After realizing communal life wouldn’t suit me, I skipped around the state and raked in some cash dishing at a café in Columbia, Missouri. Then I gravitated to Branson—the self-proclaimed “Live Music Show Capital of the World” in the Missouri Ozarks. With dozens of dinner theaters devoted to acts like Dolly Parton, the Osmonds and Andy Williams, the town was crowded with restaurants to service the busloads of music aficionados that flocked there from throughout the South and the Midwest. And where all those folks went, a great deal of dirty dishes were left behind.
With so many dish gigs packed into an area so small, it sounded like an ideal place for a postquest settled dishman. If I lived there, the notion to quit could run wild. I could discard jobs left and right yet always have plenty of other jobs at my disposal. In fact, I could even sample the dozens of dinner theaters and then settle into whichever one was the best in town.
Arriving in Branson, I found in the local newspaper evidence to prove my theory. In a town of only about five thousand inhabitants, the classifieds listed a dozen “Dishwasher Wanted” ads. I felt even more wanted than at that last commune.
Also in the newspaper, I noticed a listing for a $200-a-month room for rent. Two hundred bucks was far more expensive than it cost to live in the van or at a job site or on a friend’s couch. But heck—with $373 in my pocket, I felt rich enough to do something self-indulgent like rent my own room.
At the rental’s address, I found a country gift shop that sold porcelain angel figurines, wooden duck cut-outs and the like. Each crafty product was covered in ribbons and lace. When I stepped inside, the place smelled like someone had shat out a dozen scented candles.
“I think I’ve got the wrong address,” I told the woman behind the counter. “I was looking for a room to rent.”
She told me I had the right place, and that the building was an old house converted into a shop.
“The rent is two hundred and the deposit is another hundred,” she said as she led me through the store and up the stairs.
Filled with more lacy and ribbony crap, the room appeared almost to be an extension of the sales floor. Fake dried flowers hung from the red felt wallpaper. Above the bed hung a painting of two swans facing each other (their necks forming a heart shape). And strands of red shag carpeting hung over the tops of my shoes.
While I was trying to think of how to jokingly ask if the place had ever been a bordello, she gave the top of the bed a nudge. In response, the dozen crimson pillows bobbed up and down like buoys.
“Room comes with a waterbed.” She smiled.
I hadn’t reckoned renting a room would be this decadent. Did my dough really need to be blown on luxuries so vulgar?
Well, since she asked for no credit references or personal references or even for any evidence of income, I told her I’d take the place…mostly just because I could.
I handed her three hundred bucks.
Now that I had a place to crash, there was the matter of a job. After throwing my duffel bag on the waterbed, I reviewed the twelve dish ads. The one for the Remember When Theater stood out because it sounded like a dinner theater. If I was going to work in a town devoted to live entertainment, then dinner-theater dishing needed to be on the agenda.
On my way there, I passed a marquee sign whose foot-high letters shouted:
DISHWASHER WANTED
I pulled over.
This place—Golden Corral—wasn’t even one of the twelve ads listed in the newspaper. It was an all-you-can-eat chain restaurant, and chain restaurants weren’t really my thing. They lacked local character and soul. They required donning the ubiquitous company clothing. And they had too much hierarchy: assistant managers, store managers, district managers, general managers, etc. It was bad enough having one boss without having to answer to a whole nationwide string of command.
Still, the enormous sign beckoned me.
I stepped out of the van, went in and filled out an application.
“Dishwashing, huh?” the manager said when he glanced at my completed application. “Can you start right now?”
The lunch rush was in full swing. The dishes were piling up.
“Sure.” I shrugged.
I threw on an apron and was led to the pit, where another guy was too busy scrubbing to properly welcome me to the fold. So I sorted silverware for a while.
“And?” my new coworker finally said a couple minutes later. “How you like the job?”
I looked down at the silverware and said, “It’s not bad.”
“Yeah, it ain’t bad, is it?”
Actually, with all the openings in town, odds were that there was a better place to work.
“You think this is the best dish job in town?” I asked.
He answered with only a nervous laugh. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? I had no idea.
Over the next couple hours both my coworker and the manager eagerly asked for my opinion of the job. It seemed to give them the sought-after reassurances when I’d provide them with rather neutral answers like “It’s all right” or “I’ve worked in worse places.”
At four o’clock, the afternoon lull set in. Action in the dishroom died down. The boss told me to take a couple hours off but to be back at six o’clock for the dinner rush.
With time to kill, I drove over to my original destination—the Remember When Theater. It was between the Shoji Tabuchi Theater (featuring a Japanese country music star) and the Country Tonight Theater (featuring, apparently, a night of country music). On the Remember When’s marquee, the lettering for the star of the show—Jimmie Rodgers—was smaller than the names of his hit songs from decades prior—“Honeycomb” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.”
While making quick work of the application, I paused to reread the part that stated that if I didn’t provide two weeks’ notice before quitting, my pay would be docked. I’d never before heard of that rule. And it worried me. The notion to quit never provided me with two weeks’ notice, so how was I supposed to know when to give notice?
I’d just have to take my chances.
When I handed the application to the boss-guy, he asked, “When can you start?”
“Well—” I began. There was the petty matter of already being employed.
“Start now?” he asked.
I wasn’t due back at Golden Corral for another hour.
“Aw right,” I said.
I’d give Jimmie Rodgers’ a one-hour audition. If the place seemed like a better deal, I’d stay. If not, I’d split and head back to Golden Corral.
The boss-guy led me down to the dishpit. From the four guys in their twenties standing there—all with backwards baseball caps, Metallica/Pantera T-shirts, ponytails and goatees—the boss singled out one in particular to show me around. Since he—Jason—appeared to be the dishroom’s most senior employee, I asked him how long he’d been working there.
“Shit, man,” he said as he did the calculations in his head. “Um…almost two months. Man, I can’t believe I’ve been here so long!”
First, Jason showed me around the dishroom and kitchen. Then he led me out back, past a loading dock where a couple other suds busters were lounging. Finally, we rounded a corner to the backside of a dumpster.
“This is where you go when you wanna hide,” he said.
Jason pinched his thumb and forefinger together, put them to his lips and inhaled. His eyebrows wiggled up and down.
“Know what I mean?” he asked.
Back in the dishpit, I asked Jason where else he’d dished in town.
“Just before I came here, I was over at Grand Country Buffet with Dom and Phil,” he said, pointing at the two guys at the pot sinks. Then he added, “I came over here first and those fruits couldn’t stay away from me.”
He asked about me. I told him I’d been hired over at Golden Corral and was due back at six o’clock.
“You’re splitting?!” he asked. Heads turned in my direction. Upon hearing that I was already on the verge of becoming their ex-coworker, concern filled the room.
“There’s supposed to be seven dishwashers here,” Jason said. “With you, this was gonna be the first night since I’ve been here that we’d have a full crew.”
“Well, I don’t have to go back,” I said.
One of the other dishers—Heath—said he used to work at Golden Corral.
“You went there ’cause of that sign out front?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Man, that sign’s there all the time,” he said. “Don’t that tell you something?”
“So you think this is a better place to work?” I asked.
“Hell yeah!” he said. “Here you even get a free meal.”
Heath convinced me. This was a better gig. In fact, maybe it was the best gig in town.
I stayed.
“How many buses there gonna be tonight?”
That was the question on everybody’s lips in the dishpit. Instead of pondering the number of expected diners, the talk was about how many busloads of tourists would be rolling in. A waitress finally provided us with the number: forty-one.
“Forty-one,” Phil said. “Shit, that’s like eight hundred people. We’re gonna be busy.”
“Don’t worry,” Jason told him. “We’ve got a full crew now.”
That night, I spent the shift as the dishpit’s “runner”—running the clean dishes back to the kitchen, which left my hands dry. I did get wet, though, when a tussle broke out between Dom and Heath. They were arguing over who’d be “sprayer”—the guy who sprayed down the racks of dishes before they were shoved in the machine. As the two wrestled with the spray hose, enough water shot around the room to soak us all.
Later, when I asked Jason about my free meal, he led me into the kitchen.
“Dude wants his free meal,” Jason said to a cook as he jabbed his thumb in my direction. For a couple seconds, the cook sized me up as if to assess my worthiness to eat. Then he put together a plate of fried chicken, sweet-potato fries and cornbread.
I took my grub out back to the loading dock and sat among the lounging pearl divers. Was this the best place in town that any of them had dished? They all responded with resounding “Yeahs.”
But when I then asked which other dinner theaters they’d dished in, they all answered that this was the only one. Because most of their previous employment had been at chain restaurants—Golden Corral, Western Sizzler, Cracker Barrel, Denny’s—I decided to hold off on awarding the Town’s Best Dish Gig title to Jimmie Rodgers’ just yet.
At the end of the shift, Jason and two other dish dudes all commented to me about how smoothly the dishroom had run that night.
Jason’s exact words to me: “You made the difference.”
After work, on my way back to my room, I again saw The Sign at Golden Corral. This time the familiar words took on a very different meaning: they read as if an all-points-bulletin had been posted for me.
“Be on the lookout for an at-large, disheveled dishwasher. He was last seen promising to return for an evening shift. Suspect considered lazy and harmless.”
As Crescent and I passed The Sign, we sped up.
That night, I climbed in bed feeling gratified with my experience as a resort-town disher. In the span of fourteen hours, I’d found a place to live, worked two jobs and moved up the dish-gig ladder. Maybe it was just a taste of what life in a place like this could be like on a permanent basis.
But though the day’s events had been fulfilling, they weren’t enough to get me to sleep soundly on my new bed.
I’d slept on a slew of floors, couches and chairs; on buses, ferries and backseats of cars; and even under bridges and in doorways, all without problems, fuss or complaints (well, with maybe the exception of the floor in Darryl’s Room). But this waterbed: each time I moved, it moved. The swells left me woozy. So I abandoned ship and slept comfortably on the shag carpeting.
The next few nights, I remained the dishpit’s runner (or, more accurately, the walker). With thirty to forty busloads of customers each night, we stayed busy in the dishroom.
Each day, I put off eating until my free dinner at work. Then I’d take a break, go to the kitchen and fill a plate high with chicken pot pie, mashed potatoes, fried chicken, chili and chicken fingers.
On my fourth night, a cook asked, “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Getting my dinner,” I said.
He yanked the plate from my hand and growled, “You already had your free meal!”
As he glowered at me, I thought, He can’t be serious. I expected him to smile and say, “I’m only foolin’.”
But he didn’t. Instead he said, “You waitin’ for something?”
I left the kitchen empty-handed. Out back, I related the incident to the pot-smoking dishers behind the dumpster.
“Didn’t you already get your free meal?” Jason asked.
“Not tonight,” I said.
“But on your first night you did.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I’ve been getting my dinner every night.”
My comrades laughed.
“Dude, you just get one free meal,” Jason said. “Just one. That’s it!”
This couldn’t possibly be true.
“Hey, man, I was working here two weeks before any of these fags told me I had a free meal coming,” Dom said. “So consider yourself lucky.”
But I didn’t consider myself lucky. I considered myself hungry.
After the others finished their joint and filed back inside, I remained hidden behind the dumpster. Any place that didn’t feed its dish dogs couldn’t possibly be the best gig in town. Since the notion to quit had now struck, there was no way I could work another two weeks without eating on the job—even if leaving meant taking a pay cut.
I made a beeline straight from the dumpster out to my van.
On the way back to my room, I stopped by a convenience store and picked up a newspaper, a pint of cookie dough ice cream for dinner and a Creamsicle for dessert. Lying on the waterbed, I devoured my meal while reading the dish classifieds. Of the nine ads, one stood out: the Lawrence Welk Resort.
The next morning, I applied to dish for Welk. Though the accordion-playing bandleader was dead, the legacy of his “champagne music” was doing swell judging by the immense size of the complex.
“Oh great,” the receptionist said. “We’ve been looking for dishwashers.”
“Well, you just found one,” I told her.
Unlike Golden Corral or Jimmie Rodgers’, Welk’s wasn’t so needy for dish help that they asked me to start on the spot. Instead, I was asked to hold off for a few hours and then start a shift at three p.m.
When I returned, I was met by the kitchen manager, who immediately ushered me over to the head chef. Who immediately ushered me over to the apparently ranking dishwasher. Who immediately ushered me over to another disher. I’d only been there three minutes and had already been passed around among four people.
Mike—the dishman now stuck with showing me around—was busy running some clean pots to the kitchen. Thirty seconds into this training session, he had trouble figuring out where to put a certain 80-quart stock pot.
“Sorry, I don’t really know where this stuff goes,” he said. “This is only my second day here.”
Mike called over Rocky—the guy I’d assumed was the ranking disher. As Rocky approached us, he joked, “Do I have to do everything for you guys?”
“Oh, like you know everything?” said a female cook who’d overheard him. “You’ve been here, what, a week?”
“No,” our ranking dishman told her. “I’m in the middle of my second week.”
Rocky showed me around the dishroom and the vast—but empty—dining area.
“They can cram a thousand old geezers in here,” he said. “Tonight I heard we’ve got about thirty-eight, thirty-nine buses coming—about eight hundred people.”
As we walked past the buffet setup, he said, “When the restaurant closes at eight o’clock, we take a break and can eat whatever we want from the buffet.”
“For free?” I asked.
“Of course, for free,” he said.
I’d yet to touch a dish, but compared with Jimmie Rodgers’, this was already clearly a better gig—another step up.
Though the food was as bland as Welk’s music and mushy enough for the elderly patrons to gum it down, I appreciated its free-ness.
Since I needed a decent paycheck to pay the rent in a few weeks, I stayed put at Welk’s. Usually we had anywhere between thirty and fifty busloads of his fans—the entire parking lot was essentially one massive handicapped zone. Back in my room, I learned to sleep on the edge of the waterbed, hanging an arm and leg over the side railing to anchor myself. I still bobbed up and down anytime I moved, but remained anchored enough to not get seasick.
One afternoon, I picked up my paycheck, took it to the bank it was drawn from and cashed it. Then, on my way to work, the notion struck. Why return to Lawrence Welk’s? Now financially independent, I had the opportunity to leave that gig and find an even better one at any of the other dozens of dinner theaters in town.
But which one would be better than Welk’s? The Osmonds’? The Oak Ridge Boys’? Dolly Parton’s? Whose dishpit topped them all?
In a town packed with cheesy acts, I figured my best bet was to head straight to the cheesiest of them all: Wayne Newton’s.
It was still early afternoon when I pulled into Newton’s nearly empty parking lot. At the ticket counter, I asked the saleslady for an application for a dishwashing job.
“We don’t have dishwashers here,” she said.
“You mean, you don’t have any openings?”
“No,” she said. “We don’t have dishwashers.”
“Who washes the dishes then?”
“We don’t have dishes,” she said. “Just the concession stand.”
Since I refused to believe her, she invited me to have a look in the lobby.
Sure enough, in the lobby there was a concession stand. A peek inside the theater itself revealed rows of theater seating. I’d held an image of a dinner theater where people sat at tables around the stage as they ate steak and drank martinis while Newton performed his lounge act. Instead, the audience sat in theater seats as they popped popcorn and slurped sodas as if Newton were a circus act.
When I expressed my surprise to the ticket lady, she told me that almost none of Branson’s theaters were dinner theaters.
I couldn’t believe it. How could I work my way through the town’s dinner-theater dishpit circuit when one didn’t even exist? If I were to leave Welk’s and stay in town, my options would be limited to the loathsome chain joints.
Back in the van, I started driving. But when I reached the entrance to Welk’s, I kept going. The notion had already struck. There could be no going back. Besides, no matter how many more places I worked at in Missouri, the state would always remain #28.
At the country gift shop, I told the landlady I was moving out.
“You didn’t give me much notice,” she said.
I replied, “I didn’t know myself that I’d be leaving so soon.”
On my way out of town, I again passed Golden Corral’s “Dishwasher Wanted” marquee. I hit the gas.