Wayne Thiebaud, Pie Counter, 1963
The skin on my fingers began peeling off during my sixth consecutive shift—this dark night of the soul serpent shedding the entirety of her epidermis. I work in a supernatural kitchen staffed by angels; we daily do battle with the forces of gross materiality. One of the buffet clocks stopped at 11:11 and no one replaced the battery.
The unbelievable becomes true and I fall in love with the sub-sub leader of this seraphim crew—the dragon-slaying archangel himself—a character you’d expect to be shouting at an umpire with a mouthful of corndog. It’s interesting to fall in love as a penniless spinster with a reptilian skin condition in an ill-fitting uniform covered in mashed potatoes. The fantasies are of a different order since I’m not in them. Yet, even to love silently heals the heart.
During my first week, mechanics installed a new dish machine while we used the three-bay sink. Manual dishwashing is tedious and messy work after which your back and feet hurt, but not notably awful. It’s like washing dishes at home if all your pots and pans were huge and slick with grease and encrusted with gristle and eggs and you washed them repeatedly for hours in scalding water. But the dish machine is another beast. I’m merely the fleshly intermediary between the conveyor belt and sanitizing jets—like Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory, it’s all well and good at the start of meal service, but escalates to a mound of chinaware collapsing into the churning dish bay River Styx. The first ten minutes has the quality of a game, the next three hours that of torture: searing muscular pain, holding back a growing pile of slippery plates, rescuing tableware from the industrial garbage disposal’s fatal whirlpool, condensation from vents dripping down my back, yogurt, melted ice cream, nacho cheese, ketchup, icing, fruit stickers, bones, rinds, shells, yolks, sludge. Slipping on actual banana peels in addition to grease and soap; hundreds of napkins wadded into hundreds of drinking cups.
We clean everything in existence, clean the cleaning implements, stumble home and clean ourselves. I sleep a broken and hallucinatory cinematographic dreamscape of diners swirling down drains, neon soup poured over a kaleidoscope of muffins. However low one’s caste, there’s always one yet lower—I learn of the nighttime janitorial staff that cleans our bathrooms and locker rooms. Hell hath no bottom, as Wayne has reminded me (with unerring accuracy) for a decade.
Do you remember the children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day? I woke with an eye swollen shut, received the above email, missed my bus, etc. etc. such that by the time I got to work I was so frayed a gentle correction caused me to burst into tears. “No cry, no cry!” my colleague exclaimed. “Do you read the Bible?” “No, but I believe in God.” “God is like water. We need water for everything—for drinking, for cooking, for washing dishes. We need God like we need water, for everything. God will give you the strength.” We embraced.
God gave me the strength via her ministration. Another coworker worked an eleven hour shift to help us. Another scoured compost buckets, floor drains, and oven hoods. I relayed the tale to my archangel manager friend and his eyes welled with tears. “Rock bottom!” I shouted, holding two saucepans aloft, and he told me the story of his own ruin. Consider this, he said. A sorority girl gets a BMW convertible a lighter shade of pink than she wanted. A surgeon flees his war-torn country and works as a menial laborer. Then there’s you and me. And yet the vast spectrum of circumstances is always reduced to a singular and unmeasurable suffering.
Though my body and finances will not hold out, I am granted this initiation amongst spiritual adepts. The dishroom a hidden sanctuary, like Alexander’s invisible castle.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” - Romans 5:3-5
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