Dishwasher: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States

[May 30th, 2007]

Dishwasher Pete has finally written a memoir. If you're already a fan of his work, you really need read no further. Go to the Reading Frenzy signing at Someday Lounge and buy the book. It's great. You'll love it.

If you aren't yet familiar with Pete Jordan's mildly bizarre legacy, now's the time. Here's the deal: He's just a guy from San Francisco who dropped out of college, got a series of dishwashing jobs to pay the rent and came up with a harebrained quest to wash dishes in all 50 states. His first book, Dishwasher (Harper Perennial, 353 pages, $13.95), is the story of how he spent the next 10 years of his life in pursuit of that goal.

Along the way, he became an extraordinarily skilled dishwasher, made scads of friends all over the country, published 15 issues of a wildly popular zine, made a number of appearances on NPR's This American Life, devoted a great deal of time to studying the culture and history of modern dishwashing, and scrubbed an unthinkable number of pots and pans. He also became something of a modern folk hero, an inspiration to and advocate for oppressed dishwashers everywhere. He's like Woody Guthrie, only with really wrinkly fingers.

That said, Jordan was about the worst employee imaginable. Sure, he was strong, efficient and organized, but, by his own admission, he stole from employers, slept on the clock, quit jobs after a few days or even hours without giving notice and otherwise embodied what George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, calls plongeur (dishwasher) morality, a devil-may-care attitude belonging to workers "too low to be prosecuted." In short, Dishwasher Pete was a lout, but a likable one.

Jordan is especially well loved in Portland, and he loves us right back. Calling the city "a dishwasher's town," he devotes several chapters to his adventures dishing at an Oaks Park Oktoberfest, a chi-chi westside ladies' club, an unnamed seafood joint, the much-missed La Cruda and Paradox Cafe. He was the first-ever volunteer at Reading Frenzy, where he sold his "Dish Master" merchandise and met his wife, Amy Joy, with whom he carried on a slow and clueless romance for several years. Jordan even writes that he might have settled here, were the cost of a home not far beyond the reach of a dishwasher's income.

Dishwasher is not a polished memoir. The writing, though often humorous and sometimes poetic, is not that of a professional. Jordan calls himself "a dishwasher who happens to write," and his cheerful, unpretentious prose reflects that. What the book lacks in grace it makes up for with passion: It is in equal measure an enthusiastic defense of the world's most denigrated profession, a disturbing exposé of the conditions under which many dishwashers labor, and a populist travelogue. But mostly, Dishwasher is the story of 10 fascinating years in the life of a man obsessed—what more could you ask for in an autobiography?