After a few weeks of rambling, I landed in Boise to finally hit Idaho some six years after the state had first been targeted unsuccessfully during my Northwest Tour. Within twenty-four hours of my rolling into town, Idaho clocked in as state #29: a gig was landed in the cafeteria at Hewlett-Packard’s corporate campus.
At 3:30 p.m. on my first day, the soon-to-be-former pot-scrubber who was training me said it was time to go.
“What about the rest of this stuff?” I asked, pointing to the stacks of awaiting baking sheets and pots.
“Just leave it for tomorrow,” he said.
On my way out, the kitchen manager caught my attention by looking at me and stroking her jawbone.
“Don’t forget,” she said.
Earlier that day, at the daily kitchen staff safety meeting (the morning’s topic: Be careful—knives are sharp), she’d introduced me to the fifty-odd cooks, bakers, cashiers and dishwashers. Then she remarked that if I didn’t shave the scruff from my face by the following day, I’d be working in a beard net.
Movie stars don’t shave for a couple days and they look chic. I don’t shave for a couple days and I look jobless—even when I have a job!
Though I didn’t have a rule about not working in a beard net, it was only because it’d never occurred to me to establish one. Normally, something like a beard-net requirement would’ve provoked me to leave a sterile fluorescent-flooded kitchen and go snatch up a dish job someplace where I could be as whiskered as I wanted. But those places didn’t have what HP had: full-time pot scrubbing. With the opportunity to move “pot-scrubber” from my To Do list to do to my Done list, I had to suck it up and break the not-yet-established beard-net rule by not walking out.
It was midwinter and my nights were spent parked in a dirt lot behind an apartment complex. Lying under my sleeping bag and seven thrift-store blankets, by flashlight I would read through the latest batch of mail, then write replies until falling asleep. At 6:30 a.m., I’d get up and smash the half-inch-thick layer of ice in my plastic water jug so I could shave—in the dark—with the frigid water and get to work by seven o’clock. Each morning, I’d trudge past a maze of office cubicles that covered an area the size of a football field (I’d walked off the measurements) on my way to my own cubicle—the pot cubicle—where I’d be greeted by the pots and pans I hadn’t finished the previous afternoon.
Then I’d scrub all day, trying to finish the burnt pots and pans by the end of my shift. But come 3:30, when I’d finally drain the sinks, a stack of dirties would be left to await my cleaning the following day. I’d exit past the cubicle maze. Peering over the dividers, I’d see people sitting at their desks but had no idea what they were doing. In contrast, anyone who’d see me in action at work would automatically know I was a pot-scrubber. But they just sat at their desks—like professional desk-sitters.
After work, it was back to hanging out by myself since I knew no one in Boise. Even HP’s dishwasher crew was anonymous to me because their cubicle was on the other side of the cafeteria from mine. So I tried to look up some of the locals from the thousands of names in my address book. At the first two addresses, the search resulted in awkward encounters, with me asking for people who no longer lived there. On the phone, though, I managed to reach a guy who’d regularly corresponded with me years before.
“This is Pete,” I told him. “Dishwasher Pete.”
“Dishwasher what?”
“Dishwasher Pete,” I repeated. “I write that Dishwasher zine.”
There was a long pause, then a slow, suspicious, “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m in Boise, scrubbing pots out at the Hewlett-Packard plant.”
“And?”
“And I was calling to see if you wanted to go get some ice cream or something.”
Another pause. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “I just thought, you know, maybe you would.”
“No,” he said.
“Aw right,” I said. “See ya.”
After I hung up, I felt pathetic. Years before, this guy had probably gotten a kick out of corresponding with an itinerant dishman. But since then, he’d probably thrown out his zines, got married, bought a house, had kids…. When he hung up the phone, his wife probably asked, “Who was that?”
“Nobody,” he’d have said to her. “Just some weirdo wanting me to eat ice cream with him.”
People changed, I guessed. But somehow, I didn’t. I was still just wandering around, washing dishes as usual.
I put away my address book and didn’t bother contacting anyone else.
That night, in Crescent, I opened a letter from a Los Angeles filmmaker who’d written to ask if she could capture my quest on film. The request was hardly unique; it was the fourth query from a documentary filmmaker.
Having a camera in my face held no appeal. But then, who knew? Maybe this woman would dig gallivanting around with me. After all, her letter was so enthusiastic, it boarded on being flirty. As we traveled together in Crescent from state to state, maybe she’d fall for both my lifestyle and me. Maybe—just maybe—it could work between us as she turned my life into a movie.
I could see it already on the big screen: scenes of camping out under a tent of blankets, shaving with ice water in the dark in the back of a customized 1973 van, calling up strangers looking for ice cream dates in the middle of winter….
Wait a sec. What woman would want to stick around for that? This filmmaker lady would surely get sick of the bumming around. She’d bolt back to L.A. before she could say, “Cut!” And experience already showed that a mailbox full of postcards and letters from me wouldn’t be enough to tide her over until the next time I passed through town. In fact, every relationship I’d had always ended, in part, because of my foolish belief that I could keep traveling while still maintaining the romance.
Certain it wouldn’t work out with the filmmaker, I wrote her one of my usual “thanks, but no thanks” replies.
The next afternoon, I used my phone gizmo to call Jess and told him what a downer Boise was.
“Yeah, but just think—you’re the world’s most famous dishwasher!” he said, trying to cheer me up.
Jess had enjoyed saying this ever since he had a cush dish job handed to him in San Francisco merely because the restaurant owner was trying to get him to introduce me to her.
“No I’m not,” I told him.
“Well, if you’re not,” he said, “then who is?”
Maybe he had a point. I couldn’t think of any other rightful claimants. Until the day an exceptional dish dog went straight from the sinks to either become president or assassinate one, I was probably stuck with the title. But little good that did me. I couldn’t even find someone to eat ice cream with me in Boise.
So then, one Thursday night, I went by myself to an ice cream parlor. It was February 10, 2000, a date that seemed like it shouldn’t go unnoted. So I spoiled myself by ordering a banana split.
It was supposed to be a celebratory dessert. On February 10, 1990—exactly ten years earlier—I’d proclaimed my fifty-state goal. But as I shoved the scoops down my throat, I wondered, What am I celebrating? Ten years of clean dishes? Ten years of roaming? Or ten years of cultivating carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis and a stiff back?
Embarking on the quest had enabled me to satisfy my curiosity about what lay beyond San Francisco’s borders. During those years, not only had I seen so many corners of the nation, I was also able to window-shop the country for a place to live once all fifty states had been dished. But the more I traveled, the harder it became to stay put. And now I was on a course toward total rootlessness.
By the time I’d scraped the last of the cold hot fudge out of the bottom of the dish, I determined that if I’d learned just one thing from a full decade of travels, jobs and ailments, it was this: I didn’t want to settle down in a van in Boise.
As miserable as I was, I couldn’t afford to leave town for another couple weeks, not until the next payday. So I slaved onward. Day by day, I gained ground on the pots, leaving fewer and fewer of them to soak overnight. Finally—after striving for twenty-two straight shifts—one afternoon, I managed to clean every single pot, pan and cooking utensil. At the end of that shift, I was able to stand for a minute and take in, for the first time, the sight of a vacant, sparkling pot cubicle.
The following day was payday. The weeks of struggling to keep pace with the pots were over. Come 3:30, I left behind in the cubicle dozens of sheet pans coated with burnt bacon grease—an offering to whoever would replace me. At 3:45, I cashed my check. At 5:58, Crescent and I said good riddance to Idaho and crossed the state line.
I reached Portland, Oregon, and within two days was dishing again at two of my old haunts: Paradox and La Cruda. Though the gigs were in state #15—a state I’d conquered many times over—they were at places where I could be as slovenly as I wanted about shaving, where I got paid in cash after each shift and where I was able to wash both the pots and the dishes.
While it was good to be back in a town where I had no shortage of pals to eat ice cream with, I was sad to find that so many of my colleagues had gotten out of the dishwashing racket. Hawthorne had left Genoa and was now in advertising. At La Cruda, Lauren was now a cook. Yanul ditched Montage to become a full-time musician. It was all part of a larger trend. Letters were frequently arriving from long-time pearl divers who apologetically confessed to me—the Dish Master—that they’d hung up their aprons and found other, less worthy employment. While I soldiered on, others were dropping left and right.
The worst was when, not long before, I’d slipped through the back door of a café in Arcata and found Jeff chopping vegetables. When my dish guru noticed me, he looked as guilty as if I’d caught him chopping up a baby. He averted eye contact and said, “It pays twenty-five cents an hour more.”
In Portland, I was volunteering again at Reading Frenzy while crashing at the house of the shop’s owner, Chloe, and its lone paid employee—Amy Joy. It’d been three years since Amy Joy had taken me to lunch at the diner, two years since she’d gifted me the sunset picnic and a year since she’d treated me to dinner in New Orleans. As cheap as I was, it was painfully obvious that it was now my turn to feed her.
During a pizza-slice dinner, I told Amy Joy about my miserable time in Boise. And about how constantly bouncing around the country like a pinball was wearing me down. And about how I only ever had affairs with places—and dumped each for the prettier one just down the road.
Later that night, while treating her to drinks at a bar, I said, “I just wanna have some little place of my own.”
I wanted to experience the change of seasons year-round in the same spot, to stick around long enough to join a bowling league, to cultivate a garden.
“At the very least,” I said, “I wanna own a plant.”
I was telling Amy Joy that I wanted to buy a house somewhere—a home base for the last years of my quest until I finally settled down for good. Amy Joy said she wanted to join me.
This time I finally got the hint.
On the surface, it appeared that I’d finally discovered the answer to the question: “What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?” To be honest, though, I didn’t believe it could work between us. I figured I’d take off for the dishes, go roaming around while thinking everything was hunky-dory. And in the meantime, she’d dump me.
Amy Joy assured me she wouldn’t.
Yet how did I respond? By unconsciously trying to shake her off my trail.
But whenever I’d suggest we go for ice cream in stormy weather, Amy Joy never daintily demurred. She was always ready to ride her bike with me in the rain to the ice cream shop.
And when—during a trip up to Washington—I’d suggest we ride another ferry, Amy Joy was always game. In a single day, we rode six different Puget Sound ferries.
And whenever I mentioned that I didn’t know where I wanted to buy a house, Amy Joy was never bothered. It didn’t matter to her, as long as we were together.
For once, I couldn’t shake a woman—no matter how hard I tried.
Amy Joy was definately a keeper. Only problem: where to keep her.