Dishwashing Memories
When I was 17, I worked as a dishwasher at Salve Regina College in Newport with my friends Derek and John. It was a pretty cool gig: since it was a university, the pay was better than average for dishdogs, and the shift was always over by 8:00 PM. The best part was that we got an hour for lunch,paid, which led to all sorts of mischief on weekend shifts. Derek and I both owned Mazda GLCs, and the three of us would go racing out along Memorial Boulevard out to Purgatory Chasm, where we’d walk out along the trails to the cliffs, and get stoned off our asses watching the surfers. After this we’d drive back, Derek, John, and I clowning around on the road like a couple of idiots. It’s a wonder we didn’t get killed, or leave a body in our wake.
Salve Regina was known as “Save Your Vagina” among us townies, and jokes about Salve girls were pretty standard fare. What does a Salve girl do every morning? Puts on her make-up, and heads home to her dorm…” The school had recently began accepting males students, invariably guidos who invariably busted our balls. “Bust our balls,” muttered John to himself, as the conveyor belt sent dishes and glasses filled with half eaten food through our hoses, into the automated dishwasher, which cleaned about six racks a minute. “Bust our fucking balls? Did you hear what that cock fuck said to me?”
He was talking about Anthony, this Cosby-sweater-wearing asshole who seemed to have a name for everyone. He called John “Banjo”, because of his platinum blonde hair, not knowing that John was a varsity wrestler for Portsmouth High, and could rip his ass to shreds. John fucking hated Anthony, we all did, but we liked our cushy jobs and couldn’t afford to trade unemployment for the sheer pleasure of kicking Anthony’s condescending ass. Our impotent contempt for Anthony gradually became a general contempt for most of the Salve student body. They were pigs, deliberately wasting food, some of the bastards performing stupid stunts like piling jello on top of chipped beef, pouring the mix into a glass, stirring it up, and then plunging wadding napkins to the bottom of the glass for us to dig out.
“They wanna bust our balls?” said Derek. “You know what we should do?” He looked around conspiriatorily.
“Give ‘em balls right back.“.
“‘How’s that gonna work?” Jim asked.
“Oh, you’ll see,” said Derek, as a rack full of silverware came steaming out of the dishwasher. He took a spoon out of the rack and shoved it down the front of his pants, stirring the spoon all around his crotch, which was filthy and wet with food waste and cleaning residues. “Fucking douchebags wanna bust OUR balls? I’ll give ‘em balls.” He reached for one of the cylinders that held the silverware, put in his infected spoon with two or three others, and waited near the conveyor belt. “This way we’ll see who grabs the magic spoon. We didn’t have long to wait before we had to scurry back to the dishroom so no one would see us howling with laughter, except for maybe Tim, the retarded guy with the severe speech impediment. It was that kind of atmosphere.
Although there were bathrooms on the same floor as the dining area, University rules required that employees use specifically designated restrooms, which due to the building’s architecture, were three floors down from the kitchen. In the crunch you simply didn’t have time to spare, not when you’re part of a Henry Ford style line of dishwashers busy scraping plates, handing down to the racker, handing over to the feeder, with a guy at the end of stacking the racks as they clattered out of the machine. There were two choices: hold it and wait, or use the mop room on the other side of the dishwashing machine. There was a scrub sink in there, and it was never used for anything related to food, not that we would have cared. Unfortunately, management knew that we could have cared less, and getting caught pissing in the sink was bad news. The sink was a last resort, and if you really had to go, you had someone keep an eye out for you.
As it happened, it was one of those last resort moments for Jim Simmons. He’d been holding it in for the last two hours, and the rush just wouldn’t slow down. After shifting his weight until he got to the point that he thought his bladder was going to explode, Jim finally asked Derek to keep an eye out while he pissed in the sink.
No sooner had the door shut behind him, when Kenny Baker, one of the most uptight of the managers, walked in.
“Hey Derek,” he said. “You back here all alone? Where’s Jim?”
Derek brought his finger to his lips. “SHHH!” he hissed. He pointed his thumb toward the door. “Shh. Jim’s in the mop room,” he whispered.
Kenny arched a brow. “The mop room? What’s he doing in there?”
“I dunno,” Derek said hushedly. “He’s been in there 10 minutes at least! I think he’s…” He looked both ways,a s if someone might overhear. “I think… I think he’s jerking off,” Derek said, with an accompanying hand movement emulating self-abuse.
“What? What? That’s cra–” Kenny began, but just then Jim walked out of the moproom, zipping up his fly and sighing “Oh GOD that was good!”
“Jim!” Kenny said, staring. Jim jumped a foot, his face turned bright red, and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. “What were you doing in the mop room.
“Uh.. d’uh uh. I mean…, Jim stammered. While Jim was distracted, Derek got behind his back, and with a huge shit-eating grin performed the most cartoonish masturbation gestures he could think of. Kenny couldn’t take it anymore, and just walked out of the room, laughing so hard he was crying.
As for Jim… well, Jim never did find out why management referred to him as “Jack” from that day forward…
One Response to “Dishwashing Memories”
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November 27th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
When I was in high school, I used to work in the dish room at Penn’s International House. You don’t want to hear the stories about that place…