Randy Russell

P.O. Box 2284

Portland, OR 97208

MAD, IN FRONT OF THE MACHINE—the mighty Hobart dishwasher, high art, low art, industrial stainless steel, children's toy, your best friend and worst enemy. The first and last in the food factory line. The top of the circle, the integral part of the mechanism, and the bottom of the totem pole. "We need more spoons right now!"

Always the first to get blamed and the last to get paid. No respect, high turnover—just waiting for a busser spot to open up or a bus to get out of town. The job of Dishwasher: Something you could depend on if everything else failed, you were in a fix, needed a few bucks, a job. There was always an opening somewhere, according to myth, if you needed it—all you had to be was willing. I mean, all you had to do was not be able to pay for your dinner and you were automatically a dishwasher for one evening. According to myth.

It meant: No money in your pocket. It meant defeat. Desperation. Romance. In the mythical land of America, The United States Of, there are three things you can do if all avenues lead to Shit Creek: Join the Navy. Turn to crime. Be a dishwasher.

So it turns out that crime is really the only thing you can depend on. It took me awhile to learn the truth about the dishwasher racket. It wasn't something I set out to discover the inside-outs of—it was just something that happened, like the bad haircut you get when you join the Marines. It all started, appropriately against my will, in grade school, my first job ever, at the school cafeteria. They had this deal where you could work on the slop line a few times a week and you'd get lunches free, so you could save your lunch money from mom for beer and drugs.

The kitchen was fascinating, as I recall—my job was to scrape the unwanted food off the returned trays and then load the trays and silverware on racks that would run through a huge car-wash-like automatic dishwasher. A Hobart, no doubt. The kitchen, especially next to the dishwasher, was balmy as hell itself, and it didn't help that I was a frail kid who used to get sick all the time and faint. The women who worked there were plain scary, and what I remember most of all was the overwhelming, sickening strong smell of black coffee. It would be over a decade before I would be able to touch a cup of coffee again without it churning my stomach, much less enjoy it. I suppose the whole experience was supposed to prepare me for the work world somewhere down the line, but I found it to be distasteful and unnecessary. Call it common sense or greed, but I soon realized that my parents were paying for my lunches anyway, and I didn't even particularly like the lunches, and I was not really benefitting personally from all my toil. I retired from the world of work forever, I hoped, figuring I'd become a millionaire playboy. Later, in high school, when that goal started to seem a little unrealistic, I vowed to become a bum. The point was: not to work. Of course, that was before they invented the word homeless.

In 1982, a year after I had begun to drink coffee again—too much coffee—I headed west to start a new life. I stopped in Tucson, Arizona long enough to lose the momentum necessary to make it to California, so I hit the streets in search of a dishwasher job, or any job, really. A newspaper article had said that Tucson had the fourth best economy in the country. I was naïve and believed it. I found out there were jobs in Tucson, if you were unskilled and a student and willing to get paid nothing, or skilled and an illegal alien and willing to get paid less, or in the Air Force (and were willing to join the Air Force). The school wouldn't have me, nor would the Air Force, nor would the illegal aliens. I've always had this problem: Everyone thinks I'm a cop, except for cops, who arrest me just for being myself.

A couple of years later I did the student thing, after I found out that through financial aid they would pay for me to go to school. I also found out that low paying jobs were readily available—jobs that weren't supposed to have anything to do with your goals, and in fact you weren't even expected to do a very good job, or even be there all of the time. In fact you could call in and say you can't make it in that day because you have to study, and it's, like, a legitimate excuse. Well, I guess some of these jobs can be pretty uninspiring, having to work side by side with other pinhead students, but I got lucky—I went in, said sign me up for anything, and I got "stuck" with morning weekday dishwasher. See, I like getting up early, and I started at seven and worked until the dishes were done, at ten or so. The best thing about it, however, was that I worked in this huge dishroom alone. The students would put their trays on a conveyer belt in the dining room which led through a long tunnel back to the dishroom where I'd take care of them. There was a switch where I could turn the belt off if I was getting swamped, and I pretty much set my own pace.

The trays would start coming down the conveyer belt as soon as I arrived—if I was late, they'd be stacked on a rack in the dining room. I'd spray this dishes, dump the food down the garbage disposal, load the dishes and trays into plastic racks, and run them through this enormous dishwasher on a moving belt, and they'd come out the other end clean, and I'd let them dry and stack them. As usual, only the silverware was a pain in the ass.

The great thing about this job was how it seemed to dominate so little of my life. I'd usually wake up about five minutes before I was supposed to be at work, throw on some clothes, drive there like a maniac, and be in the dishroom before I was even awake. It usually takes most people a while to become a human in the morning—you can sit at home for two hours reading the newspaper, eating scones—but this was better. I'd be at about fifteen percent of my mental capacity for about the first hour, and by the time I got done I was feeling good and awake and ready for classes. I usually didn't get bored until I got to the silverware. And since I worked alone, I could go about it anyway I wanted, just so it got done. There are few bad jobs you can say that about.

The other good thing was that every morning was like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I was allowed to drink all the "juice" and "coffee" I wanted from the serving line, plus they'd give me a breakfast item each day. But besides that, I had an incredible amount of untouched food coming down the conveyer belt. See, the students didn't pay for their food with money, but food coupons, most often purchased by mom and dad at the beginning of the semester. Many students would sell their food coupon books to make money for beer and drugs. Anyway, they had plenty of food coupons, and it didn't seem like actual money to them, so they'd just buy whatever they thought they wanted without thinking about if they were hungry, and then not eat it and send it to the garbage untouched. I was the garbage. At first I was eating a stack of pancakes and french toast every day. Always enough donuts, and often greasy "breakfast sandwiches" of soggy toast, melted cheese, and slimy ham. And better yet, the kids would often leave loose food coupons on their trays—often twenty-five cent ones, always five and ten cent ones. I saved these and they added up. The students didn't think of these as tips, but I did.

After awhile I couldn't touch the pancakes or french toast to save my life, but I always enjoyed making a huge doughy cannon ball out of uneaten pancakes and then throwing the massive object as hard as I could at the trash can. Golly, what fun. Man, you should have seen Fridays, a big hangover day, because if you don't know, Thursday night is the biggest drinking night on college campuses. These kids would come in and, you know how you have a hangover and think you want to eat, but then face to face with the food...you can't. Untouched, it came back to me.

How was I to know this would be the peak in my dishwashing career? In a way I think I did know, or I should've known. I knew nothing.

So with that ideal in my mind, I figured I'd have dishwashing in my future—if I wanted it. Something to fall back on, like dogshit on the sidewalk. A couple of years later, I found myself at an Indian restaurant in one of my famous (in my mind) one-day jobs. Just because I liked Indian food didn't mean I'd enjoy cleaning curry stains off dishes. Plus, there was no Hobart—just a sink.

Later that year I tryed my hand again—at a Holiday Inn restaurant, second shift. They gave me the whole introductory treatment, the head chef with a tall hat taking me around so everyone could make a big point about wiping their hard-working hands on their aprons before shaking my hand. The sous chef was a guy named Dent—he'd be my actual boss—and the other two dishwashers I was working with were crazed rednecks who came to work with three foot high ostrich feather cowboys hats. They told me how the "best thang" was when we had to work until four a.m. More money. The later the better. Dent told me that whenever we get off earlier than bar closing time, everyone meets at the bar across the street, Cheers, Too.

On my way to work on the fourth night—what would it be tonight? Cleaning the deep fryers, or the broiler oven, or filters—I didn't exactly make it in. I flipped out on the highway and seriously considered running my car into one of those concrete abutments. I decided that I would stay on the road, but go a different direction.

That summer, staying with my parents, broke, and kind of depressed, I applied for a lot of jobs including a third shift dishwasher job at the Country Kitchen. I had a good interview, and the job sounded so depressing I figured I was just the right person to get it. But I didn't. I'd probably still be working there, seven years later, had they hired me. No I wouldn't.

That fall I did something I had never done before. I found a job in a town before moving there. I was visiting Kent, Ohio, and I kind of impulsively went out looking for jobs one morning because there was a room open in my friends' house. I found the job in twenty minutes, and I was working the next morning.

Going to work that first morning, bright and early, fear and dread running through my consciousness, thinking, "What the hell am I doing?" I made the big walk there, with all the cars zipping by me to their jobs, and the sun on the horizon. To give myself courage I kept thinking how I was insane and nothing could touch me. Every time I go to a new job I think about how I'm insane and nothing can touch me. But it's never true. It turns out I'm merely touched and everything's insane. A little and a lot.

The job turned out to be a nightmare, however. Some advice: If you get considered for a dishwashing job, check to see if the machine is a Hobart, and not a makeshift jalopy piece of shit. I worked eight a.m. until four p.m. with no break, running the whole time, struggling against my faulty technology. I kept this up five days a week for a month, and about half way through my tenure, they hauled out the contraption and replaced it with something worse, but funnier. This new non-Hobart had an oval shaped track that ran the dishes around like a racetrack so you could let them go through as many times as you wanted. It was nice in theory, but it was held together with bag ties and kept breaking down, and I'd have to go climbing inside of the machine to fix it, kind of like Scotty on Star Trek. It also made a horrible noise, and at one point my annoyed boss and owner yelled at me, "Can't you keep that thing quiet?!" I didn't say something like: "You bought the fucker!"

Yes, and then there was that wonderful day when I just couldn't bring myself to go into work. I hadn't planned it, nor was I thinking about it the night before. I decided they couldn't pay me to do that job, not one day more. At that point the contract breaks down and negotiations are in order. My solution was to send them a letter and tell them about the job dreams I was having and how I feared for my mental health. Their solution was to then hire a mentally disabled person—they told me this when I picked up my last check—which they were happy about because they got government subsidies for hiring a mentally disabled person.

I approached my next dishwashing job with a better attitude. Another 24 hour country restaurant without a Hobart, but it was a fine dishwasher, and a pretty good set-up—isolated in the back. Cleaning hillbilly vomit from the bathrooms and mopping the lobby over customers' feet was also part of the job, so I really savored the dishwashing part. The most work came after the Sunday buffet, when there were a lot of dishes and all the buffet pans to clean—but also the most free food. I would load up a plate high with leftovers from the buffet, lots of sausage and eggs with cheese, potatoes and even waffles. It was not something to scoff at.

It was, I think, during this job that I kind of figured out how the restaurant thing really works. To be able to do this job you have to actually get into it—kind of like dancing. The thing about dancing is, no one actually does it without either coke or speed, along with alcohol. That's why when you work at a restaurant they encourage you to drink all the caffeinated beverages they have on hand. Coffee and cola just aren't enough to get me rockin' and rollin', however, even if I know it's for my own good. Rock'n'roll just isn't my natural state. I don't mean to sound like a snob, but I wash dishes like Thelonious Monk plays piano. You can't work in a restaurant like Thelonious Monk.

Oh, and there was one more dishwashing job—the real anchor for my resume. It was later that year at a 24 hour truckstop, where I got hired for a few nights a week as third shift Hobart-operator. I was delivering flowers during the day, but the thing about working two jobs is that it makes the inferior of the two seem all that much worse. And all that much easier to quit. Even though I saw some magnificent sunrises after work, my days were too filled with haziness. And even though they had a fine little Hobart, they also had a video monitor in the kitchen, presumably to keep employees from stealing steaks—but no one likes being monitored electronically. I saw a few fine sights at this job, like the cook throwing up blood from an ulcer just before his shift, but mostly it was just pretty depressing. I quit before too long even though I had promised the boss I would stick around. He yelled at me the day I came into pick up my check, and I happened to be in a rare good mood so I yelled back at him: "Fuck you asshole!" Not very original, but it was in front of several waitresses and customers. A solid gold moment.

I still want to wash dishes. But what I want is a pleasant weekday morning, part-time but good paying, all-you-can-eat, Hobart-rich dishwashing job. I may as well ask to be CEO of my own corporation. It is a job that just doesn't exist.

But then as you can tell by my attitude, I don't really want to work. I just want to hang out in the steam, eating free food, looking at art, and jotting down whatever comes into my head. And occasionally read a book.