One American who worked there was a nineteen-year-old named Dave.
He was this complete jerk-off from Illinois.
He would constantly talk about OSHA and how we couldn’t do certain shit because it was unsanitary.
The other dishwashers would stare at him like an asshole and tell him he was stupid.
There isn’t much that can be said about him except that he was a big loser.
There were some other dishwashers but they were either there at the beginning of when I got there and or at the end when I got fired.
SELLING MOVIES
One night at the Grand Canyon.
I was up all night drinking with some kid from New Zealand.
His name was Tom, a nice kid.
He had grown up in New Zealand, had an American mother and a Kiwi father.
I guess his family had money back in New Zealand and he was just passing through.
He was kind of a backpacker but backpackers never go near real people and stay on their scheduled route and only speak to other backpackers.
Tom was different, but he didn’t care.
There was a sense of hopelessness and disillusion about him that I think brought him to enjoy the company of lower class people like myself and the other dishwashers at the Grand Canyon.
Whatever made him feel like that, I don’t know.
Well, one night we had stayed up the whole night in the community TV room of the dorm talking about our lives and other people’s lives, and whatever thoughts came to our drunken brains.
The sun eventually came up and we were sitting there about ready to go to sleep and then this old beat-to-shit Indian came in, sat next to us, pulled out Top Gun from his pocket, showed it to us and said, “You wanna buy this video?”
Tom and I stared at him, wondering what the hell was happening.
We both said, “No thank you.”
Then the Indian put the video back in his pocket and left.
Tom was like, “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
THE FEATHER
It was the Fourth of July at the Grand Canyon.
No fireworks because of the dryness of Arizona.
A lot of drinking though.
I was sitting in the community TV room with like six other guys.
There was Martinez Whitehair, an Indian who was completely insane.
That day he wore socks up to his knees, shorts, and a plain white t-shirt.
When he was drunk he would go on for hours about how the Navajo language came from the rabbits, how people need to respect the dishes they wash, how the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s ark, and how the Elders are racist.
There was a fat guy named Bob who had a handlebar mustache, was bald, and fucking stupid.
He would never get drunk.
But would talk about how people can lift themselves up by their bootstraps all night.
I would argue with the fucker all night.
I didn’t have a clue what I was talking about.
But random people would say they thought I was right.
There was a guy named Michael who was African-American and very pissed all the time.
He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.
He made me look stupid constantly. Everything I told him, he would tell me I was wrong.
As the years passed I would find he was right, and not because I was looking for the answers he gave me.
But because after I figured it out I would think, “Holy shit, Michael told me that at the Grand Canyon two years ago!”
I wish I could find Michael to tell him what I learned and to learn more from him but he’s gone.
They are all gone and if there are any left they will be gone one day too.
Tom was also there.
We were all sitting there having a nice Fourth of July talk and then a middle-aged broken-looking Indian comes in and sits down on one of the couches, drinking a tall boy and carrying three more with him.
He had on a ball cap with one feather in it.
Bob the fat guy asked the Indian how he got the feather.
The Indian looked at us and said, “In Vietnam.”
The darkness is coming, I thought.
The Indian with the feather began his monologue on the Fourth of July.
The monologue was scatterbrained.
The man obviously had been drinking heavily for over thirty years and had what is called Mush Brain. Which is common among older people who have spent their lives drinking and doing drugs and have been through too many absurd and terrifying experiences.
It is when a normal person can barely communicate with the outside any longer. They have an inability to form paragraphs and sentences to convey complete thoughts. You can tell when speaking to them that they know what they are talking about and they know what you’re talking about. But they have killed too many brain cells and just can’t do it anymore.
The Indian with the feather basically told us.
He went to Vietnam on the Fourth of July back in ’68.
That he thought it was bullshit that he had to go because the Vietnamese weren’t doing shit to him but he was drafted and didn’t want to go to prison.
He was there on the front lines because he said if you were a minority that is where you immediately went.
He snuck away from the American side and found a small village and found some Vietnamese people to live with.
Waited till after the war was done to go back to America.
While speaking he kept telling us he saw babies burned alive.
“I saw babies burned alive!
“I saw babies burned alive!
“I saw babies burned alive!
“I saw babies burned alive!”
How he saw useless death all the time.
Everyone in the room barely said anything during his monologue.
There was no need to interrupt him.
We wanted to hear what he had to say and we didn’t want him to get off track.
He didn’t say it like it would change our lives either.
He said it like it had changed his life.
He didn’t really care who he told or who was listening.
He just knew it had to be said.
I would not doubt that he told that monologue to a different group of people every Fourth of July and that he will tell it till he dies.
THE YOKE
After I got fired from the Grand Canyon I moved to San Diego.
It was one of the biggest culture shocks of my life.
The first week there I’m sure I just walked around and stared at everything like I’d entered an alternate reality.
Everything in San Diego in 2000 after the great bull market of the nineties looked shiny, glossy, and new.
The streets were perfectly paved and clean.
Not a cigarette butt to be found on a sidewalk.
All the buildings were less than ten years old and if they were older they were remodeled to look like new.
When you walked down the street, people didn’t give you the “I’ll cut your fucking balls off” look that is common in Youngstown.
Youngstown was a third world country compared to the neon newness of San Diego.
When we first got to San Diego, we sometimes went to the beach and sat on the wall separating the beach from the boardwalk.
Watched people ride by on bikes or just jogging.
We would sit there for hours, staring at the people going by, talking shit about them as they passed.
Most of them except the Mexicans seemed very concerned with how they looked.
They wanted pretty faces, strong muscles, and basically to look cool and sexy.
Tom and I looked homeless, which we were. We’d been sleeping in gas station parking lots in my ’89 Caprice Classic.