our last ride in the bread truck
I remember the rain. It was coming down in silver sheets. It was September 16th, my sister’s birthday and the day I was scheduled to report to basic training. I emerged from my bedroom in the basement with a heavy heart. The news of Ramone’s suicide hung heavy on me. It had been a few weeks since Alan and I had learned of Ramone’s death and I hadn’t slept very well since.
I walked across the kitchen to the dining room. I sat my travel bags on the floor next to the table and walk across the room to my father who was standing in the front of our open front door listening to the rain. My parent’s house was quiet as time on a monument except for the faint sounds of my mother’s sniffles coming from my parent’s bedroom. It was early, I don’t remember exactly how early, but it was still dark and cool outside.
“ It’s coming down out there this morning,” my father said as I walked up beside him.
“You got everything,” he asked without looking at me.
“I think so,” I said turning to look at his profile.
“Better check before you go.”
My father had been in the Air Force and had fought during the Korean war. An experience he rarely spoke of. He was old school, he believed action spoke much louder than words. My father was a quiet man. Stoic, yet approachable. He was not the type of man who went around tossing out I love you’s like they were confetti, but if you were family you knew that you were loved. He was strong, smart, and the most patient person I have ever known. My father was a straight shooter, a guy who as far as I knew always walked on the right side of the line in life. When I was a kid, I wanted to be my father. In many ways I still do.
The economy in the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan era economy was garbage, and finding a decent paying job was hard to come by, but trouble, not so much. You didn’t have to look too long or too hard to find trouble. Because trouble was always lurking in the shadows, hanging out at all the popular hot spots, if you called, trouble would be more than happy to show himself in the form of drugs, alcohol, frustration, and anger before exploding from the shadows. Fuel by the newest and most devastating drug of them all, crack cocaine.
A destroyer of lives, past, present, and in some horrible cases future. The Reagan administration’s reaction, a real quippy new slogan “Just say no,” and legislation that unduly targeted minorities and destroyed families for generations. The effects of crack on the scene were immediate and devastating. As I look back now, I can see that this is where Alan and my views on social and perhaps racial issues were beginning to diverge for the first time. This change also coincides with us moving into young adulthood. Alan and I disagreed over the drug sentences being handed down to minorities as compared to their white counterparts.
Alan thought that people selling drugs should have the book thrown at them. I agreed if it were the same size book. Black and Hispanic offenders were getting harsher sentences than white offenders for almost the exact same crime. Friends of ours that we had grown up with were going down. We were seeing it first hand. Fat Rich Martinez, got caught selling dope and caught a hand full of years, his brother Jumbo went the same way, Flip and Solman went the same way and got sent up, Donny, a white kid in their crew got probation. Alan couldn’t see the glaring difference, I did.
“Donny wasn’t selling crack,” Alan said.
“Cocaine is cocaine, rather it’s rock or powder. They should have all gotten the same amount of time.”
“The sentences had nothing to do with race. Maybe Donny’s parents got him a better lawyer?”
“He had a state-appointed lawyer like the rest of them,” I said.
“Still, I just don’t believe that it had nothing to do with race.”
It’s funny how two people can look at the same thing, yet see something totally different. The differences in the Americas we both lived in was beginning to emerge.
My father understood why I had to leave. He may not have liked it, but he understood it. My mother on the other hand, was hurt and angry and didn’t care to understand. My mother was in her and my dad’s bedroom. She wouldn’t come out. I had joined the Army against her wishes, and I was leaving again, and she wasn’t too happy about it. I had to go. For my own sanity, I had to go. I had just return unceremoniously from California where I had gone to play football, but health issues, undiagnosed asthma, put my dreams of playing in the NFL on the rack. So, back I came to Detroit, angry, dejected, and bitter at what I saw as limited options.
Alan offered to get me a job at C.Q. the laundry company he was working, but I turned him down flat. It was a dead-end job and I wanted more.
“It’s good enough for me, but not good enough for you,” Alan said bitterly after I turned him down.
“ It’s not that,” I said regretting not finding a more subtle way of turning him down.
“So what, the rackets. You saw what happened to Jumbo and those guys.”
“ I’m going into the Army,” I said. Thinking back to the shocked expression on his face still makes me smile. My girlfriend, the woman that would later become my wife had just moved to Florida, her mother’s job had been transferred to Jacksonville so nothing was keeping me in Michigan. I wanted to marry her and the Army was my way of providing us with a tangible future.
“She’ll be alright,” my dad said in his calm soothing way referring to sniffles coming from their closed bedroom door. The guilt I felt was overwhelming.
“ I have to go, ” I said with my voice quivering with emotion. He turned to me and smiled. It was a small intimate smile; one he had never given me before or since.
“ I know you do,” He put his hand on my shoulder as he spoke, “It will be good for you. Get you out of here. You go see the world.” He let his hand drop from my shoulder and stuffed it into his front pocket and turned back toward the door and looked out at the pouring rain.
“Thanks, dad.” I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go into the Army, but what I was sure of was this, I had to go. If I wanted any chance at a decent future I had to go. As I sit here now writing this, I remember standing with him in that doorway listening to the rain slapping down on the sidewalk in front of our house on Promenade Street. I remember staring at his unflinching profile wondering what he was thinking about. I wondered if I was what he had imagined his only son would be like. Was he proud of the man that I was becoming? I wondered if he ever saw parts of himself in me. I don’t know. I’ll never know.
My father died a few years ago while I was in Florida. We would speak on the phone, not as often as I would have liked. My dad was never much for talking on the phone. When I called my mother would always answer the phone. She would ask how I was, then ask after Carmen my wife, then our son Jamie, she would ask if I would like to speak to my father as if I would ever say no.
“Hey,” he would say. My dad had a rich baritone voice, “How’s everything?”
“Good dad, we’re all doing fine.” I would say happy to be talking to him.
“How’s the wife and baby?”
“They’re fine, Jay’s getting big.”
“ I bet he is. Is he taller than you yet?”
“Not yet, almost though, did you watched the Lion’s Sunday dad?” I’d ask referring to the Detroit Lions.
“Them old Lion’s,” he would say with a chuckle, “they have to win eventually, right? we would both laugh.
“ Alright then,” he would say still chuckling. “ I got nothing else to say, here’s your mother.”
“Okay then,” and he would give my mother the phone.
My dad and I stood in the doorway watching as the headlights turned into our driveway splashing light across the front of the house and us. Dad looked at me.
“You got any money,” he asked seriously. I nodded.
“I do. I have a couple of hundred dollars.”
He reached in his pocket and tried to hand me some more money.
“No, Dad. I’m good. This should be enough,” he shook his head.
“You never know,” he said, “Just take it. Put my mind at ease.” He pulled three hundred dollars out of his pocket.
“Seriously, dad, I’m good.”
“ I know that you are, but for me. Put your mother’s mind at ease.” He handed it to me. I reluctantly took the money and stuffed it into my front pocket.
“Thanks,” I looked toward the closed bedroom door. My dad put a hand on my shoulder.
“ Don’t worry about her. She’ll be alright. Go on,” he motioned toward the front door, “let your friend in.” I walked over to the front door in time to see Alan getting out of the car, hunched over running across our side lawn to the porch. I could hear the slushy sounds of his feet on the wet grass. He ran up on the porch soaking wet and breathing heavily. He looked like a soaked poodle wearing a blond helmet.
“Funny,” he said stomping his feet and shaking off the rain. I opened the screen door and Alan entered our house. The house was dimly lit with only the light from the kitchen and a small lamp on a side table.
“Want some coffee,” I asked as I moved toward my parent’s bedroom which was just down the hall. Alan had already grabbed a cup and was pouring coffee when I asked.
“Thanks,” he lifted the cup in my direction. He knew where we kept things. He had been coming here since he was a kid. He was virtually part of the family.
“Where’s mom,” he asked. I nodded toward the bedroom and shrugged.
“Oh,” he said. There was no need for me to say more.
“I’ll be back,” I said and walked down the hall toward my parent’s bedroom.
“Thelma,” my dad called to my mother as I walked toward the bedroom door, “ Come on out now, the boys getting ready to go.” I walked over to the bedroom door and stood next to my father.
“Mom, I’m getting ready to go now. Alan’s here.”
“So, you are going to leave after all?” The muffled disbelieving voice came through the door.
“ I have to. I’ll get in trouble if I don’t.” I stood there waiting for the door to open, but it didn’t.
“Fine then, go.” I backed away from the door heartbroken. My dad followed me back into the dining room.
“Hey Dad,” Alan said to my dad and quickly shook his hand, “Can you believe this one,” he motioned toward me, “He’s in the Army now, god protect us all.” We all laughed as I gathered my bags and made my way toward the door. I shook my father’s hand. I wanted to hug him, but I’m not sure how he would have felt about something like that, so I shook his hand, and off Alan and I went. As we backed out of the driveway and turned onto the street, I could see my mother in the door watching us. I waved and she waved back as we pulled away.
Alan and I rode in silence for a long while each lost in his own thoughts. We had been here before. Our friendship put to the test by time and distance. The first came when my family left the old neighborhood first. In the back of my mind and I believe in the back of Alan’s to we thought this might be it, but it wasn’t. Here we are again almost ten years later facing the same threat and once again we came through it. Neither of us could have imagined the threat Donald Trump would pose to our friendship almost thirty years later.
“You really going to go through with this,” Alan asked referring to my decision to join the Army.
“ I have to now. I’m already signed up.”
“Shit, instead of going to Metro (the airport) we could cross the bridge and before you know it you’re in Windsor.”
“I ain’t running to Canada,”
“Because I already signed up. They’ll come looking for me.”
“Whose gonna come looking for you?”
“Uncle…and who in the hell is that?”
“I don’t know, the F.B.I. or some shit,”
“Nobody’s gonna come looking for you if you don’t show up.” Alan and I rode in silence for a while then he said in a low raspy whisper.
“ I can’t believe he did that.”
“ Ramone, I can’t believe he killed himself.”
“ Yeah,” I said looking out the window, “ It’s pretty horrible.”
“ I thought he was stronger than that,” Alan said glancing at me.
“Sometimes the weight is just too much to bear”
“We all got our problems, you be a man and deal with them, that’s how we were raised, right?” I nodded.
“You don’t take the easy way out.”
“How do you know it was the easy way out?”
Alan looked at me confused.
“You think walking into ongoing traffic was easy, I sure in the hell don’t.”
“Must have been easier than facing his problems like a man.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The atmosphere was radioactive in the car. We rode in silence for the rest of the way to the airport with our friendship teetering on the narrow head of a pin. I remember thinking,
“Ramone is gone, and I don’t know who this asshole sitting next to me is. Maybe it’s time to cut ties with everything and everyone from my past and start fresh. If I were going to do it, now was the time. Yeah, now is the time.” I sat back and looked out the window and watched as Chene street slid by us. Every now and again I would catch Alan stealing a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye.
“FMB bakery,” he said grinning as we passed an old abandoned building, “We had some good times up on that roof.” I smiled and let my head swivel in the direction of the building as we passed. Alan was right, as kids, we had some great times there. When we were kids our friend Billy and his mother Lexie, and his sister Lucy lived over the bakery and Billy’s mother Lexie worked as a delivery driver for the bakery. Billy’s family was from Kentucky, and I remember one of the first things he told me when I met him was that his mother Lexie was a former Playboy model, she wasn’t, but at the time Alan and I believed him. She looked like she could have been one honestly.
Billy was in our 5th-grade class even though he was a year older than the rest of us, he had Mrs. Drum the year before us and failed and he had to repeat her class. Ramone and Billy never became friends, but Alan and I became good friends with him and would often spend the weekends over his house partly because he was a fun guy, and partly to ogle his super attractive mom who liked to walk around in Daisy Duke shorts or bikini bottoms and a tee-shirt on her days off.
We never had so much freedom, as we did when we spent our weekend nights over Billy’s house. His mother would buy us a case of Pepsi and pizza and basically leave us to our own devices. Our nights were spent staying up super late listening to music, our favorites in case you were wondering were “Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting, by Carl Douglas, Shadow Dancing by Andy Gibbs, and Saturday Night Fever by his brothers, The Bee Gee’s,” and talking about girls in our classroom, Franchesca, in particular. We all had it bad for Franny. A golden brown girl with dark limpid eyes, thick black hair, a small upturned nose, and pouty blushed lips. The product of a white father and a black mother Franchesca looked about as exotic as her name sounded to us all at the time. When we weren’t pining over Franchesca we were leafing through the mountains of playboy magazines that Billy’s mom’s married boyfriend Richard had gotten for him. We couldn’t believe the stack of dirty mags he had and his mother didn’t seem to mind, and we certainly didn’t.
My parents nor Alan’s parents never knew about the dirty magazines, Daisy Duke shorts, or bikini bottoms or we would have never been allowed to stay over. On those clear summer nights, when Billy’s mother went on her deliveries, his sister Lucy and her boyfriend Otis crept off to her bedroom for the night Billy would always want to go and play one of our favorite games, “Stump the Drunk”.
“Come on guys,” he would say in his easy Kentucky drawl. Alan and I would look at each other and off we would go scurrying out of Billy’s bedroom window onto his rooftop. We would duck low and move quickly past Lucy’s bedroom window and over to the edge of the building. There was a high brick wall, a rampart of sorts, it was high enough to hide us from sight, but low enough for us to see clearly out across the main road. We would then hustle about on the rooftop gathering small rocks and pebbles to throw.
Then like clockwork starting at around 1:45 in the morning men and women would begin to wobble arm in arm out of “Max’s Lounge”, a glorified hole in the wall on the corner of Chene and Fredrick street. Giggling women in form-fitting shimmering dresses clinging to the arms of fidgeting men of all shapes, sizes, and colors, all dressed in variations of the polyester white suit that John Travolta wore in “Saturday Night Fever.” The hunched couples would stagger across the wide blacktop to their waiting LTD’s, Lincoln continentals, and Cadillacs. As they crossed we would pop up like Jack in the boxes and start chucking our rocks at them, not to hit them, we never wanted to do that. We just wanted to freak them out, and we did do that.
They would freeze like deer paralyzed in the road by approaching high beams. Brains locked, watching as the lights grew wider and brighter until something becomes nothing but a twitching stain dying on a lonely road. For our staggering friends, it was nothing quite that dramatic. Our deer would stand swaying in the middle of the road looking around bewildered and afraid as invisible objects clunked down near them. Some would stand for a moment before the brain snapped back to life and off they would dart back across the street to the safety of the lounge, others defiantly waved their fist into the night sky cursing and daring us to show ourselves, still, others stood as still as rocks in the road half-drunk looking glassy-eyed and uncomprehending.
“ Look at them,” we would all laugh pointing and throwing rocks until we ran out of them. When the last of the rocks were thrown, high and arching invisible in the black sky before falling to earth like a tiny meteor we would turn and scurry off belly laughing until the one night we heard a scream that stopped us in our tracks. We all looked at each other our smiles fading, our eyes wide and afraid. We slowly crept back over to the wall in time to see a young woman holding her head being helped back across the street. Blood was streaming down her face. People were pouring from the bar looking up and pointing in every direction.
My heart was pounding so hard in my narrow chest I thought I might pass out. Alan was as pale as a sheet of paper, his brilliant blue eyes danced wildly back and forth between Billy and me. Billy, on the other hand, seemed as calm as if nothing had happened.
“Come on,” he said as he was slowly backing away from the wall.
“What are we going to do,” I asked.
“Nothing, they didn’t see us. They don’t know where the rocks came from.”
“Fuck you, Billy,” Alan said, “We’ve got to tell someone what happened.”
We went back and forth for several minutes before our fear of getting in trouble from our parents and our pure cowardice at the time won out and we decided to keep our secret, that is until now.
This is a recent picture of Chene street, it’s sad to see how bad it looks now. The last time I was anywhere near here was when Alan and I found out about Ramone’s death and that was about six blocks away from here. When we were growing up none of these buildings were abandoned, it was a bustling fun place to spend our weekends. It’s sad. Back to the story, the woman we hit and no one knows whose rock it was that hit her was fine. Turns out she was a young woman that worked up the block at what used to be a local drug store.
The woman was okay, we saw her a few days later working at the corner drug store at the end of the block, I forget the name of the place, but like everything else, in that area, I imagine it’s been closed for years by now. The name tag hanging on the shirt of her bland brown and white uniform was Janice.
The three of us walked to the counter carrying out Better Made potato chips and Faygo sodas. I remembered thinking that she was really pretty up close and that she looked way too young and innocent to be hanging out in a sleazy joint like Max’s. She had a small bandage on the right side of her head near the hairline where she had to have stitches.
“ Is that it,” she asked, her voice bored and robotic. She sat her paperback down on the stool next to her. She was looking right at us, but she really didn’t see us. We were an annoyance, like wiping down the counter or sweeping the floor, we were a chore she needed to get done as quickly as possible so that she could get back to her book, and here Billy was asking her stupid questions.
“What happened,” Billy asked pointing to the bandage on her head. Her eyes narrowed.
“None of your business, you little redneck tard.”
“Sorry,” Billy said slowly turning up the knob on his southern drawl. He gave her a sly knowing smile that suggested that he wasn’t sorry at all. She stared at him for a minute then glanced at Alan and me.
“Yeah, I bet you are… sorry.” She said to Billy, and then rang our items up and picked up her book and began to read as if we were no longer standing there, we were dismissed. As we walked out she looked up at us and with a slight smile spreading across her thin lips and the devil dancing behind her hazel eyes.
“Bye, bye, ” she said coldly while flicking her wrist at us then went back to her book.
“Jeez, what a bitch,” Alan said as we made our way back up the block toward Billy’s house.
“Yeah, maybe she has a headache,” Billy said trying to keep from laughing.
“Next time we should throw bricks,” I said joking.
“ Yeah, smash the wicked witch of the north,” Alan chimed in. The truth be told we were glad to see Janice was okay, and although no one ever said we shouldn’t do it, we never played “Stump the Drunk,” again. If I’m being honest and I always try to be, the way Janice treated us wasn’t that out of the ordinary. Most older girls didn’t appreciate young knot heads staring at their breasts or backsides. We were a small pack of horny dogs back then and Billy’s skin magazines didn’t help.
That night we went on deliveries with Billy’s mother. It was fun we would eat cakes and cookies until we had our fill, while we visited wonderbread, Bluebird, and several other major bread company warehouses. Most of the warehouse workers were mostly men at that time of night, between eleven at night and four in the morning would always hit on Billy’s mom, women did too. His mother seemed free and open, she didn’t carry the baggage other parents seem to lug around. She was happy with the way she was and didn’t seem to mind if people didn’t like or understand it.
There would be times usually when Lexi and Richard were fighting that she would seem to stay extra long at certain stops. She would be talking to the warehouse manager off in the shadows, and then they would be gone. sometimes for up to a half an hour at least that’s how long it seemed to me at the time. She would appear out of the shadows and without a word slide into her seat and buckle in.
“You boys ready to go home,” she’d asked in that sexy southern drawl of hers and before we could answer she would be pulling out of the dock. By the end of the night, the truck would be filled with empty bread trays stacked in columns against the front wall of the truck. The truck she drove was similar to a UPS truck with open sliding side doors on both sides. On summer nights Lexi would let us keep the side doors open so that we could catch a breeze as long as we stacked our trays toward the back and away from the open doors, and we did. The ride home was usually quiet. Our stomachs were full of cookies and cakes and we were beginning to come down off our sugar highs. We would each find ourselves a stack of empty bread trays and climb in. Our butts and backs were the only parts in the tray and our legs and arms would dangle over the sides and off to dreamland we would go. It doesn’t sound like it would be comfortable, but it was. Lulled to sleep by the sweet aroma of fresh bread lingering in the summer night breeze was great. It’s one of my fondest memories from my childhood to this day.
I remember it like it was yesterday, the night I almost died. The night we went out on the route was like any other night except on this night there had been a light drizzle. Not enough for an umbrella, but enough that if you stood out in it longer than a few minutes you would be wet. We waited for Lexi’s truck to be loaded and off we went. I could tell that Lexi was in a hurry to get done because Richard was going to be there when she got home. She did her route as quickly as possible and before we knew it we were all laying in our bread trays dozing off on the way back to Billy’s house.
The highway was nearly deserted like it always was on our early morning returns, I could vaguely hear the swooshing of the tires gliding over the wet roads. Lexi was unusually quiet on this night, most nights she would play the radio softly and sing along with the songs she liked, but not tonight. I would learn later that Lexi had asked to meet with Richard that night to tell him that their relationship was over and that she was thinking about moving back to Kentucky, the bakery was closing, but that wouldn’t be for another two years. Billy told us later that when he asked her why Richard stopped coming around she told him, she wanted to get married and Richard had broken his promise to leave his wife so she was leaving him. She just wanted to be free of Richard and the harassment of his wife.
As I slept on the bread rack I noticed that the trays were beginning to sway, we had stacked them to high and they were threatening to fall over. I opened my eyes and noticed that Billy was still sleeping and Alan had already jumped down from his pile and was already removing trays from his stack.
“ Your trays are too high you better…” Alan started to say when Lexi slammed on the breaks. A driver who was starting to fall asleep had swerved into her lane. Lexi blew the horn and swerved to miss him. The other driver swerved back into his lane. All the trays in the back of the truck went flying as she swerved back into her lane. Billy fell to the floor and was slammed into the sidewall. My stack of trays slowly tilted and fell forward and I went flying toward the open door. Lexi turned and through her arm out in my direction trying to break the fall, but she couldn’t hold the steering wheel and stop my fall at the same time. I could see the wet pavement rushing toward me glimmering like black ice.
My arms pinwheeled as I grasped for anything that would stop my fall. I remember thinking that I was about to die. I closed my eyes and tried to think of one of the prayers I had heard in church on the few mornings I went, but my mind was blank. The banging and clanking from the tumbling metal and plastic bread trays were deafening. As I slid forward I opened my mouth to scream. Suddenly I was no longer falling forward. I felt a sharp tug on my right leg and looked back and saw Alan holding onto one of the nylon straps used for tying down the trays and the other holding my leg. He was on one knee, his arms were spread eagle, he reminded me of the biblical Samson pushing the pillars apart in the temple of the Philistine leaders.
He was trembling, his head twisting back and forth like a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur. His blue eyes were so light they almost looked white. His lips were pulled back into a snarl exposing his clenched teeth. The cords of muscles in his skinny arms bulged and I could see it his eyes, if I went, he was going too.
“Help him,” Lexi screamed at Billy who was just sitting there frozen. He instantly snapped to life and grab my other leg and they pulled me back into the truck.
“ I got you,” Alan said with a nervous chuckle and patted me on the leg then fell back exhausted.
“You all right,” Lexi called back to me.
“Yes ma’am, I’m alright.”
As we turned off of Chene street and onto I-94 the rain had begun to slow down. I looked at Alan’s profile remembering that night I almost died. He must have felt the weight of my stare. He turned to me wearing a slightly embarrassed expression.
“What,” he said grinning.
“You looking at my pimple,” he brought a hand up to cover the red pimple on his cheek.
“ I wasn’t, but now that you mentioned it.” I laughed.
The rest of the ride was filled with reminiscing and jokes. I didn’t see Alan again for nearly four years.
