Dishwasher

by Pete Jordan

  After heading down to Lake Sakakawea and looking at the water for a minute—just to be able to report to my dad that I’d done so—I poked about Minneapolis and Milwaukee. Then, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I tracked down the location of where a diner had been in the 1930s. On the outside of the building—which now housed an office—I posted sheets of paper that read:

  Gerald Ford

  washed dishes here

  1929–31

  Though it felt somewhat odd to pay tribute to such a scumbag—he’d pardoned Richard Nixon, former busboy—Ford had washed dishes on that spot during his last two years of high school. And not content with just the one experience, in the couple years that followed, Ford went on to dish in Ann Arbor for his board at his University of Michigan fraternity house.

  Remarkably, while a teenage Ford was scrubbing in Michigan, at the very same time, only a couple hundred miles away, another future president and fellow scumbag was also in the suds. At Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois, slumped over the sinks through his first two years of college was Ronald Reagan.

  But maybe it’s unkind to call these two dishpit alumni scumbags. After all, Ford had once complied with my mailed request to inscribe a photo of himself—while president—as he loaded a dishwashing machine. He’d written, “To Pete, another fine dishwasher, Gerald Ford.” And besides, these two characters actually busted suds, unlike that malarkey-spewing president/scumbag Lyndon Johnson.

  When not busy warmongering, LBJ often regaled anyone who’d listen (friends, diplomats, biographers) with tales of how, after graduating high school in 1924, he left Texas and set out for California in search of adventure. One LBJ biography quotes him as saying, “When we got there, I had several jobs but didn’t hold any of them for long.”

  In another biography, he says, “Nothing to eat was the principal item on my food chart. That was the first time I went on a diet. Up and down the coast I tramped, washing dishes…always growing thinner.”

  Though LBJ did drive out to California with four buddies, that’s as far as the truth goes in the story. Oft-repeated “facts” of the tale simply weren’t true. Johnson was not in California for two years; he was there for a little over a year. He did not tramp up and down the coast; he remained in San Bernardino. He did not sleep outdoors or in rooming houses; he lived in his cousin’s four-bedroom ranch house. He did not go hungry; he ate rather well. He did not hitchhike back to Texas; his cousin Clarence Martin drove him back in a Buick.

  Most important, Johnson did not “scrub dishes in hash houses” (as one biographer put it). He spent his time in his cousin Tony Martin’s law firm—as a clerk! The story apparently wouldn’t have been nearly as captivating had Johnson tried to regale visiting foreign dignitaries with tales of a rebellious youth spent “tramping up and down the coast, clerking in law firms.”

  After Michigan, at a cemetery outside Chicago, I sought to pay tribute to a notable figure from dishwashing history who was certainly no scumbag.

  On previous stops through Chicago, while reading through old newspapers, I’d learned about Thomas F. W. Scanlon. In 1903, he was a leader of the Miscellaneous Workers Local 513, representing the “unskilled” workers—including dishwashers—in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, the craft union that was largely anti–unskilled labor. When hotel and restaurant workers staged a massive strike throughout the city, Scanlon spoke before the delegates of the Chicago Federation of Labor in order to win the support of the city’s other labor organizations. In that speech, he said:

  I represent a union that has grievances of the most pronounced order. These humble people work in watches from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. Then they get a rest until 5 p.m. and work from that hour until midnight. They are given a small room to sleep in—ten or more in one room—and they are given stuff to eat that is rejected by the customers. What do they get for all of this toil? The munificent sum of $20 a month.

  His speech was key in convincing the CFL board to endorse the strike. But during the hectic peak of the labor action, when strikers and picketers were facing off in the streets daily, Scanlon suffered a heart attack and died at the age of thirty-one. His death was widely attributed to the strenuous work he did on behalf of those he represented.

  For several days after his death, Scanlon’s body lay in state in the union’s headquarters on South La Salle Street. The room was filled with bouquets, floral pieces and stray blossoms that were purchased with the small contributions of the porters, chambermaids, scrubwomen and dishwashers he’d represented. Two pearl divers in their pressed kitchen whites stood at attention at the head of the coffin. More than four thousand mourners filed through to pay their respects. After the funeral service at the union hall, hundreds of mourners followed the funeral cortege through the streets to the train station. From there, the coffin was taken to the suburb of Hillside for burial.

  One of Scanlon’s contemporaries, so moved by his death, wrote, “We have lost our brightest star and his name shall be emblazoned on the scroll of organized labor’s history that babes unborn shall sing his praises, and time shall never be able to efface it.”

  I was one of those unborn babes seeking to sing Scanlon’s praises.

  In Hillside, at the cemetery’s office, I learned the row and plot number of Scanlon’s gravesite. But in that part of the cemetery, I soon discovered, most of the headstones had disintegrated. On the spot estimated to be Scanlon’s grave, I laid flowers. On a small piece of stone that’d crumbled off a nearby headstone, I wrote in marker an inscription. The front of it read:

  Thomas F. W. Scanlon

  d. August 28, 1903

  aged 31 years

  The back:

  We Never Forget

  25

  Utopian Dishwashery

  In northeast Missouri, I pulled up to the farmhouse feeling apprehensive. For a couple of years, I’d been receiving invitations from Lindsey, one of the farm’s residents. The most recent one was a postcard that read: “This is your annual notice that a Missouri dishwashing opportunity is upon you. End of Sept thru Oct is our sorghum harvest. 20–30 folks = lots of dishes. Your services are needed. Room, board, no boss, peace & quiet, fresh air—who could ask for more?”

  I was intrigued. Obviously—after Michigan (#26) and Iowa (#27)—it’d make Missouri #28. But it’d also give me the chance to experience farm life and see if it was for me. Furthermore, the farm was a commune. What exactly that entailed, I wasn’t sure. But I was interested in checking out a democratic, nonhierarchical live/work situation for its possibility as a place to settle. At the same time, though, I was unnerved by visions of touchy-feely, patchouli-soaked hippies spinning in circles to the tired groans of the Grateful Dead.

  I’d just have to keep an open mind.

  At the farmhouse, I was greeted by Lindsey. After admiring Crescent, she said, “There’s a guest bedroom available if you want—or you can stay in your van.”

  The thought of a bedroom for a month was tempting. But I wasn’t so sure I wanted to get too committed just yet. Having to gather up my stuff and hastily explain in a hallway why I was bailing could complicate things if I had to split in a hurry.

  “I think I’ll just stay in the van,” I told her.

  “You sure?” she asked. “There’ll be more volunteers arriving tomorrow, so if you don’t take the room now, it’s gone for good.”

  The need for a quick getaway was too valuable.

  “The van’s fine,” I said. “Where can I park it?”

  “Somewhere out of the way,” she said. “How ’bout down by the pond?”

  She got in the van and directed me off the dirt road and through the tall grass. With all the bumps and dips, we couldn’t go faster than three miles an hour. But we found a nice spot beside the pond, out of view from both the road and the main farmhouse. If nothing else, the seclusion would be nice.

  Then it was time for dinner. Standing in a circle around a central serving table, the twelve of us held
hands. The others fell silent. To feel less awkward, I closed my eyes. The woman to my left squeezed my hand. Keep an open mind, I reminded myself. Five seconds later, she squeezed my hand a bit harder. I knew I was fresh meat on the scene but hadn’t expected the female communards to be quite so forward.

  A couple seconds later, she really wrenched my hand.

  Then the woman to my right squeezed my other hand. What, her too?

  When I looked up, all eyes were on me. The cook then held up the hand of the guy to her right. He held up the woman’s hand to his right. She held up my hand. I finally understood. I held up the hand of the woman to my right. When the chain reaction returned to the cook again, she said, “All right, let’s eat.”

  The meal of millet burgers and Indian dal was actually quite tasty. Lindsey explained that all the ingredients from the salad were from the farm’s huge vegetable garden. The muffins—baked the day before—were smothered in butter made from milk from the farm’s own cow. Even the beer I was drinking was brewed on-site. It was pretty cool to feel—for the first time—so connected to the source of a meal.

  I finished my eats before the others and was raring to get started with what brought me there. At the kitchen sink, I found a note taped to the window above it that read: “Pete, welcome to our funky farm sink!”

  I donned my custom-made Dish Master apron and got to it. An hour later, when I was nearly done with the dishes, one of the women announced that it was time for the sing-along.

  “Pete, are you gonna join us?” she asked.

  “Uh…” I said. An open mind, I thought. Keep an open mind. “Uh, I need to finish the dishes first.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Come join us when you’re done.”

  The group of communards gathered in a circle in the front room—in view of the kitchen sink—and began singing a Joan Baez song. My mind began to close.

  After a few songs, the chorus leader called out, “Are you done yet, Pete?”

  “Not yet,” I replied, which was true only because I’d been dragging out the dish work. But a few minutes later, when all the dishes were put up and the sink sparkled, the singing was still in progress. It looked like there was no avoiding it. But then I noticed the bucket I’d been tossing the food scraps into. Aha! I grabbed it and announced, “I gotta dump the compost!”

  Out the back door, I emptied the bucket’s contents onto the compost pile. Then I fumbled my way through the dark to Crescent. Once inside, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. I wasn’t cut out for a dish job that entailed group hand-holding and sing-alongs. I wanted to rev up and tear out of there. But my plan to be readied for a quick getaway had backfired. In the dark, I doubted I could successfully navigate through all the bumps and tree stumps to get back to the dirt road.

  So instead, I crawled into bed and went to sleep.

  In the morning, I ate breakfast with Lindsey.

  “I heard you ducked out on the singing last night,” she said.

  “Yeah, but…” I said, starting to defend myself before realizing I had no alibi.

  “Don’t worry about it; I skipped it too,” she said. “Group singing doesn’t happen that often.”

  “And the hand-holding at dinner?”

  “That’s just something we do,” she said. “It’s harmless.”

  I took her word for it.

  Though I was there for the dishing, I didn’t mind helping out with the harvesting as well. So after breakfast, Lindsey walked me out to the fields. There, she taught me how to use a machete to first strip a sorghum stalk of its leaves and then cut it down. The stalks were then loaded on a flatbed trailer, which a tractor hauled to the farm’s mill. There, the juice was squeezed from them, boiled and reduced down to a syrup that was jarred and used like molasses.

  Just before lunch, I returned to the farmhouse and got started on cleaning the mess that the cook-of-the-day had already made.

  A daily routine soon developed for me: a couple hours of field work in the morning, then lunch and the lunch dishes. A couple hours of field work in the afternoon, then dinner and the dinner dishes.

  The view out the kitchen window above the sink might have been the best view I’d ever had at a job. It beat the oil rig porthole’s view of the Gulf of Mexico. And it even beat the summer camp tent-cabin’s view of the Tahoe Basin. Most of the time, the view was of just part of the organic garden. But then at lunchtime, it often livened up when female communards in their twenties came in from the fields—topless.

  One day, after lunch, one of the women approached me at the sink.

  “You seem to have a real bond—a deep connection—with dishwashing,” she said. “Is it spiritual for you?”

  “No,” I said. “Just something I do.”

  “But don’t you find washing dishes to be zen?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Seems like if it were zen, it wouldn’t hurt my back and arms so much.”

  I had to keep on my toes to not stick out too much. It wasn’t always easy, like when I’d forget myself and ask, “Has the mailman been by yet today?”

  “Mial-co,” I was corrected more than once about using the gender neutral term.

  Or the time I broke out a box of Little Debbie brownies. When I offered them around, they were received as if I was trying to hand out used diapers. From then on, I kept my store-bought snacks hidden in the van.

  Or the time when I found myself engaged in a conversation with a woman about her beliefs in goddesses and faeries. It took me too long to realize she wasn’t putting me on.

  Despite all that, it wasn’t quite the hippie-fest that I’d feared. Male hair was short, most everyone was lucid and intelligent and I didn’t hear a lick of jam-band music the whole time.

  After a few weeks, I found myself asking everyone—both the commune’s residents and the farm’s other visitors—about the rationale and philosophy behind intentional communities. For historical background, someone suggested reading the behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s 1948 novel Walden Two. A tale of a fictional utopian intentional community, it was the influential book that directly—or indirectly—inspired the founding of many communes in the 1960s and ’70s.

  While reading the farmhouse’s copy of the book by flashlight one night in the van, I came close to dozing off. But my eyes popped wide open when the author introduced the tricky subject of shit work. In any discussion of utopian societies, it’s the thorniest of issues: Who will pick up the trash? Who will dig the ditches? And, most important, who will wash the dishes?

  In Skinner’s egalitarian world, the dish work was a responsibility shared by all of the thousand-odd residents. This is exemplified when the reader is introduced—in one of Walden Two’s cafeterias—to the dishpit (or, as Skinner termed it, the “dishwashery”). It’s staffed not by some wino or an immigrant but by “a very pretty girl” and “a distinguished man with a full beard.”

  Skinner makes requisite dishing less arduous through his innovations and “cultural engineering.” Foremost among these are trays with little beveled compartments for the main course, side dishes, dessert, etc. By modifying the residents’ behavior to accept eating their meals off such a contraption, Skinner boasts that the sheer number of plates and bowls dirtied would be reduced. Moreover, the trays would be made of transparent glass. This would enable the dishwasher to see whether or not the bottom side was clean without first having to flip it over. The result: wrists would be taxed less; time would be saved.

  I begged to differ.

  Granted, decreasing the total number of dishes would help alleviate the dishwasher’s lament of “too many dishes.” That’s a given. Even a hundred years before the publication of Skinner’s book, Henry David Thoreau—a dude who apparently hated unnecessary dishing—had advocated in the original Walden, “Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.”

  But glass trays as a solution? They sounded more like
a nightmare!

  If Skinner’s very pretty girl were to spot some splotch on a tray, I imagined, she’d start scrubbing at it. But if it didn’t disappear, she’d think, Crap, all that scrubbing for nothing. She’d then have to flip it and scrub all over again. Yet if she had opaque dishware, she’d know good and well what side any splotch was on. Thus, in Walden Two’s innovative dishwashery, her wrists wouldn’t be doing less twisting; they’d be doing more!

  Besides, who really cares if a bottom side is cruddy? In the heat of battle, even a Dish Master doesn’t have time to go chasing after every splotch in every corner of every piece of dishware. And as long as there are no outbreaks of salmonella or hepatitis A, no one’s ever the wiser. But a disher can’t get away with laxness like that with clear glass. A diner who sees crud through the plate won’t just ignore it. Customers—who never bother to commend a disher for sparkling clean silverware—won’t miss the opportunity to scream bloody murder at the sight of some harmless crust on the bottom of their glass plate.

  Skinner was full of it. For all his highfalutin ideas, the guy had obviously never busted a single sud. He’d probably dreamt up all this as he sat back with his feet propped up on his desk, dictating the tale to his secretary. Surely even she’d rolled her eyes when he let out, “I’ve got it! Glass trays!”

  If I couldn’t gulp his idea for utopian dishing, how was I to swallow his plans for an entire paradise?

  The next morning in the kitchen, while complaining to Lindsey about the glass tray conundrum, I flipped my breakfast plate over and over to illustrate my point.

  “See?” I asked. “See what I mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about that,” she answered. “It’s been a long time since I read that book.”

  Later, out in the sorghum field, I continued to press my case.