I stepped off the bus in Little Rock, Arkansas, walked out of the bus station and found the house rented by Jim, a dish dog I’d met briefly in California. Jim had told me to look him up if I ever passed through Little Rock. Because it was only six in the morning, I decided to wait a couple more hours before officially looking him up. In the meantime, I crashed on a beat-up couch on his porch.
When Jim woke me a few hours later, practically the first words out of his mouth were: “Have you found a job yet?”
Of course I hadn’t. Not only had I been in town for just a couple of hours, I still had a few dollars in my pocket from the New Orleans drug study. I usually didn’t look for work until I was flat busted. Knowing more dishing loomed once I hit that no-money mark, I could stretch those final few bucks for weeks. But, like surrogate parents constantly wondering when I’d get off my ass and get a job, well-meaning friends often suggested places for me to work. Actually, it was helpful. Otherwise I would’ve ended up broke and cadging money from them. My parents would’ve been happy, had they only known that so many people were out there trying to keep my butt in line.
“Let’s get some beer,” Jim said, “and go find you a job.”
Several hours and miles and a couple of six-packs later, while we were walking up Kavanaugh Boulevard, Jim struck gold—The Sign in a restaurant window that’d been so elusive in New Orleans: “Dishwasher Wanted.”
“Perfect!” he said.
“Great,” I muttered.
Jim pushed me into the restaurant. I asked for the job and was hired.
“Two things,” the chef said. “Don’t show up to work drunk and don’t drink on the job.”
Apparently he didn’t smell the fumes, because he then asked me to start right away.
Since I knew all too well how painfully slow the work hours dragged whenever I started a shift plastered—and since I was already close to that state—I told him, “I’ll come back in an hour.”
That was now another rule of mine: Never start drinking until at least halfway through a shift, when the end was in sight (a rule I’d adhere to every night at that job).
An hour later and slightly more sober, I returned. A few minutes behind me, Lonnie—the other disher—arrived and trained me.
“Chef Dumb hired you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why’s he called Chef Dumb?”
“’Cause he’s dumb.”
Four minutes after it began, the training was complete.
“Now you just find yourself a chair,” Lonnie said, “and make yourself comfortable.”
He pulled a chair for himself into the tiny dishroom. I slapped together a makeshift seat by placing a new mop head atop a five-gallon bucket.
Sitting was a familiar position for us here. Despite its efforts to be an upscale eatery, even on the busiest weekend nights, the place attracted mostly yuppies-in-training who drank at the bar and ordered little from the kitchen. The upshot: few dirty dishes. Everyone else—bartenders, barbacks, wait staff, bussers and even the cooks—were constantly busy, but there was barely enough work in the dishpit for a lone dishwasher, let alone a two-man crew. So I sat on my ass and read my book while Lonnie sat on his ass and listened to the radio.
Arkansas was now #14.
During that first night, while I was standing over the sink and scrubbing a few pots and pans, Lonnie pulled down his pants and showed me all the entry and exit wounds from when he’d been shot in both legs. As he told the story, I started to feel dizzy, as if still plastered from the beers of hours earlier.
Lonnie then pointed his forefinger and fist at my face to describe the revenge he’d exact on his nemesis: “I’m gonna blow his head off.”
My own head was now clouded and felt like it could blow away.
“Yeah, but won’t prison suck?” I asked.
“I’m not gonna get caught,” he said. “You know why? ’Cause no one will know who did it.”
“Oh,” I said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Queasy, I looked at the steamy fumes I was inhaling from the sink and asked, “Hey, man, what’d you put in this water?”
“All that stuff,” he said, pointing to several plastic jugs beneath the sink. They were the very cleansers, detergents and bleaches whose labels warned against mixing them with other cleansers, detergents and bleaches.
On the verge of passing out, I tore through the kitchen, through the dining area and out the front door. On the sidewalk, I finally breathed fresh air.
Over the next few nights, though I was able to convince Lonnie to be less ambitious with the cleaning agents, the air in the dishroom remained acrid. Sniffing around, I figured out that some sort of noxious fumes were emanating from the locked utility closet adjacent to the dishpit. What the gas was—or what it was used for—I had no idea. All I knew was that it made me teary-eyed and nauseated. When I complained about it to Chef Dumb, he vowed to look into it.
Lonnie dealt with the gas issue by hanging out in the kitchen and bullshitting with the cooks or by hanging out at the bar and bullshitting with the bartenders. Preferring reading to bullshitting, I’d remain in the dishpit with my book until my concentration dulled or my vision blurred. Hanging out elsewhere in the restaurant may have meant breathing cleaner air, but it also meant encountering Chef Dumb and his empty promises. Or worse, encountering the customers.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t completely avoid the creepy patrons. Employees and customers used the same bathrooms. There, I had to endure lushes in suits practicing their dance moves, suggesting pickup lines and pissing on the floor. It was enough to make a dishman stay in the pit and whiz in the empty sink.
Though I never ran into Little Rock’s very own Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, while in town I did meet a native named Chip. He told me about the time when Hillary and Chelsea came into a place where he was working. Hillary ordered a sandwich. Chip plucked a booger and added it to her dish. Hillary ate the sandwich.
The Bus Tub Buffet paid off well at this place. At cheap diners where the portions were larger, very few leftovers made it to the dishroom. But at fancy places, customers paid bundles for puny portions and then often left much of their meal untouched. This restaurant was no exception.
Because a bus tub’s yield is random, I never knew what would be next on my menu. That, in itself, could be both exciting and perturbing. Eating whatever came my way meant gorging on superrich cake, then some mushy green beans, then maybe a fruit tart dessert with the teeth marks still in it. Then cold chicken, soupy pasta, more cake, oily potatoes and so on. Though it could add up to a lethal combo in my stomach, no matter how much my gut implored me not to, I always shoveled in more grub. The result: a bellyache—but a good bellyache, one from too much stuffing as opposed to those horrible nothing-in-the-gut bellyaches.
The main drawback to the Bus Tub Buffet was the damn smokers. There was nothing worse than reaching for something like a choice hunk of chicken parmesan only to find a cigarette butt stamped into it. Only the most heartless of customers could mistake leftovers for ashtrays. Hopefully they weren’t so careless as to also use their leftovers as repositories after successful nose-picks. Putting boogers in the food was something best left to the professionals.
Meanwhile, the gas from the utility closet continued to be a nuisance. One night, I pressed Chef Dumb on the matter. He swore, “It’ll definitely be fixed by tomorrow.”
When I arrived the following night, the dishpit was still as gassy as Chef Dumb’s promises.
A dishwasher in a situation like this wields little power. That is, with the exception of one teeny maneuver. It’s a move that requires almost no effort, energy or planning. In fact, even proclaiming the two words to express the maneuver was sometimes itself too much to bother with. Really, this tactic required nothing but to do nothing.
As I stood in the dishroom doorway considering my next move, Chef Dumb seemed to read my thoughts.
“Please stay,” he begged. “Go hang out at the bar, have a drink, read your book. Then just come do a load of dishes, then go back to the bar.”
He was so desperate that he was willing to break his own rule by having me drink on the job. I was tempted to see what other bribes he might have in store. Free meals on my days off? A raise? Better yet, a decent chair in the pit?
But I couldn’t do it. He’d promised to fix the gas leak—and he hadn’t done so. And I didn’t want to let him get away with it.
“No thanks,” I told him. Then I added those two crucial words: “I quit.”
To make sure he didn’t gas even more dishwashers, I was prepared to do the unthinkable: snitch to the authorities. But it was 5:30 on a Friday afternoon—the health department was closed for the weekend.
It turned out I never had to make that call.
I left Little Rock that night. While passing back through town a week later to pick up my paycheck, I entered the restaurant and found Chef Dumb sweating it out at a table as a couple of health inspectors read off the violations. I was glad to hear the dishroom gas leak made the list, along with improper food storage, improper food handling and vermin infestation. The last violation was a surprise to hear considering I hadn’t seen any of the rascals myself. But then again, as a bystander in the vermin wars, I hadn’t been looking for them.
While Chef Dumb was busy getting reamed, I wandered into the kitchen. A prep cook told me that on the night I’d walked out, Lonnie did the same only an hour later. A few hours after that, a cook went out in grander fashion: he threatened to return and shoot Chef Dumb. But instead of following through with his threat, a few days later he called the health department—and talked.
After the health inspectors left, Chef Dumb ceased wetting his pants long enough to retrieve my paycheck. In the meantime, I panicked about my pay. What would I do if he tried to screw me on what he owed me? I had no leverage. I’d already quit; the health department had already been alerted. What could I do? Order a gigantic meal, eat it and not pay?
When Chef Dumb handed over the check, I was both surprised and relieved to discover that it was accurate.
“So, what d’ya say?” Chef Dumb said, smiling nervously. “Ready to come back to work?”
He looked like a rejected lover who refused to accept that it was over. And I didn’t know how to break it to him. I muttered something indistinct and then split for good.