My First Job

I was hired as a dishwasher by my neighbor Hal, a white boy with a mushroom tattoo married to a lovely, fat-bootied black girl. They had the cutest little pickaninny kid... but ah, I digress.
Hal asked me one day if I'd care to come down to Scarpelli's on Nicolette Avenue and bust a few suds. When I figured out what that meant, I said, "Sure!"
Sign me up for makin' some scratch fo sho bro, I'd been applying for jobs for a year with no luck.
Hal was a baker at Scarpelli's, a 450 seat cavern of connected storefronts in a building that I'm sure has long since been torn down. They served up mid western Italian cuisine on a grand scale. The cauldron I was tasked with cleaning as soon as I arrived for my shift was 150 gallons. Coated in burned marinara. I learned my first trick, the fact that burned on marinara is still acidic, and requires only 15 minutes of contact with water to release it from stainless steel.
My fellow dishwashers were two hardcases, one just a year older than me and the other a 20-something mercenary type. The younger guy was off to join the Marines, hence my hiring.
When I asked, "Aren't you going to miss all that hair?", he replied, "'Tis a small price to pay for a guaranteed future."
He actually said "'Tis".
I realized at that moment I would never see the inside of a barracks. That scrawny little fuck is probably a General these days.
The other fellow, Mike, hated me on sight. He had me pegged as a lazy, pot-addled suburban layabout white boy fuck. Goddamn if he wasn't right.... well at least my first four days.
I caught on quick, my first clue coming when I asked "When are breaks scheduled?" and everyone.... I mean everyone, like, 15 people in a ten yard radius, burst out in belly laughs.
I had this very tired sinking feeling that never left me at that job.
After my cauldron cleansing every afternoon, my job was the removal of every single item in that cave of a walk-in cooler, stacking it all out on a series of milk crates in the hallway, then wiping with bleach every single wire shelf in the cooler and replacing said merchandise before mopping the metal frosty floor with ammonia. After those lungfuls, I had to hightail it to the dish-pit where I was greeted with the steamy effluence of many solvents, enzymatic cleaners and degreasers, not to mention the rinse agents. HOLY CRAP, what an inhalation. I'm already exhausted, the aforementioned tasks had to be completed in 45 minutes to prepare for the dinner rush and get all the prep cooks' pots and pans out of the way of the incoming salad plates.
Then it really started. The joint was full, every night. It was the place to go if it was your first date, if you wanted to break up, if you were just too hammered to make it to the show. It thrived on the edge of downtown and so did I.
I found customers, loyal ones, for my fledgling pot business. God bless cooks and waitresses, they know their fellow humans like no other. For better or worse. Let me tell ya, it takes no small amount of marijuana to deal with you useless fucks day in and day out. When they got really pissed off, they'd take the salads into the walk-in and plant pubes in them. Word to the wise, always be nice to your food-bringers.
Those bus-tubs would roll in non-stop, 'til it got to the point where I fucking hated the word "Incoming!"
It's only cute once, sweetheart, not all goddamn night. The place just screamed from 5:30 PM to 11 o'clock, the cooks would cut themselves and make marinara jokes as their very essence spilled invisibly into the spaghetti.
Schooner glasses would shatter all over the dishpit, shards staying in my forearms for weeks, fumes wafting out of improvised soak tanks for the mannicotti broiler dishes. The waitresses would complain about the dishwasher throwing temper tantrums and salad plates to a selectively deaf manager. ("He shows up for work, I can't fire him!")
Had I realized at that juncture, this was the easiest job I would ever have, suicide would have been the only acceptable route.
Thankfully, we toughen with age.