While I was scrubbing my single serve fry pan this morning (not this morning, but the morning when I was writing this column), it reminded me of a day long past. It was a day during basic training when I, once again, had the privilege of being selected for KP (that’s kitchen police for the handful of you readers who may not be familiar with military-speak) duty. On a side note, doesn’t your life pass before your eyes just prior to death? Scary. Anyway, it was always the KP modus operandi for everyone reporting to the mess hall at 2 a.m. to bite, kick, eyeball-gouge, and scratch their way to the front of the group so as not to be assigned to the dreaded back sink. The back sink held the last two spots to be filled, and meant the two hapless souls filling them would spend the day in the hot kitchen scrubbing all the pots, pans, pitchforks, baking tins, chainsaws, rototillers and other heavy duty meal preparation implements of destruction. Normally the morning load on the stainless steel table next to the sink was finished about five minutes before the lunch load piled up. To make things even more pleasant, once a week the back sink guys would have to go outside and clean out the grease pit (that’s the stove’s outhouse for you readers not familiar with restaurants, hog farming, or certain fast food chains).
This particular morning (not this morning but the morning I had KP), I didn’t feel like biting, kicking, for an early spot, so I just waited to land in the dreaded back sink spot. My unlucky partner and I went to the back of the kitchen, rolled up our sleeves, and started on the morning’s load. The pans had a lot of hard black, baked-on organic, inorganic, and other miscellaneous whatever build- up from years of quick wipes from KPers who just wanted to be finished and on their way. I had an idea, so I told my workmate I’d handle the scrubbing if he would do the rinsing, which precipitated some boot kissing from him.
I was sure there was some form of metal underneath the black whatever, so not being one to do a half-baked job while making a good impression on the mess hall sergeant cook, I scrubbed the utensils until they were at least a half-size smaller. After a while, the cook sergeant came back to peek around the large pot and pan pile, probably figuring he’d find us sleeping. In the midst of berating us for dragging our feet and other body parts, he picked up a cleaned pan and was shocked to find that, indeed, it really was made of metal. He told us to keep doing what we were doing.
Twenty minutes later the sergeant came to us with two pieces of cake and told us to sit down and take a break. In the afternoon he brought us some pie and coffee. I could see the guys out front sweeping and mopping and sweating and scrubbing the cracks between the cinder blocks in the walls with toothbrushes. They occasionally glanced in at us sitting with our feet up and having a gay old time eating goodies and laughing with the sergeant. As a final stroke of good fortune, because this happened to be a grease pit day, the sergeant picked two other guys to go out and clean the stinking, disgusting, pit.
Finally back in the barracks about 10 p.m. that night, the other guys on KP duty with us wanted to know what we did to get the special treatment, so I told them. It would do them no good, though, because the utensils were now clean and shiny and it would take some years of neglect to get them back to the condition in which I found them.
Is there a moral to this story? Of course not. I’m just scrubbing and waiting for the next past life experience to foreshadow my imminent death.