dishroom chronicles: the vignettes

In November of 1995, I started working as a dishwasher at a large university.  I worked in a food court that served lunch and dinner to thousands of students every day of the week.  Ironically, I had just graduated from the university the previous spring.  In print issue #3 of Thoughtworm I started writing the Dishroom Chronicles.  You can read that original installment by clicking on "The Original Dishroom Chronicles" on the main page of writings.  The following sketches contain observations and thoughts originally penned at work and shortly after I left the job, when things didn't seem quite so surreal as they do now...

The Cooler  (dishboy diagram drawn by Malinda)

   A lot of my time at Johnston Food Court was spent trying to avoid work.  There were various ways to do this, of course.  The simplest involved going to the bathroom.  I did this many times during the day, regardless of whether or not I needed to relieve myself.  Sometimes I brought a newspaper, book, or my writing notebook and sat in a stall for awhile.  I used any excuse to get out of the dishroom that I could think of.  If someone was needed to do some cleaning up on the loading dock or sweeping in the parking lot, I always volunteered.  I never accepted help; I enjoyed the solitude and wanted to make it last as long as possible.

   Other days I helped out in the to-go drink cooler if they were short a worker in the mornings.  This happened most days because they intentionally didn't schedule someone until 12:30.  They knew they could get some poor sap like me to work in there in the morning, setting up for lunch.  This, of course, left the already under-staffed dishroom in an even more desperate situation.  So I would go back and forth between the two places until someone came in to work in the cooler.

   Working in the cooler wasn't too bad as long as you had a long-sleeved shirt or jacket to wear.  Basically all you had to do was keep the shelves full of drinks and then before you left for the day you had to stock the cooler with cases from the vault downstairs.  I usually just shoved whatever drinks were close by onto the shelves.  Every week guys from Coke and the other drink distributors would come in and straighten out and arrange all their products correctly.  By the next day, the shelves had returned to utter chaos.

   Most of the idiot students didn't care what drink they got, that's why we just shoved anything up there.  Occasionally some fool would ask, "Uh, do you have any, uh...Mango Strawberry Surprise?" to which I promptly would reply, "NO!" even if the damn stuff was sitting right in front of me in the cooler.

   My friend Mohammed, a 50-year-old former schoolteacher from India, drew an insightful conclusion regarding the drinks in the cooler.  Picking up a bottle, he intently read the label, then looked up at me quizzically.  "It's all the same stuff, right?  Just sugar water.  High fructose corn syrup is the main ingredient in all these drinks."  I smiled and nodded.  American society never failed to throw Mohammed for a loop.  And when I wondered to myself why a man who spoke 7 languages was working as a dishwasher, it threw me for a loop, too.

Curtis

   Working in the dishroom you get stuck with all the rejected employees who are unfit to work serving customers.  Curtis, a Vietnam vet with a bum leg ("Ah had a bad case of athlete's foot back in the war, now mah leg's all fucked up), used to cuss out the customers when he worked out in the dining area, wiping tables.  He also had a bad habit of never washing his pants, so that over time they developed a crusty layer of old food.  We all heaved a collective groan when Curtis was transferred into the dishroom.  The guy was a live wire.  He slouched at the window, collecting the trays as they came in on the conveyor belt.  Instead of dumping the silverware into the soaking tank, he would hurl it halfway across the room in the direction of the table where we sorted silverware.

   Curtis loved to share information with his co-workers.  Unfortunately this often translated into graphic descriptions of sex with his wife.  After seeing his wife one day, these descriptions took on even more horrific significance.  Sometimes Curtis would come up to me when I was reading at work and try to talk to me.  He would tell me about how much he loved reading westerns ("Ah love them westerns.  That Louis L'Amour, he's a fahn writer").  Or if it was raining he would mutter something about the weather reminding him of the jungle back in 'Nam. 

   I kind of felt sorry for Curtis.  He seemed to have gotten a bum deal in life.  Eventually, he forgot to wash his pants one too many times and management got rid of him.  I wonder where he is now,  if he got another job, or if he's at home in his trailer, chain-smoking Dorals, and reading Louis L'Amour novels, waiting for his wife's disability check to come in the mail.

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