The Dishwasher
Hudson Tesoriero (Griffith University)
In the dark, filthy parking-garage underneath the L-shaped block of the restaurant complex. A damp and depressing quagmire to confront before work. I strip off my outfit from the dayshift at the vintage fashion store. Monotonous. Scripted conversation with customers. Nine out of ten don’t want to talk, don’t want the help, but the one I’d ignore would write a negative Google review. I wish all the work was building toward something, a greater goal, but right now there is no emerald light across the pier. Buried in debt, failed IVF, failed engagement, failed life. Now, a two-job status quo in attempt to pick up the pieces.
Sliding on my stained and faded dish-pig clothes, still soggy from last night’s shift. Black Levi’s shorn above the ankle, faded Waylon Jennings tee, an olive-green apron which provides little armour for the job, and splattered Birkenstock clogs with extremely pronounced grooves on the insoles. You gotta earn those grooves. I must look suspicious hopping around in my underwear trying to get changed. Whole place smells of mould, piss, and car exhaust. Colder down here too. Subterranean bowels of the glitter strip. No one has good mental associations with underground parking garages, we’ve all watched too many crime shows and heard too many anecdotes. Still, I think the fear taps into something rooted deeper, a childhood fear of the dark, of the unknown – where primal imagination flickers, where ancestral terror oozes. For a moment, I imagine a hulking, writhing mass of limbs and teeth behind the walls, amorphous shadows clawing and salivating in the wet black. Shut the fuck up. Sometimes I just can’t bear my own inner monologue. Gotta get to work.
I trudge up the winding staircase leading to street level, clogs slapping against cracked concrete. Already feeling out of breath. Damn. When did thirty-years-old and a belly that hangs over my waistband come knocking on my door? Guess they crept in through the back. Time to moonlight another shift as a damn dishy.
An especially shit night in the kitchen. I enter through the back corridor and barely get a nod of acknowledgment from the pair cooking. There’s my boss, Baron, Irish and severe. Seriously, who has that name? And his personality couldn’t be more fitting. Pompous little prick. Five-foot-nothing with a suggestion of a red moustache arched above a cruel little mouth lined with pointy, yellow teeth. He wears gold earrings and a gold necklace with a pendant of what I assume is some Celtic deity – a gilded simulacra of a big-headed, round-eyed sonofabitch. Now, Baron might not run the whole place but he sure as shit runs the kitchen and doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind you. He always smells musty somehow, triggering an immediate biological dislike before he even opens his mouth.
‘Three minutes late, Joe.’ Baron sneers as soon as my back turns from the kitchen to enter the adjoining dish-room. The other chef, Gary, barely speaks and I think the longest he’s stayed back at work after obligated was five minutes. Can’t say I blame him. Though he calls out now.
‘Joe?’
I swerve back around to face the kitchen. ‘What’s up?’
‘I’ve gotta take my grandma to the airport on Tuesday, reckon you could cover my shift?’
I don’t ponder on it long. Need the money. ‘Yeah bud, no dramas.’
Baron gives him a sinister side-eye, then mutters, ‘Great, Chef Joe in the kitchen.’
I roll my eyes and ignore it, calling out, ‘Smells good, chefs.’ They’re cooking laksa and nasi goreng. Great, plenty of woks and pans to steel wool until my hands bleed. Rich waves of fried vegetables, Indonesian sauce, coconut milk. The kitchen is open, so the aroma fills the whole place. There’s a decent amount of people drinking and meandering around in groups of two and three, standing. The half-dozen tables from the bar at the entrance to the kitchen at the back are seated with people eating. The walls are bare brick and decorated with neon signs, framed posters of indie, garage, and psychedelic bands and a few movie posters. The one that often catches my eye is of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu. A pale, bald, fanged Klaus Kinski cradling a hypnotised woman. I imagine caving the fucking vampire’s head in with a fry pan, taking hours of dish-pit misery out on his undead cranium.
Front of house is busy tonight. The bar is weird because on Friday and Saturday nights after the dinner rush, a DJ comes in and the place pretty much turns into a fucking night club. Nothing like taking a piss in-between dishwasher loads to a choir of obnoxious cocaine snorting from every single cubicle, and the general bloody shenanigans that find their way to the bathroom. Everyone loves coke, and so would I if it wasn’t my entire week’s wage for a gram. You can do the math there. Occasionally someone will ask, Hey Joe, want a line? And this does lift the spirits, if only for a little while.
The dish-pit is packed. During prep they spared no utensil, chopping board, or pan. Sometimes I suspect they use extras just to give me more work to do. I take a deep breath, retrieve my Bluetooth speaker from my tote bag and place it on the middle of the three metal shelves that ascend from waist height to ceiling on my left. I que Chopin on my phone. Nocturne No.10 in A Flat, Op.32 No.2. Now we’re talking. Peaceful music, get into a meditative rhythm to work. Count each breath, in for three, out for four. Load up the plastic basket with plates, cutlery, saucepans. Two-minute dishwasher cycle, pull them out, dry them with a tea towel, run them into the adjacent kitchen. Dodging Baron and Gary cooking.
Baron refuses to move even the slightest bit or acknowledge you as you try and return the utensils and crockery to their kitchen home. At times he’ll push past to use the dish-pit sink, turn the tap to cold water so he can fill a Tupperware to defrost something, or wash rice or lettuce in a basin, that sickening smell of his filling my nostrils. Not once has he ever returned the tap back to hot. More dishes, wash, dry, return to kitchen. Repeat process for hours. I eventually swap Chopin out for my old-school country playlist. That’s How I Got to Memphis by Tom T. Hall plays.
Losing myself in the song, imaging that I’m the forlorn cowboy travelling to Memphis in search of my former lover. Sitting in a diner, drinking a big mug of percolated American coffee, looking out the window at a highway, hoping it leads like a concrete vein to her. A tear running down my leathery face, each wrinkle a roadmap of things left unsaid, of destinations unreached. Distracted, I almost fumble a stack of plates from the dishwasher to the shelf. C’mon. I place them behind me, there’s a full wall with shelving and a waist-high bench with an open slot. This gives me a small glimpse of the patrons, not bad when girls walk by in tight dresses. Gotta enjoy the little things. This also means any acquaintances or friends can see inside, often inevitably drawing me into small talk conversations. But no one sees me now.
The shift goes on. It’s hot, getting swampy in the groin area, can’t focus on my own music because the DJ has started and it’s loud. Metallic, repetitive. Try for deep breaths. Feeling the knot of a headache tightening behind my eyes. Thoughts want to form but I force them back. A Tupperware filled with two inches of chicken juice flies past my ear and rebounds off the sink wall. Baron doesn’t even look back to see where it collides. Target practice. Fuck this.
The dishes keep coming in. I feel like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia when the brooms keep multiplying. The bar staff half-assedly scrape the food off the plates, dropping used napkins and cutlery on the floor. Often, I drop a stack in to the sink water only to discover half a hidden cheeseburger in-between the pile. Deep sigh. Keep scrubbing. Can’t stand most of the front of house staff but they never seem to stay long. The number of bartenders we’ve had disappear, stop coming in, I can’t even count. Almost always suddenly and without a word. Guess that’s just hospitality for you.
Staring down at my hands, calloused and immune to the hot dirty stew they plunge in and out of. I imagine strangling Baron, hacking him with the serrated bread knife, forcing his head into the deep fryer, shoving my hand into his stomach and ripping out his intestines while I cackle. Oh man, this is unhealthy. My gory fantasy disrupted as Jessica stumbles in with a cherry vape. An old friend of mine, kinda, sorta. Drunkenly inviting herself through, she sits on a milk crate in the corner where the mop-buckets live. Her floral perfume is a nice contrast to the smell of food scraps and dish detergent. She’s wearing a sheer black dress and black cowboy boots. Her hair freshly bleached platinum blonde. She sucks her vape and looks at me with glazed over blue eyes.
‘How you going?’ She leans forward with mock seriousness.
I pull a saucepan out of the automatic dishwasher and place it to the shelf on my left, narrowly missing my music speaker. ‘Oh, you know, just living the dream.’
She laughs. ‘The dream of doing the dishes?’
‘Well, someone’s gotta do ‘em.’ I shrug.
‘But not you Joe, you have two uni degrees.’
This makes me smile. ‘And look where they got me. Plus, I got two jobs. You can call me Sisyphus.’ I can sense Baron eye-fucking me from the kitchen.
‘Who?’ Jess looks at her phone now.
Turning to face her, another load of plates and cutlery put through the machine for a cycle. The whirring begins.
‘How’s the vintage store?’ she asks, attention back on me.
‘Well, it’s not glamourous like this, I assure you.’ I flick my hair back, smirking. ‘So, how you doing?’
‘Yeah, just needed a minute.’ She pauses to hit her vape, blowing out a plume of sweet-smelling cherry smoke. ‘It’s fucking hectic out there.’
I crouch down and look out the slot, squinting at the people piling in. Countless pairs of Vans, Converse All-Stars, Dr Martens, baggy jeans, and no-longer-ironic mullets. The girls all dressed to the nines. It makes me feel even more insecure having to wear these soiled-ass kitchen clothes, while patrons come in, peacocked and threaded in their nightclub best.
‘All good.’ I sigh and turn back to the sink.
Sensing the loss of my attention, Jess stands up. ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something.’ Her voice cracks a little.
An immediate flash of anxiety hits me like a brown bullet in the guts. I try my best to feign indifference. ‘What’s that?’ Turning to her once again.
‘Well,’ She composes herself a little. ‘Me and Billy have been trying for a baby.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’ What a great time and place to have this conversation. I wipe my hands against my apron, relaxing my face into the most sympathetic expression I can muster.
‘And I know you and Maddie had problems and kept trying for a long time.’ The drinks she’s had really shatter any politeness at broaching the topic.
I sigh and lean in a little. ‘Look, I know there might be a lot of anxiety right now, but you gotta stay optimistic. Don’t let the process poison shit, don’t let it ruin you like it ruined me.’
This sits with Jess for a little too long. She rocks back and forth savouring each word. ‘You chose to be ruined, though,’ she says finally.
I take a deep breath at this one. Blunter than a wooden sword. ‘Well, consider me a cautionary tale.’
Jess smiles and inhales from her vape again.
I continue. ‘Look, it’s not always the easiest-’ Another Tupperware flies past me and crashes into the sink. Water splashes up on me and Jess. ‘You motherfuck,’ I say reflexively, glaring at Baron.
He flares his pointed nostrils at me. ‘C’mon, you’re on the clock.’ He dabs his sweaty forehead with a blue and white Chux wipe, breaking any sincerity this forced drunken conversation was accumulating.
‘Never mind.’ Jess presses a light fist to my chest. ‘I’ll talk to you about it later.’
‘Sure.’ I nod with a smile betrayed by baggy eyes and return to the monotony of the dishes, Baron’s beady eyes burning holes in my back.
An hour passes before Baron trots into the dish pit, surely with cloven hooves stuffed into his clogs. He eats three chicken wings drenched in mayonnaise on a tiny plate. A bead of sweat travels down from his hairline to his munching jaw.
‘What did she want?’ He eats with his mouth open and gestures to the dancefloor with a half-sucked chicken bone.
‘She just wanted a break, it’s so busy out there.’
Baron nods. ‘Good, plenty of money coming in’.
‘Plenty of dishes too.’
Baron sneers. ‘Hardly.’ He slides his plate along the edge of the sink. They always look like they’ve been subjected to a gangbang by a pack of horny golden retrievers. Mayonnaise smeared across every inch of the porcelain. He turns back to the kitchen, farting before he exits. I roll my eyes and keep washing the dishes.
The night goes on, flitting past my eyes like a timelapse. Dish after dish comes in, wash, dry, back into the kitchen. I’m tired, truly deep-in-my-bones tired. Emotionally torn and in two minds. Simultaneously on the edge ready to collapse at any moment, but also completely resigned to my fate. What choice do I have? If I persist, so must the work. Any brief lapse in dishwashing cycle is met by Baron huffing in and demanding I scrub this crevice with the steel wool or dismantle and clean some fucking thing. You got time to lean you got time to clean. You got time to scroll, you got time to roll. Roll that boulder Sisyphus.
Now that the DJ has been playing for a while, the kitchen orders slow, so it’s time to pry up the long metal drains which snake along the floor of the dish-pit and kitchen like a steel vein. The buildup of scrubbed paint, grime, rotting food residue, and whatever else you could imagine gets trapped under a kitchen floor, fucking stinks. Grill scraper to scoop it out and slop the greyish sludge into the bin. Swear I see a human tooth in the mass that builds with the scraping, but I instinctively push the filth down the drain hole before the thought to inspect takes root. Mind playing tricks. As I contemplate, Baron stands over me.
‘Make sure to get boiling water and flush it through. And I want the grates spotless.’ His smell, even over the stink of the drains, is overpowering.
‘They always are.’ I don’t make eye contact. My arms burn as I chisel away. The fluorescent light searing down wills me into a daydream. Memories. Maddie and I together meeting for the first time in high-school and having requited crushes, until I finally asked her out in year twelve, becoming official. The way we’d race home from final period and tear the clothes off each other. The way those days smelled like a spring and a specific perfume, and how they shimmer in my mind. Young and in love. Half-awake mornings, her favourite Nick Cave song playing, distant voices from upstairs, a cat purring at my feet, a gentle breeze creeping in through the sliding door. Then when I was a student, and she was working a lot. I was tempted by every new and exciting female that entered my life. The first break-up. Realising how nice it was to have someone that was invested in you, that cared how your day was. Begging her to get back together. Then this new space, slightly older, slightly truer. Getting stoned and watching a Gaspar Noe film, holding her close and tight, feeling scared but completely vulnerable and utterly in love. The second break-up, the definitive adolescent earthquake. But then reuniting as adults, a few kilos heavier, a few more lines on our faces. Trying to make that real go of it, trying to have our child. The mosaic shatters.
The drain cleaned, I go outside for a cigarette break. Not granted of course, but snuck in the course of taking the cardboard fruit and vegetable boxes to the dumpster chamber outside. I crouch against a poxy concrete wall and savour the cigarette, the only unnecessary expense I still indulge. The debt of the doctor bills, and everything she took me for in the end, furnace the rest of what I make. For a moment it sounds like I can hear something in the wall, a slithering, muffled movement. The visions return of an undulating fleshy mass, beating like a dripping, bleeding drum. Goosebumps raise on my forearms. Who knows what shit lives near the bins. Giant rats? Giant bugs? And then I imagine things worse than those. I don’t entertain the thought for long. My friend Kieran who bartends next door enters with a plastic bin in his hand.
‘Hey Joe.’ He says it loudly. Then, as an afterthought. ‘Where you goin’ with that gun of yours?’ His dark facial stubble shines under the light of the back area.
I wave then shrug. Offering a smile like I haven’t heard that one a hundred times. I take a long drag from my cigarette, and he walks over.
‘Busy tonight?’ Kieran slams his garbage bag into the dumpster like it’s the finishing move of a wrestling match. He retrieves a disposable vape from the front pouch of his apron and blows a thick cloud of watermelon smoke into the air above us.
‘It was,’ I reply, inhaling my own cloud of real smoke. ‘But settling down now.’
‘Ah, nice bro.’ He nods, unsure of how to continue the small talk.
‘So, you manage to get much studying done this week?’ I decide to put in some effort here. Kieran has been ostensibly studying his undergraduate in fine art for years. Part-time.
He shrugs. ‘I’ve been so busy with work, y’know how it is.’
I sigh and take another drag from my cigarette. ‘I do.’ The conversation goes nowhere, as I suspect will his artistic career. We return to work.
Multiple eternities pass. I stare up at the ceiling light of the dish-pit and imagine merging with it, ascending into the brightness, disintegrating. Being overcome by warmth and shedding the corporeal form. Transferring consciousness and escaping this reality. Still kind of thrown off by the conversation earlier with Jess. Residual anxiety from having what I play over in my head spoken out loud. The entitlement to just waltz in and dredge up old shit – old shit that is still my current shit. I should go to her work and do that. Yeah right.
Eventually, the bar staff start finishing and we’re closing down the kitchen. I run the last gauntlet of errands. Each trip outside or to the front of house is a nice reprieve from the bright mausoleum. Take the bins out. Pour the kitchen oil into the drums next to the dumpster. Scrub and clean the metal walls and surfaces of the kitchen, first with steel wool and soap, then sanitiser, then dry with a tea towel. I work through the list until it’s just me and Baron left to the retiring night. Baron disappears and I duck out to piss, an orange dehydrated stream. Always forget to drink water when I work, suppose this doesn’t help the headaches. I milk the bathroom trip for as long as possible before returning, splashing water on my face, and taking deep breaths in the cracked, graffitied mirror. Hardly recognise myself, so many new lines in my face, new greys in my hair. I swear the reflection looking back at me, isn’t me. Like another me is smirking back, some kind of shadow-self. Tear myself away, take another deep breath, and head back.
The bar I’ve returned to after my toilet trip is a different one. No longer my place of work but a damp, dark, misty catacomb. The entire tenor has shifted. A palpable air of fear, of violence, hangs heavy. It doesn’t even look the same, like I’ve stepped into some other malevolent, predatory world, like there’s been a cruel dimensional shift since I did a piss. Unsure what to do now, pagan instincts tell me to run. But I force my step.
It’s freezing cold inside, heart beating faster, anxiety crashing and clashing. I see the door to the adjacent walk-in freezer open just the tiniest bit, a little bar of light escaping, enticing. I force a calm. Strangely compelled now, walking towards it, slowly sliding the door across. I have no idea what I’m looking at, there are no words. Frosty fog escapes the walk-in like clawed, cloudy fingers, and I see Baron. But it isn’t Baron. A pale, hideous creature stares at me. The skin of Baron, looking like a lubricated rubbery suit, is pulled down to the waist. There are two black eyes, two little slits for a nose, a rotten yawning orifice for a mouth dripping coagulated black tar. All sitting grotesquely in the middle of an oversized head which I can’t understand fitting into the human mask.
‘What the fuck?’ I say it, or rather nearly vomit it, without thinking or being able to truly comprehend what I’m seeing. I’m fairly certain with a breath out I also spray shit a little too, not that it’s of immediate concern.
The creature blinks and steps back. It tilts its head to the side as if considering something. Its skin is translucent white, and I can see veins of a colour I can’t comprehend spreading like a cruel galaxy all over. We continue to stare at each other. I can’t move, transfixed, hypnotised, spray shit soaking into my underwear. The creature eventually shrugs. This disarms things and all of a sudden the scene is kind of funny. I catch my breath properly and it speaks.
‘I guess you know now.’ Its voice is the same as Baron’s, but it seems so strange watching the words articulated from this monster’s hideous face. The slimy skin suit dangles from the waist, and the hollow, flapping body parts are distracting. Hard to believe anything would be distracting from the face I’m looking at.
‘Fuck, man, maybe I’ve always known.’
It nods.
‘What happens now?’ It’s so cold in here I can see my breath as I talk. I rub my hands together.
The creature begins pulling its human suit back on, a strange transformation and ritual to watch. ‘Let’s see,’ It puts its slimy claws back through the arms of the Baron costume. Pulled up to the neck now, only the monster face remains. ‘I guess you can never leave now. If you ever try and quit, I’ll have to kill you. Even if you consider it, I’ll know, and you’ll be fed to my family below.’ It stops for a moment as a thought occurs. ‘But-’
‘But what?’ I challenge, imbued with some sort of inexplicable confidence in the face of this surreal confrontation.
‘The truth of the matter is, I kind of like you, Joe. I know it may not seem like it, but I do. You’re a hard worker, you cover shifts, you’re reliable. So maybe there’s a third option.’
I’m more surprised hearing that this despicable nightmare-fuel said it liked me than that there’s a third option.
‘And what’s that?’ I’m almost completely relaxed now, flight mode tapering off.
‘You could join myself and the family.’ He beckons to the grate on the floor as if to suggest the presence of what lurks beneath.
‘And what, eat people?’ I almost laugh now.
‘Well, sometimes. If they can afford to be eaten.’ The thing pulls up the last of the Baron suit and relaxes it over his face and head. I’m with my old boss again.
‘Shit, is that what happened to Whitney who stopped coming in last month?’ Piecing the puzzle together now, ignoring Baron moving the skin suit around to get his eyes through the holes.
Baron answers with a sinister little smirk but lets the previous offer hang in the air.
‘So, it’s work here as a prisoner until I die, die earlier by trying to quit, or join you and a breed of monsters?’
Baron nods and takes a little step closer, raising his head, carnivorous eyes tracing me up and down, as if to force the answer.
‘Does it come with any benefits?’
Baron’s an inch away from my face, his stench now surprisingly palatable. ‘You’ll be happier than you’ve ever been. And no one will ever be able to hurt you again.’
This is an enormous, life-changing, species-altering, decision. After brief consideration, I answer.
Baron and I pack up the last few things around the bar, now returned to its previous plane of reality. Music off, lights off, fans off, fridges on. We leave out the front door.
Sometimes I miss Maddie, even though she broke me. Sometimes I miss the vain attempt to carve out any kind of life for myself. Sometimes I miss being human. But honestly, I kind of like it down here with my new family. No bills, no debt, just the gnashing of teeth and the carving of flesh. Everything I ever cared about or worried over will turn to dust and fade to an eventual nothing. Lives will pass and I will remain in the dark. With all responsibilities of being a man absolved, hey, what’s washing a few dishes?
Hudson Tesoriero is a PhD candidate from Griffith University. He has had multiple short stories published through journals and subculture zines.
