Cleaning 4: What Does It Mean To “Wash The Dishes”?

When I was about twenty-four, I moved into a large house in Seattle with six other residents. It was not the first time in my life that I’d lived somewhere without an automatic dishwasher. But it was the first time when several conditions were met at the same time:

• I was cooking for myself frequently, and so often generated dirty dishes.
• Nobody else was there to do the dishes for me.
• There was no dishwasher.

My six housemates were often annoyed with me because I would leave dirty dishes in the sink for long periods of time before washing them. I didn’t want to be a difficult housemate, and yet I dreaded washing dishes so much, and I was putting so much energy into cooking, that after I ate, I didn’t want to ruin the experience with cleaning.

It almost seemed that, by cleaning up and putting away all the plates, cups, spatulas, pans, and spoons that I’d just soiled, I was somehow saying that to make the mess in the first place had been wrong. And I didn’t want to feel like it was wrong. I had cooked very seldom growing up, or even in college, and I was proud of myself for finally forging ahead in the difficult but righteous path of preparing my own meals. Why, after a successful sortie, must I be sent to the scullery, as if to atone for sins?

One day, I was in the kitchen, talking to Mel, the fellow housemate with whom I got along with the best. My dishes were in the sink, and we both knew it, so out of respect for her, I started to wash them while we talked.

Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, she stopped speaking, and stared at my hands. I looked. I was holding a soapy bowl. I looked back at her.

“I know why you hate doing the dishes so much,” she said.
“Why?” I asked, truly wanting to know.
“Because it takes you five minutes to wash one fucking bowl,” she said. Read the rest of this entry »

Cleaning Rituals II

Clean Graffiti

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, Cleaning Rituals I. Let’s make a distinction between types of cleaning:

Physical cleanSing. Mikvas, baptisms, exorcisms, even “ethnic cleansing.” The idea is not to clean so much as to purify. The thing that needs to be eliminated is the physical manifestation of some moral or spiritual obstacle to purity. I went to a mikva one time, in Israel, when i was sixteen. I don’t remember anything about it. It would be nice to think that it was some kind of transformative experience that brought me closer to appreciate the religion I was raised with. But, like every other experience designed for that purpose, it wasn’t.

Every single result on the first page of a google search for “cleansing” is about colon cleansing.

Spiritual cleanSing. Often accompanied by, but not the same as, physical cleansing. Confessions, acts of contrition, acts of redemption, acts of forgiveness. Hamlet couldn’t kill Polonius because he was praying, and therefore in a state of grace, and would go to heaven. Harvey Keitel ends up in a state of grace at the end of Bad Lieutenant, and so does Sean Penn in, well, State Of Grace. Part of the problem with attaining a state of grace is that you have to be ready to die. Which might be part of the reason that it’s something we see so often in fiction: we want to vicariously experience it more than we want to actually experience it. A high school principal had a Santeria cleansing ritual performed on the school, complete with chicken blood. They make those janitors work way too hard. Also, I knew a guy who is a Santeria saint. He runs a video store in east Los Angeles. He’s a dick. Read the rest of this entry »

Cleaning Rituals I

When I was in college, I went a on a trip to St. Louis with a few other guys, and we shared a hotel room. One afternoon upon emerging from the shower, I found them all sitting on the beds, staring at me angrily.

“Clean?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I said.

There was a long pause. I stood there drying off. They looked at me like they expected me to say something, but I was clueless.

“When you were growing up,” said another friend, “did you have to share the bathroom with anybody?”

“Nope,” I said. I had my own until I was eighteen.”

He didn’t answer. They all continued to stare at me, but now they were shifting uncomfortably. I realized that I had given an unexpected answer to a rhetorical question.
Read the rest of this entry »

Freakishly Clean

I recently moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of cleaning to be done. Naturally, instead of doing it, I’ve taken to having long conversations with myself about the nature and history of cleaning.

Retired UCLA championship basketball coach John Wooden gave a great TED talk in which he asserts that keeping things neat and clean is a key to success in any aspect of life. He’s not speaking metaphorically; me means actual, physical cleanliness, and he leaves its connection to success implicit, which is, after all, the whole point.

Barbara Erenreich wrote elegantly, if someone critically, of the house-cleaning industry in her autobiographical exploration of working-class life, Nickel And Dimed. Erenreich worked for a franchised cleaning company that did not allow her to use water, and required her to clean on her hands and knees as a way of demonstrating to the customers that real work was being done (when the opposite was true). Read the rest of this entry »