The Dishwasher, 2 (Jobs v. Life)

Comic comes from Natalie Dee.

Jobs v Life is essays about all the jobs I've had, in chronological order.  So far there's been paperboy,  and McDonald's... click here for an explanation and table of contents.


When I left off telling about my job a a dishwasher at Chenequa Country Club -- the third job I ever had in my life -- I was here, talking about

cruising, which as I realize it has nothing at all to do with Chenequa Country Club but you're stuck with the me that's stuck on this story, and cruising it is.  Cruising was something we did about every three weeks, driving around on Highway 100, smoking and pretending we were cool and not bored and seeing girls and wondering what it would be like to talk to them, and cruising was Godawfulboring right up until the one night it was not, the last night we ever went cruising, and what made cruising not boring that night was that on that one night, instead of just cruising around, stopping at the stoplights, getting some food, and then going home, on that one night, instead, things took a wild, random turn for the bizarrely worse when at a stoplight, a guy got out of a car and ran over to our car and reached in through the front, open, passenger-seat window and grabbed my friend Fred and began punching him as hard and fast in the face as he could.

That is how one of the rare nights on which something happened began: we'd been cruising, on Highway 100, and then that took place, and we all began yelling.

I have to make a correction to the story, though, as since last time I have realized that it was not Fred who was being punched, it was my friend Bob.

Bob and Fred were best friends, both on the track team, both lived near each other for a while, and they hung out together.  I was a hanger-on to their duo, and that continued with both Bob and Fred working as waiters at Chenequa Country Club before I began as a dishwasher there.  The fact that we would all work together made it seem to me like it might be kind of cool to work there only it wasn't at all.

Bob was in the passenger seat, as I recall, and I was in the back seat behind the driver, with the driver being my older brother Bill, and Bob in the front passenger seat. 

I realized, after last time, that I was wrong on the placement of that front-seat passenger because it was only after going back and re-reading it to be being this segment that I remembered the critical factor, which was how this whole thing had started, which was that Fred, who was prone to doing things like this, had flipped off the guys in the other car.

We didn't know that as Bill started driving, doing so as soon as he could, which was both almost immediately and a lot longer than you want it to be when you are under attack, and while we waited for the light to change and the cars in front of us to move Bob was trying to roll up the window while also being punched in the face and finally we were moving, trying to get out of the stop-and-go cruising traffic on Highway 100 and away from the guys who were suddenly chasing us.

We didn't know why they had attacked Bob, or us, or whether they'd meant to attack just Bob or what was going on at all; all we knew was that we were being chased, and it was for real.  We got off of Highway 100 and into the side streets that ran through all the subdivisions and small strip malls around West Allis and Brookfield, Wisconsin, and in the dark of that night we were being pursued by an unknown number of guys in a car for no apparent reason, and they were not giving up.

As we drove, we were all shouting instructions to Bill about what to do and where to go; I suppose we were trying to lose them, but we weren't doing a very effective job of it, because when you actually go through something like that, it's way harder to lose someone than you immediately think, even in a bunch of residential streets.  Or maybe especially in a bunch of residential streets, where there are stop lights and other cars and it's not all that late and so while you are driving to save your life you also are driving, at least a little, somewhat responsibly, in that Bill would pause or at least slow down for stop signs, something they never do in the movies.

This went on for about forty years, or ten minutes, depending on whether you want to know how it felt or how long it actually took.  For about 10 minutes or so we sped as much as we could through quiet residential streets, with these guys after us, and it was during that time that Fred confessed that he had flipped the guys off at the stoplight, prompting us all to start yelling at him about why he would do that, while he yelled back his defense, being that he didn't know and he thought it would be funny.

I thought these guys were going to kill us.

I had only been in, at that point, about three fights in my entire life, if you don't count constantly fighting with my brothers which I don't because when we fought we had rules, like You can't hit each other in the face (a rule my older brother Bill would, not long after this event, break, along with my nose, when he punched me in the face when I wasn't even looking at him, resulting in a life-long bend in my nose), so when we fought as brothers, even those times we picked up weapons, which was sometimes, we almost never did any real harm to each other.

The three fights I had been in were two of the usual kinds of fights, in grade school, where nothing much happens.  One had been against Mark Hanley, a kid whose parents were friends with my parents, but who I never cared much for.  I don't remember why I fought Mark Hanley, other than that I didn't much care for him and I had (have, but it's easier to control at age 43 than at age 10 or 12) a terrible temper.  The fight with Mark Hanley took place on a baseball diamond and involved only a few punches and maybe some wrestling.  I don't remember it well but I remember that I didn't get badly hurt at all and neither did he, and Mark and I after that remained wary acquaintances until high school where I never recall talking to him ever again.  Maybe he moved.

Another fight was with Dean Larsen, in 5th grade, and I got in trouble for it, because Dean Larsen was making fun of me wearing glasses and an eye patch.  When I think back about Dean Larsen, I remember him as being taller and stronger than everyone in the 5th grade, and the rumor was that he'd been held back, but even if he had been held back, it couldn't account for how I remember Dean, because I remember him as being grown-up sized, double my height, and that can't be, right?  I'm sure I've inflated how large he was to make up for how badly that fight went, when I charged Dean Larsen for making fun of me and tried to punch him and he easily got me in a headlock and tackled me and pulled my glasses off and gave me a facewash until a teacher broke it up and I got sent to the principal's office for starting a fight.

After 5th grade, in our district, everyone changed schools and went to junior high for 6th-8th grades at Hartland North, and I don't recall seeing Dean there, so maybe I've completely blanked him from my mind after that.

The only other fight was one I got into when I was about 17; my uncle, Mark, was staying with us at the time, as my grandmother had recently died and Mark was only about 20 years old.  Mark and I had gone out on one Friday night to a "teen bar," where we could shoot pool and dance and smoke and he could meet girls and I could hope to meet girls, and there was a guy there who was picking a fight with me and finally I said I would fight him, although I can't imagine what I was thinking when I agreed to that.

I left, with Mark, and he left, with his friends, and a bunch of people who knew what was going on left, too, and we met on the sidewalk outside the teen bar, which was called "Jellybeans," and which held a weekly lip-synch contest where once I had come in second by doing a lipsynch to Adam Ant's Strip.

(I did not strip all the way down; I had a pair of shorts under my jeans.)

(You didn't get any prizes for being second, though.)

Outside, me and this guy faced each other, about three inches apart, each daring the other to hit first.  We had a belief, back then, that if you hit first you could be arrested, whereas if you hit second you could never be in trouble at all.   I know now that that rule is not exactly accurate, but that's what we thought back then, so many fights started the way this one did:

Him:  Go ahead.  Hit me.

Me:  No.  You hit me.  [I was desperately praying that he would not hit me because by then I had calmed down and realized that there wasn't any chance, really, that I would come out of this in any shape I wanted to be in.]

OTHERS:  Hit him.

This went on for a few minutes, until this happened:

Him:  Hit me.

ME:  HITS HIM AS HARD AS I CAN SQUARELY ON THE NOSE, WATCHING BLOOD SPURT AND HIM STAGGER BACK.

You probably think you can guess what happened next, and if you guessed "I turned around and said to my uncle, Did you see that? I hit him!" only to turn back and get pasted in the face myself and fall to the ground," you guessed correctly.

Two punches, one from each, and I was down, but that fight was not over because he kicked me, again and again, forcing me to cover my face because he was trying to kick it, and I stood up only to have him trip me and knock me down again and start kicking me and I got up again only to have him punch me in the head and I went down again and he started kicking me again...

...I have to point out that as I understood the Rules of Fights, one does not kick.  This really seemed unfair to me.  Also, painful.

...and after a few minutes of that, my uncle somehow pulled me out and kind of pulled rank -- he was a year or two older than everyone else -- and it stopped and they left and he helped me get into the car and we drove home, leaving me to wonder to this day why he waited until the third round of kicks to stop the bout.

All of that is to say that while I had been in a few fights in my life, they had never gone well, and in the most serious one, I am pretty sure I'd have been hospitalized by Kick Guy if not for my uncle finally deciding to help me out of that one, and thus, as we drove through neighborhood after neighborhood and could not shake these guys, I was 100% positive that I was going to die this way, so I was quietly awaiting my fate when we hatched a desperate plan.

We had, in the car with us, a bottle of Schnapps.

Don't judge us.  I know that teenage drinking is kind of wrong and that drinking and driving is wrong, but first off, Bill was driving and he was not drinking, and secondly, this was back roundabout in 1988 and while drinking and driving is always wrong and I get that -- I was mowed into by a drunk driver a few years later and broke my neck -- back then drinking and driving was wrong on the level of, say, jaywalking, or not shoveling your driveway.  Here is an actual thing that happened to me when I was 20:

We had been at a party, and we had been drinking, as we were wont to do at parties.  Around about 1 or 2 a.m. when we ran out of alcohol and the party wound down and the people like me who did not have girlfriends to make out with had to go home because everyone was making out with their girlfriends started leaving, we had to decide who was going to drive.

I was chosen to drive on the basis of having had the least to drink: our choices were Fred, who could barely stand up, Bob, who could stand up but not much more, and me, plus my younger brother Matt who also, I believe, was stoned. 

So I got the car keys and the responsibility of driving, and I drove carefully and did pretty well for the five or so miles home, a trip that involved going through downtown Hartland and within a block or two of the police station before hitting the long straight road that led to our subdivision.

We were on that road, and apparently I was speeding, because I got pulled over by the local cop who knew us the best, Officer Begin (his name was pronounced Bay-gen, in case you are wondering, which you probably weren't.  If you weren't, I apologize for wasting your time, but it seemed more important when I wrote it that you know how to pronounce his name even though, I assure you, the pronunciation of his name does not factor into this story at all.)

Officer Begin pulled me over just one block away from the street I lived on, and our house was only three blocks up that street, so we were 1/3 of a mile from home when I got pulled over, and this is how seriously drinking and driving was not taken back then: I wasn't worried about drinking and driving, I was worried about underage drinking, and speeding.

Officer Begin came up to the car and looked us over.  He knew me, and he knew our family, mostly because of Bill, who was constantly in low-grade trouble, and sometimes in middle- or high-grade trouble.

"Where you going, Briane?" he asked me quietly.

I mumbled something about going home, aware that I was kind of slurring my words.

"You tired?" Officer Begin asked.

Fred, in the backseat, was laughing and paying no attention to the fact that the cop was asking me questions.  I agreed I was tired.

"Have you been drinking tonight?" the cop asked all of us.

We all assured him that we had not, all except Fred, who was laughing about something else now.

Officer Begin sighed and said to me: "Just go straight home, okay?"

And he walked back to his car and turned off the lights and left.  We drove home.

So we had a bottle of Schnapps in the car with us, because that was what kids did then, and our plan, as we tried to shake the guys who were chasing us, was this:  We would throw that bottle at their car.

We didn't know what it would do, to throw the bottle at them.  It was pretty much the only thing we could think to do because we were 20 miles from home and lost in the subdivisions and needed to end this and get on the freeway and go home but we didn't want them following us to our houses, so as we rounded a corner and the car gained on us, these guys who had been chasing us now for about 20 minutes, Bob leaned out the window and held up  the bottle of Schnapps -- it was one of those heavy, thick flask-sized bottles, built like a glass brick -- and he threw it.

We heard the bottle smash against their car, and out the back window we could see that he'd hit the front of the car and hit it good, and what happened next was the only reason that plan worked.

The driver of the other car stopped his car cold, slamming on the brakes, and opened his door, and began running after us! 

We had been about 20 yards away when Bob threw the bottle and this guy gets out and starts running after us, and we all realized immediately that this was it, this was our break, and began hollering for Bill to floor it and he did, taking off like a shot as the guy continued to try to chase us on foot for nearly a block but we of course left him behind, and Bill took a turn and another turn and then he was alone in an area we didn't recognize.

"Turn off the headlights," we told him, and he did that.  We assumed the guy had gotten back into his car and was looking for us, but we were far enough ahead, we figured, that we could continue to sneak around, and that was what we did for about 15 more minutes, driving as quickly as we could with our lights off, all of us silent; the feeling was like in one of those submarine movies where the entire crew sits motionless, sweating, in the green glow, waiting to see if they have been discovered.

We weren't.  We made it out of that neighborhood, got our bearings, and got on the highway, and headed home.  We took backroads through our town to make sure nobody was following us, because we were smart that way.

And only that way.


 
PS: I realize that this has nothing whatsoever to do with dishwashing.  Next time I will talk about the actual job, but maybe the point is that work, jobs, have so little to do with what life is all about that I cannot directly think about a job like dishwashing, and so instead my brain gets redirected to the good parts.

Introducing: Homer's Oddity!

I've started a new project.  It's called Homer's Oddity, and can be found here.  It's a steampunk/swords & sorcery retelling of The Odyssey, and it begins thusly:

This tiny dot I hold within a jar

Which fell into my hands that fateful day

Controls yet all that is both near and far

Which is, then, why I keep it hid away.

For while I struggle still its pow'rs to learn,

And as I wander lost amidst the rules,

I know that many others out there yearn

This speck of energy to hold, as jewels

Might well adorn the crown of kings but be

Mostly locked away, hidden mark of might,

Ill-gotten gains cementing the mighty

Into their reigns, though never earned that right.

An accident, this burden: yet, my dream

Is that it may help me regain my queen.

--Homer's Sonnet, 1

 ___________________________________________________________________________________

There once were rules.

Well, one set of rules, anyway.

Once, when Telemachus was just born, or so he was told by Penelope, when he was a baby, the world followed only one set of rules.

"Up used to always be up," she'd say to him, when he was a boy.  "When you were little and you dropped something, it fell to the ground."

"Always," she would add.

Telemachus looked out at the feast he did not want and sighed.

He picked up a goblet of wine, carefully, lest it begin to droop or suddenly burst into flames or become sentient, and eyed it warily.

Then he sipped it.

Out of curiousity, he held the goblet out at arm's length and then deliberately overturned it.

The wine stayed glued inside the cup, refusing to pour out onto the grounds and spill over the parapet onto the revelers below, the partygoers who would not leave and who he desperately wished would go.

He turned the golden cup back rightside, peered into it.  The wine sat there, slightly translucent.  He could see the bottom of the cup.

He sipped it.  It poured into his mouth as it should have.

He wondered where his father was, as he did twenty, thirty, one hundred times per day.  He wondered if he should go see his mother, see how she was doing on the funeral shroud she had promised to weave and which had not been completed, not in 19 years.

Down below, he saw two large, bearded men lean over and harass a servant girl, pawing at her legs as she walked by.  One of them tried to trip her, and she stumbled, almost spilling the tray of meat slices and fruits she carried.  The men laughed and pelted her with apricot pits, the seeds falling to the floor amidst the mess his few remaining hired helpers struggled to clean up each night, working around the drunken bodies of carousers, rapists, thieves, and other less-than-desirables that passed out in his banquet hall each day.

Enough, Telemachus decided.  Enough is enough.

"Once, there were rules," he heard his mother tell him, the words echoing from his memories of being a little boy and watching walls vanish only to reappear made of bricks instead of wood, memories of there being dragons one day and abominable snowmen the next.

Once there were rules, he thought now. That applies to more than just the laws of physics, of nature.  He saw the servant girl peering at him from behind a curtain where she had taken refuge.  He could tell, even at this distance, that she had tears in her eyes.  He motioned for her to leave.  There will be rules again, he decided.

"ENOUGH!" he tried to roar.  He was only 19 and so it was not as commanding as he had hoped, plus the acoustics of the banquet hall had shifted, but it was loud enough and it captured the attention of those down below, or at least those who were not so drunk or stoned that they could not focus on him standing there, on the pathway above the hall.

"I have decided!  You all must leave.  All of you.  Get up.  Take your pants, your shirts, get clothed.  Go home.  Take your weapons and your toys and your drugs, and leave my house, my mother's house, my father's house.  You are not welcome here.  You have never been welcome here and you will never be welcome here.  You are destroying our house, squandering our wealth, and killing my mother, who mourns every day the loss of her husband and my father.  You are forcing her into seclusion and not letting her properly work through her emotions.  You have caused our loyal friends, our longtime helpers and servants, to leave in terror and disgust.  You gorge and drink and smoke and rape and root through our house, destroying our things and our people.  Some of you have been here nearly as long as I have and I was born in this house!  You have no right to be here, and you are not wanted."

He took a deep breath.

"SO I TELL YOU: LEAVE AT ONCE, OR FACE MY ANGER."

A deep silence fell over the hall, and then the laughter started.  The two men below him started throwing apricot pits at him, and then others joined in, and soon Telemachus stood there, pelted with silverware and cups and a pipe and rinds of fruit and bones of chicken wings and a beer can (They found the beer! he noted with resignation.)

He stood there, refusing to be bowed by it.  For nineteen years, he had put up with this.  He was no longer going to kowtow to them.

Eventually, they stopped, and one of the men below him, one of the Apricot-Throwers, bellowed:  "You are always good for a laugh, young Telemachus!  But why would we leave?  Why would we go from outside of this house, where the changes are less frequent, where the wealth of generations of your family provides us food and sustenance, where we can spend the Shifting Times in relative safety, and where we know that eventually, your mother will have to choose one of us to marry, and that person then will take over whatever is left of your holdings?  Why would we leave?"

Telemachus thought of the holdings that remained.  Did they know of the Flashpoint?

"She will not marry you, or any of you," he told the man.

"Then I will marry her!" the man roared, and laughter ensued.

"YES!  We will all marry her!" another man said.  "Why wait? There are no rules, and haven't been for a long time!  They will never be restored, will they? The Shifting Times will never end and eventually this world, all worlds, all men, all women, all children, all things will crumble into chaos, the entropy dragging us apart and betwixt!  Let us all marry her, now!"

The cry rose up unbidden: The men began to chant: "Penelope! Penelope!  PEN EL O PE!"  and those who could stand did so, grabbing weapons where they could and food and drink where they could.  A swirling, heaving mob of men began to move towards the stairs that would lead them in a spiral up to where Telemachus stood with his goblet of wine, and past that to the broad staircase that led to the third floor, his mother's quarters.

"STOP!  I forbid it!" Telemachus hollered, but his voice was lost amidst the ongoing chants of PENELOPE! and the tumult of drunken, armed men climbing the stairs intent on raping his mother and taking her by force... and his remaining hopes of getting them to leave, of using the wealth he had to find his father, to restore order and rules would go with her.

The Flashpoint.  The Singularity.  The Coin.  They must be protected, as much as his mother, if not more.

He moved back, to the base of the stairs, standing on the third stair up.  Faux marble felt smooth and safe beneath his feet.  The stairs had been cobblestone most of the morning. He was glad of the shift.  This time.

He stood alone.  He would not call the help, would not ask them to face this danger, too. He pulled out his Fire, shaped almost like a pistol but rounder, sleeker, even cobbled-together as it was.

It was small comfort.  Even with the amount of power it could channel from Nether, it would not hold up to the fifty or so men that swarmed into the corridor, some of them nearly careening over the ledge in their drunkeness.  They moved towards him.

He held up the Fire, and said "STOP! Or I'll shoot."

They stopped, and one of them pointed, and said "What... is that?"

He pointed the Fire at the man.  "It's a Fire.  You've not seen anything like it before."

Behind him, a voice said:  "I stand with Telemachus."

The voice was a growling rumble, and he turned to see a large misshapen man behind him, holding what appeared at first to be a bagpipe -- but the bag was clenched in the man's arms, and all the larger pipes were not pointed skyward, ready to make music, but instead were leveled at the crowd.

He thought for a moment that he saw a beautiful woman, small and slender with short hair and small breasts, naked but for a tiny loincloth and a necklace, but it was gone.

"Where did you come from?" A man, one of the Apricot-Throwers, demanded.

"It's a trick!" Another yelled.  "An illusion!  Telemachus deceives us with his illusionry!"

"It's a Shift!" said another.  "He didn't know it was there!"

The ogreish thing said to the men: "Go. Go back down to the banquet.  You must leave and not come back."

The Chief Apricot-Thrower laughed and held up his knife.  "You don't scare me, Ugly Man," he said.

And he changed his grip on the knife, quickly, flipping it around and throwing it towards the man.  As it flung through the air, end over end, it began to glow brighter until as it reached Telemachus and the Ugly Man it hurt to look at, and it exploded as it reached them, all taking less time than the blink of th eye.  Shrapnel flung in the arc the knife had been thrown, and Telemachus knew he and the Ugly Man would be shredded, the tiny pieces would burrow into them and through them, propelled by the explosion, leaving pinpricks in their front and fist-sized holes in their backs.  Shrapnel Knives were horrifying weapons at this range.

The particles fell to the floor, not a single one touching him or the Ugly Man.  There were gasps from the assembled drunken mob.

"GO," the ogre said again.

The mob hesitated, and the Apricot Thrower began to fumble with his pockets.

The Ogre breathed into the small tube of the bagpipe thing, and flares of radiation shot out from the ends of the tubes, sparkling rays of diamond-flecked light lancing from six separate sources, and the men those rays struck screamed with the pain of burning.  Telemachus saw skin peeling off them, and guessed it was gamma rays being shot.  He could feel the heat over his shoulder.

The men who had been hit fell to the ground.  The others began to fall back, some slowly stepping away and others turning and running.

"GO!" The ogre shouted, and the men ran as a group, leaving their fallen cohorts laying in agony, all of them pounding back down the stairs in a frightened rabble, all but the Apricot Thrower, who had gotten something out of his pocket, a small mirror, as it turned out.  He held it up, peered into it and looked in surprise at Telemachus and the Ogre.

"Athena," he said, quietly, as Telemachus held his Fire up and pulled the trigger.  A small dart shot from it, whistling as it found its mark in the man's arm.  The moment it did, a blue flame spread from the dart onto the arm of the man, who dropped the mirror and shook his arm, motion that caused the blue flame to grow hotter and spread to his shoulder.  The Apricot Thrower took one last look at them and ran, trying to dampen the napalm flames that were engulfing him.

In moments, the entire house fell silent, all the men having left.

Telemachus turned to talk to the Ogre, but the Ogre was gone.

His mother looked out from the top of the stairs.

"What is going on?" she asked him, quietly.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Look for more installments as time goes on!

A Minute With Mr Bunches: The Letter E

Are you looking to improve yourself? Maybe get that second degree to improve your job prospects?  Want to impress your friends and neighbors? Why would you care about that?

Anyway, online learning is all the rage now, and I'm never one to ignore the rage, so here's the first in a series of online lectures from Mr Bunches, who today is telling us all about The Letter E: