Short story: Dirty Dishes

By Michael Ginsberg

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — The summer of 1965, I was not quite 17, not quite 5-foot-7, and not quite a college freshman. I was also broke, and I was convinced that I held the school record for number of crushes on girls who couldn’t quite remember who I was when I called for a date. I couldn’t do anything about my age or height, but I decided to solve my other two problems with a summer job at a Catskill Mountains hotel, piling up tips and meeting girls – Jewish preferred, but not required.

Maybe I should have included the dating-challenged thing on my resume, but – whatever the reason – Grossinger’s, Concord, Kutscher’s and the other name brand Borscht Belt hotels weren’t interested in me. So my Uncle Lou called in a favor from a friend who owned the Plaza Hotel in South Fallsburg, in the middle of what was also called the Jewish Alps. Most New Yorkers would have recognized the big-name resorts, still in their heyday in the 1960s – especially for Jews. No one knew the Plaza, unless they were hunting the cheap ads in New York newspapers, where the Plaza advertised its “kosher cuisine” and “air-conditioned elevators.”

After my first week at the Plaza, I was hitting my stride as a busboy but my record remained zero for girls. I had even brought my Johnny Mathis album, but it remained in my suitcase, along with my Weejun penny loafers, which were on call for special occasions.

As it turned out, the Plaza and I shared a dubious label: Nothing special. Advertised as in “a class by itself,” it certainly was ahead of its time in leading the downward slide of the Catskills as a vacation destination.

From one of the Plaza’s weekly bulletins:

• Slimnastics and Simon Sez every morning with Sid and Lynn Gold.
• Free dance class Wed., Fri. and Sat. at 11:30 a.m. with Howard and Nina.
• 2:30 Arts and Crafts for Adults, with Sid and Lynn Gold
• 3:30, Water Polo for Adults & Teens, with Larry Keep.
• Shuffleboard and Ping Pong paddles may be obtained at the desk.

Menu highlights included Potato Soup, cold borscht, chilled schav with boiled  potato, hot gefilte fish balls, baked vegetable roast with mushroom sauce, fluffy jelly omelet, and a garden vegetable plate. (I’ll bet Sid and Lynn loved it.)

I never saw any guest rooms, but the staff “cabins” were certainly in a class by themselves: rat- and bat-infested, filled with dilapidated furniture, mattresses with springs that had long since sprung, and toilets that had not been cleaned since . . . oh, never mind.

“Air conditioning” was supplied by gaps between the log walls. I wondered what my uncle Lou had done to collect this ‘favor.”

Two weeks in, it all came apart for me.

One of the servers in the kids’ dining room was Wayne, a pre-med student and football player at Cornell. Wayne decided his job description included harassing me, which he did – quite well.

On this particular day, we had just finished serving lunch and cleaning the children’s dining room. I was eating my lunch – some mystery fish and spaghetti – while Wayne was removing half-chewed food particles from the kids’ utensils. To this task, he added another feature: throwing food pieces at me, from a distance of about five feet, while I was eating.

I responded gently at first, with “Please stop, Wayne.” After a few of those, I raised it up a notch, testing out my Brooklyn street vocabulary. Wayne smiled and kept throwing food. Obviously, he had a limited vocabulary, probably from playing football without a helmet.

I finally retaliated, standing up and heaving a fistful of spaghetti for a direct hit to Wayne’s face, sauce and all. Wayne lunged and launched a roundhouse punch that missed. He turned his back, and I dropped the fish down his back. Measured response, right?

Apparently, my measuring was off. The next morning, the staffing coordinator dropped by after breakfast to tell me I was fired – effective immediately. I asked why, and he said the head chef was unhappy with my performance.

Chefs rule the kitchens and dining rooms, but I thought I had good relationships with everyone except Wayne, so I asked our chef why he fired me. He said he knew nothing about it. “If I wanted you fired, kid, I’d have told you myself,” he said. “I got no beef with you.” I resisted the temptation to try a “kosher” joke and headed to the owner’s office.

The owner said my behavior the day before was unprofessional and inexcusable. I tried to explain what had happened and asked him if Wayne was fired, too.

“That’s none of your business,” he said and waved me out.

I returned to the chef and told him what had happened the previous day with Wayne and what the owner said.

“Wayne?” the chef exclaimed. “He’s the owner’s grandson.”

Oh.

I returned to my room to pack, and the security guard dropped by to tell me I had two hours to vacate the premises. It was now officially one of my worst days, and it was far from over.

Dragging my suitcase and a half-dozen garments on hangers, I headed for South Fallsburg on foot. My forced march took about two hours. Then there was the five-hour bus ride to New York, seemingly stopping every 10 minutes to pick up or drop off . . . no one.

I arrived at the Port Authority bus station after midnight, exhausted and depressed, but figuring nothing else could mess up.

Wrong. No sooner had I stepped off the bus when a disheveled old man, ahead of his time with sagging pants, came out of nowhere and lunged at my suitcase. “It’s mine,” he spat.

In the midst of our tug-of-war, one of New York’s finest yanked the suitcase out of our hands and announced that we had to go to the police station before he could open the bag and settle the ownership question.

I asked the officer which one of the two of us was more likely to have stepped off a bus from the Catskills. I told him exactly what he would find if he opened the bag, and I offered to walk away.

I guess my luck was starting to run back in. The officer opened my suitcase, found what I had described and shooed away the old man.

A $30 cab ride later, at about 1 a.m., I arrived at our family’s apartment in Brooklyn. I awakened my sister and gave her a condensed version of my tragic saga, which she found hilarious. At that moment, I wished I had saved some spaghetti and fish.

I spent the rest of the summer bagging groceries and extending my dateless . . . and apparently clueless . . . streak. I even tried advertising. In the midst of paving repairs in front of our apartment building, I carved a heart in the not-quite-dry cement and added, inside the heart, “MG + MR,” for Maria Ravelli, a neighborhood girl with a reputation that suggested she – shall we say – had a weakness for Johnny Mathis.

If anyone visits our apartment building on Lenox Road in Brooklyn, they will find – 55 years later – a fading heart, and the suggestion that MG and MR had something going on.

Little did I know that MR had moved on from JM to J, G, P and Ringo.

So did I.

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Michael Ginsberg is a retired teacher and freelance journalist based in Louisville, Kentucky.