It was a recession, not unlike now, but not as bad. The man lived down the street from my family in Montgomery, Alabama. He owned a sea-green station wagon that looked like a military half-trac. He had been laid off from his job a few weeks earlier. One day he had an idea – donuts.
He bought 100 boxes of regular glazed from a popular donut baker on the Southern Bypass, twelve to a box. He stuffed that station wagon to the roof. His plan was to have several neighborhood boys – of which I was one – sell the donuts around town. He said he would pay us a dime a box. It was my first experience with sales commissions.
Each of us took $5 in change and headed out to sell our donuts door-to-door. It was an education in human nature and biological pain.
The first few houses did not answer, although I knew they were home. An old man tried to get me to give him one donut, saying no one would ever miss it. A woman with a face like a hippo tried to tell me how to sell them. She did not buy any, however. When the teenage guys surrounded me near Fairview Avenue, I was already over selling donuts. They circled, they taunted, they wanted all of the donuts and described in graphic detail what they would do to me if I did not cooperate.
I was scared but they were going to have to pry those donuts from my cold, dead hands ?– an option that seemed likely with every word and dollop of spittle that hit me. The tallest one grabbed the top box and opened it and shoved a donut in his mouth. The others laughed and gathered around, each one taking turns extracting a donut from the box. I had three boxes left. They chewed like cows possessed.
Then the knife came out smoothly, glinting, catching my gaze. The short kid threw it at my feet. It stuck in the ground three inches from my dirty, canvas Chuck Taylors. I thought about the knife sticking in my foot between the laces. On the next throw, it did exactly that.
If you have been stabbed before, you understand the pain. It was my first time. It did not hurt as bad as I thought it should, but it looked odd sticking straight up in my foot like a pearl-handled sail. I felt the inside of my shoe filling with warm crimson and the pain built slowly, oozing blood through the little holes on the side of my Chucks. The guy who threw the knife looked like he wanted it back but my foot looked like it did not want to give it up.
The teenagers cursed at me, threw the empty donut box in my face and ran. I sat the donut boxes in the grass, leaned over and slowly pulled the knife out. It hurt a lot more coming out than going in. I wiped the blade and folded it and slipped it into my pocket. My shoe was ruined. But my limp helped me sell the other three boxes of donuts. Sympathy sales.
By the time I returned to the station wagon, our employer was smoking and sweating and looking around nervously. I gave him the money. He looked at it and shook his head. The entire area around the station wagon smelled like donuts. It was a pungent, manufactured, dough smell hanging like wrong perfume in the Alabama humidity. This attracted dogs, flies and kids. None of them had any money.
We tried to sell more but a couple of hours later he gave up his misbegotten donut dream. He was done. I was almost bled out anyway and squished with every red step. He never noticed the blood.
He had to pay us in donuts since he made about $7 on the whole venture. We rode back home, trailing a sugary sweet aroma of donuts and failure. When I walked in with four boxes and no money, my dad nodded and pinched the bridge of his nose. My mom tried to be positive, saying things like, “?Well, it was a good experience,”? and ? “Look at the bright side, you got four boxes of donuts.”? My dad, however, knew a crummy deal when he saw one and now I did too. My mom’s positive attitude shifted when she saw the wound in my foot. I was not sure if she was upset by my injury or the ruined shoe.
The man eventually got a job and a new car. He told my dad that he could never get the smell of donuts out of that station wagon.
