Memoirs Of A Bread Man

Memoirs Of A Bread Man - book excerpt

Chapter 1

It’s three a.m. in Madison, Wisconsin, late December 2004.

"Let me tell you somethin’, Junior."

My boss, Frankie, is in early to train a new guy today. He is an Old School Bread Man, now the District Sales Manager of the least-grossing division in the Midwest. He often refers to himself as a midget (he’s about 5’8”) but everything else about him is huge—not in muscle, but in his Drill Sergeant voice and wild eyes. He stares straight into me, his face tilted slightly downwards, adjusts his hat and says, “Let me explain something to you, O.K.? This is how it works. Women go crazy at thirty-five. They have their mid-life crisis at thirty-five. When we have our mid-life crisis, we buy sports cars and drink our faces off. Women go crazy, tell you they never loved you, and have some twenty-something lawyer—still happily married ‘cause his wife hasn’t snapped yet—hand you divorce papers at a Stop-N-Go gas station on the south side of Milwaukee. You’ll say to yourself I didn’t even know we were fighting. But she’s unhappy and that’s that.”

He pauses to take a breath, breathing in deeply and then violently out his nose. “Now, you’ll find yourself walking out the front door with a red suitcase in your hand, your wife, house, and children to your back, wondering when you’re gonna be on ‘Americas Most Wanted’, ‘cause in her mind you‘re a goddamn criminal. That time you were drivin’ and your eight-year-old daughter started kicking you in the head and calling you a fucker, and you grabbed her by the shirt and threw her in the back seat—that was child abuse. Or that time you begged your wife for sex ‘cause it had been eight months, and she finally gave in—that was rape. When she was thirty-four, you were a father and a husband. Now that she’s thirty-five, you’re a child abusing rapist.”

Again, he breathes loudly. It sounds like a punctuation mark before his words again race past. “So there you are in front of a judge—a child-abusing rapist—and he’s looking at you like all you’ve done for the past twenty years was drink beer and watch professional wrestling. He doesn’t know that you’ve been getting up at two in the fuckin’ morning to deliver bread since your first child was born so you could be home at noon to raise your kids while the wife goes off to her five-fifty-an-hour job cause she has friends there and she likes to get out of the house. He doesn’t know it was you changing the diapers, watching a dancing purple dinosaur sing the same goddamn song for the ten millionth time, fixing lunch and dinner, picking the kids up from school and band practice, their friends’ houses … nor does he know that by the time she gets home you’ve been up for fifteen hours and you’ve spent the last fourteen years trying to function on two hours of sleep. He doesn’t know that she’s been fucking your best friend for the past eight months, and you don’t either, not yet anyway. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, cause he’s seventy goddamn years old, and when his wife was thirty-five it was the 1940s, and leaving the prick wasn’t an option.”

Still staring through me he says, “Eventually, this mother fucker tells you that she gets half. You know what ‘half’ means, boy? It means all of it. She gets the kids ‘cause she’s the mother. Since she gets the kids, she gets the house, ‘cause the kids need a place to stay. She gets what's left in the bank account ‘cause she’ll need it to pay for the house and the babysitter while she’s off at the bar with her new single friends pretending she’s twenty again. She’ll need the babysitter ‘cause the children can’t be left alone with a child-abusing rapist. You’ll hear that your best friend is living in your house, fuckin’ your wife, raising your children, living on your money ‘cause they won’t marry. Soon, you’ll be living under a bridge sleeping next to black feet, cause if you're not workin’ all she gets half of is nothin’. Eventually, you’ll come to what’s left of your senses and get back on a route, living on baloney sandwiches because it’s all you can afford—that and the Jameson you’ll need to keep you from shooting yourself in the face and jumping in the fuckin’ river.”

Sitting on the bumper of a bread truck, surrounded by bread and the stench of the depot, I listen carefully and think to myself my boss is both crazy and immaculately sane at the same time. I say “carefully” because I don’t want my face to show anything. He is an ex-Master Gunnery Marine Drill Sergeant and he generally knows what you’re thinking before you do. Even if he doesn’t, it won’t matter. Once he’s sure, he’s sure. I’ve learned not to argue. If it’s in his head, it’s true. After two months of him yelling at me, I eventually realized it was because he liked me.

Kim, a forty-something Bread Vet, has been standing at Frankie’s side throughout the monologue, holding up his hands, palms facing me, calmly smiling and nodding in agreement as though Frankie were a preacher. His approach is much more relaxed, the pacing of his Muppet voice much more careful.

“He’s right,” Kim nods. “See, sometimes they don’t leave you though. But you’ll wish they had. My wife was always crazy. But it wasn’t till thirty-five that the … the goal of my marriage changed. See, you have to understand that women’s brains are made differently. She was always crazy, but at thirty-five my vows became, no matter what, that I will not kill her.”

He smiles and grabs his belly, round like Santa Claus’ in my younger mind's eyes, as Frankie lights up a menthol and starts bitching about the new guy being late.

“See, that’s how you’ll spend the rest of your life, day in and day out, trying not to kill her,” Kim states.

He’s smiling at you, somehow looking both serious and amused.

“Where the fuck is this guy, Junior?” Frankie growls at me.

“If he’s smart, he’s asleep,” answers Walter.

“It’s almost three fuckin’ thirty in the goddamn morning! I don’t have time for this.”

“What time did you tell him to be here?” I ask.

“Four a.m. What the fuck are you doing here on time anyway, boy? You sick or something?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Couldn’t sleep! What do ya think, Walt?”

Frankie starts circling his lighter in an upside-down fist over an imaginary bong and adds, “Is that code for I got drunk and stoned all night, and decided to come to work ‘cause if I went to sleep I’d never get up? What do ya think, boys?”

Walter clears his throat, and says in his deep voice, “He was probably …”

“Where the fuck is this guy, Junior!” Frankie interrupts. All of Frankie’s questions are rhetorical. He has no interest in your response.

He’s getting more anxious now. He starts breathing heavily, snorting and wheezing, and rubbing his hand back and forth atop his crew cut, the other hand holding his baseball cap by the brim. He makes the sounds of a nose cleaned out by coke, and the huffing from lungs coated with Marlboro Menthol.

Your first day on the job—Walter explained—if you wanted any sort of life while being a Bread Man, you’d carry an eight ball on you at all times. “You’ll need it if you ever want to see your friends again,” he had said.

Walter has been a Bread Man for twenty-one years. He has no friends left.

Chapter 2

We moved to another part of Northeast Ohio right before I entered the third grade. No more rummaging through the bike and car graveyard in back of my best friend Tommy’s house in Brunswick, fishing for spare parts to build go-karts, a new bike to crash, or to get a moped running while Tommy's father was off either working or hunting with his coon dogs.

Ohio is a strange place. There is, of course, Cleveland—the core—and then there are the suburbs; but the periphery, the rural areas, are more deep south than mid-west. And Brunswick was a dichotomy of both the suburbs and the rural areas of Ohio. We no longer lived in the rural part of Brunswick, rather right along the border of the suburbs. I was too young for it to be a culture shock. I was eight or nine in my memory. It was sometime in the 80s, right after that teacher died on the space shuttle that blew soon after lift-off.

I remember because my brother—a fifth grader—was sent home for saying, "People die every day. Why should we care just ‘cause it's on TV?”

According to his home room teacher, he was "void of sympathy and emotion, and should go home and think about what he had said."

Obviously, she had never frisked a man.

I had an awful time adjusting, suffering panic attacks constantly, though I and no one else seemed to know that is what was happening to me at the time. Three months into school, they assigned me a friend. They called it "the buddy system".

My teacher sent me into the hall, and when she came to get me, she said I’d be sitting at a new desk, next to my new friend, Jeff Idle.

Poor bastard must have raised his hand when she asked for a volunteer. It’s a task no adult would accept. These things require the bravery of innocence.

I instantly took to following him everywhere he went. I followed him out of the classroom, into the bathroom, back into the hall, outside school, all over the playground, and so on. The crying spells and panic attacks stopped, and I felt safe.

I remember him looking over his shoulder at me, blue eyes widening. At first, he was reticent, perhaps regretting his decision, but soon we became best of friends, which led to more friends.

We moved again five years later—my freshman year of high school—this time two states away to Illinois.