My dream of a house temporarily deferred, Amy Joy found us an apartment to rent and I heard that the deli at a Pittsburgh co-op food market needed a dishman. Seven years earlier, I’d dished at a similar food co-op in Boston. I’d appreciated that the fruits of my labor went toward the good of the store and its members rather than toward lining a restaurant owner’s pockets with profits. So this Pittsburgh co-op sounded like a promising workplace for trying to hold down a steady job.
Getting hired was a snap. The tough part was—for the first time ever—to try to do what most people did routinely. It was what my dad had always done: go to the same job…work it every day…indefinitely.
At every stop along my fifty-state quest, an end to each job always remained comfortably within sight. Whether it was a couple weeks or—at the very most—a few months, the fact I knew there’d be a day not far off when I’d no longer have to come to the job helped me to ever go to the job in the first place.
Breaking the Fundamental Rule on the oil rig had been an easier challenge than this one; on the oil rig, I knew from the start I only had to survive two weeks, tops. Here, there was no telling how long I’d have to stick around in order to convince a banker that I wasn’t a habitual quitter.
So any morning I was scheduled to dish, I couldn’t roll over and go back to sleep. When I was riding my bike to work, I couldn’t flake out and keep on pedaling. And if a cook burnt a pan or my back acted up, I couldn’t pull off the apron and walk out. Every urge to succumb to the notion had to be suppressed.
That I actually didn’t completely hate the job helped the suppression. The young deli manager seemed scared of me and gave me a lot of leeway. The other deli employees were all interesting and entertaining. I ate well on the clock and was even able to take home tons of leftovers to Amy Joy. Best of all, after three months, I’d have health insurance for the only time in my adult life aside from when I dished in Alaska.
As the weeks passed and the impulses were quelled, little by little, I transformed into Mr. Reliable. I was never late, always arrived clean-shaven and kicked ass with the dishes. Not only did I never blow off work, I became the guy the deli manager called when the other disher was too hung over to work.
Life as Mr. Reliable was good for a couple months, until I started to notice the blue-rimmed plate. The deli used only plain white plates, so the sudden appearance of the oddball blue-rimmed plate was a mystery. Had a coworker brought in a plate of homemade cookies and forgotten to take the plate home again? Had a customer somehow slipped it in? I asked my coworkers, but no one knew where it’d come from.
Each time I washed him, Blue-Rimmed caught my attention. As soon as he was returned to the clean stacks, up he’d pop again in my sinks. It seemed like I was washing him constantly. Then, on a busy Saturday in the deli, I counted how many times Blue-Rimmed passed through my hands. Twenty-seven times! I couldn’t believe it.
Up until then, I’d always considered dishwashing a progressive pursuit: I’d start a shift with dirty dishes, finish it with clean ones, then move on to the next town, the next job, always moving forward. But, as Blue-Rimmed went round and round, he pointed out that I had it all wrong. Really I was just moving in circles: washing things that only got dirty again within minutes. The next town, the next job, the story would always be the same: the dishes would never remain clean.
Over and over, Blue-Rimmed seemed to ridicule me, saying, “Dishwashing is pointless.”
I tried to silence Blue-Rimmed by hiding him on the bottom of the clean stacks or by leaving him on the bottom of the sink while I washed the anonymous white dishes in his place. But no matter what I did, Blue-Rimmed always worked his way back into my hands, where I was subjected to his taunts yet again.
Finally, I had enough of him. And with great satisfaction, I threw him at the floor and watched him smash into blue-rimmed shards.
But the satisfaction was short-lived. Though the messenger was dead, his message lived on. Despite the shattered corpse on the floor, dishwashing still remained pointless. Even worse, my nemesis had the last laugh. Instead of just kicking the shards under the counter as the Dishwasher Pete of old would’ve done, Mr. Reliable dutifully swept up the remains and deposited them in the trash.
A couple of nights later, I took a tumble of my own. While exploring a new route home from work, my bike hit a speed bump in the dark. I flew over the handlebars and landed on my face. When I awoke, my very first thought was: That’s odd—the street’s wet, but it isn’t raining.
I lay there with a damp face until I heard a car approaching and then scrambled to sit up. The car slowed as I stared directly into its red headlights. Red headlights? I looked down. The little puddle my face had been lying in was blood.
I looked up at the car’s driver and he looked back at me aghast.
“It’s bad, huh?” I asked.
“No, no, no,” he stammered while looking visibly ill at the sight of me. This wasn’t a good sign. It seemed like he should’ve been able to handle it. After all, he was a cop.
The driver and his partner stepped out of their patrol car and helped me to my feet. They wiped some blood off my face and wrapped my head in a bandage. They had no fasteners, so they affixed the bandage by simply tucking it into itself.
“You sure you don’t want us to call an ambulance?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said. “Can’t afford it.”
My health insurance from work was still a couple weeks away from kicking in. And an ambulance ride was nothing but a thousand-dollar taxi ride and—for someone too cheap to even take a regular taxi—out of the question.
The cops then got a call over their radio and had to go.
Slumped over the handlebars, as I pushed myself home on my bike, the bloody bandage began to unravel and trail in the wind behind my bloody face. Judging from the leeway motorists gave me at intersections, it must’ve made for a gruesome sight,
Once home, I didn’t first inspect my injuries or even lie down. Instead, I did something that would’ve made the old Dishwasher Pete puke: Mr. Reliable called work.
“Hey,” I told the baker, “I won’t be in tomorrow.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I fell off my bike and don’t feel so good.”
Amy Joy wasn’t home, so a friend picked me up and drove me to the emergency room.
As a doctor stood over me and tweezed the gravel out of my head and sewed up the gash, I lay there in a daze. With the lamp shining in my face, I admired his work. It must be nice to be skilled, I thought. If someone had come to me with a nasty head wound and asked me to help him, I’d be confounded. If he’d bloodied his dishes in the process, then I could wash those. Otherwise, he’d be shit out of luck.
During my hours in the emergency room, I admired the work of all the nurses and doctors that treated me. Maybe it was the concussion, maybe it was the Percocet, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how these people were using their skills to do valuable work. They were actually making a difference in the world. Meanwhile, what was I doing with my life? Over and over, I was just washing the same dishes (blue-rimmed or not) that only ended up dirty again within minutes.
I’d always joked that there was no hurry for me to complete my mission because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself afterwards. Now, I wanted to know.
With a broken arm, two sprained wrists and a mangled knee, there wasn’t much else I could do but lounge around the apartment to convalesce. I lay in bed and thought about the speed bump I’d hit. Whoever had designed it or installed it doubtlessly had done so without cyclists in mind. The angle of the bump was so severe, it could’ve been deadly for someone on a bike. But that wasn’t surprising. There seemed to be a lot of road infrastructure intended for cyclists in Pittsburgh that didn’t make sense—as if they’d been designed by someone who didn’t ride a bike on a regular basis. There were too many civil servants who only drove their cars yet were responsible for dealing with the way cyclists, pedestrians and public transit users navigated their ways through cities. There needed to be more people in such jobs who viewed transportation from a nonmotorist’s perspective. As I lay around, I realized that one of those someones should be me.
After all the cycling and walking and public transit riding I’d done throughout the nation, it seemed like I could put my knowledge to use to help produce better means of travel. It’d sure beat producing temporarily clean dishes. In order to get the skills to attain some sort of desk-sitting job in that field, I wanted to return to college and finally pursue a degree in something I was interested in: urban planning.
After mulling it over the whole week after my tumble, I told Amy Joy about my idea of returning to college. I’d first pursue a degree and then a desk-sitting job as some sort of transportation planner for a municipal agency or a nonprofit advocacy group.
She liked the idea.
First though: my mission.
When Jess had told Letterman that he (meaning: I) didn’t want to finish the states before he/I was thirty-five, I was only twenty-eight. Now, on my next birthday, I’d turn thirty-five. And before that date hit, I wanted my apron to be hung up for good; the quest achieved once and for all.
To do so would mean racing to tackle the remaining twenty-one states while crossing off lingering items from my To Do list: dude-ranch dishing in Wyoming; working in Shelbyville, Illinois, where Josephine Cochrane had invented the motorized dishwashing machine; visiting my pals at the Champion dishmachine company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to work as an official test disher on their new models; and pearl diving in Pierre, South Dakota—one of only two state capitals I’d never been to.
In addition, I still wanted to dish on a riverboat and at a state fair and on a train and in a restaurant atop a skyscraper and in a catering firm’s mobile dishwashing trailer.
And, of course, it would all culminate in Honolulu—the other state capital I’d never been to—where I’d finally enact the whole final dishmachine smooch and beer-on-the-beach Hawaiian grand finale.
To accomplish all this, a thorough, comprehensive push was required. It would call for an unprecedented Herculean effort. Thus, the Farewell to Dishwashing Tour was born.
With the buying-a-house-in-Pittsburgh project now dead, Amy Joy returned to Portland. I stored three thousand of the remaining seven thousand Dishwasher #16 covers in a friend’s attic in Pittsburgh and loaded the rest in the van. Since orders were still coming in for the issue, I figured somewhere along the way, I’d finally get around to publishing it.
Then I set out on the Farewell Tour.