Woo-jin’s boss was this guy by the name of Sandford Deane whose eyes always looked closed. And yet he still managed to not often bump into things. He was supposed to be the guy who greeted valued guests at the door, but often ended up out back behind the grease bin smoking the cigarettes he called fags. He was supposed to be the owner of this place, or pretend to be, but everyone knew he was just some actor in a stained tuxedo going table to table complimenting the guests on their fashion decisions and asking if they’d care for a glass of port on the house. The real owner of Il Italian Joint was a company in Shanghai. Sandford Deane stood in as a representation of what the owner might have looked like had he been a human being instead of a collection of codes and spreadsheets, meetings, and quarterly reports in sexy buildings. He was standing in the doorway next to the Dumpsters when Woo-jin tumbled through some shrubbery into the near-empty parking lot.
“I’m early I think,” Woo-jin said.
“You’re early every day. You could at least use the time to do something useful, like masturbate,” Sandford said.
“But I’m a dishwasher,” Woo-jin said, slipping past his boss, snatching his apron off a hook by the back door. “I figured out the ultimate pot scrubbing device.”
“What’s that.”
“Diamond-coated steel wool.”
Sandford nodded. “That, or we could start scrubbing the pots with lasers.”
“Lasers.” Woo-jin clenched his eyebrows at the thought, pushing his way into the kitchen’s greasy yelling and clanking. “Lasers.”
The wash station looked like it had been hit by a car bomb. Three guys from the previous shift were standing basically gaping at the pile of dishes, spraying a bowl here and there, overwhelmed by the madness of it all. The three dishwashers were Pontoon, Ben O’Winn, and Bahn Kan, fellows comprised of scraps of ethnicities, doused in food particles, and enduring some kind of experiment in sleep deprivation. Waitresses screamed at cooks, something burned on a stove, and a couple sauciers were trying to rescue one of their kind who’d gotten trapped in the walk-in freezer. Pontoon held out a spatula with something black stuck to it. Ben O’Winn trembled and whimpered from the stress. Bahn Kan scratched one sideburn, the only one he had, and said something in a language that sounded like Vietnamese but with a lot more sighing.
“Sometimes maybe you guys could do a better job with the dishes,” Woo-jin said sadly then started telling them what to do. Pontoon hauled a pile of clean dishes back to the prep area. Ben O’Winn snuck to the edge of the dining room and commandeered the bus carts. Bahn Kan fetched Woo-jin an orange soda. Woo-jin roughly counted the dishes in their precarious stacks, assessed the number of pallets on the dishwasher, considered the time of day, anticipated the rate of new dirty dishes arriving, then let the part of his brain that washed dishes for a living kick in and do its shit. He almost felt like he was sitting back and watching a robot do the job. He was the best dishwasher in the world and he had the gold medal to prove it, from the previous year’s Restaurant and Hotel Management Olympics. The medal hung spattered with grease and soap on the wall behind the washer. Often, when feeling discouraged by the rate of dirty dishes coming in, Woo-jin glanced at the medal, smiled, and recalled how he’d defeated the Red Lobster regional champion in pot scrubbing by point-nine seconds. Sometimes dishwashers from out of town showed up at the back door of Il Italian Joint, hoping to watch Woo-jin work. Tonight the champion’s arms wheeled over the mass of forks and coffee cups, fruit rinds and disintegrating napkins, smears of Bolognese, ramekins, cigarette butts, hardened macaroni and cheese, the fossils of burgers and fries, and steadily the pile shrank in the curling steam. By midshift the pile was obliterated and the three ineffectual dishwashers skulked home to their television sets and prescription medications, with sitcom theme songs stuck in their heads, falling asleep into the routines of hideous dreams. For a while, work had pulled Woo-jin’s thoughts from the previous night’s morbid discovery, but as the dinner rush thinned out her face came to him again, floating phantom-like in the steam.
“Yo, Mike.” It was a waitress named Sally who commuted a hundred miles both ways. An older woman, she was always showing pictures of her grandson to her coworkers, who would smile and say he was cute despite the ghastly facial deformity that nobody wanted to acknowledge. Sally held Woo-jin’s shoulder and repeated, “Yo, Mike.” He looked at her. She had thought his name was Mike since she started here two years ago and no one had gotten around to correcting her, including Woo-jin. “Are you okay, Mike?”
Woo-jin glanced around at the spotless dish-washing station and the dormant kitchen beyond. Everyone had gone home, it looked like.
“I am definitely not okay.”
“Walk me to my car. I’ll give you a cigarette.”
Sally was on who knew how many painkillers and her body seemed to generate little bursts of static electricity as she walked. Woo-jin hauled the last of the trash bags and Sally locked up. From the parking lot they witnessed the erratically lit-up skyline of New York Alki peeking over some nearby houses and businesses. Sounds: distant construction banging, two guys yelling in the near distance, a piece of cellophane scraped along the asphalt by the wind. Sally took his arm and hugged it close under her own and, choked up, said, “Sometimes I think you’re the only person who knows I exist.”
Woo-jin’s guts fluttered as this old waitress’s manifold sufferings bled a path into his nervous system. She was going to tell him again about her grandson and all the cruel things the neighborhood boys did to him, how they taunted him about his facial challenge, murdered his cat, knocked his special-ed books out of his hands onto the ground. Woo-jin really would have rather avoided her by slipping out the back door at the end of his shift but nightmare visions of the dead girl had mesmerized him at his station long after the last cup had been dried and shelved.
“I don’t know what to do with those boys they’re so cruel. What would their parents think if they knew they were giving wedgies to my poor Donald? Well, they’d probably laugh, being cruel and unthinking themselves. That’s where those boys got their cruelties, I’m sure.”
Woo-jin said, “They don’t know what to do with their suffering, so they give it to your Donald.”
Sally sighed. They’d made it to her car, a North Korean something banished from a factory. “Even though you’re a retard, Mike, you have a gift. A gift for understanding all the ways people feel like crap.”
Woo-jin wanted to tell Sally about the dead body but knew she’d only nod and let the horror of it slide off the protective surface of her own woes. He found her tragic this way, stewing in the nasty things that happened to her immediate family but incapable of feeling anyone else’s pain. Sally’s eyes were glossed over almost like she was sleepwalking, maybe to prepare for her commute. But then Woo-jin understood she was looking over his shoulder at the construction rising behind them into the night.