock and get in to work shithead." It was Kyle this time.

"Dude, grow up," I said. A fifteen year old telling a twenty-eight year old to grow up. The irony.

"You’re a fucking dick." And the phone hung up again.

I walked to my room. What losers, I thought. Didn’t they have anything better to do than call and berate me, like maybe finding a replacement?

The phone rang again. My mother answered.

"David, it’s for you!"

I picked up the receiver.

"Do you just do oral or do you take it in the ass too?" Steve this time. I could hear laughter in the background.

"Fuck you, man!"

Click.

Ten minutes later the phone rang again.

"Don’t answer it," I told my mother. "It’s those assholes from the restaurant."

The phone rang and rang throughout the night. Occasionally we’d answer it, only to find that it was indeed the cooks making another taunting call.

By Sunday, fortunately, they’d gotten over me and stopped the harassing calls.

The next Monday at school I ran into Danny.

"What the fuck?" he said.

"I’m sorry, man," I said.

"You fucked me over."

"I’m really sorry. I just wasn’t feeling well that night and they kept calling and yelling at me. I couldn’t go back after that."

"They were really pissed."

"I know."

"You fucked me. I recommended you."

"I know. I’m sorry. I’m a dick."

"Whatever."

Danny and I never talked about the incident again. We never really talked about anything. Later that week he picked up my paycheck for me and brought it to school. Fifty one dollars, tax free. In cash. For that one night. I couldn't remember when I held more than twenty dollars in my hand at one time. I thought about the money I could’ve made if I’d had the balls to kowtow to the bullshit of working there. The next week I went and got my worker’s permit and secured a job as a bag-boy at the local supermarket. A significant decrease in pay (only four dollars and fifteen cents), but no one prank called my house if I didn’t show up for work or bounced grapes off my head all night long. There’s always a little give and take with any job I guess.