by Pete Jordan
It was supposed to be a celebratory dessert. On February 10, 1990—exactly ten years earlier—I’d proclaimed my fifty-state goal. But as I shoved the scoops down my throat, I wondered, What am I celebrating? Ten years of clean dishes? Ten years of roaming? Or ten years of cultivating carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis and a stiff back?
Embarking on the quest had enabled me to satisfy my curiosity about what lay beyond San Francisco’s borders. During those years, not only had I seen so many corners of the nation, I was also able to window-shop the country for a place to live once all fifty states had been dished. But the more I traveled, the harder it became to stay put. And now I was on a course toward total rootlessness.
By the time I’d scraped the last of the cold hot fudge out of the bottom of the dish, I determined that if I’d learned just one thing from a full decade of travels, jobs and ailments, it was this: I didn’t want to settle down in a van in Boise.
As miserable as I was, I couldn’t afford to leave town for another couple weeks, not until the next payday. So I slaved onward. Day by day, I gained ground on the pots, leaving fewer and fewer of them to soak overnight. Finally—after striving for twenty-two straight shifts—one afternoon, I managed to clean every single pot, pan and cooking utensil. At the end of that shift, I was able to stand for a minute and take in, for the first time, the sight of a vacant, sparkling pot cubicle.
The following day was payday. The weeks of struggling to keep pace with the pots were over. Come 3:30, I left behind in the cubicle dozens of sheet pans coated with burnt bacon grease—an offering to whoever would replace me. At 3:45, I cashed my check. At 5:58, Crescent and I said good riddance to Idaho and crossed the state line.
I reached Portland, Oregon, and within two days was dishing again at two of my old haunts: Paradox and La Cruda. Though the gigs were in state #15—a state I’d conquered many times over—they were at places where I could be as slovenly as I wanted about shaving, where I got paid in cash after each shift and where I was able to wash both the pots and the dishes.
While it was good to be back in a town where I had no shortage of pals to eat ice cream with, I was sad to find that so many of my colleagues had gotten out of the dishwashing racket. Hawthorne had left Genoa and was now in advertising. At La Cruda, Lauren was now a cook. Yanul ditched Montage to become a full-time musician. It was all part of a larger trend. Letters were frequently arriving from long-time pearl divers who apologetically confessed to me—the Dish Master—that they’d hung up their aprons and found other, less worthy employment. While I soldiered on, others were dropping left and right.
The worst was when, not long before, I’d slipped through the back door of a café in Arcata and found Jeff chopping vegetables. When my dish guru noticed me, he looked as guilty as if I’d caught him chopping up a baby. He averted eye contact and said, “It pays twenty-five cents an hour more.”
In Portland, I was volunteering again at Reading Frenzy while crashing at the house of the shop’s owner, Chloe, and its lone paid employee—Amy Joy. It’d been three years since Amy Joy had taken me to lunch at the diner, two years since she’d gifted me the sunset picnic and a year since she’d treated me to dinner in New Orleans. As cheap as I was, it was painfully obvious that it was now my turn to feed her.
During a pizza-slice dinner, I told Amy Joy about my miserable time in Boise. And about how constantly bouncing around the country like a pinball was wearing me down. And about how I only ever had affairs with places—and dumped each for the prettier one just down the road.
Later that night, while treating her to drinks at a bar, I said, “I just wanna have some little place of my own.”
I wanted to experience the change of seasons year-round in the same spot, to stick around long enough to join a bowling league, to cultivate a garden.
“At the very least,” I said, “I wanna own a plant.”
I was telling Amy Joy that I wanted to buy a house somewhere—a home base for the last years of my quest until I finally settled down for good. Amy Joy said she wanted to join me.
This time I finally got the hint.
On the surface, it appeared that I’d finally discovered the answer to the question: “What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?” To be honest, though, I didn’t believe it could work between us. I figured I’d take off for the dishes, go roaming around while thinking everything was hunky-dory. And in the meantime, she’d dump me.
Amy Joy assured me she wouldn’t.
Yet how did I respond? By unconsciously trying to shake her off my trail.
But whenever I’d suggest we go for ice cream in stormy weather, Amy Joy never daintily demurred. She was always ready to ride her bike with me in the rain to the ice cream shop.
And when—during a trip up to Washington—I’d suggest we ride another ferry, Amy Joy was always game. In a single day, we rode six different Puget Sound ferries.
And whenever I mentioned that I didn’t know where I wanted to buy a house, Amy Joy was never bothered. It didn’t matter to her, as long as we were together.
For once, I couldn’t shake a woman—no matter how hard I tried.
Amy Joy was definately a keeper. Only problem: where to keep her.
28
Cheap Houses, Cheap Dishman
So…where to live? That’d always been the kicked-about hypothetical question while I traveled. Now, though, it really needed to be answered.
From all my years of bouncing around I knew settling down in the mountains or in the country or even in just a small town like Colby, Kansas, was out of the question. I’d go stir-crazy and quickly become restless if I lived somewhere where there weren’t plenty of old neighborhoods to explore by bike or foot. That also ruled out the nation’s many sprawling suburbs. A city like New Orleans would’ve fit the bill if it weren’t for its relentless humidity. For that matter, the climate canceled out the entire South. Southern California was easily ruled out because it was a nightmare for cycling or walking. At the same time, cities that were landlocked, like Phoenix or Denver, were especially suspect and to be avoided since they didn’t feel like they should even have a reason for existing.
Cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco were alluring candidates because they had plenty of old interesting neighborhoods suitable for exploring. They fit almost all of my criteria, in fact, except that a dishman simply couldn’t afford to live in them. According to a survey of wages by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of 505 occupations, dishwashing came in 505th—dead last—with only a $13,000 annual average. To be able to settle into my own home in my own hometown of San Francisco, I’d have to work at least five or six full-time dish jobs at the same time. With my occupation’s crap wages, even a town like Portland—the place I’d drifted back to so many times—was out of my league.
After much contemplation, I finally determined the ideal place for me to establish a base. It was a good-size city and had numerous old and interesting neighborhoods. Though it was still somewhat decaying since its industrial glory days had ended, it was tree-filled, river-lined and hilly. The people I knew there were all nice. And it seemed like a place I’d remain excited about each time I woke up and slowly realized where I was. Most important, it had heaps of cheap houses that even a cheap dishman could afford.
It was back in state #21—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
When I told Amy Joy it was my destination, she eagerly packed up her stuff and threw it in Crescent. She left behind her life in Portland to move two thousand miles away to a town she’d never even seen before. I grabbed about seven thousand of the ten thousand Dishwasher #16 covers, figuring I’d finally get around to publishing that issue since, by now, I had thousands of orders for it. Then we left.
My plan to find a cheap home was to scour the hillsides for a vacant house that could only be reached by one of the city’s many municipal stairwells. In an age when everyone needed to be able to drive their car right up (or even into) their house, the demand for homes that were
inaccessible by car and could be reached only by climbing/descending hundreds of stairs couldn’t be that great. And in a town of cheap houses, a hundred-year-old house in that kind of a location would be the cheapest, especially if it sat empty.
After a few days of climbing and descending thousands of hillside stairs, I finally found a good prospect for my future base of operations: a rinky-dink house on the South Side Slopes, a hillside overlooking the Monongahela River. It sat a hundred steps below the street above and two hundred above the street below. Through the county assessor’s office, I tracked down its owner, who showed me the house the next day. Modest, secluded and vacant for several years—it fit the bill perfectly. After the owner led me around the old place that his late parents had called home for decades, he asked me how much I was willing to pay for it.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Fifteen thousand?”
“Really?” he said, raising his eyebrows.
I didn’t know if this meant my figure was too high or too low.
He then added, “I was thinking more like…thirty thousand.”
There was a pause on my part before I realized we were now negotiating.
“Uh, okay,” I said. “How ’bout—seventeen thousand?”
“Twenty-five,” he shot back.
“Nineteen.”
He thought for a second, then said, “I really can’t go lower than twenty-five.”
Geez, I thought, twenty-five thousand dollars! Even though he would’ve been asking twenty to thirty times the price if the house were back in San Francisco, twenty-five thousand meant washing a shitload of dishes. The biggest purchase I’d ever made up till then was the $1,400 I’d blown on Crescent.
To stall for time before making such a decision, I told the owner I’d have to get a second opinion.
When I returned the next day with my friend George, he immediately pointed out something I’d overlooked. The building sat on a foundation made up of loose rocks the size of pizza delivery boxes, one corner of which had already given way to a minor landslide.
“That’s bad?” I asked George.
“Not if you don’t mind your house sliding down the hill,” he said.
George warned me not to buy the place. And it was just as well he had. I barely had twenty-five dollars to my name let alone twenty-five grand. George and others told me that I needed to get approved for this thing called a mortgage, where a bank would buy the house and then I’d pay the bank back over the years. It was something I’d never even considered years before in Kansas, when I’d wanted to buy a $15,000 house in one lump payment. The reason that plan had failed was because I’d never saved up the $15,000. So this mortgage thing sounded like the way to go to make the Pittsburgh project work.
The mortgage application I picked up from a bank asked me to list stuff like my assets and credit history and job history. Assets? I still had my duffel bag and my sleeping bag and my three-speed bike after all those years. Crescent was good for a few hundred bucks. What else? Stocks? Nope. Trust funds? No. Bank accounts? I’d closed my last bank account twenty years earlier when I’d quit my paper route. With little to report, I skipped the asset section.
Next: credit history. Well, there was that student loan I’d taken out when I first went off to college at seventeen. Actually, maybe it was best I didn’t mention that loan since I’d defaulted on it before eventually paying it back. Besides, I had other credit history to boast about. Of the umpteen times I’d bummed money from family and friends, I’d paid back every loan each time I was employed again. But the application didn’t provide space to explain all this. There was space, though, to list my credit cards. I’d never had a credit card, so I moved on.
Next: employment. Now we’re talking, I thought. If I had too little information for those other sections, I had oodles of info to fill this section, what with all the jobs I’d held. But then I realized, it wasn’t the quantity of my past jobs the bank was looking for, but rather the quality and security of my current one. The bank wanted to ensure I wasn’t just some shiftless habitual job-quitter who couldn’t make monthly payments.
I left the mortgage application blank.
Before I could even think about buying a house, I had to liven up my mortgage-worthiness. I needed to open bank accounts and round up credit cards. More important, I needed to find a steady dish job and hang on to it for months or even—gasp—years.
29
The Blue-Rimmed Plate
My dream of a house temporarily deferred, Amy Joy found us an apartment to rent and I heard that the deli at a Pittsburgh co-op food market needed a dishman. Seven years earlier, I’d dished at a similar food co-op in Boston. I’d appreciated that the fruits of my labor went toward the good of the store and its members rather than toward lining a restaurant owner’s pockets with profits. So this Pittsburgh co-op sounded like a promising workplace for trying to hold down a steady job.
Getting hired was a snap. The tough part was—for the first time ever—to try to do what most people did routinely. It was what my dad had always done: go to the same job…work it every day…indefinitely.
At every stop along my fifty-state quest, an end to each job always remained comfortably within sight. Whether it was a couple weeks or—at the very most—a few months, the fact I knew there’d be a day not far off when I’d no longer have to come to the job helped me to ever go to the job in the first place.
Breaking the Fundamental Rule on the oil rig had been an easier challenge than this one; on the oil rig, I knew from the start I only had to survive two weeks, tops. Here, there was no telling how long I’d have to stick around in order to convince a banker that I wasn’t a habitual quitter.
So any morning I was scheduled to dish, I couldn’t roll over and go back to sleep. When I was riding my bike to work, I couldn’t flake out and keep on pedaling. And if a cook burnt a pan or my back acted up, I couldn’t pull off the apron and walk out. Every urge to succumb to the notion had to be suppressed.
That I actually didn’t completely hate the job helped the suppression. The young deli manager seemed scared of me and gave me a lot of leeway. The other deli employees were all interesting and entertaining. I ate well on the clock and was even able to take home tons of leftovers to Amy Joy. Best of all, after three months, I’d have health insurance for the only time in my adult life aside from when I dished in Alaska.
As the weeks passed and the impulses were quelled, little by little, I transformed into Mr. Reliable. I was never late, always arrived clean-shaven and kicked ass with the dishes. Not only did I never blow off work, I became the guy the deli manager called when the other disher was too hung over to work.
Life as Mr. Reliable was good for a couple months, until I started to notice the blue-rimmed plate. The deli used only plain white plates, so the sudden appearance of the oddball blue-rimmed plate was a mystery. Had a coworker brought in a plate of homemade cookies and forgotten to take the plate home again? Had a customer somehow slipped it in? I asked my coworkers, but no one knew where it’d come from.
Each time I washed him, Blue-Rimmed caught my attention. As soon as he was returned to the clean stacks, up he’d pop again in my sinks. It seemed like I was washing him constantly. Then, on a busy Saturday in the deli, I counted how many times Blue-Rimmed passed through my hands. Twenty-seven times! I couldn’t believe it.
Up until then, I’d always considered dishwashing a progressive pursuit: I’d start a shift with dirty dishes, finish it with clean ones, then move on to the next town, the next job, always moving forward. But, as Blue-Rimmed went round and round, he pointed out that I had it all wrong. Really I was just moving in circles: washing things that only got dirty again within minutes. The next town, the next job, the story would always be the same: the dishes would never remain clean.
Over and over, Blue-Rimmed seemed to ridicule me, saying, “Dishwashing is pointless.”
I tried to silence Blue-Rimmed by hiding him on the bottom of the clean stac
ks or by leaving him on the bottom of the sink while I washed the anonymous white dishes in his place. But no matter what I did, Blue-Rimmed always worked his way back into my hands, where I was subjected to his taunts yet again.
Finally, I had enough of him. And with great satisfaction, I threw him at the floor and watched him smash into blue-rimmed shards.
But the satisfaction was short-lived. Though the messenger was dead, his message lived on. Despite the shattered corpse on the floor, dishwashing still remained pointless. Even worse, my nemesis had the last laugh. Instead of just kicking the shards under the counter as the Dishwasher Pete of old would’ve done, Mr. Reliable dutifully swept up the remains and deposited them in the trash.
A couple of nights later, I took a tumble of my own. While exploring a new route home from work, my bike hit a speed bump in the dark. I flew over the handlebars and landed on my face. When I awoke, my very first thought was: That’s odd—the street’s wet, but it isn’t raining.
I lay there with a damp face until I heard a car approaching and then scrambled to sit up. The car slowed as I stared directly into its red headlights. Red headlights? I looked down. The little puddle my face had been lying in was blood.
I looked up at the car’s driver and he looked back at me aghast.
“It’s bad, huh?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” he stammered while looking visibly ill at the sight of me. This wasn’t a good sign. It seemed like he should’ve been able to handle it. After all, he was a cop.
The driver and his partner stepped out of their patrol car and helped me to my feet. They wiped some blood off my face and wrapped my head in a bandage. They had no fasteners, so they affixed the bandage by simply tucking it into itself.
“You sure you don’t want us to call an ambulance?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said. “Can’t afford it.”