Donut

"Morning Mal," someone would say over the door chime. They would ask for the classics: old-fashioned, cruller, cake, glazed, long john, apple fritter, jelly-filled.

By the time I met him, Mal was in his mid-forties, trim and fit but not a gym rat, with greying light brown hair. His long nose anchored a pair of intense blue-grey eyes, and rather than a butt-cut superhero jaw, he had a long face with a gentle taper from a high forehead. I always wondered what his story was. I had plenty of time to do it, having retired young from a career that I could care less about in public health care.

I got up before dawn and left the house. My kids were grown and my wife was not interested. I would go to Donut Panic and let Mal set me up with his world-class coffee and a pile of donut holes. He mixed medium and light roast with a touch of espresso, making the best diner-style coffee you can imagine. You could sit on one of the little tables with fiberglass benches and sip from a real ceramic mug for hours, reading the paper or surfing the internet.

Fred Anderson gave me the backstory on Mal:

Dieter,

You would not believe the shit we are in, but I can't tell you about any of it anyway 'cause the Corps will have my ass. Say "high" to my ex-wife and her new beau. I hear he is hung like a horse and has lots of money, so my bet is he has a tiny dong and lives in a trailer smoking weed and playing video games all day. Anyway, you asked about Mal, so here's the skinny.

He came to town one Sunday in a little camper thing on the back of a Toyota truck. There was room for a bed, a toilet, a sink, and maybe a place to put your feet. He parked it behind Burger Heaven and owned the place within a few months with a suitcase of Kruggerands, if you believe the rumors. I knew of him back when I was stationed outside Abilene. It's a small town when you only move among the people who are going somewhere.

You asked about his first wife, and the long and the short of it is that Dory is an idiot. I mean that literally, like a moron or imbecile or something. She seemed nice but not kind, and sort of insane, but I think that was because she was just stupid. Her brain could not process basic things and came up with these tangential hallucinations instead. It felt like she was missing some of the parts that make up a full human being and that meant she could not think about things more complex than fashion, sports, restaurants, and shopping.

Mal fell for her hard because he was on the rebound from a relationship with a cruel woman who was also missing a piece inside. Dory was just there and was nice to him, and he made it his mission to fall in love with her. He projected his own intellect onto her. He was always sure she was thinking about something deep or mysterious, but really, it was just brain fuzz and nerve static. She was a personality formed of affectations wrapped around a void.

One fall Saturday she left him when a better offer came along. It was her personal trainer and he had deep brown eyes and a donkey dick. He was going to take her to California and make her a star. She was a hot little redhead with bright green eyes, Irish I think, which pissed off his blue-blood parents to no end. But then she was gone and he was sad then happy then sad and finally just left Abilene to come to Tyler.

Anyway pardner I found myself in a bit of trouble over here but I have a vacation coming, two weeks in Germany, and I'm going to drink all the Lowenbrau in Munich. Enjoy the small-town life for me.

Fred

Mal was a mystery without trying to be one. He simply does not talk about himself or his thoughts. His shop looks straight out of the 1950s but he approaches dough like his coffee with a mixture of science and art. The shop is just there, like running water or gravity, and it happens to be the best donut shop in the region and the most accommodating place to drink your morning coffee and be alone with your thoughts. I have no idea where he lives or if he even watches television.

I was nearly to the door one morning when I heard a little cough and turned around to see this bottle blonde, nearly my height with an athletic frame and salon nails. I started looking for escape routes but none presented themselves. "I'm looking for Malcolm Godwinson, is this his shop?" she said.

A furtive shadow darted back into the kitchen on the periphery of my vision, so I said, "I think some old Vietnamese lady owns this thing. His shop's across town, let me take you there." She watches too much television, so she fell for that old trick.

I drove her to Starbucks. On the way she told me her story. She grew up poor on the South Side of Chicago, was raped in college, then ran into Mal when he came back from Afghanistan. His parents were not into his reckless self-endangerment, they said, and he had come back to find that the girlfriend he thought was waiting for him was in fact carrying on with the guy he thought would be his best man. They waited until he was settled to tell him and he found smug looks of pity chased him everywhere in town so he decamped from Tyler to Brenham.

So it was natural for him to hit the road and she just hopped in the truck along with him. Mal went to B-school at night while punching computer code in the day, and he just neglected her, so she had a little dalliance, as she put it. She told him she loved him and promised never to do it again, but she was perplexed when she came home to an empty house. The dumb sumbitch up and left her, she railed, and he was low-class enough to mail her divorce papers from a truck stop in Fargo.

"Like he just didn't love me at

all

," she said. I made sympathetic noises, then told her I was late for my transfusion of AIDS drugs. Her face crinkled into an expression of horror, she stammered some excuses, and fled without even finishing her double bullshit latte.

It may have been a season or two after that, but I found myself in the town's best vintage shop Oh Tempore! looking for a few old recordings from the sixties pre-punk explosion. I liked the old garage rock, it had a good energy. Macy Sunderberg got a good monolog going for Harlie Marceau:

"He tried so hard, she said. He married this girl with the light of the sun in her eyes, and she was going to change the world. Oh,

boy

. She never found a sad case she would pass on by, so she was always out saving the whales, housing the homeless, tending to the sick, and bringing home stray cats, you name it. He was charmed by it at first, thought he finally found someone with love in her heart, but over the years he figured out that maybe that was so but

he

was not in her heart. She told him one day the world was a cruel place and she could not imagine bringing children into it. On the surface, they was good, y'know, all cuddly and happy, but it was an inch deep, he said later. She told him her parents had ruined her by never having an ounce of faith in her as a child and favoring her sister. She saw family as like having a car, something you did because you couldn't

not

do it. He overheard her one day telling her sister she wanted kids, just not

his

kids. I think he saw in the moment that there was something missing inside of her, and all that pity for others was just her self-pity taking on a life of its own. When he heard her say that, he was up on the roof to fix the antenna, but he just stopped breathing and fell straight into the bushes. He lay there under the branches until she left the next day, then got in his car all bloody and dirty with nothing but a jug of apple juice and drove straight to Lubbock."

When you are retired, you have nothing but time, and you better fill it or you start thinking how each day takes you closer to the grave. The big dirt nap, the nonexistence, or maybe there is a heaven, but I would not bet on that. I go to the library a lot, and one day I went into the back and dug out the microfiche for the

Tyler Herald

, looking up his name in the index book to find an article:

Godwinson Goes To Washington

by Emily Farrell Harris

Wednesday, April 5: The iconoclastic proprietor of Henderson Hardware who made a name for himself by lowering profit margins in a recession, Malcolm Godwinson is no stranger to controvery. Last Monday he proved this when he took a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing that the framers of the Constitution never intended for property taxes to exist because they harmed the working middle class.

While his suit was not successful, Godwinson -- educated in the law through a correspondence course -- made a compelling case before the nine justices, raising what David Souter called "a compelling argument for a Constitutional basis to tax reform" in his dissent to the majority. Godwinson detailed how in Tyler, many homes have been seized by the city for non-payment of property taxes that often constitute a "second loan" of two to three percent of the property value per year.

Returning on a private jet loaned by local businessman Harlon Elgin, Godwinson waved to supporters and said, "This is not over. They are going to take your homes because they cannot get their spending under control, and this is both unconstitutional and immoral." Cheers filled the hangar where the homecoming event occurred with loquat punch and the famous pear-apple-pecan spicy pies from Maisie's Truck Stop on I-20.

Despite the many notable faces in the crowd, the event ended on a sad note when Godwinson was served with divorce papers by his wife Daisy, who alleged that his betrayal of the poor by taking tax money from social programs was further proof of his alcoholism, abuse, and molestation of his children. In a state of shock, Godwinson was led from the gala by state deputies who kept him in jail overnight until a guardian angel could provide bail the following day.

It looked like after that he turned tail and went to Colorado, where he wrote an award-winning computer program that extended your desktop onto your phone, then created a thriving local business that recycled junk metal into industrial-strength raw materials. I called my brother Jack who lives out Denver way and he emailed me a scan of the divorce filing, which cited irreconcilable differences. His new wife Suhani gave it to him with both barrels:

Petitioner alleges that MALCOLM has demonstrated a rejection of her religious faith, which she acquired after a car accident left her wheelchair-bound two years ago. In her disabled state, she turned to the Church of Eternal Light for guidance, and found her newfound commitment to poverty and humility incompatible with his desire to, as she puts it, 'save the world through science and capitalism.' Petitioner asks for a 75-25% division of assets to subsidize her for loss of companionship and support in her quest, as well as to provide her with a minimal lifestyle as a disabled person. Petitioner further argues that since MALCOLM has left without notice and is living in Marble Falls that any items from the marriage in her possession be granted to her as compensation.

That night, I finished off the whole six-pack of Karbach Hoppadillo, something that normally takes me a week because something in the workshop distracts me. To keep from waking up the wife, I finished the third garage bay with sheetrock and ran in wiring from the junction box. I have a little bathroom, a sofa to sleep on, and all my gadgets and toys, which is good because I spent most of the nights there so I can keep my own schedule. In fact I have not slept in the house since last Fourth of July.

So there I was, a week later, hanging out in Donut Panic as the sun first peeked through the clouds, talking to Fred Anderson who was back from his tour of duty with a new wife, Lene, who he met in Austria while he was a logistics engineer for the NATO readiness force. He said he had not seen his sister Charlotte since he re-upped seven years ago, but he knew just after that her bum of a husband had gotten a promotion and traded up to an international jet-set wife, so he was worried for her.

"I seen some shit, buddy-boy," he told me. "This species is in deep trouble. The best aerospace engineers in the Corps think the sun is expanding faster than the scientists thought and we have only a couple million years to get off this rock before it goes up like an orphanage in a napalm strike. We got to find some faster-than-light travel or we are going to be proof of Fermi's Paradox, that like people most intelligent species self-destruct before they reach maturity."

Rob Turrell and John Conrad were there with us, each with an old-fashioned. The sour cream is what makes them so good. Turrell had just escaped his first marriage and was on his way to making his HVAC firm the quality choice for the old guard in town, and Conrad had finally launched his own CPA business after ten years of building back the money he lost when his wife took off for Detroit with her lover Tiguan and all of his credit cards, too bad he was on an oil platform for two weeks at the time. When he got back he was broke, and then the divorce settlement took the rest and then some, but he clawed his way back to the top.

"Y'ask me, humanity is stew of randomness: bitterness, self-pity, neurosis, fear, pretense, resentment, and scapegoating," said Conrad. "The more days go by the more I see people trying to do things they should know will never work out, then when they get caught, they just blame someone else. It's narcissism, through to the bone, and it spreads because no one will call it out for what it is and tell them that our culture says this kind of behavior just is not acceptable."

"True 'nuff," opined Turrell. "We get new guys on the crew, I can tell right away if they are going to sink or swim. The ones who have self-confidence can accept when they are wrong and fix it, but the shifty ones are always blaming the tools, the weather, Jesus, aliens, who knows. They don't last long. I think humanity is heading toward some kind of point of judgment on this Earth where we either decide to get our shit together or go back to being monkeys."

I had been thinking about self-pity earlier that day. It is like a magic credit card. You play the victim and everyone backs off because they do not want to appear to be the aggressor. The offended rule the world. But someone should be the aggressor, and call out that bad behavior, or we would all end up like Mal, alone and silent. My wife said she wanted a separation because I did not respect her. I think she is like the donuts, something missing in the center.

Just then the door chimed and in walked Charlotte, but she did not even see Fred. Her eyes were on Mal. He dropped something and was at her side in an instant, holding her. I would not say they were in love, just very good friends, but what do I know, because she had three kids with her and they all had his eyes. Fred shrugged and smiled. Maybe he finally found one as good as his coffee. He surely has paid his dues. I thought I should have another old-fashioned.