After bouncing around the South, the Midwest and the East Coast in the spring of 1999, I went to Portland to publish Dishwasher #16—the cafeteria issue. It was about cafeterias I’d worked in and contained news clippings about cafeteria dishers, book excerpts, some dishwashing comics and letters to the editor from fellow dish dogs about their cafeteria gigs.
While putting together the zine, I noticed in the want ads that a Jewish nursing home was in need of a dishman. Aha! Another chance to cross something off my To Do list.
The year before, I’d received a letter from a dishman who was working in a Chinese joint in Boston. He referred vaguely to special Jewish dishwashing rules and asked if I’d ever “dished kosher.” Sadly, I hadn’t. I was embarrassed to admit in my reply that I didn’t even know what kosher dishing entailed. Even more so, I was jealous that, when it came to ancient dishwashing rites, this cat had been initiated and I—the Dish Master—hadn’t!
The dishwashing traditions I was following—laziness, drunkenness and ditching jobs without even a minute’s notice—were public knowledge and only about a century old. So the idea of being entrusted with covert dishwashing traditions that were thousands of years old was tantalizing. After reading the want ad, I broke my rule about not commuting farther than a comfortable walk or bike ride to a job and jumped on a bus out to the nursing home in southwest Portland.
I filled out the paperwork—which mentioned nothing about upholding traditions—and was sent to the kitchen to talk to Riki, the kitchen manager. While waiting for her in her office, I wondered if she’d ask me if I was Jewish or what I knew about kosher dishing. If she did ask, I’d be at a loss. I kicked myself for having hurried to the place without first stopping by the library.
When Riki arrived, she glanced at my application and said, “So Pete, tell me—what recent accomplishment have you made that you’re proud of?”
“Um…,” I said, caught off guard by yet another idiotic question that boss-types learn in boss school. Of course, I thought it was a major accomplishment to be on the cusp of washing dishes in holy water with candles and incense and whatever other Catholic imagery from my altar boy days I could attach to my vision of kosher dishing. But maybe that’d scare her off.
“Um, I’m kinda proud that I’ve shaved almost every day this week,” I said.
“Terrific!” she said. “Can you start right now?”
Without any questions about my faith, without being asked to pledge to uphold thousands of years of dishwashing tradition and without even being sworn to silence about the ancient secrets that I’d be entrusted with—I was apparently hired.
Riki handed me an apron and led me over to the dishroom. There, she introduced me to Martin, who was busy washing the lunch dishes.
“Martin, Pete’s going to be working with you,” she said. Then to me, she added, “Okay, Pete, Martin will show you what to do.”
As Riki left, I threw on the apron and stood ready to be initiated into the world of magical dishwashing. My new mentor, though, was in no hurry to reveal any secrets. Since Martin was silently rinsing the dishes and loading them into the machine, I took my cue and started stacking the clean plates coming out of the Hobart.
For five minutes, we worked without saying a word to each other. Then Martin came over to me.
“Hey, Pete,” he said. “You like Star Trek?”
He was wearing a Star Trek baseball cap and—visible behind his apron—a Star Trek T-shirt.
“Sorry,” I said, “I never watched that show.”
“Oh, okay,” he said.
He was obviously disappointed, so I asked, “Do you like Star Trek?”
“Oh, yeah.” He lit up. “I like all kinds of science fiction—all genres.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Who’s your favorite Star Trek character?”
As a big fan, I figured, he’d have a strong opinion on the matter. But Martin didn’t respond. He stood there, frozen, and gave no indication of what was going on in his head.
Had I said something wrong? Had I mishandled the kosher dishes or something? After waiting for his answer for about thirty seconds, I assumed our conversation was over, so I resumed stacking the dishes.
After two full minutes of standing silently, Martin finally spoke.
“Pete, I’m sorry. I don’t think I can answer your question,” he said. “I just love all the characters so much.”
I didn’t want to cause him any anguish.
“Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter,” I told him. Then I admitted, “This is my first time working in a Jewish place.”
“Really? Well, let me show you around,” he said. “This is the dairy dishroom, where we wash the dairy dishes—the breakfast and lunch dishes.”
He held up an orange-rimmed plate.
“These are a different color than the blue dinner plates, so never mix them up.”
From the dairy dishroom, he led me through a pantry and into a dishroom that was—amazingly—the mirror image of the first one.
“We wash the meat dishes—the dinner dishes—in here.”
Identical dishpits? Nice!
Back in the pantry, Martin picked a pot off a shelf and pointed to a marking crudely scratched into its side.
“What’s that say?” he asked.
I studied the marking for a moment, then answered, “I don’t know.”
“It’s an M!” Martin said. “Can’t you see the M?”
“Oh yeah, I see it now.”
“And you know what that means?”
“No, what’s it mean?”
“Meat,” he said, a bit exasperated. “Get it? M for meat?”
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “I got it—M for meat.”
Martin then led me over to the other side of the pantry, grabbed another pot and handed it to me.
“What’s that one say?”
I found the etching and said, “D?”
“And what’s D stand for?”
“Dairy?”
“Right,” he said. “On that side of the room are all the meat pots and pans. On this side, the dairy ones. And you have to make sure that they never get mixed up.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s a sin or something if the Jews eat meat and dairy together,” he said. “Watch out, ’cause sometimes the cooks put dirty pots in the wrong dishroom. So always check before you wash a pot and then double-check it before you put it away. It’s really important you don’t mix them up.”
“But isn’t there a rabbi around that takes care of that?”
“No,” Martin said. “It’s our job.”
“There’s no rabbi that blesses the dishes with holy water or says some prayers or anything?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
Back in the dairy dishroom, we worked on the lunch dishes. Martin pushed the dishes into the machine while I pulled them out and put them away. We worked in silence for a couple hours until Martin asked, “Pete, are you single?”
“Yep,” I replied.
“Oh good. Then you’ll be interested in this group I belong to.”
He held out a leaflet to me.
“We meet every Tuesday night and one Saturday night a month.”
I took the leaflet.
“It’s a really neat group of people. Pastor John and his wife lead the meetings. We go roller skating and have birthday parties.”
As he boasted about the wonderfulness of his group, I stared down at the leaflet—titled “Christian Singles”—and dreaded where all this was heading.
Mercifully, a big bearded guy in his forties then walked in. “Oh hey, Zlatko,” Martin said to him. “This is Pete—new dishwasher.”
Then to me, Martin added, “Zlatko washes dishes, too. He’s from Bosnia—doesn’t really speak English.”
As Zlatko left to get cracking on the accumulating dinner pots in the meat dishroom, I fled to the break room before Martin could resume his sales pitch. When I returned fifteen minutes later, Martin said not a word about Christian Singles or even about Star Trek. In silence, the two of us finished the lunch dishes.
After Martin left, Zlatko and I worked the dinner dishes in the meat dishpit. Though I riddled Zlatko with questions about kosher dishing, he provided no answers in English—or in Bosnian.
The next morning, before work, I stopped by the library to better understand kosher dishing. In the Torah—the Old Testament—it was stated: “Thou shall not boil a kid in his mother’s milk.” In other words, don’t eat meat and dairy together, so cheeseburgers were off the menu. Furthermore, any dishes or cookware or flatware that came into contact with meat or dairy took on the “kosher” status of being either meat or dairy. Thus, a bowl used to serve chicken soup was considered tainted with meat and therefore should never be used for serving ice cream until it was first neutralized by being burned in fire or boiled in water. To be on the safe side, though, it was best to prevent cross-contamination by only using dishes or cookware or flatware exclusively for either meat or dairy.
During my bus ride out to the nursing home, I filled out the rest of the story: After more than a thousand years of keeping their meat and dairy separated, along came Jesus who apparently told the Jews it wasn’t a big deal after all. He told anyone who’d listen that boiling a young goat in his mother’s milk wasn’t really a commandment from above, rather just a helpful culinary tip like “Don’t oversalt” or “Thaw before eating.”
Such sermons were welcomed heartily by those Jews who were sick of having to stick their chopped liver plate in the fire before they could eat their cheesecake dessert off it. They flocked to Jesus in droves and the whole affair was capped with the famous ham-’n-cheese-sandwich Last Supper. Then—ta da!—Christianity was born.
In the meantime, Orthodox Jews continued to keep their dishes separated. But fine, if the Jews had stuck to special dishwashing rules for more than three thousand years, then I was glad to lend my services to enable their obsessive-compulsiveness.
Toward the end of that second afternoon, Martin and I cleaned up the dairy dishroom and shut it down for the day. Then we headed over to the meat dishroom, where Zlatko had already started washing the dinner dishes.
“You—” Zlatko said, pointing to Martin. “You wash.”
“Me wash?” Martin said. “No, I’m going home. You’re washing.”
Zlatko insisted, “You wash.”
As Zlatko tried in vain to explain himself in his native tongue, the head cook happened by. He took one look at Zlatko and asked, “What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know,” Martin replied. “He wants me to stay and wash the dishes.”
“He doesn’t look good,” the cook commented.
After the cook retrieved a chair from the dining room, Zlatko flopped down and started moaning.
More cooks crowded into the pit to take a gander at Zlatko and to listen to his foreign mutterings. His wife—a cook—usually acted as his translator, but she’d already left for the day.
So the nurse on duty was sent for. When she arrived, she inspected Zlatko for a second and then yelled, “Somebody call an ambulance! I think he’s having a heart attack!”
The ambulance arrived and the paramedics carted Zlatko away.
Martin wasn’t happy. The Bosnian’s departure meant he was stuck working overtime.
The next morning, I was back at eight o’clock. The schedule had me working the morning shift with Zlatko, but he was a no-show. His wife stopped by the dairy dishpit later to apologize for his absence.
“He have heart attack,” she said. “Still in hospital.”
Fortunately, breakfast wasn’t very busy. When Martin arrived at noon, we worked the lunch dishes in silence for a half hour. Then he walked over and asked, “Pete, do you have to work Tuesday night?”
I knew the answer was no, but didn’t trust where Martin was going with his questioning.
“I think I am,” I said.
“No you’re not,” Martin said. “I already checked the schedule.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Then I guess I’m not.”
“Great!” he said. “Then you can come to the singles meeting, right?”
Wrong, I thought.
“Martin, what I said about being single wasn’t entirely true,” I lied. “Actually, I do have a girlfriend.”
“That’s okay,” Martin said, without missing a beat. “Your girlfriend’s welcome to come, too. We’ve got a few couples in the group.”
He wasn’t letting me off the hook so easily.
“Well, there’s another thing,” I said. “I’m not Christian either.”
“No problem!” he said. “We aren’t prejudiced against non-Christians.”
Wait a minute.
“You don’t have to be Christian or single to be part of your Christian Singles group?”
“That’s right,” he said, cheerily. “We welcome everybody.”
I had the sinking feeling that if I told him I was a Satan-worshiping free-lover, he would’ve replied, “See you Tuesday night!”
My attention returned to the plates I’d been loading into a rack.
“I already phoned some other group members this morning and told them about you,” he said. “They’re all excited to meet you!”
“Look Martin, I appreciate you inviting me to your get-together and all—” I began, then looked up. Martin—with sad, puppy-dog eyes—waited for me to finish my sentence.
I had to tell him flat out.
“—but I’ll never go to one of your meetings.”
Martin said nothing, turned around and went back to the other side of the dishroom. I watched him for a moment, then I continued loading the machine.
Martin began to pace back and forth and started mumbling. Then his grumbling grew louder.
“I don’t know what it is with people,” he said to himself. “You try to be friends with people but nobody wants to be friends anymore.”
Then he marched up to me.
“You know, when you started working here, I thought I had a new friend,” he said.
I didn’t look up from the dishes. He resumed his pacing.
“I thought I was being nice by inviting you to join our group. All I wanted was to be friends.”
I figured the tantrum would blow over. Instead, he kept ranting about how he’d been wronged until I snapped.
“Dude, we just met! You hardly even know me!” I said. “How’d you like it if I asked you to join some group that you didn’t wanna join?”
“If you asked me to join your group, I would,” he said.
“What if it was for people who hated Star Trek?”
“Wouldn’t matter,” he replied. “I’d join because I considered you my friend.”
“Well, that’s a stupid reason,” I said.
Muttering to himself, Martin turned and left the room.
I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing the lunch dishes and shutting down the dairy pit for the day. My shift ended and I clocked out while Martin was in the meat pit, starting on the dinner dishes.
The next morning I arrived a tad late. Martin was already busy with the breakfast dishes when I walked into the dairy dishroom.
“Hey,” I said. “Good morning.”
Martin glanced over at me but said nothing. As long as he didn’t want to rant about what an awful friend I was, I didn’t mind if he sulked.
As he pushed, I pulled. I reshelved the clean dairy plates and pots. It was while I was putting away a dairy sheet pan that I noticed the M scratched into the sheet pan I was about to let it touch. How’d that get there? Were the meat pan and the dairy one beneath it now tainted?
I took the suspect pans into the dairy dishroom and said, “Hey, Martin.”
He didn’t react.
I walked up beside him.
“Hey, Martin,” I said. “This meat pan was lying on top of this dairy one.”
Martin turned and looked at the pans in my hand but said nothing.
“What are we supposed to do with them?” I asked.
Finally, he spoke.
“Oh, you don’t want to be my friend but you want me to tell you what to do?”
Sensing drama, I dropped the tainted dairy sheet pan in the sink and carried the meat sheet pan over to the other pit. I scrubbed the already spotless pan but didn’t know if that was enough to rekosherize it. Did I need to burn it or boil it as well? I scrubbed it again and then stood it diagonally in the dishmachine and ran it through two full cycles.
Hoping the meat sheet pan was now rid of all the dairy cooties, I brought it to the pantry. Before shelving it with the other meat sheet pans, I checked the top few to make sure no dairy ones had infiltrated the stack. As I was doing so, Martin walked over with a soup pot in his hand. He tapped the pot against some of the meat pots sitting on the shelves. Then he ran the soup pot along the edges of the stacked meat sheet pans. Finally, he set it down atop the meat pan I’d just—hopefully—kosherized.
Then Martin stood there with a smug grin on his face.
I picked up the soup pot. Sure enough, etched into it was a D. He’d just defiled dozens of M pots and pans.
I wanted to backhand Martin with the soup pot. But instead, I walked off with it to the dairy dishroom.
While scrubbing the soup pot, I was concerned about the other newly infected pots and pans. Even if I raced to rekosherize them all, there was nothing to prevent Martin from spitefully pulling his little stunt again. Why should I have to clean those pots and pans? It was Martin who’d infected them. But if I didn’t tend to them, and the meat ware remained teeming with dairy toxins, in effect, a kid would be boiled in his mother’s milk.
Some of the elderly residents may have strictly followed kosher dietary laws their whole lives—exactly as their parents and grandparents and generations of ancestors had done before them. Now these folks were nearing the front of the line to the entrance of their god’s eternal nightclub. But before He’d let them past the velvet rope, first they had to have led good kosher lives. And who was responsible for ensuring they had? Me!
Ugh. I stood at the sinks wondering what to do. Upholding more than three millennia of Orthodox Jewish dishing traditions was supposed to be a thrilling adventure. Instead, busting kosher suds was now riddling me with anxiety. Maybe that’s what did Zlatko in—he’d cracked under the pressure. I sure didn’t want to end up like him.
A few minutes later, while still confounded, Riki entered.
“Zlatko obviously won’t be in tonight,” she said. “So Pete, we’re gonna need you to stay and work dinner as well.”
Breakfast, lunch and dinner? That was twelve hours of dishing!
“Why me?” I asked. “Why not Martin?”
“Martin stayed past his shift the night Zlatko went to the hospital,” she said.
Behind Riki, Martin’s smug look grew smugger. The urge to backhand him resurfaced.
I left the dairy dishroom, went to the break room and brooded. Now I really didn’t want to rewash those pans. But then again, it was Martin who’d caused the damage. Any bad mojo was on him, not me.
So, not wanting to work overtime, not wanting the stress of kosher dishing and not wanting to keep fighting the urge to backhand Martin, I walked over to the meat dishpit and gave the dishmachine a kiss. Then I walked to the dairy dishpit and—in front of Martin—kissed the dairy dishmachine.
“What are you doing?” Martin asked.
“Carrying out my own traditions,” I said.
My timing for quitting this job couldn’t have been more perfect. After pulling off my apron and clocking out, I reached the bus stop the same time the bus did.