In 1985 I had just finished my first year of college in Pennsylvania and needed a job for the summer. For some reason, jobs weren't all that plentiful, but when I'd been looking the summer before, the manager at Dunkin' Donuts had promised me one when I came back the following year. My father really didn't want me to take the job. Dunkin' Donuts in Woodbury, New Jersey was literally on "the other side of the tracks." Actually, it was right on the other side, but it was on the edge of what we called the "black section" of town and not-so-pretty section. We didn't go to Dunkin' Donuts to sit and drink coffee, we only went there to pick up a dozen to go because it really wasn't the classiest of establishments. The manager himself sat on one of the stools in an old white T-shirt with cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve; not the picture of a respectable businessman. Usually he was surrounded by a dodgy crowd of people from all walks of life, not usually from our own. My father confessed that he sometimes was worried about getting shot in the back if he stood with his back to the glass walls. I don't know that he had made any enemies quite that intense, but needless to say, the place made him nervous.
But this didn't keep us from stopping in and picking up a dozen deep-fried, sugary, empty-calorie but oh-so-delicious delicacies to eat with our coffee... at home.
My father groaned audibly when I told him where I was working. He looked more than a little bit alarmed, too, when I told him I was working the 6 p.m to midnight shift.
It was not a high-paying job, mind you, but it was better than nothing at all. I think I made $2.40 an hour, justified by the fact that we got "tips"-- although the regulars left just dimes and nickels for our tips. I wasn't going to pay off my college tuition with that paycheck. And yet the experience I gained was priceless.
The crowd that was there in the evening was mostly the same, regular crowd. Think "Cheers" with characters in white T-shirts, dirty jeans, and bloodshot eyes. There was Jim, a truck driver who drove locally, apparently, because he was always there at the end of the day. He was always flirting with me and asking me to run off to Atlantic City with him for the weekend. There was Ralph, an old, dirty-necked guy who wheezed horribly when he laughed, but kept lighting another cigarette off the previous one in between sips of coffee. He was always sitting by the payphone waiting for his "girlfriend" to call. He was always talking about his "old bag" of a wife who "had no idea" about his little "dollface" on the side. There was Pat, a very large man who took up two stools and wore the same shirt everyday. His hair was long and greasy and he talked with a lisp, mostly because of his front crooked teeth, and didn't appear to have an education above the first grade, but when it came to me, he confessed he was "in love." And then there was "Digger"-- no his real name, of course. Digger was a short, red-eyed black man who wore a dirty Ford cap and called me "Sweetie" and "Honey" and thought we were a lot alike because we were both "preacher's kids." No one knew Digger's real name, but once he found out that my "Daddy" was a preacher he said he was gonna tell me his real name.
"Ain't nobody here know my real name," he said, "but I'm-a gonna tell you now," and the others leaned in real close as Digger motioned me forward. "My name is Hezekiah Wiggins after King Hezekiah in the Bible, because my mama was a good Christian woman!"
The others slapped the counter and laughed out loud. "Hezekiah Wiggins! I'll be damned! That's a pretty big name for such a scrawny little guy like you!" exclaimed Ralph.
Digger looked at him very seriously. "My mama was a good Christian woman, she raised me to love Jesus," he said, nodding his head very seriously.
When I first went to work there, my father had gotten me so worked up with fear that I wouldn't go anywhere near the customers at first. I'd take their orders, give them what they wanted, take their money, and then plant myself back at the cash register. Finally, my manager must have gotten complaints.
"You gotta talk to the customers, darlin'," he admonished me. I sighed. Ok.
I was a pretty sheltered preacher's kid. My world was pretty small and clean. Even the church parsonage was located in the rich part of the neighborhood, among the doctors' and lawyers' houses, far on the other side of town. My father started driving me and picking me up, because he feared for my safety. Two of the walls of the store were glass, so at the counter, I was on display for the whole world to see. People driving by could see who was, in fact, hanging out at the local donut shop that was open 24 hours. After 6:00 p.m. it was pretty much the same crowd. The rest of the world did as the Michaels did-- they got their donuts to go.
I nervously drew further away from the cash register and tried to make conversation with the clientele, but it was nerve-wracking. The closer it got to midnight, the weirder the crowd. But those same regulars that I named hung out my whole shift, nursing their one cup and free refills hour after hour. There was one man who wanted to show me his key-chain of a little monkey, and kept coaxing me closer so I could see it better. I didn't want to get too close because the guy was a little scary, but as soon as I got close enough, he pressed the monkey's belly and out popped a penis that was much larger than its owner. I backed off quickly and stayed away from that guy.
"Oh, c'mon honey, get back over here, I wanna show you my monkey!" he said in a fake innocent voice. I pretended to sort the donuts. Donuts were never so organized at that establishment.
The baker on my shift was a short, young woman who looked like she'd done time and fought her way through. She was small, but you didn't mess with her. She'd seen things, and I could only imagine what she'd done. She liked messing with me, too. One night, close to midnight, a couple of older women came in, one very large, and the other had spent way too much time in the sun. Her skin was leathery and dirty. The bigger one had a mass of black curls covering her head and flowing down her back and she talked in a gruff voice. They both ordered coffees and sat at the end of the counter away from everyone. Every once in awhile, another customer would sidle up to one of them, strike up a conversation, and the two of them would leave together and disappear into a van parked at the edge of the parking lot. After awhile, the woman would come back alone, get a refill of her coffee and just sit.
"You know what's going on, don't you?" Lynn the baker asked me one night.
"What do you mean?" I asked innocently.
"You know what those men are doing with those women out there in the van, don't you?" she said, smiling.
"You mean...?"
"Yep, honey, they got quite the business going. The boss knows about it, but he pretends he doesn't, because they bring in more customers," she said, winking, and walking back into the back room.
One night at midnight, my father pulled into the parking lot and flashed his lights to pick me up. All of my new friends turned around on their stools and faced him through the glass. I started to untie my little pink donut-tree apron and gather my stuff to go.
"Is that your Daddy?" Digger asked excitedly.
I smiled. "Yes," I said, and before I knew it, Digger had jumped off of his stool and was out of the store, knocking on my father's car window. I stopped to watch as my father hesitantly and nervously rolled down his window and Hezekiah introduced himself as the local gravedigger in town. He remembered seeing my father presiding over burials in the local graveyard and he just wanted to tell my father what a pleasure it was to meet him.
My father looked back at me through the glass, with a kind of deer-in-the-headlights look, imploring me to come out and save him.
He decided I could drive myself from that night on.
One night, I worked with Pat, a hard-living, trash-talking, bullying kind of woman who got very impatient with me and my pace. She was not an attractive woman, but she flirted shamelessly with the men at the counter and often lifted her skirt and said some pretty crude things, egging them on. She just plain did not like me, and often berated me as a "goody-two-shoes, fancy-pants preacher's girl." As we went through a rush at the counter, she kept yelling at me, pressuring me and getting me all worked up and stressed, until at one point, I rushed to put on more coffee and somehow jammed the filter. When I hurried back to see why the coffee wasn't dripping through, I thoughtlessly pulled out the filter that was full of boiling hot coffee that immediately rushed out over my hands. I let out a piercing scream and within minutes, Jim had jumped and swung his legs over the counter, grabbed my hands and immediately shoved them into the cooler full of ice. The pain was excruciating. He yelled at another of the customers to get on the phone and call the boss, while he kept my hands underneath the ice cubes. I stood there and sobbed, shaken and in pain, while he talked gently to me, soothing me and calling the other woman all kinds of nasty names.
The boss arrived, asking "what the hell happened here??" and so the other woman got into a lot of trouble because all of the regular customers related how she'd been driving me hard all night till I was just a bundle of nerves. She never messed with me again. In fact, she was never scheduled to work the same shift as me again. The boss took me to the emergency room, and by the time we got there, my right hand was covered in ugly large blisters. They gave me some painkillers and wrapped it up in gauze after applying some salve on it. They said I'd have the blisters for awhile, and the first night would be painful. All night it felt like my hand was on fire and I didn't sleep much.
After that night, the guys were particularly tender toward me. When I got off at midnight, they all turned around on their stools to watch me walk to my car, to make sure nothing happened to me. Another night, a small Hispanic man came running into the store late at night and accosted a larger, African-American man. He started screaming at him in Spanish, shoving him off his chair, beating on him until his face was bloody, until the other guy turned on him and started beating back. Lynn the baker ran out of the back room and jumped into between them, screaming and cussing at both of them as they tried to get around her at each other again.
"Call the police!" she yelled at me. I ran back and did just that. The police came quickly and broke up the fight, cuffing the little Hispanic guy after they discovered a very sharp knife and an impressive looking ice pick in his back pocket. After they left, the waitress for the next shift came in stepping over a puddle of blood and asked me,
"You gonna clean that up?" I was horrified. Really? I told her what happened and she shook her head and laughed. "Oh honey, that ain't nothin'. That's regular business around here," she said. I went home a bit shaken, and of course my father wanted me to quit right away. But I only had a couple of weeks left, and I knew the guys at the store would continue to look out for me. I was too old for him to actually forbid me, and so feeling a little rebellious, I went back. And it was true, the guys did look out for me, to make sure nobody "messed" with me.
A couple of weeks later, I worked the Saturday afternoon shift on my last day. The guys from the evening shift all showed up on Saturday afternoon to say goodbye. I noticed Pat had on a new-to-him clean shirt.
"I got this shirt just for you," he said proudly.
Hezekiah was wearing a shabby old tie. Even the prostitutes showed up. At the end of my shift that day, as I was untying my apron, Hezekiah got off of his stool and stood up (he was the same height). He held up his hand, cleared his throat and said,
"I want everybody's attention now. Miss Sue," he said, "we are awfully glad that you come to work here at our shop, and we are going to miss you a whole lot. Now I want you to go back to school and study real hard, and make your daddy proud. You keep on bein' a good Christian girl and don't let anybody make you do anythin' different, ya hear?" He swallowed, and I noticed, his bloodshot eyes were suddenly full of tears.
"I wanted to give you a little somethin', it ain't much, but I took a collection, and we all wanted to give you something to show you how much we like you," he said, and handed me a dirty envelope, smudged with fingerprints, but with my name sloppily written on the outside in what looked like a child's handwriting. Inside was a card signed by all the regulars, and inside the card was a crisp new $10 bill. I laughed self-consciously, but I was deeply touched. Then, one by one, they all lined up and came by and shook my hand over the counter and wished me well. I would've hugged Digger/Hezekiah, but the counter was between us. He sniffled, tears running down out of his blood-red eyes.
"You listen to your Daddy, ok? You be good," he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve and shuffling out the door.
I never saw any of them again. I got busy with my life and school, and a couple of years later when I went back to Woodbury, I noticed they'd closed it down, and by now, I have no doubt, there's something else in its place. I always liked Dunkin' Donuts coffee and donuts, but I admit I have a special place in my heart for it precisely because of the guys at the Woodbury Dunkin' Donuts who opened my eyes just a little that summer of '85 and surprised me with their grace and kindness. The Dunkin' Donuts I go to now are always much cleaner and nicer, much more well-kept, and no one has to wear those god-awful brown and pink uniforms with donut trees all over them. But whenever I get to taste those sugary treats now, I always think of Digger and his eyes full of tears.
