the essay

“Are you a punk?” teased the short Greek man with greasy black hair and a belly like Santa.

His smug look flattened me; my boss can be quite blunt.

I sucked air in through my clenched teeth and let out a light, “No.”

I gazed around the frustrating rectangular kitchen, from left to right: dishwashing machine, stretch of counter, refrigerators with salad plates inside, stoves, shelves with plates and bowls, another long stretch of pasty white counter, a rusty pizza oven and finally back around to my boss. The lights flickered meaninglessly. These surroundings were to me harsh silhouettes reminiscent of pointless endeavors to clean, clean, clean, to him a playground. I marveled at the grin he could maintain within the confines of my existence.

Jay, a fellow dishwasher, stood at the sink where we scrub the sautés. His fatigues, which included tight black denim shorts with a rip in the rear right pocket, an earring from which hangs a miniature handcuff and sharply spiked green hair, were a testament to a world that hardly seemed possible through the sweaty blur of manual labor. In a superficial sense, a sharp contrast between us was apparent; I sported beige corduroys, a collared shirt, and a tight, neat haircut. Our lives were united, however, in the struggle against the mundane.

This struggle, for me, began after studying Henry David Thoreau and his time at Walden. Before this, the obnoxiously mellow work environment that I visited a few times a week had seemed normal. After, as his ink permeated my essence, the industrial, impersonal, pointless obtuseness was almost too much to handle. My initial reading of Thoreau’s work led me to new perspective on life’s context. Furthermore, the abstract thought process summed up by Emerson’s phrase, “When you waste time, you injure eternity,” carried over into the practical sphere of reality.
Facing, now, my pillow-faced boss and considering the tireless motion of my hands under running water, I considered my work. Everything natural now seemed vastly superior to the mechanisms and tiles, to the “railroad” that was riding us in the dark kitchen of an Italian restaurant. My conscience sighed at all the missed opportunities that the humming dishwashing machine was stealing from me. The drudgery of this job was leading me to a life of “quiet desperation.” I thought to myself, “God lives in the moment.”

In a moment of haste and truth, I cast off my apron and thus resisted personal devolution. The ever-so-reliant grass that smells of a child growing up, the thrilling wind that whistles past our ears like air passing swiftly over a jet’s wing and the soggy bark of the termite-infested oak in the woods of Everywhere, USA summoned me forth from the cave of blank expressions.