Free The Last Holiday by Gil Scott Heron

dishwasher on the night shift at Jackson’s. I was actually too young to work
there, too young to be in a place that sold cocktails past midnight. But while laughing, I had smeared some of my mother’s eye shadow across my upper lip where there were so few hairs I knew
them all by name. The owner knew I was too young. The manager knew. Not how young I was, but how old I wasn’t. But they called when they needed somebody suddenly.
    At times I might do an 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift, their heavy time. The time when I would ordinarily be studying or listening to the radio or working on one of my stories about a private detective
with a comic book name and five pages to catch his man. Instead I was in the “pits,” in the elbow of a dishwashing machine that mostly moaned and groaned as it trudged along on a
conveyor that mostly conveyed how hot and how tired and how thick with grease everything was.
    From the moment I walked in there, it felt flat-out awful. I went to the back, through the swinging doors that separated the dining area from the dying area. It was hot, unnaturally so. You dig?
The kind of heat that changes your mood and your attitude. A nondiscriminating hope-to-God-some-cold-beer’s-waiting-that-I-can-bathe-in hot. Like a combination microwave and a dame with big
tits on Spanish Fly rubbing up against you like she wants to melt you hot.
    It had something to do with the combination of heat from the grill, with all the burners blasting, and the steam at my post, the dishwasher corner where these two flaps were located, reminding
you of the tunnel of love. When I raised a flap to my right, I could shove a wooden square about my size into the darkness that always roared over the sweating dishes. To the left the dishes
emerged with a whoosh of steam that literally seemed to smack me dizzy every one and a half minutes.
    There was a young Italian waiter who came through our work area as though he was on roller skates with some customer’s lobster, headed for a huge pot of scalding water, always singing,
“That’s your fucking ass, baby!”
    At Jackson’s, I came to understand the term “sweatshop,” though this wasn’t one and they never treated me bad for even one second. But I also came to understand why they
have child labor laws wherever they have them.
    At about 11 p.m. it was as if the Spirits whispered my name to the manager just as the big hand of the steam release struck me full in the face and made me so nauseous that my knees literally
wobbled.
    “How ’bout a steak, kid?” the manager asked.
    “Right through your fucking heart,” I croaked back.
    And everybody howled and somebody slapped me on the back and I almost vomited. I stumbled and bumbled my way to the back window, where the change in the taste of the air, the smell of it, the
feel of it against my face and chest like water after a desert trek, made me feel nearly ecstatic.
    I praised the steak and potatoes and veggies the cook fixed especially for me. He was a gigantic Jamaican who always sang off-key and could handle a half-dozen orders at once and still keep his
grills spotless and his platters looking as if he pulled them from an ad in a magazine. I ate every bite of everything, finishing with nothing but butter on my fingers from the rolls.
    I soon learned how to beat the heat by walking to the open door after every second tray of dishes, about once every five minutes. I learned how to flog the smog, joke about the smoke, and to
pour a cool glass of water over lettuce leaves and put them in my hat. I made it through every shift because my mother and I needed that money. The five hours I put in should have earned me about
seven-fifty, but they always gave me ten bucks. The men I worked with called me “man,” and they treated me like one, so I went back every time I was called, usually once or twice a
month.
    After finishing junior high at Creston, I had to decide which of two Bronx high schools to attend. Benjamin