Noah Cicero - The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I

He went to the living room and sat down in his favorite seat.

His wife came in and screamed at him, “You no-good piece of shit!

“You are so fucking stupid!

“Can’t you do anything!

“What’s fucking wrong with you!

“Go mow the lawn you lazy no-good fucking piece of shit!”

When I was nineteen I lived and worked at the Grand Canyon.

I worked there for a month until they fired me for drinking.

I worked at El Tovar.

The most expensive restaurant at the Grand Canyon.

Presidents, rock stars, if you had money you ate at El Tovar when you went to the Grand Canyon.

One table of six could amass a six hundred dollar bill at dinner.

I worked in the dish tank.

The reason I worked in the dish tank was because I was American and not in a good college.

The Grand Canyon got workers from all over the world through some program I can’t remember the name of.

If you were from Russia, France, Iceland, etcetera they would put you in the front of the house as a busboy or server.

It also worked the same way with kids from good colleges like Yale and Harvard.

The reason they would have the foreign workers work in the front of the house was because the name tags at the Grand Canyon specified where you were from. And the rich tourists would look at the people’s name tags and see Holland or England and think it was great.

They also only had to work three to four days a week for no more than four hours at a time while dishwashers worked five to six days a week ten hours at a time.

The front of the house people made more money per hour than the dishwashers.

They made $5.35 plus tips. We made $5.35 with no tips.

The people who had to do dishes were Americans from states like Illinois and Ohio, and the Native Americans.

There were two dish areas.

A front area where plates, cups, and silverware were cleaned.

And a back area where pots and kitchen utensils were cleaned.

The room where the kitchen shit was cleaned was a hellhole.

The walls had all the paint crusted off.

The garbage was filled with dead fish.

Old soup.

Meat.

It smelled like hell in there.

The room was filled with steam from the hot water.

There was a metal stand to put the dirty pots on.

There was a small radio that played the Grand Canyon radio station which was just the same four bad songs over and over again.

There were three huge sinks.

One to soak the plates.

One to wash them.

One to sanitize them.

Two guys worked that room together.

For the month I worked there, I worked with about seven different people because the Grand Canyon fired people constantly.

When I first got there, the head of the dish tank was this deranged old wastoid named Chuck.

He was about fifty years old.

Had a handlebar mustache.

Had worked at over five national parks.

He once said this to me: “I remember one of my past lives. I was a slave master in the Old South. I remember being in charge of a huge plantation.”

I looked at him and said nothing.

He would talk like everything he said would be life-altering and earth-shattering, which is common among people who don’t know shit about anything.

The guy wasn’t miserable though.

He loved living in beautiful places and having new experiences.

Which isn’t bad.

I knew a lot of people way more intelligent than him back in Youngstown, but they never had the balls to be happy.

Even though Chuck was dumb as shit, he always found a way to live in beautiful places.

Then after a shitty day of work he could walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon or to the hot springs of Yellowstone and smile.

The second in command was José, a Hopi Indian.

He had the most horrible teeth I have ever seen on a human being.

They were all black and broken up.

They looked like black gravel in his mouth.

It was fucking horrible when he smiled.

José would work really hard and look miserable the whole time.

He didn’t talk much either and no one could understand what he said.

He had a really thick Hopi accent.

The weird thing about José was that he could disappear and reappear out of nowhere.

Like you would turn around and José would be gone or you would look back and José was standing there.

You would say, “José, how long you been there? You scared the fuck out of me.” And he would respond, “Like ten minutes.” It was fucking weird.

José was a drunk.

As were most of the Indians at the Grand Canyon.

Well hell, most of the Americans working at the Grand Canyon were drunks too.

José didn’t show up to work one day because he decided to not stop drinking while down in Flagstaff and they fired him.

Which was sad because he was a really good dishwasher.

I saw him before he left the Grand Canyon and he said that he was going to another park deeper into Arizona to work.

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.

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.

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.