Everything and the Kitchen Sink: The Memoir of a Dishwasher
By CHARLES McGRATH
Until just recently, Pete Jordan hadn’t washed a dish professionally in seven years. Now an author, Mr. Jordan used to be a paid dishwasher, following in the steps of literary plongeurs like Theodore Dreiser and George Orwell, who, recalling his time behind the sink in Paris, once wrote:
“This washing up was a thoroughly odious job — not hard, but boring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend their whole decades at such occupations.”
Mr. Jordan, 40, spent more than a decade at such an occupation before finally turning in his towel and hanging up his apron. He now lives in Amsterdam, where he and his wife run a bike shop, and is working on a book about Dutch cycling.
But while he was in New York last week, promoting his just-published book, “Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States” (Harper Perennial), he did a washing-up stint at Union Picnic, a little Southern comfort-food place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, owned by his friend Suzy O’Brien. She used to run a Mexican joint where Mr. Jordan worked occasionally in the ’90s, and lent him her rattan couch to sleep on.
Right away, Ms. O’Brien greeted him with bad news: her dishwashing machine was on the blink. “I’ve only had it for two months,” she said. “I bought it on eBay.”
Mr. Jordan was actually relieved after he discovered that the malfunctioning machine, a Hobart, was an under-the-counter model, which would have meant a lot of bending and stooping. Instead he stepped over to the sink, a stainless-steel three-tubber, cranked on the hot water, dumped in some Palmolive from an industrial-size jug and went to work by hand.
He noted approvingly that the Hobart is the professional dishwasher’s machine of choice these days, and explained: “It’s a direct heir to the Josephine Cochrane machine. Hobart bought her out in 1926.”
(Josephine Cochrane, readers of Mr. Jordan’s book will discover, is the patron saint of dishwashers. She was a wealthy socialite from Shelbyville, Ill., who invented the dishwashing machine in 1886 after she grew tired of her servants’ breaking the china.)
When addressing a tub of dishes, Mr. Jordan takes an extremely wide stance, with his feet well outside his shoulders, to bring himself closer to sink level. He holds the dish in his left hand and after swabbing the center, gives it a careful clockwise wipe around the rim. He scrubs pots with a giant wad of steel wool and a liberal application of spray from the overhead nozzle.
On this particular evening, he said, the cooks were making his job easy. “It’s pretty slow right now,” he explained. “So these guys have the luxury of not burning anything. It gets hectic, and then you never know what you’re going to find in the sink.”
The subtitle of Mr. Jordan’s book is a bit misleading. He came up with the notion of washing in all 50 states in February 1990, after a year or so of being a dishwashing vagabond, bouncing from job to job in Alaska and on the West Coast, but over the next decade or so he made it to only 33. One day, standing outside a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Myrtle Beach, S.C., he decided to sell his van and walk away, parting from his grand plan as easily and with as little regret as he had walked away from many of his jobs.
As it was, his career hardly lacked variety. Among the places where Mr. Jordan washed are a fish cannery; an offshore oil rig; a college cafeteria; a ski resort; a kosher nursing home (where there were twin dish rooms, one for dairy, one for meat); a commune; a hospital; the Lawrence Welk resort in Branson, Mo.; and a Rhode Island dinner train where someone had neglected to fill the water tanks.
His favorites, he said last week, were neighborhood places just like Suzy’s. “What I hated,” he added, “was places where you had to wear a uniform, where there were fluorescent lights and layers of management looking over your shoulder.”
Mr. Jordan grew up one of seven children in a San Francisco family that didn’t own a dishwashing machine. His father thought he should finish college, and for a while couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge his son’s profession, which in an opinion survey of job desirability, Mr. Jordan points out, then ranked 735th out of 740. Only envelope stuffer, prostitute, drug dealer, fortuneteller and beggar were lower.
Mr. Jordan got into dishwashing for the same reason so many others have: because he was broke and because it was an easy job to get. He quickly decided, though, that washing dishes was a more dignified calling than waiting on tables, which he recently called “panhandling for tips.”
He also liked the free food (courtesy of what he calls the Bus Tub Buffet — leftovers from people’s plates, in other words), the occasional free drink and the freedom afforded by a discovery he made at the end of his first week: “Upon awakening on a morning that I was due at work, I rolled over on the couch and went back to sleep. That was that.” The longest he ever stayed on a job was six months, and that was in a vain effort to prove himself mortgage-worthy; the shortest was 45 minutes.
Stretches of “Dishwasher” read like a slacker’s idyll. Mr. Jordan is seldom without a girlfriend, and there are countless couches where he is welcome to crash. But some of his slackerdom is notional, even though to this day he claims, “I obviously would prefer not to work, and I think I proved that on plenty of occasions.”
Most of the time he was a diligent dishwasher, seldom resorting to the old dodge of hiding the dirty plates. He maintained an extensive correspondence with fellow dish dogs and pearl divers (to use the professional jargon) and also published a dishwashing zine, full of dishwashing lore and dishwashing trivia. He discovered, for example, that both Presidents Ford and Reagan had scrubbed plates for money, as had Malcolm X and Little Richard.
The zine was offbeat and original enough that in time Mr. Jordan became known as a character, Dishwasher Pete. “People were always trying to ‘discover’ me,” he said while in New York. “I was supposed to be this wacky guy. It drove me crazy. I didn’t need discovering any more than America needed discovering by Columbus.”
In the late ’90s, David Letterman’s TV show got wind of him and sent a letter asking him to appear. Out of both modesty and impishness, Mr. Jordan sent out a friend, a Dishwasher Pete imposter, while he remained in the green room, scoring some more free food.
He is looking forward a bit more to his cross-country book tour because it means an opportunity to look up old friends and also to distribute the 16th and final issue of his zine, which he finished only recently — the last unfinished business of his dish dog days. Not long after moving to the Netherlands, he said while taking a break at the Union Picnic sink, he applied in a moment of financial panic for some dishwashing jobs in Amsterdam. He was told that, as someone older than 23, he would cost too much under the Dutch minimum wage law.
Several years later, though, literally on the day he finished “Dishwasher,” the phone rang with a call from a restaurant offering him a spot. His wife answered and deliberately neglected to take down the details. “She was like the wife of a junkie,” he said. “She just hung up.”
