vagabondia, zines - book - 2007 - Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States

Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States
Pete Jordan
Harper Perennials
2007
374 pages

Greetings, I borrowed Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All 50 States from the Toronto Public Library.






Pete Jordan was, and possibly still is, the world's most famous dishwasher.  He was not a man who washed dishes to make ends meet while aspiring for fame, rather Jordan is a man who is acclaimed for his intense devotion to the profession of washing dishes.  In 1989 Jordan embarked on a quest to wash dishes in all 50 states, and during this period he published what became a well known zine about his journey, titled Dishwasher.  I remember hearing about the Dishwasher zine for the first time on a segment about zines aired on the, now defunct, CBC radio program Brave New Waves.  That was probably around the years 1999-2000, and at the time, Brave New Waves host Patti Schmidt spoke of Pete Jordan's quest in the present tense.  Jordan ended his quest, without completing it, in the year 2001 and in 2007 he published this memoir of his life lived in dedication to dishwashing.  

Dishwasher Pete has become a mini-media presence.  He has  been interviewed by V. Vale of Re/Search Publications for vol 1 of the Re/Search Zines book, and he has also appeared on David Letterman (sort of), twice.  The first appearance, which is discussed in Dishwasher, was actually a prank where Jordan allowed one of his friends who dreamed of appearing on national television, to take his place.  The second appearance was more recent, as Pete Jordan was promoting this very book.  Finally, he has also worked as a medical test subject and has appeared in another well known zine focusing on low-pay work, Guinea Pig Zero.  Jordan is also an occasional contributor to the popular NPR program, This American Life. Dishwasher is Jordan's first published book which recounts the time that he spent washing dishes, publishing his zine, and other assorted and associated pursuits.  I chose to read Dishwasher because of an interest in zines, and I was expecting the book to be an anthology of the fifteen issues of Dishwasher that were published during Jordan's 12 year quest.  As I delved into the text I realized the book pertains to a host of interests in addition to zines, including labour issues and vagabondia.


During Jordan’s second appearance on Late Night with David Letterman,

Letterman ended the interview by stating that the book isn't really about dishwashing, it's about the people Jordan meets on his quest.  After having read the book, however, it seems to me that it IS about washing dishes, and why not?  Jordan's book is full of anecdotes that are directly related to the experience of washing dishes professionally.  Jordan expounds on proper techniques, on his rituals for working a shift, on the costs and benefits of doing such work.  Furthermore, Jordan occasionally discusses famous entertainers and politicians who once worked as dishwashers, historic anecdotes that involve ‘dish-dogs’, and labour statistics that pertain to the profession.

Pete's story is of a traveler who worked cheap, traveled cheap, lived cheap.  He found dishwashing to be his calling because it kept him from dealing with irritating restaurant customers, plus it provided him with free food, and it was easy work to find.   Pete could easily collect his gear together and move on, expecting to find a new place to work in a new town.  Dishwashing was an easy job to abruptly walk out on, and he did so often, which was easy for him since he had few responsibilities in his life. Jordan’s perpetual traveling across America recalls Kerouac’s On the Road, although Jordan is as much a transient labourer as he is an adventure directed by wanderlust.  Jordan’s story of low status labour also recalls Charles Bukowski’s novel, Post Office, in which the caustic poet recalled events of his life as an employee of the United States Postal Service.  While both Post Office and Dishwasher are written in simple prose styles, Jordan’s attitude is far more upbeat than Bukowski’s perpetually grim view of the world.  The Bukowski connection to Dishwasher is quite strong, as Jordan notes that the poet was once a dishwasher, himself, and the elder writer’s feelings on the profession are quoted by Jordan.


Jordan's book reads as though the dishwashing entry in Stud Terkel's book, Working, exploded into hyper-mode (note: there actually is not an interview with a disherwasher in Terkel's book).  Dishwasher is fascinating because its author displays an intense dedication to what may be considered one of the lowest status professions in Western civilization.  While Letterman refused to acknowledge that the book is actually about dishwashing, to me the book seems to suggest that anything can be the grounds for interesting storytelling provided it's approached by someone with the right mixture of emotional sensibilities and imagination.  Jordan discusses how his zine seemed to open up dishwashing as a professional subculture, noting the development of its own set of slang terms, such as ‘pearl diver’, for dishwasher, or ‘bus tub buffet’  the scraps of food left on dishes that are still good to eat.


One of the most interesting aspects of Jordan’s text is the description of his lifestyle during this time in his life.  Dishwasher Pete lived frugally, slept on couches, and when he gets a loan from his brother to publish Dishwasher issue 16, he uses that to buy a van which became a home.  He ate at work, part of the job’s appeal, and occasionally described buying ice cream for a meal.  Towards the end of his quest, Jordan also wrote of his naievete of a normal life, where he wanted to once pay for a house in cash, and by the end of the book, he considers a home again, and considers a mortgage application with his unique set of assets and skills.  While Jordan’s text may be grounded in the zeitgeist of the late-1980s to early 1990s, identified with the underachieving Generation-Xer, many of his lifestyle choices exceed the bounds of the valorized Gen-X slacker, towards the earlier model of the Hobo.


Jordan eventually settled down, after meeting a woman whom he married, and has offered this memoir as the chief achievement of his post-dishwashing period.  It is the culmination of a period in the life of an individual who has made the most of a low status profession, and the legacy of one of the most popular zines of the 1990s zine golden age.   

vagabondia - book - 1984 - Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes
Ted Conover
1984
Viking Press
274 Pages

Hey out there in computer world!  I borrowed Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes from Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.

Rolling Nowhere is the first book by Ted Conover, an investigative journalist who has made a career out of immersing himself in the social world he intends to take as his subject matter. Conover wrote this text while he was still a student at Amherst College.  Inspired by his anthropology classes, he decided to embark on an adventure of social as well as geographical exploration, as he traveled the America by train, posing as a member of the hobo underclass.  Through his travels, Conover finds that in the early 1980s people with meager means of support still resort to hopping freight trains as a means for transportation and survival.

Rolling Nowhere is a story of Conover’s entry into, and participation in, the lifestyle of the travelling hobo over the period of several months in the early 1980s.  Much of his text notes Conover’s feelings and thoughts about what he is doing, his determination to go through with his plans despite his fears, his desire to speak with his family or the acknowledgment that his behaviors and attitudes are being changed by his adventure.   Much of the text is also descriptions of the people he meets or the experiences he has with them, however Conover’s self-transformation is really the subject of his book.

The text begins with the author’s naive efforts to catch out for the very first time, as he simply headed to the train-tracks one night to try to find a train to hop.  He quickly found Leroy after his travels began, who gave the author a quick education in the dynamics of train hopping and tramp living.  From that point on, Conover, lived among the hobos, riding trains with them, eating at missions and sleeping at Hobo jungles.  He began to smoke and drink with the men (and one woman) he met, and witnessed their forms of behavior directly.  

The persistent themes of Conover’s book are violence, scarcity, addiction, and isolation.   Conover witnessed pointless violence between the hobos, however he also witnessed the hobos victimized by people, particularly children and adolescents whom he said “attacked the only kind of grown up they could get away with attacking.”  Real accounts of such attacks have made headlines in recent months and are probably an ever-present possibility for the vulnerable poor.  Conover acknowledged that many hobos have fallen outside of society due to  trauma in their past, and often nurture an assortment of critical personal issues that make it difficult for them to reintegrate into society.  He observed hobos as people who are socially detached from one another, even when they appear to be engaged in friendships. Conover noted that the men who ride the rails are prepared to separate without sentiment at any moment, or worse, turn violently on one another over matters that may seem trivial.

Conover ascertained that while the train moving, the hobo is safe.  Danger looms when the train approaches its destination, as rail security, police, and potentially worst of all, other hobos, may be present at the stop.  Conover recalls a few close calls between himself and other hobos, and he describes some scenes of hobo on hobo brutality, however for the most part he avoided engaging in violence himself.  A single cruel act is committed by the author when he realizes a hobo was trying to enter his boxcar while the train was moving.  Conover insisted that to enter an occupied boxcar without asking its occupant is poor hobo etiquette, and when an invader grabbed hold of his car, Conover stomped on his fingers to force him to release his grip.  This one scene is shocking and almost creates a sense that Conover has crossed a boundary set by his middle class values, into the moral realm of the career hobo.  

While I was reading Rolling Nowhere I was expecting the text to end with some kind of stomping, like the sort Hunter S. Thompson described himself receiving at the hands of the Hells Angels in the epilogue to his account of the motorcycle club.  Instead, towards the end of Conover’s text, he described narrowly escaped the light of a police officer, probing the boxcar he was hiding in in Tulsa.  Conover described Tulsa as a “hot” town, where the police were intensely active in the search of illicit train passengers.  Conover then rests under an overpass and creates a sense of dread through his reflections upon all of the threats a hobo has to be concerned with, and expresses a profound lethargy over this constant worry.  He thus extends this dread to a kind of sympathy with the real hobos who did not share in his luxury to return home when they felt the adventure was over.  This feeling of dread Conover develops is palpable, however, and is perhaps as profound a means of conveying the danger of the depicted lifestyle as Thompson’s final experience of brutality at the hands of the notorious bikers.

    Rolling Nowhere describes the sincere effort made by a middle class young man to enter a social realm occupied by desperate and often dangerous men.  Conover lived as closely to the ideal hobo lifestyle as possible, without betraying his origins to any of the people he met on the road.  People came to respond to him as a fellow traveler, and he appeared to develop an insightful understanding of hobo society.  His reflections on the ways of living and methods for survival adopted by the train-hoppers he met are interesting enough that they should be acknowledged by researchers of this subject matter.