12

Biscuits, Hush Puppies and Deep-Fried Everything

I didn’t make it to the dude ranch. But in Saint Paul, Minnesota (#10), I did dish at a coffee shop. Then in Dayton, Ohio (#11)—where Larry Flynt once busted suds at an Italian restaurant—it was at a hospital. To get myself hired on at the hospital, my urine had to be drug tested. So when it was time to quit, I thought it fitting to call the boss and tell him in my worst druggie voice, “Bro, I’m totally high right now.”

He was supposed to tell me to get lost.

“It’s okay,” he said instead. “What you do on your own time is your own business.”

Huh? What’d I have to do to get fired?

“But like, I’m seeing sounds and smelling colors,” I added.

Still, he wouldn’t can me.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He insisted I come to work. So I was forced to end my work relationship a more conventional way: I hung up the phone. With that, I’d quit.

 

When I rolled into Hattiesburg, Mississippi, I had my heart set on working in some dumpy shack diner that served grits, biscuits, hush puppies and deep-fried everything. I wanted a place where catfish was caught from the kitchen window and the bathroom was just a hole in the floor. Sure, they were clichés. But they were what I craved.

While wandering the streets of Hattiesburg, though, I didn’t find a single “Dishwasher Wanted” sign. Some towns fly The Sign and some don’t. For example, a few months before, in Boston, Massachusetts (#12), I’d only just left the bus station and was meandering along Newbury Street on my way to my friend’s apartment when I saw The Sign flying in a café window. I popped in, got the job and was asked to start that night. Then I continued on my way and, within minutes, saw another sign. But not wanting to be too gluttonous, I left that second job for some other pearl diver to pick up.

Though in Hattiesburg I didn’t find a sign downtown, I did find plenty of neat old buildings that were vacant, crumbling and forgotten. While the buildings were great to explore and lounge about in, their condition was depressing. Obviously, their best days had long passed.

 

One day I picked up applications from fourteen eateries. None of them were exactly shack diners. And the one bar where the urinal was a hole in the floor? They said, maybe not surprisingly, that they had no use for a dishwasher.

The following day, I sat down to fill out the applications. First, though, my story. I had to figure out how to explain who I was, why I was in this town, why I’d left my last job, etc. Was I a happy-go-lucky ass-kisser? A scowling transient? An impoverished family man in a jam?

While I was staring at the stack of blank applications and pondering my identity, the phone rang. It was the fella from the Chinese restaurant. When I’d asked him for an application the day before, instead of handing me one, he just asked for my name and number. And why not? Any other information (experience, references, education, etc.) about a dishwashing applicant was superfluous.

“You dishwasher?” the voice asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You want job?”

“Yeah.”

“You hired.”

The next afternoon at the Chinese place, Milton—the boss—explained that a couple days earlier, his dishwasher was caught trying to supplement his income by robbing a nearby restaurant. Off to jail he went, and into his job I followed.

For less than an hour, I putzed around the dishroom with the lunch dishes before I was told it was time to eat. The dining area was deserted—the afternoon lull—but the lunch buffet was still set up. After following the cooks through the buffet line, I sat at a small table with my book.

“No,” Milton said. “You sit here.”

He pointed to an empty seat at a larger table where the rest of the crew sat.

One of the cooks leaned over and said, “In Chinese culture, it’s rude to eat alone.”

Well, I figured, when in Mississippi (#13), do as the Chinese-Mississippians. I moved to the big table.

“Where you from?” one of the cooks asked.

I told the truth. “San Francisco.”

My answer got the attention of everyone at the table. I quickly learned that to Chinese immigrants in a place like Hattiesburg, Mississippi, San Francisco—home to a massive Chinese community—was Mecca. No one present had yet made the pilgrimage, but they all hoped to do so someday.

“A lot of Chinese restaurants there,” Milton said.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “Hundreds of them.”

When he asked how the food at this restaurant compared with the chow at the Chinese places in San Francisco, I didn’t lie to him.

“This is better than any Chinese food I’ve ever had in San Francisco,” I said.

Since I’d never worked in a Chinese place, and because I didn’t eat out, I’d actually never dined in any Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. But the food was free, so I felt obligated to praise it.

 

That night, Milton walked into the dishpit, reached for the pot I was busy washing and said he needed it.

“Let me just rinse it first,” I told him.

“Not necessary,” he said and then grabbed it.

“Yeah, but—”

He made off with the soapy pot and, a minute later, started making soup in it.

Later, he told me I was spending too much time scrubbing pots. They needn’t be rinsed after they’d been washed. He then pointed to a rack of water glasses waiting to be run through the dishmachine and said, “Don’t need to wash these.”

Milton picked up the rack and carried the glasses back to the dining room.

Now normally, a request to work less couldn’t have fallen on more sympathetic ears. But this kitchen—and everything in it—was so filthy and greasy that my professional genes couldn’t let the cleaning slide.

In the days that followed, Milton kept a close eye on me. He was quick to inform me if he thought I’d spent too much time pot-scrubbing. Therefore, in his presence, I had to swab the pots and pans ever so casually. But as soon as his back was turned, I’d scrub furiously. And before I ever dared to run the water glasses through the machine, I had to peek around to make sure no one witnessed my subversive act.

Actually, there was never a moment when I was truly alone; I shared the dishroom with a cockroach colony. Roaches—and rodents, too—had a keen appreciation for free grub that challenged even my own. In almost every American restaurant, they’re snacking away. Though some restaurants are better than others at keeping the vermin out of view of the customers, the critters are there nonetheless. Any restaurant owner that claims otherwise is lying and diners should avoid the place. But at a restaurant where the owner does cop to infestation, though it may seem an unappetizing idea, one shouldn’t hesitate to dine there. It may be infested, but at least the owner is honest—and that should count for something.

At this Chinese joint, all around me the cockroaches scuttled, scampered, skipped and scattered. Before I arrived on the scene, they’d had free rein to brazenly eat whatever they wanted. But now there was a new sheriff in town. I soon spent much of my time tracking, trapping and slaying them. Or, at least, trying to.

Once a cockroach clung to a plate I’d pulled from a bus tub. Before I could hose him off the plate and down the drain, the roach leapt onto my shirt. I tried to brush him off, but the surly critter maneuvered much too fast. My hands scrambled to catch him as he ran laps around my torso. Then I felt something on my pant leg. Another roach was trying to pull me down. A third dropped from the ceiling onto my head. It was three-on-one—unfair! As we jostled and wrestled, my body spun across the room and crashed into stacks of dishes. They knocked me off balance and to the floor I went. Two of them held me down while the third slapped me senseless. In bitter defeat, I mumbled, “Uncle.” Each roach dragged a bus tub of dirty dishes off to a dark corner. To the victors went the spoils.

That may not be exactly how it happened, but that was how it ended. If anyone, it was I who was the intruder—the pest. The cockroaches were there before I arrived and would be there long after I left. They could skip and scamper to their heart’s content. I admitted defeat and, in the vermin wars, officially proclaimed my neutrality.

 

The job provided mountains of fortune cookies. And when my fortune read “Work expands to fill the time available,” I knew that it was time to move on. Then again, if I’d really wanted to, I could’ve culled a fortune that would’ve prompted me to stay. But this particular fortune turned up on the very afternoon that the restaurant’s previous dishman finally made bail. Upon his release, he came straight to the restaurant. After catching up with the cooks, he entered the dishpit.

“So you’re the new dishwasher, huh?” he asked.

Shy about discovering how an armed robber might react to an opportunistic disher who’d nabbed his job, I answered reluctantly, “Um, yeah.”

But in this restaurant, I discovered, he was no armed robber. He was a dish dog. And so was I. Though he didn’t know me from Adam, almost instantly he showed off his new jailhouse tattoos of his kids’ names.

Then the old disher hung out and told me about how, at his hearing, the presiding judge openly disapproved of his interracial marriage.

“The judge about shit himself when I told him we have kids!” he said as I scrubbed a pot. He started putting the pots away without first rinsing them. Watching him work, I realized that, as a mere itinerant, I’d just been keeping the dishwater warm for him during his absence. And judging by his failure to rinse off the soap, I knew the quality of dishwashing would again decline to a level satisfactory to the boss. It was clearly time to pass the scrub brush back to him.

 

At the end of my shift, I quit, telling Milton I was leaving town.

“Yeah, you a big-city guy,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to do in this town.”

There was some truth in what he said. While traveling around the country enabled me to see all the places I’d dreamt about, it also provided me with the opportunity to window-shop for possible places to live if I were to ever settle down after the quest. Any possible new hometown would need to be somewhere where I could wander the same streets year after year. And not only was there a limit to how much exploring could be done in a town as small as Hattiesburg, but many of its walkable streets were being replaced by sidewalk-less, strip-malled boulevards.

Unfortunately, it was a typical story. Even Milton pointed it out to me.

“Here, for entertainment, people go to Wal-Mart,” he said. Instead of strolling the streets, they strolled the store’s aisles—even if nothing was purchased.

For weeks, the talk of the town had been the closing of the old Wal-Mart and the opening of the new, farther-out-of-town, superenormous Wal-Mart. Around the restaurant, as well as around town, the question on everyone’s lips was the same: “Have you been yet?”

I hadn’t been yet. So I went to see what all the fuss was about. While following the sidewalk-less boulevard out of town, I got a bad feeling as I lumbered past all the big-box stores and drive-throughs. After finally reaching the store, within minutes of entering I became disoriented, developed a rare headache and had to flee. Though my first Wal-Mart experience lasted no longer than six or seven minutes, it made a deep impression on me. If municipal strolling was limited to this monstrosity’s aisles, then I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay settled in a town like this for long.

I liked what I saw of what the town had been; feared what it was becoming; and agreed with Milton: small-town life here wasn’t for me.

After he paid me, I filled a bag with enough fortune cookies to last me a month.

 

According to my meticulous records of Dishwasher correspondence (hundreds of names and addresses scrawled chronologically into a large book), a Dishwasher reader lived in this town. So I sent him a postcard.

“Hey, this is Dishwasher Pete. I’m in town,” it read. “Let me know if you wanna hang out and swap suds stories.”

Minutes after my final shift at the chowmeinery, the phone rang. It was a friend of the person I’d written to. She’d actually been the one who’d found a copy of Dishwasher #9 at a bookstore in Atlanta.

“Can I take you to breakfast tomorrow and pick your brain?” she asked.

“If you’re paying,” I said, “you can pick whatever you want.”

The next morning, while I scarfed diner fare, the woman—Cheryl—asked the usual questions about my quest. How did it begin? What states had I hit? Where was I headed next?

To that last question, I answered, “I don’t know yet.”

“Louisiana!” she exclaimed. “You need to do Louisiana next.”

She’d just finished a master’s degree in creative writing and was in the process of moving back to her boyfriend’s place in New Orleans.

“You gotta come down and stay with us and wash dishes there,” she said.

New Orleans? I’d heard identical accounts from two different white guys who’d unsuccessfully sought dish work there. White employers, they claimed, hired only blacks for those jobs. In both accounts, the narrators had left that town without busting any suds, saying it was impossible for a white boy to dish in New Orleans.

I accepted Cheryl’s offer, gung ho to prove those chumps wrong.