Washed up

WE come now to the inevitable result of our addiction to fame: the celebrity dishwasher. Meet Pete Jordan, a San Francisco slacker whose vague plan to bust suds in all 50 states has spawned a 350-page memoir.

“Dishwasher” began life as a zine Jordan published during his years as an itinerant scrubber, and the book retains the informal charms of its previous incarnation. We get a mildly diverting overview of dishwasher culture, from the labor movement of the early 20th century to George Orwell’s life amid the plongeurs of Paris. Jordan also displays a winning sense of self-deprecation: “Like Burt Reynolds, Robert Duvall and Richard Gere, who’d each arrived in the city and washed dishes as a first step toward their dreams of acting in New York, I hoped to wash dishes as a first step toward my dream of, well, washing dishes in New York.” And there’s a certain vicarious buzz to tracking Jordan, as he bumbles from one sink to the next, unfettered by job security. (“Cool, I thought, a new job to quit!”)

Unfortunately, the conversion of plucky zine to memoir requires certain capacities that dependably elude Jordan. The shaping of a narrative, for instance. An eye for detail. The occasional bout of self-reflection. This book reads too often like a haphazard road diary. Jordan gets a job, then quits. Rinse. Repeat. The closest he comes to a moment of clarity is this humdinger, 316 pages in: “People changed, I guessed. But somehow, I didn’t. I was still just wandering around, washing dishes as usual.”

Yes, somehow.

Given the breadth of his experience, Jordan might offer us any number of insights into life as a wage slave in America, or the nature of consumption in a super-abundant society. He might tell us something new about the mostly hidden domain of dishwashers. But his literary ambitions are about the equal of his menial ones. Mostly, the dude wants to score free food.

In fact, Jordan goes to great lengths to portray himself as an everyman with a humble agenda. Yet, for all the proletarian platitudes, all his claims of eschewing publicity, it’s clear he spent a lot of time marketing himself as King of the Dish Pit. You don’t scare up 10,000 orders for an issue of your zine -- or become a regular on public radio’s “This American Life” -- by hiding your sponge under a bushel.

Jordan’s passion feels more like a shtick than a true calling, and a cynical one at that, given the huge number of people (many of them immigrants) who bust suds not as a lark but as a matter of economic necessity.

“Dishwasher” ranks as a triumph of quirk over content, one that never quite transcends the verdict Orwell rendered back in 1933. Dishwashing, he observed, “was a thoroughly odious job -- not hard, but boring and silly beyond words.”