I could have had other jobs. I could have been a male car-hop as Munshin had warned, or a parking-lot attendant, or I could have gotten work of some sort in one hotel or another, but I chose to wash dishes as though my eight-hour stint in the steam and the grease and the heat, with my fingers burned by plates which came too hot from the machine and my eyes reddened by sweat, was a sort of poor man’s Turkish bath for me. And when I was done for the day, I would grab a meal in a drugstore, an expensive drugstore, but it was the cheapest I could find, for it would have been easier to come on a yacht than a hash-house in that part of the desert, and the restaurant where I worked did not feed the help, except for what help I could get from a friendly waitress—the last of Munshin’s predictions—who would slip me a Caesar salad or a peach melba which I would eat with water-puckered fingers, hardly missing a beat on the plates as they erupted from that gargoyle of a machine which threw its shadow over me, while the most simple lesson of class, the dirge of the dishwasher, steamed furiously in my mind: did those hogs out there, those rich hogs, have to eat on so many plates?