I followed an ad in the local paper. This place, The Windjammer, just up the street, was hiring a dishwasher for $5.25 an hour. $5.25 an hour! At my current job, counting cans and bottles at the redemption center, I made minimum wage, $4.25. This would be a huge upgrade and I wouldn’t have to smell like stale beer every day, plus, the old man cashier at the place worked me like a rented mule, always up my ass about something. He even made me mop the floors a certain way, his way, but when he turned his head I went back to doing them my way.

Just a senior in high school. Looking for a couple of nights a week. A minor. I called and waited while the hostess went looking for the guy in the ad, Mike. When he got on the horn he said to come in and meet him the next day at 11 a.m. I told him I’d be in school. “Ok,” he said. “Just come in after school.” When I went in he barely looked at me, I just filled out the paperwork and he told me to come in next Saturday morning at eight.

I got in and met the chef, Cat. A beefy dude with a goatee. “We listen to jazz in the morning here,” he said. “I hope that doesn’t bother you.” He set me up with this kid the same age as me, Chris. A tall and gangly fella with a shock of red hair. He seemed ok. He took me through the daily opening procedures. “First things first,” he said. “We vacuum the dining room.” He took me out there into the large empty space, the center of which was dominated by a sort of captain’s bridge where the salad bar would go during night service and they did the complementary brunch on weekend mornings. He showed me to a broom closet and pulled the vacuum cleaner out. “You don’t have to do that good of a job,” he said. “Just get all the crumbs and stuff or they’ll make you do it again.”

It took me a while to get it all done. When I went back into the kitchen, I found Chris and we went into the employee locker room and each had a cigarette. An older Asian guy was in there changing. “This is Ming, he doesn’t speak English but he’s a good guy,” Chris said. Ming nodded. Stoic. “Do you smoke other things?” Chris said. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go on a laundry run,” Chris said.

The Windjammer was connected to a hotel. Every so often the dishwashers were required to haul this big cart full of aprons, towels, and such on tiny, wobbling wheels through the parking lot to the laundry room. Chris had me push, it was winter, so the going was a little tricky, icy, slushy. “Stop here,” he said. We went behind a dumpster and he pulled a metal pipe and a sack of weed from his corduroys. “This is just some decent Canadian purple,” he said. “It’ll get the job done,” I said. “You can smoke me up next time,” he said.

Stinking of weed, Chris directed me as I pushed the cart through an entrance in the back of the hotel where two women worked in an enormous laundry facility. They unloaded the cart and I took it back to the kitchen. So far the job was great. It had been two hours, I was already high, and I hadn’t even touched a dish yet.

When we got back inside, Chris told me the basic procedures. Ming was already at the hose, getting through the mountain of stuff piled up from morning prep. The dish machine was one of those giant conveyer belt types where you shoved stuff into one end and it came out the other side piping hot. For the first hour or so I unloaded and familiarized myself with where everything went. I met the prep cooks and the line cooks. The kitchen was massive. The line cooks looked like pirates, lots of facial hair, bandanas, tattoos, scars. The prep guys much more relaxed, there was even a good looking girl among them who smiled at me. Chris was over there peeling and deveining shrimp. They seemed to use a lot of large bowls for mixing various ingredients. One guy labeled the top of a bucket “Cock sauce.”

Chef Cat came over and touched my shoulder. “You want some eggs?” Over on the line was a big hotel pan full of them. He handed me a plate and fork. “There’s some home fries there too if you want them.” I went and sat in the locker room, ate, and lit up a butt. What a great job. Ming came in. He sat staring at me with one leg crossed over the other and smoked with his elbow up on the top knee and the first two fingers holding the cigarette. He sucked down a quarter of the cig with each drag. We sat there in silence. A cook came in, this guy Jamie. He went into his locker. “What the hell?” he said. “Ming! How did you do it?” Ming smiled. “He somehow breaks into my locker and steals my cigarettes. C’mon Ming, fork ’em over.” Ming smiled, reached into his pocket, and handed the a pack of Marlboros over. “I keep changing my lock, but he somehow gets in there,” Jamie said.

Back at the machine. At some point, Ming came over to my end of the machine, nudged me out of the way, and gestured over to the hose area. This was the start of brunch service. To my right, a little window where the bus tubs came through, below my waist a 50 gallon trash can. For the first half hour it was smooth sailing, then the shit hit the fan. Bus tubs jam packed with plates, silverware, napkins, and uneaten food were jettisoned through the window at me. I had to pick through each one, scraping the food off into the trash, tossing the towels into a bin, throwing the silverware into a plastic bucket to soak. Every so often a rack of glasses came clanking through.

I looked over my shoulder at Ming who was casually stacking and unloading at the other end while I drowned. At some point the window got clogged up and some guy stuck his head in the window. “Let’s go, kid! Move! Move!” I picked up the pace. There were servers everywhere all of a sudden. Black clad ants racing around. One of them came into the kitchen, “Glasses! We need glasses!” he shouted. I looked over at the line cooks who were in some sort of dance, flames everywhere, shouting through the window at the waiters, “Pick up! Pick up!” An occasional pan would burst into flames.

At the point when I would catch up, a cook would come over and drop off a melted bus tub full of saute pans. “We need these now!” he said. I scrubbed with wild abandon. Most of the pans were easy, but some so caked and singed I had to put them aside for later. More bus tubs. I had to start stacking them one on top of the other to make room. More glass racks. Ming down at the other end chilling, going to the locker room for smoke breaks.

The guy who hired me, Mike, burst into the dish area. “What the fuck is going on here?” I just looked at him, wide eyed. He bounded over to Chris who was telling a joke in the prep area. I heard a stream of curses and then Chris appeared by my side. I saw that instead of scraping each plate off one by one he loaded the dirty dishes into the rack and then sprayed them all at once. Before long he had Ming hustling down at the other end of the machine and in just under 30 minutes he had the whole dish pit squared away and went back to the safety of the prep area.

Near the end of it all, after yet another wave combined with all the caked hotel pans from the steam tables, what they called the “brunch pounding.” Afterwards, Ming and I went and had a cigarette. Again, he sat in his weird way, staring at me. When I came back, Cat came over and asked me what I wanted for lunch. “Grilled cheese?” I said. “You want some fries too?” he said. I sat on a bucket by the machine and ate it all with a big pile of ketchup. My hands were pruny, my jeans and sneakers soaked through and black from all the refuse. After I punched out, Chris took me upstairs to the office. The restaurant was still, not a soul. Mike sat at the desk, he handed us each an envelope. “What’s this?” I said. “You guys get tipped out each shift,” Mike said. I opened the envelope, inside, $15 cash, all dollar bills. We left. “Want to go smoke up?” Chris said. “Your weed this time?”