Gold Crust

I wanted him dead. Period. No need to sugarcoat it or dance around it.

I was born in Los Angeles. Grew up there. My father used to drive down Sunset when the sun was going down. One hand on the wheel. The other tapping the rhythm on the door like he was playing a tune nobody else could hear. I was in the back seat thinking the world was this. Everywhere. Forever.

I wasn't stupid. Even at eight I could see where the seams were. To the east people were dying of exhaustion. To the west money stood up straight and told itself it was virtue. Between the two there was nothing. Eyes that dropped. Windows that went up. We all pretended we lived in the same place. Nobody believed it. Nobody said it.

Now that shape doesn't exist anymore. Things that really die die slowly. It starts with a smell. You tell yourself it's nothing. Then you see a blue tent on the corner of a street where you used to buy tacos at three in the morning when you were sixteen. One tent. Then ten. Then fifty. Then bodies lying in broad daylight on the sidewalk where kids used to wait for the school bus and the kids step over the bodies and everyone calls it living.

The city stinks. You have to start there. Hot piss on scorching concrete. Rancid sugar. Sick skin. Human shit on the sidewalk thirty meters from a restaurant where people pay forty dollars for a steak. The images you can still file away. You can tell yourself it's political. It's structural. The smell won't be filed. It comes in through the nose and goes down the throat and stays.

I pay my goddamn taxes. Every month. I get up at four in the morning. I built this bakery from nothing. Fourteen-hour days. Fifty-five-pound bags of flour that saw through your shoulders. I'm asking for one simple thing. That we still have the right to say what's livable is livable and what isn't anymore isn't. But try. Try saying a street is broken. They pull out the compassion. The slow voice. The voice for children and the guilty. And at some point you're the asshole.

So you swallow it. You shut your mouth. And what you swallowed stays there. It turns in your gut like milk gone sour. It ferments. A low acidity that never rises high enough for you to scream but never sinks low enough for you to forget.

The shop is called Gold Crust. It's on Virgil Avenue. Four hundred square feet. A wooden counter we sanded ourselves. We sell bread. Croissants. Donuts. Nothing spectacular. But it's the only thing in my life that looks like a place where you're supposed to be.

Danny found the name. Gold Crust. He was talking about bread. But he wasn't only talking about bread. How the golden crust is just a crust. About us. About what we were to each other when nobody was looking. Danny always found a way to fit the whole world into something that fit in your hand.

In the morning before I open there's a moment. Just one. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe less. The oven's been hot for an hour already and the heat has filled the room. Slow. Steady. Until you're in it up to your neck.

The smells come in layers. Always in the same order. First the yeast. Something sharp. Like something alive pushing up in the dark. Then the butter. Butter melting into the dough and changing everything. Turning flour and water into something someone would want to put in their mouth. Then the sugar. Sugar starting to brown at the edges and releasing that warm dark smell that grabs your throat and tells you you're exactly where you need to be. Then the coffee. The coffee I started first, waiting in the pot while the day falls into place.

Flour floats in the shafts of light coming through the window and for a second it looks like snow. Like something falling in slow motion in a place where nothing ever falls in slow motion.

It's an order. The only order I know that doesn't lie. That remakes itself every morning exactly the same. That asks nothing more than for you to be there and go through the motions. The kind of religion that doesn't ask you to believe. Just to get up.

If I've done one thing right in my life. One thing. It's helping this place exist.

I met Danny in a kitchen on Alvarado. A Mexican joint. He had flour on his forearms. Sugar in his hair. He looked at me. One second too long. The kind that lasts just long enough for something to decide in your body before your head has time to weigh in. My body said yes.

We fucked that same night. On a mattress laid on the bare floor. It wasn't delicate. The clean violence. The kind after which there's nothing left to say. Three months later he was leaving a toothbrush at my place. A year later we were signing the lease on the bakery.

He can be tender to the point of absurdity. With an injured dog he kneels down and talks to it like a child. With me when I pretend to be asleep he puts his hand on my back and waits. Tender yes. Soft never. Danny knew the difference. That's why I love him.

His donuts shouldn't be called donuts. The word fits them too small. Brioche dough, long fermentation, fried in oil he changes more often than he should economically, filled with a crème brûlée made from scraped vanilla, its mouth sealed shut like a man busy repairing an old wrong. When you bite in there's first the light resistance of the sugared crust, then the warmth, then the cream that gives way all at once and runs down your fingers, your chin. For three seconds the world stops existing. People close their eyes. Accountants, night nurses, a cop once, an old woman with fingers swollen from arthritis. They close their eyes like they're in church.

Now Ben.

Ben set up in front of our place on a Tuesday. Or a Thursday. One more guy on a Los Angeles sidewalk. As if the city manufactured them at night and deposited them at dawn in front of the shops of people who paid their goddamn taxes.

Khaki military jacket. Gray tee shirt that used to be white. Lukewarm can of Steel Reserve. His shoes didn't match. The left one still had laces. The right one held on by itself. Out of stubbornness. And that smell. Wet wool. Alcohol. Skin that's spent too much time in the sun and too many nights on concrete.

He looked up at me. Something almost joyful. Like he'd been waiting for me. The guy was available. To the world. To me. To this whole mess. And I wasn't available to anything at all at four thirty in the morning. The joy. His goddamn joy.

— Smells good here, he said.

After a week he had a blanket, a plastic bag, two books with no covers, three crushed cans he arranged in a line like he was building something out of scraps. The customers started noticing him. A woman hesitated at the door. A guy let out you should call someone. Danny said let it go.

Danny gave him coffee and a croissant. And Ben took. With both hands. Dirty fingers. Like a guy holding a bird fallen from the nest. Danny's no saint. It was a reflex. You feed what's there. It wasn't morality. It was just how he is.

The tent showed up on a Friday. A small gray and orange dome pitched against the wall between the door and the window. It wasn't just a presence anymore. It was an annexation.

One morning I arrived and he was standing. In front of the window. His nose four inches from the glass. Motionless.

He was looking at the croissants. The ones Danny had lined up the night before behind the glass for the next day. Four rows. Nicely golden. Nicely even.

— My mom used to make ones like these when I was a kid.

I didn't answer. I opened my mouth and closed it and put the key in the lock and turned it. A mother. A kitchen. Butter. That's all. And that's exactly what wrecks you.

September: down fifteen percent. October: down twenty-two. November: down thirty. I wrote them in the spiral notebook under the counter. A clientele is like trust. And trust when it leaves doesn't warn you. It thins out. And one morning you look right through it.

One evening Danny said: he used to be a math professor. At a university. A real position. An office. Students who called him professor. It changed nothing. No. That's not true. It changed something. Just not in the direction Danny hoped. It put me in a rage. I drew no compassion from it.

One morning he was standing in front of the window. Standing like a vertical defeat. Eyes open and absent. The fentanyl. And that smile. Especially then. He was standing in front of my name in gold letters and people were crossing the street before they reached us. That day we made two sales. Two. In eighteen hours.

In bed Danny said: we sell. I said no. He said we can't make the loan payments anymore. I said I know. So what then. We stay. What for, Jake. It took me a while.

— Because if I leave here I don't exist anymore.

One morning Ben was dancing. An old pair of headphones with the foam disintegrating. The cord plugged into nothing. He was dancing in front of my window as if the world had never taken the music from him. On the other side of the glass there were four hundred square feet of food that wouldn't sell.

A regular came in. Blue shirt, black briefcase, the same guy for a year and a half. He paid. He pushed the door open. He saw Ben dancing. He pulled out some coins. Ben stopped.

— You just dropped ten bucks on a goddamn donut, and that's what you give me?

The customer turned toward me. His look wasn't angry. It was worse. He was disappointed. As if Ben were part of the service. He never came back.

Danny made a coffee. He went outside. He held it out to Ben. Ben took it with one hand. Then he opened his fingers. The cup fell. The coffee splashed Danny's apron. Danny didn't move. Ben had already put his headphones back on.

Danny came inside. He put his hands in the sink. He untied his apron. He folded it in four and set it on the counter. He didn't look at it a second time.

That night we ate cinnamon rolls. Three each. The ones nobody had bought. Set right on the kitchen counter, no plate. We ate standing now, always, like men installed temporarily in their own lives. The sugar stuck to our fingers. The cinnamon had lost its spark. It left a drier taste, almost ashen.

I wasn't looking at Danny. Looking at Danny had become hard.

The oven clock was in front of me. I watched the numbers change.

Eleven minutes without a word.

— My grandmother is a hundred years old, he said.

I looked up.

— A hundred. She's been smoking for seventy years. She drinks her glass of red every night. She takes enough pills to fill a laundry basket. Heart, bones, blood pressure, sleep. Pills to compensate for the pills.

He was smiling.

— When she turned ninety we started betting. Ten bucks she won't make it past Christmas. Ten bucks she won't make it past Easter. Nobody ever won a cent.

He took a piece of roll, chewed it calmly.

— So one night I did something. I was twenty-two. I had her sign a life insurance policy. She didn't know what she was signing. It was after her pills. The time of the evening when everything starts to float a little in her head. You could've handed her the Constitution and she would've signed it just the same. That was ten years ago. She's still here. Her husband died. Her children died. Her friends died. Everyone's dead except her. And we still joke that she refuses to let go of our money.

I laughed. Danny too.

Danny's laugh went out. He looked down at his hands sticky with sugar and cinnamon. Then he looked at me.

— What if we did the same thing with Ben?

I said nothing.

— A life insurance policy. We get him to sign when he's drunk enough not to read. We wait. Then we pay off the loan. We leave. You and me. We start over somewhere else.

He wasn't hesitating. The plan wasn't being born before my eyes. It was coming out of a place where it had been kept warm.

— We take him out drinking. We buy him everything. When he can't stand anymore we put antifreeze in the vodka. It's sweet. No smell. We leave him outside the city. The cold does the work. Nobody will ask questions. A guy like Ben nobody will ask questions.

The next day, we went and bought a life insurance policy for a man we intended to kill. Danny lied and the agent believed Danny because Danny lies the way he makes bread. Well. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The loan plus six months of cash flow plus two plane tickets. Danny had done the math. The math Ben had stopped doing.

We waited nine months. The time it takes to make a human being. We were making the opposite. We kept making bread. We bought him beers. We talked to him. We were his best friends. His only friends. One night we invited him to the house.

— How long have you two been together, Ben said.

— Five years.

— I was married three years. To a woman named Sarah. Literature professor. We used to argue about Shakespeare. She said Hamlet was depressed. I said he was a mathematician. That he calculated too much.

He drank.

— She was right. But I liked being wrong with her.

Danny prepared the beer. Ben drank it from the bottle. Then his voice changed. Not all at once. Like a faucet being turned off slowly. First the sentences. Then the words. Then the eyes. His head tilted. Gently. Like a flower wilting in slow motion.

Danny took out the insurance papers. He set them in front of Ben.

— Ben! A raffle. You sign and you get a chance to win a trip to the Caribbean.

— I've never seen the Caribbean Sea. Sarah wanted to go.

— It's free.

— I've never won a thing in my life.

— Has to start somewhere.

Ben signed. A scrawl. The signature came out of him like the last thing he had left to give.

— The Caribbean, he said again. Thanks, guys.

He laid his head on the table and went out. We took him under each arm. Ben's body was warm. We carried him to bed.

The ninth month came. We left on a Saturday night. Ben had put on a plaid shirt. He'd combed his hair with his fingers. He was watching the city through the window and the lights slid across his face and the fog of his breath made a circle that appeared and disappeared. He was singing Hotel California.

— Fuck, guys, this is the best night of my life.

At the first bar he ordered a vodka and drank it in one go. At the second he was talking to everyone. At the third there was salsa. A live band. Ben heard the music and his body changed. His shoulders opened. He danced. An old Mexican guy yelled dale. A girl smiled at him. A guy slapped him on the back. He had three hours left to live.

In the car Ben was still singing. Danny took out the vodka. I took out the antifreeze. I poured a little in the bottom. Danny took the bottle. And he tipped it. The whole bottle. A liter. The thick green liquid poured into the cup. He added a splash of vodka on top.

— Here. A special cocktail.

— Fuck, it smells like candy.

He drank. All of it. In one go.

Ben fell asleep. We took the 5 north. Los Angeles shrank in the rearview mirror. The lights grew farther apart. Then there were no more lights. Just the headlights and the road and the dark. And the sound of Ben breathing behind us.

We stopped on a dirt road. Danny took off the jacket. The shoes. The plaid shirt. Ben's skin in the headlights was gray. Danny started the car. Ben's body kept shrinking in the red light of the taillights. Then there was no more body.

The next morning I turned the corner of Virgil Avenue at four thirty.

Ben was there.

Sitting against the wall. His military jacket on his back. His mismatched shoes. His can in his hand. A liter of antifreeze. Twenty-seven degrees. Half-naked on a dirt road.

He saw me. He stood up. He opened his arms.

— Guys. Hell of a night. The best of my life.

Danny was behind the counter. White.

— How.

— I don't know.

— A liter, Jake. A liter.

— I know.

— A LITER.

— Don't yell he'll hear you.

Danny looked at the wall. Behind the wall there was Ben. Six feet away. Humming Hotel California.

— The guy's a goddamn nuclear cockroach. We could make him drink bleach and he'd come back the next day saying it cleared his throat.

Silence. The oven was heating. The bread was rising. The smell of butter filled the room. And outside Ben who should have been dead was waiting for his coffee and his croissant.