Nobody told us what happened inside of the building across the street before my mother rented the house in the summer of 1983. Since we moved in over a weekend it was a few days before we found out that the small white building was an industrial bread bakery. As far as we were concerned, that summer we had arrived in paradise.
Our version of paradise was a high ranch three bedroom house on a dirt lot, a few doors down from the elevated train tracks. There was one fewer door between us and the train because the house next door had burned down shortly before we moved in. The presence of a charred windowless shell of a home 15 feet away probably contributed to my single mother being able to afford the place but like I said, it was fine by us. We had spent the last four years living in basements on the edge of poverty and suddenly we had ROOMS.
Then, after the weekend, the bakery came back to life. I don’t know if you’ve ever been three doors down from THOUSANDS of loaves of bread being baked at once but it’s pretty much the best thing ever, or at least it was the best thing my brother, my sister and me had experienced to that point in our life. At nine years old I was the oldest so I led my brother and sister down towards the bakery where we saw the racks of bread cooling outside.
Unless you’ve been poor you can’t understand how amazing it is to see so much food just sitting out in the open. We just stared at it from the curb for a while unsure if it was real. There were people inside but nobody was standing by the racks. After a few minutes someone else approached the building and knocked on the door. They handed the person who answered it some money then they were handed a paper bag which they filled with bread. We had stumbled onto the black market of bread where it was just sold out of a factory back door and taken straight home to eat.
Looking back it doesn’t seem like much but it was one of the most amazing things my siblings and I had ever seen up to that point. We had not only moved into a giant house but there was food just sitting around waiting for someone to come and get it. Between the three of us we had less than a dollar but that was enough to get a small paper bag from the man inside which held a fresh loaf of bread. On later trips we would learn to fill the paper bags and our pockets and eventually to just fill our pockets and run.
One morning my brother and I were on our way back from a bakery run with our pockets full of onion rolls when a car pulled up beside us. We were only about 50 feet from out front door and we were about to get busted for stealing bread…or so we thought. When the driver told us to get in the car we said nothing to one another. When he opened the car door I told my brother, under my breath to not go. He told me under his breath that he knew that. This guy in the car was trying to kidnap us.
He beckoned us towards the car through the open passenger door but we stood our ground. When he said as nicely as possible: “Get in.” My brother and I decided to see what was in it for us.
“Why should we get in?” I asked as I looked towards my house.
Everyone was still asleep inside and couldn’t see what was going on. The driver had situated his car between us and the path to our front door.
The driver reached into his bag and said: “I have a cupcake.” He pulled a single individually wrapped Hostess cupcake out and showed it to us.
My brother had a question: “Do you have a cupcake for each of us?”
Perhaps it was his first day as a kidnapper because he admitted that he only had the one cupcake. My brother and I told him that we would get in the car only if he got us a second cupcake. We told him we’d wait there, he closed the passenger door and drove away.
My brother and I debated waiting for that second cupcake for moment and then thought better of it. We ran home to eat bread and watch from the window to see if our would be kidnapper returned. He never did.
