The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (39 page)

The most pressing problem was the truck stop next door, which was the refinery’s main
customer. Dean had long since stopped paying attention to his store, where half the
employees were stealing from him and would have failed a drug test if they’d been
given one. In October 2009, Dean had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which allowed
him to keep his truck stop business—Red Birch of Martinsville, Inc.—open and reorganize
its debt. Flo Jackson’s contract said that she wouldn’t be responsible for managing
the truck stop, but she ended up spending most of the year on Dean’s business—first
trying to save it, then unwinding it. The books were a mess—two entries totaling a
quarter of a million dollars were marked simply “withdrawal by owner.” The truck stop
owed the bank two million dollars, and no buyer would assume that debt. Flo told Dean
that he was running his business like a dreamer. And Dean began to resent her, for
here was the reality principle in the person of a tough, blunt-spoken woman, brought
in by Gary from the outside, telling Dean what he didn’t want to hear. Over time,
he went to the refinery less often. As far as he was concerned, the new regime was
squeezing him out.

One bad thing followed another in the year 2010. Because of red tape, the first half
of the stimulus money took nine months to arrive, and in the meantime the news of
the grant brought Red Birch Energy to the attention of officials in Henry County.
They went after Dean for eighty-five thousand dollars in back taxes owed on the truck
stop between 2007 and 2009. Dean swore it was political, because Red Birch was so
identified with Perriello and Henry County was deep red. The county also cited the
refinery for a grease spill, and the fine kept going up. “The county manager has done
everything he can to get us out of here,” Gary said. He and Dean, being North Carolinians,
would never be accepted in a narrow, closed-up place like Martinsville.

From the highway, the biodiesel refinery and the truck stop appeared to be part of
the same operation, sitting on the same couple of acres carved out of the same red
hillside and separated by just a hundred fifty feet of pavement. In 2008, when the
future looked bright, the arrangement was celebrated as a “closed-loop system.” But
in 2010, financial troubles made it clear that these were different businesses whose
interests were in some ways opposed. The truck stop—Red Birch of Martinsville—was
entirely Dean’s. The refinery—Red Birch Energy—was a partnership that was falling
more and more on Gary’s shoulders. When the refinery became one of the truck stop’s
creditors, Gary had to take out an eighty-thousand-dollar line of credit to keep fuel
in the ground. Dean paid him by relinquishing stock in Red Birch Energy.

On September 16, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Western District of Virginia ordered
Dean’s truck stop business into Chapter 7. There were thirty-six other debtors in
court that day. Red Birch of Martinsville was completely liquidated, and the truck
stop was sold off to a national chain, WilcoHess, which tore down the store’s two-level
front porch, with its balustered wood railings—the old-fashioned country-market appearance
that Dean’s customers had loved when he introduced it back in 1997—and replaced it
with a façade of brutal whitewashed concrete. The gas station stopped pumping biodiesel
and went back to regular number 2 diesel, the imported fuel that had been cut off
by Katrina in 2005, leading Dean to his come-to-Jesus moment. So Red Birch Energy
lost its main customer, and soon the refinery was making biofuel at just 10 percent
of its capacity. The sign outside the plant was still, strictly speaking, true: Red
Birch remained “America’s 1st BioDiesel Truck Stop.” But its claim to fame was gone.
Red Birch no longer grew it, made it, and sold it.

Four days after the bankruptcy order, Dean was indicted by a Henry County grand jury
for failing to turn over almost ten thousand dollars in meals taxes that his business
had collected on behalf of the state.

He had always feared the power of government, almost as much as he had feared poverty.
Government could put you in prison, and prison was one of his nightmares. He didn’t
think he could stand losing his freedom. He often dreamed about it—a feeling of anxiety,
that he had messed up somehow, though not intentionally, and they were coming for
him—and he would wake up from these dreams overwhelmed with relief, thinking: “Thank
God that wasn’t real.” Once, in 2007, around the time he was getting into biodiesel,
Dean had to spend a night in jail. The divorce settlement with his second wife had
required him to send her thirty-three hundred dollars a month for five years (Dean
worked it out to eight hundred dollars for every day of their marriage), but when
his ex remarried he assumed that he was off the hook and stopped paying. It turned
out that Dean still owed the money, and the judge at the Rockingham County Courthouse
in Wentworth ordered him put in shackles. Ryan, who was twelve, was with Dean and
saw his father led away as a prisoner. Dean spent that night in a cell with a dozen
other men, and he never wanted to go back.

Dean didn’t like to talk about these things. If someone asked him a difficult question
about the state of his business affairs, or his personal finances, or his legal troubles,
he would answer, “Ummm…,” a high elusive syllable that floated away into the air,
implying that the thing wasn’t so serious, would be taken care of, was already being
taken care of, and then he would turn the conversation to the wisdom of Napoleon Hill
or the promise of the new green economy. In 2010 it was easier living in his imagination
of the past and the future than on the stretch of Route 220 that was his life, and
so there were many calls that went unreturned, pressing matters ignored, reckonings
deferred.

That was one of the hardest years of Dean Price’s life, and 2011 would be even worse.
Yet he always swore he’d never quit. He never lost faith in his vision. He would not
be like the gold prospector in Colorado that Napoleon Hill described, who stopped
drilling and sold off his machinery when, as things turned out, he was just three
feet short of the mother lode.

JUST BUSINESS: JAY-Z

Everything has to be put in context.

Shawn Corey Carter, born in ’69, Marcy Houses, country of Bed-Stuy, planet of Brooklyn
(New York and the universe came later). Fourth and last child of Gloria Carter, employed
as a clerk; father Adnis Reeves, a preacher’s son. Marcy was a fortress in brick,
twenty-seven buildings, six floors each, four thousand people, living to the left
of him, right of him, on top and bottom of him—parties and stress, a birthday one
day, a shooting the next.

At four Shawn got on a ten-speed bike, put his foot up, and coasted sitting sideways.
The whole block was amazed—“Oh God!” First feeling of fame and he liked it. Fame felt
good.

Mom and Pop had a million records stacked in milk crates: Curtis Mayfield, Staples
Singers, ConFunkShun, the Jackson 5, Rufus, the O’Jays … He loved Michael Jackson
the most, and when Gloria got home from work and put on “Enjoy Yourself,” Shawn sang
and spun around the room, his sisters singing backup. The seventies weren’t bad in
Marcy, kind of an adventure for a kid. Dice games on the concrete, football in fields
strewn with glass, junkies nodding off on benches—kids would dare each other to tip
them over. “We were able to smuggle some of the magic of that dying civilization out
in our music and use it to build a new world,” he later wrote. “We found our fathers
on wax and on the streets and in history.”

Summer of 1978, he came upon a Marcy kid no one ever noticed before in the middle
of a crowd, rhyming, throwing out couplets about anything, about the benches, the
people listening, his own rhymes, how good he was, the best in New York, for half
an hour, and Shawn thought: “That’s some cool shit. I could
do
that.” Home that night he wrote down rhymes in a spiral notebook. It filled up, rhyming
took over his life, in front of the mirror every morning, on the kitchen table while
he banged out a beat past bedtime, driving his sisters crazy—he could
do
that. When an older boy named Jaz-O, the best rapper in Marcy, taped their voices
with a heavy-ass recorder and played them back, Shawn’s sounded different from the
one he heard in his head. “I saw it as an opening, a way to re-create myself and reimagine
my world. After I recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable rush to play it back,
to hear that voice.”

I’m the king of hip-hop

Renewed like Reeboks

Key in the lock

Rhymes so provocative

As long as I live

People in Marcy started calling him Jazzy.

Sixth grade, he tested off the charts—reading like a twelfth grader. School never
challenged him, but he scoured the dictionary for words to use. One day, Miss Louden
had the class take a field trip to her brownstone in Manhattan. The refrigerator door
produced water and ice cubes. That was the first time he knew he was poor. People
in the projects spent half their lives sitting on plastic chairs in dirty government
offices waiting for their name to be called. Kids snapped on each other for every
little sign of poverty, so they talked about getting rich by whatever means, and he
got that hunger, too—no way he was going to sit in class all day. When he eventually
got his hands on enough cheese to buy an off-white Lexus, “I could just feel that
stink and shame of being broke lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad shit
is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.”

That same sixth-grade year, 1980, his pop bounced. Worse than a father he never knew
was a father who was around the first eleven years, teaching his boy how to walk fast
through the hood and remember which bodega sold laundry detergent, whether it was
owned by Puerto Ricans or Arabs, how to observe people in Times Square (what was that
woman’s dress size?), and then disappeared and never came back. The boy never again
wanted to get attached to something and have it taken away, never wanted to feel that
pain again, never let anyone else break his heart. He became guarded and cool, eyes
flat, stopped smiling, harsh laugh: “Hah hah hah.”

Next year, when he was twelve, his big brother stole some of his jewelry. Shawn got
a gun, saw the devil in Eric’s drugged eyes, closed his own, and squeezed. He hit
his brother in the arm and thought his own life was over, but Eric didn’t go to the
cops, even apologized for using when Shawn came to the hospital. Just another shooting
in Marcy and there’d be more, but he never again hit, never got hit. He was lucky.

Crack showed up in 1985, a few years behind rap, and it took over Marcy. Crack immediately
changed everything and was irreversible—brought coke out of bathrooms and hallways
into public view, turned adults into fiends, kids into hustlers, made parents fear
their children. Authority was gone and the projects went crazy. Shawn Carter saw another
opening.

He got in the game at fifteen. He was just following—kids went to college where college
grads were everywhere, kids sold drugs where hustling was everywhere. His friend Hill
lined him up with a local dealer, and they went in for what turned out to be a job
interview. The dealer told them how serious the hustle was, that it required dedication
and integrity. The dealer was later murdered—balls cut off and stuffed in his mouth,
then he was shot in the back of the head. That was how serious the hustle was. It
didn’t stop Shawn. He wanted in.

He was helping his mom with the light bill. He was buying the right gear for himself,
the Ewings, the gold teeth, the girls. He was feeling the adrenaline rush. With a
cousin of Hill’s he got a piece of a dead-end street in Trenton and started taking
New Jersey Transit over on weekends—pretty soon he was living there. He hid his work
and weapons in baggy jeans and puffy coats, construction boots kept his feet warm
on winter nights. He was all business. He put the hurt on the local competition with
lower prices because he got his supply cheaper from the Peruvians in Washington Heights.
The squeeze made him unpopular, and one afternoon there was a face-off in the park,
guns drawn, nobody shot—it was win or go home. Another time, an arrest—his first,
no charges—cost him his stash and he had to work sixty straight hours in Marcy to
get his money back, staying awake eating cookies and writing rhymes on brown paper
bags.

His dream was to be the rich guy in the nice car with the big gun, Scarface—
“Say hello to my little friend!”
The hustle was a paranoid fever, one eye always open, “excited with crime and the
lavish luxuries that just excited my mind,” and he got addicted to the rush just like
the fiends got addicted to what he sold. Kids who put on their orange uniform and
walked past the hustlers on the corner to a job at McDonald’s were suckers trying
to play by the rules. They didn’t have a dream, they had a check, surviving nine to
five, but he wasn’t trying to survive—he was trying to live it to the limit. Better
die enormous on the street than live dormant in a little box called Apartment 5C.
He rarely smoked weed and stayed sober when he drank—being conscious let him focus
on the money. He was always about the money. Second best wasn’t worth the ultimate
price on the street, so he learned to compete and win as if his life depended on it.

The crack game didn’t end the rap game. He would go back to Marcy for a few weeks
at a time and get with Jaz-O to work on rhymes. But his months on the streets took
him further and further away from the notebook, so he learned to memorize longer and
longer rhymes without writing them down, and that became his method. He had one foot
in rap, one foot out. His cousin B-High thought he was wasting his talent hustling
and stopped speaking to him. “These rappers are hoes,” his crew told him. “Some white
person takes all their money.” Secretly, he was afraid he might not make it in music.
And the business looked like a pay cut—especially after EMI offered Jaz-O a record
deal in 1988, flew him to London for a couple of months with Shawn tagging along,
then cut him loose when his first single bombed.