This is a piece based on a beautiful and favorite song of mine. It takes place about 12, 13 years ago. Here's the song if you’d like to listen. As always, thanks for reading and please support in any way you can—sharing, commenting, contributing.
I been tryin' to enjoy
All the fruits of my labor
I been cryin' for you, boy
But truth is my savior
Lucinda Williams, “Fruits of My Labor”
SHE SAID THAT if I got the money we’d get donuts from the place with the flashing red bulb. “That’s how you know they’re fresh and hot.”
It was already hot and I was sweating in my new polyester suit. We were on our way to south Louisiana because I needed $85,000.
“We can buy alotta donuts with that money,” I said.
I don’t even like donuts. And I can’t remember why I needed a ride. Probably because my truck shit out. Or because it was raining and the gaskets in the driver’s side door of my truck shit out years before–so everytime we got those late late summer New Orleans monsoons when it seemed the whole earth took a bath, rainwater would pour in where the gaskets were meant to be and soak the floorboards and the soles of my shoes and my socks. I didn’t want to show up wet and nervous asking for that kind of money. For that kind of money, best to be dry and calm.
We left New Orleans and drove across the elevated expressway. Underneath and around us was the Mississippi. Its water this time of year is the color of sweet tea, cargo ships floating on top of it like dirty ice cubes. We drove past empty toll booths and rusty bridges and billboards for oilfield work with grinning guys in hard hats great benefits and smirking lawyers on billboards a mile down the road asking the oilfield guys if they were exposed to mesothelioma. We went past the Bollinger shipyards, past the Monsanto plant where they cook up glyphosate; past handpainted signs of pink pigs with chef hats putting smaller pink pigs into cast iron pots with a cartoon fire underneath: THE BEST BOUDIN-stop now! We were listening to Lucinda Williams’ album World Without Tears. And our favorite song, “Fruits of My Labor,” was always on repeat.
My suit was making me hot. The polyester cotton blend itched my wrists, the starched collar of my brand new dress shirt was damp with sweat and humidity and it was all soggy on my skin. I tried making talk, but the words which came out were just camouflage for my nerves.
In my pocket next to my cigarettes and rosary and coins and horn comb was a USB stick I couldn’t stop rubbing. I’d spent months making the presentation on it perfect: editing, writing, curating the clip art and photos and graphs. As I worried, as I stared out the window thinking about my feelings but unable to name them, the sweat from my palms and fingers rubbed the brand-name off the stick.
Come to my world and witness
The way things have changed
I was asking for $85,000 from the South Central Planning and Development Commission of Louisiana. They had a bumper crop of funds from the feds for economic development in the wake of Katrina. I needed the money to open my first bakery: I needed it for working capital and rent and pallets of flour and a computer and oven mitts. I needed it because I wanted it and I didn’t have it. But I was scared about what I was asking for; I couldn’t ever un-ask for that kind of money. I couldn’t quit or have second thoughts.
And I knew that I could never forgive myself if I didn’t try. It seemed easier to risk failing than to risk staying the same. Still, there was always that voice, that damn voice, always chipper and caffeinated, which told me I wasn’t good enough, that I don’t deserve this, that I’ll probably fuck it up. Fear was always keeping the door ajar.
WE KEPT DRIVING through the backcountry of Louisiana. Each yellow light, each curve, each front yard was a new lyric in the song.
Tangerines and persimmons
And sugarcane
Grapes and honeydew melon
And when she shifted the manual transmission, each new gear took a deep breath.
Lemon trees don't make a sound
'Til branches bend and fruit falls to the ground
Then the engine caught, the accelerator was pushed, and we went further south. The car snaked through cotton fields with deer stands, past busted crab traps and stilted trailers; past levees big as buildings tipped on their sides and lonely pockets of cypress bayou. Past abandoned plantations, past loose skeins of lesser Canadian geese flying beneath clouds slow as tug boats. About every few minutes we passed another clapboard wooden church called New Zion First Baptist, the same looking oyster-white Buick in the parking lot.
Lavender, lotus blossoms too
Water the dirt, flowers last for you, baby
Sweet baby
We got where we were going. Houma, Louisiana, population 33,727, elevation 10 feet. Water, water was everywhere: the whole place was flossed by stagnant water. Canals, bayous, ponds, false rivers, ditches, reservoirs. It looked like there was more water than earth.
She pulled into a parking space. I rolled the window down and it smelled like dried shrimp, a spilled Monster Energy drink, and boat diesel. “I’m going down the bayou to see my mom. Good luck, call me when you’re done.” I said thanks and sorted my tie in the rearview mirror and brushed the dandruff off my shoulders and picked at the wart on my palm and took the 30 business plans I printed and bound at Kinko’s from the back seat. The fingers of my free hand were rubbing that USB stick as if it were a genie.
MY GRANDMA LENT me $300 to buy my suit. “Check’s in the mail, Graison, good luck!” I went to the mall because I thought that’s where one buys a suit. I stared at the directory in the entrance way. Burlington, Hollister, Dillard’s. Settled on Macy’s.
The saleswoman asked what jacket size I was. “I don’t know.” She asked me what my budget was. I mumbled. She took out some flimsy measuring tape, brought me to a dressing room of mirrors and just-vacuumed carpet. She stood behind me, right where I couldn’t see her, and put her mouth to my ear. “Stick out your arms. I’m going to measure you.” I heard her murmuring numbers to herself, her tape pressing into my shoulder, into my elbow, into my skinny jeans and bare wrist.
I settled on a black thing. Calvin Klein, on sale. Slim-fitting, bit shiny, the cuff of the pants hanging delicately just above the eyelets of my Chuck Taylors. The trousers cinched my waist tightly, their red banding ribbon pressing into my hips.
“It’s hard, because you’re between sizes. I know the pants are tight, but I like how they fall, the cut in the thigh is good. The jacket though…stick out your arms towards me again, like a zombie.”
The jacket was light, pliable, fitted; it moved whenever I moved, it went wherever I went. I wasn’t used to things like that.
She cocked her head, smiled. “I just can’t tell with you. You’re so between sizes. Try this bigger one again.” She gave me the Regular, I took off the Short.
“How does that feel?”
I SAT IN the waiting room of the Development Commission, drinking my sixth coffee and chicory from a squishy foam cup. The room smelled like Werther’s and Glade. The water cooler burped every few minutes, a bubble the size of my fist rising from somewhere in its belly to the surface.
Then Ms. Guidry came in. She was all grins and warmth.
“They’re ready for you now, cher. I can tell you’re nervous! Don’t be, you’ll do great! I’ve got your USB stick put in and your presentation is pulled up on the projector. All ready to go!” I walked inside the conference room.
60 eyes, 30 notebooks, 30 pens and notepads. 60 legs, 30 pairs of shoes, 20 overhead lights, three clocks. An entire room of adults staring at me.
I smelled the cologne I bought at the Macy’s checkout counter. Drakkar Noir, musty and bold and acrid. I smelled my armpit sweat and aftershave and my nerves and the last cigarette I’d had in New Orleans still tingling on my gumline. I swallowed a breath and words came out.
“My name is Graison Gill and I’m here today to request $85,000 in a working capital loan to open a wholesale bakery.”
I reached in my pocket to rub my USB stick and it was gone.
I MOVED TO New Orleans right after Obama’s first inauguration. The newspapers were effervescent, all about HOPE and CHANGE. It seemed everyone I knew expected this year would be a magic wand, that this guy was a genie who would fix the whole country.
I came to see that New Orleans wasn’t the country. It was itself, just a wild animal beached upon the shore of America. Its sores from Katrina were still raw and real: not just the National Guard’s graffiti on every house, not just the rubble of collapsed houses which sat on whole blocks like cigarette butts in an ashtray, not just the floodwater marks sunburned onto buildings by retreating floodwater. Katrina was still in the people, too. In their eyes, in the way they said their names, in the way they held their drinks. It was in the way everyone spoke in the past tense. And Katrina was in their dreams: in their dreams of sleep, in their dreams of waking.
I loved all the parts of New Orleans. Its grief and its hurt and its mercy and its texture. Creole bricks and Spanish moss and menus in French. Wrought iron balconies, relentless cicacads, houses the color of sherbert. I loved its rhythm, its litter and street names and the stickiness of the humidity. The smells of its magnolia blossoms and confederate jasmine and rotting mulberries, of coffee roasting on the Governor Nicholls street wharf; its sounds of boat horns and trolley bells and snare drums. I loved how the old oak tree roots broke the sidewalks, how the waiters in the Quarter wore blazers, how all of the days really belonged to the nights.
When I got to town I had nothing but a hangover and a criminal record. But somehow suddenly, the day after I arrived, for no reason at all, I just started baking. In my apartment, I just started baking bread. And I never stopped.
Until that point in my life, I never found anything as powerful as bread–something which could conjugate all my passion and hunger and anger and all the other ingredients youth ferments. Bread was something I could touch and move and shape and change. Bread was something I could make, something I could do myself. It was something I could share.
In New Orleans back then, everyone was hurt. But because they were hurt, everyone was honest. I was hurt, too. But I didn’t know anything about being honest. When I started to make bread everyday, I felt that it was the only thing that had ever been honest with me. Then I found out that the more I labored, the harder it was for the pain to find me. So I saturated my body with work, the kneading and the shaping and the baking became a painkiller. And no one cared, no one asked questions, no one in New Orleans wondered why I was hurting myself into bread. They just supported me, they just encouraged me, despite my zealotry and righteousness and cutoff jean shorts.
Baby, see how I been living
Velvet curtains on the windows to
Keep the bright and unforgiving
Light from shining through
New Orleans accepted me for who I was, not for who I wanted to be. So I wanted to make more bread. I needed a bigger oven. I had to have that money.
“MR. GILL, can you please tell us about the equipment you plan on purchasing?”
“Yes Mr. Jeansonne. I have secured some quotes for used equipment from a well-known purveyor in Houston.” This Texas bastard was a crook, a pirate twice my age who still shopped at Miller’s Outpost and probably hung out at the local arcade while he waited for the sales girls from Claire’s to get off shift. He sold me a bundle of shit without warranty, a fourth hand oven whose best days, likes his, were past. But he was all I could afford with my budget.
“Mr. Gill, does the equipment come with any warranty? Parts and labor, for example? We want to make sure our investment–and your passion–is protected.”
“Um.” I wanted to lie to Mr. Jeansonne. Not to hurt him, just not to hurt myself with the truth.
I wasn’t used to being heard, I wasn’t used to being looked at. But in Terrebonne Parish on a muggy late September day in 2011, I was telling a group of strangers about my dream. And I understood that bread had become, now, quite suddenly, how I told people who I was.
I didn't know myself better than any other 24 year old. Sure, I could tell you about my life, my height and weight and hair color, the books I read. But I couldn't tell you about my heart. All I could do was tell you about the kind of bread I wanted to make: dark, crusty, sour. Wholesome, honest, and warm. So heavy and real that I couldn’t use words to describe it. I just had to make it, to do it, and even then it still didn’t always make sense. And that’s when I was happiest.
“I want to, I want to, I want to…to make bread, to make bread in New Orleans, to make it in my vision, with my ingredients, with my recipes, with my hands, with my heart, with my soul….” If only I had a huge mixer and a waterproof truck and a checking account and a huge oven where I could bake my bread. If only I had the things which money could buy, I could make all the bread I wanted.
I should have said “I need to.”
I DON’T KNOW how long she was in the parking lot waiting for me. All I know is that I was alone in the waiting room for 45 minutes. I had been holding a pee for an hour because I didn’t want them to think I’d left.
Ms. Guidry came out of the conference room just as I was unbuttoning my collar, loosening my tie. She startled as if I were a ghost.
“Oh lord! Cher, what’re you still doing here?”
“Hi Ms. Guidry. I’m just waiting here like y’all said, to know if, I uh, um, got the money.”
“Of course you did, cher! They told you so after your presentation! They loved it! Didn’t you hear them say it? Anyway, congratulations! The check will be in the mail next week.”
In my head I had a Jerry McGuire moment. But then I realized: I was so nervous that I blacked out at the end of my presentation. All those adults told me that they were going to finance my bakery. They said yes to my dream. And I was in such disbelief, I forgot everything.
“Oh, they were in love with your presentation and that the equipment comes with parts and labor. You’ve got to bring us some bread soon! And before I forget cher, you’re going to need to get a life insurance policy for the loan. A nurse will come by to do the blood tests and paperwork.”
I said a thousand thank yous to Ms. Guidry and went out to the parking lot. I was too surprised to ask for my USB stick back.
She was there and when I got into the car there was a bag of donuts between us. I reached to the CD console to put Lucinda Williams on.
“So, how’d it go?”
“Um, yeah, good. I got the money.”
Reaching in, I pulled out a donut. I don’t like sweet things, fatty things. I don’t like the jolt from sugar, don’t like the way that kind of dough sits in my stomach and chews on my teeth.
“That’s great, Graison.” Fruits of My Labor came on.
She eased the car into first and we went through a stop.
“So now that you have what you want, what are you going to do with it?”
You write beautifully! So if this whole bread-baking lark you've been on doesn't work out you may have a future in writing. :-)
Beautiful, GG!