The Heritage Legacy Trust compliance officer looked through Calvin’s application materials for a third time. He watched her jeweled hands thumbing the vendor contracts, the permits, the recipes, the full-page photos of So Much Bun’s pastries. “Are these gluten-free?” she asked, her first words in half an hour. She’d stopped on a pic of a glistening cherry danish that Calvin knew had gluten in its batter, its filling, its soul.
“No,” Calvin said. He’d considered lying. This was the fifteenth bank he had asked for a measly $35,000 equipment loan. But Heritage was also his personal bank. They knew his middle name and his credit score. And they lorded over the checking account through which he paid for multiple OnlyFans subscriptions. It was probably best to play things straight. Plus, he sensed Isis only asked questions she knew the answer to.
“Shame,” she said. She resumed thumbing.
Calvin turned from the desk and scanned the bank, which was four, perhaps five times larger than his co-owned bakery. Clients trickled in solemnly, their voices hushed, hymnal. Assurances of quality, care, and fairness beamed from laminated signs adhered to slate-colored walls. Fake money trees wound upward, their leaves fountaining out. Tellers dispensed greetings and instructions from behind plexiglass that kissed the ceiling. A vigorous HVAC system heaved chilled air like a dozing walrus.
Calvin’s attention returned to Isis’ desk. “Are you allergic to gluten?” he asked.
She shook her head without looking up. After a spell, she spoke. “How has your bakery gone this long without financing?”
Calvin attempted an answer. The information compiled before her was more than pecuniary data. It marked a renaissance, a passage from idiocy to enlightenment, a ripening of the human spirit and the graceful harvesting of its delicate fruits.
“What?” Isis said.
In the beginning, Calvin clarified, he and his co-baker Malone were dipshits.
The pair thought they had the discipline needed to sustain a restaurant, founding So Much Bun after stints in kitchens felled by fires, health inspections, tax audits, sticky fingers, and destructive music video shoots. But once they secured 473 cramped square feet of a depressed Brookland shopping plaza, vague maxims supplanted their common sense.
If it’s heat, they’ll sweat it.
The bread don’t care who bakes it.
Black people undefeated.
God’s plan.
Fueled by Malone’s monthly psilocybin trips, that fuck-around-and-find-out mindset yielded a chain of ill-conceived hybrid confections that Calvin approved despite strong suspicions that they could never bake the goods at scale. (Of course, they had a maxim for his doubt.)
For a year, they integrated Malone’s conjurings into the workflow of buns, rolls, baguettes, and brioche.
In their defense, he told Isis, the goods were great. The struffin, a demented strudel filled with buttery muffin guts, demanded hours of intimate construction, but each morsel was an infinitude of delight. Customers took bites and froze in place, their brains halting all nonessential operations to process the endorphins. The pretzant, a delicate pretzel with a croissant’s latticework of downy layers, took a lifetime to fold, but the mouthfeel was sexual. So Much Bun bled money and locally sourced flour as they footed these ventures, but surely there was a cronut somewhere in this mushroom patch.
There wasn’t. Calvin and Malone tumbled into anthills of debt.
The turning point was the scagel, a hybrid scone and bagel that was essentially just a donut. Unable to overlook the stupidity of the pitch, Calvin finally canceled all further research and development. Malone didn’t protest. In fact, Malone said, he was surprised the moment hadn’t come sooner given Calvin’s love of spreadsheets.
Calvin winked at Isis, who continued to rifle through the application. Her eyes and hands were absorbed in her task, but she didn’t tell him to stop talking.
After an austere half-year, Calvin continued, the production and sale of mundane breads and pastries reached profitable levels. Three years later, they were no Bread Furst, but they were sure they were built to last.
That technically answered her question, but Calvin pressed on. After fourteen denials from all manner of banks—credit unions, commercial, retail—he understood this was the endgame. Faith flooded back into him as Isis tossed nods, hums, and brow furrows into the thrum of his storytelling. He began to insert jokes, pregnant pauses, intimate observations about the personalities of different sourdough starters. He impersonated ornery regulars and reproduced Malone’s Maryland drawl. Eventually, Isis looked him in the eye. She smiled. Laughed.
The laughter was unconvincing. Calvin examined the woman’s replies as he intensified his repartee, noticing his jabber was met with an institutional nonspeak that, while verbal and even friendly, dodged. “Very promising,” she said. “Impressive.” “That’s so thoughtful.” He listened closely to the shadowtongue as he continued to chronicle the bakery’s reversal of fortune, parsing the message encoded in her courtesy: The bank’s rejection was final. Though Calvin was a valued customer, the institution declined to finance the acquisition of state-of-the-art ovens and mixers.
“There is so much potential here, but I unfortunately cannot approve this loan,” Isis concluded.
The snub fortified Calvin’s defiance. He refused to uncross his legs, stuff his paperwork into his bag, and rise from his sunken seat empty-handed. It cost him cash money to defer kneading and folding and invoice-chasing to be rebuffed in this odorless husk of a business, which did not even provide complementary peppermints.
Calvin inhaled then expelled his breath like a bitter birthday wish, his own form of nonspeak. He crossed his arms and demanded an audience with management. Isis nodded and rose from her seat.
Calvin’s eyes followed her to a remote corner where she huddled with another woman. Calvin fanned himself with the printed spreadsheets he had delicately filled like eclairs, their cells bacterial colonies of accounts payable, debts, assets, warranties, insurance payments. The biome proved the loan he sought was riskless. He frowned disapprovingly in the direction of the conference. Had Isis not understood the story? The moral was obvious, he thought: Calvin and Malone had learned from their mistakes, revised their maxims. It turned out the bread did care who baked it.
Isis returned and introduced the branch manager, who dipped into the seat next to Calvin like a fly into soup. The company’s dismissive litanies became a harmony as the pair elaborated on the decision. Compliance, regulations, best practices, they crooned, elegant bureaucratese flowing from their throats. Calvin struggled to keep up. His understanding of how banks worked splintered further. What the hell did the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have to do with baking? Dodd-Frank? Glass-Steagall? Weren’t those the dudes who invented Superman? The tune grew densely technical and expository. Calvin’s tapping feet lost track of the meter; he sensed the time signature slipping into one of those strange fractions that perplexed him in middle school band class.
Calvin held a paper up like a penalty card and told the bankers to get down to brass tacks, a phrase he did not understand but knew was appropriate. So Much Bun had enough cash on hand to buy the goddamn appliances outright. Better yet, he and Malone knew some hustlers that could cop anything for the right price, but they wanted to do things by the book. Not only had they taken an online class for small business owners that laid out the necessity of credit, but the incarcerated owners of the tax-dodging hot wing spot that previously owned their space had visited Malone during a bad trip. Their message: a black business had to abide the law twice as hard.
“You ever tried to double abidance?” Calvin asked.
They did not respond.
“Well, we trying.”
The bank representatives, now flanked by a squat security guard, encouraged Calvin to research some grants, keep following his dream, and seek out investors. More importantly, they advised, he should lower his voice.
Calvin stood, the pacifying effects of his skinny tie and big and tall suit waning as he extended to his height of 75 inches. His voice felt firm and ancestral as he reminded them that they were in a historically black city, that they were all black. He hurled a pointed finger at other patrons and workers, also black. Didn’t he pay taxes like the rest of these motherfuckers? Didn’t he curse the bottomless potholes and rats and seasonal floods of tourists and schoolchildren just like them? “For fuck’s sake,” he said, gesturing at the DC statehood sticker on Isis’ desk. She should be ashamed to put him through this rigmarole, he said. Weren’t something like ninety percent of the residents of this city registered Democrats?
As he fired off census data and scolds, Calvin initially omitted the fact that he was born and raised in Charlotte. When he first moved to the District, Hoyas, who were overrepresented in restaurant management, constantly upbraided him for their team’s 1982 championship loss to the Tar Heels. He had grown tired of explaining the university was named after a state that was full of people with no connection to the school, him among them. But he would live in shame no longer, he decided as he admitted his hometown into the record. He shouldn’t have to be a legacy resident to lay claim to Chocolate City.
“Keep pounding!” a fellow Panthers fan chanted.
The security guard directed Calvin to sit. The baker sighed and plopped into his seat, resting like worked dough as power osmosed back into the institution. He breathed deeply. He needed to nurture this fleeting wish that redlining, the sole aspect of banking he did not find mystifying, did not apply in the bank where he already did business.
His brain scrounged up an idea, one so good a smile tugged loose his set jaw. “God’s pussy,” Calvin whispered. (The manager and security guard leaned in when he said the name, but Isis did not react. Calvin inferred she was god-fearing.)
Though R&D had been indefinitely suspended three years prior, Calvin said, Malone kept tripping in his free time and one day he brought back a keepsake too genius to discard: a cross between a biscuit and a waffle. A lifelong fan of the waffle’s built-in syrup reservoirs and the biscuit’s simplicity, Calvin agreed to allow a limited run on the condition that Malone make no more than 100 a day. His partner obliged. And after reaching an impasse on whether to call it a wiscuit (“sounded too much like ‘Whippet’”) or a baffle (“sounded too much like ‘awful’”), they settled on God’s pussy, which was how their delivery driver and sole employee Eartha described the gridded, flaky, gooey good when she first tasted it.
“Like, that’s literally what she said,” Calvin emphasized.
When Calvin had put the delights and an index card displaying their unholy name on the service counter, he expected equal parts laughter, intrigue, and indifference, with maybe a pinch of disgust. He flipped the card over and formally rechristened the mélange a biscuit waffle after the breakfast rush, but outrage, always cunning, moved faster.
After a patron posted a picture displaying the original name, God’s pussy discourse swept through the city like a presidential convoy, loud and unbidden. Within days, the confection led coverage in all the major local media and secured a foothold in the national outlets dedicated to sustaining the forever culture war. Lines of patrons and protesters formed at ungodly hours. Batters were mixed, proofed, baked, sold. Reviews amassed like white wealth. God came.
So Much Bun fanned these flames for two sleepless weeks, all the while Calvin reminding everyone within earshot that the shop was a neighborhood bakery, not a gimmick factory. He assured interviewers, radio hosts, and irked regulars that he and Malone were committed to supplying fresh Tuscan loaves to families who couldn’t afford a fancy Italian dinner in Georgetown; selling hot biscuits and coffee to WMATA workers who woke and worked in darkness; driving pounds of yeast rolls to food banks tucked into the blighted nooks of the District. The donated rolls weren’t always fresh, he confessed, but no one had complained. That counted for something, he thought.
After the final sacrilegious pastry sold, Eartha left the handwritten “pussy out” sign on the front door. Within a week, the flocks of influencers and congressional staffers thinned and the neighborhood pulled So Much Bun back into its fold. One regular, a crabby fifth-generation Brooklander, returned and told Eartha that he no longer resented that So Much Bun had taken over the old wing spot.
“In Brookland, that’s a compliment,” the bank manager explained to her colleagues.
Calvin cut to the chase. The point was that he could have gone full magnate, could have trademarked Malone’s brilliance and sentenced the plaza he shared with a payday lender, barbershop, bail bondsman, and laundromat to rent increases and pigeon roosts. But he had no interest in all that.
He just wanted to be, well, bread. A staple. An institution with regulars so loyal they accused him and Malone of disloyalty upon detection or suspicion of some minor alteration to a recipe. A friendly place where folks came through just for a clean restroom and a cup of water. A joint where hanging was never called loitering.
So would the bank please at least give him a counteroffer? He was willing to buy used ovens and mixers, or ones made by lesser brands. Under the right conditions, he’d even allow for the current inventory to be refurbished. Whatever. He just wanted to keep making bread.
Calvin sank into his chair and caught his breath. A hand-talker, he had worked himself into a steady sweat that glazed his torso and arms. The manager and security guard used the lull to decamp, but Isis remained seated.
“Mr. Washington, thank you so much for your application. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
Calvin slapped his thighs and leaned forward. “I didn’t want to do this, but I’ve got no choice,” he said as he reached into his backpack. Isis shrieked and bolted from her seat, sending Calvin’s documents flying. The flight triggered other workers and customers and they hurtled across the bank like streakers. Within seconds, ballpoint pens, deposit slips, and spreadsheets laid across the business like buckshot. Calvin looked to the entrance, expecting an armed robber or a displaced bear. He found neither. His gaze fell to his right hand, which gripped the final biscuit waffle. “Oh,” he said aloud. He held the pastry up like the Liberty Torch and rose. He was not robbing the bank, he informed his accidental captives as he swiveled in place so his voice would carry. In fact, he announced, he didn’t even own a gun, a word multiple people repeated with the urgency of exclamations like “Cheers!” and “Fire!” as they wormed deeper into their hidey-holes. The security guard used the confusion to dash out of a fire exit, setting off an alarm. No one moved or spoke or even ventured a haha-what-the-fuck as the clarion ripped through the air. Calvin lowered his arm, dropped the pastry, and began retrieving his papers. Stepping over felled stanchions and capsized chairs, he peeled the documents off tipped artificial trees, lifted them off bowed backs quivering with fear. He’d done nothing, was still doing nothing. The forms became a doughy wad as his sweaty palms slapped them together, ink running, cells smearing. He examined one sheet that was especially sticky. It was the parchment paper from the biscuit waffle, which was missing. A line of crumbs and paperclips led to a desk adjacent to Isis’. Calvin followed the trail, peeked under the desk. He found a young man in business garb clutching the confection like a last grenade. The bank employee begged to keep it. “I’ve heard good things.”
Calvin considered the treat’s monthslong and unplanned exile in the bottom of the bakery freezer; its faded color; its unideal defrosting in his bag; its middling position in the ranking of quite delicious goods he and Malone sold; his swelling hunger after skipping the fresh hot breakfast he usually made and ate at the bakery; the principle.
“It’s gluten-free,” Calvin lied.
The man grimaced and handed it over. Calvin stuffed it into his bag and ran to his car.
◆
Malone, Calvin, and Eartha glared at the final biscuit waffle, which Calvin had dropped onto So Much Bun’s service counter like loot. They’d agreed beforehand to split the pastry if the bank didn’t bite, but none of them had actually expected that to happen. It was supposed to be a good luck charm. Calvin crammed a cherry muffin into his mouth as they sulked.
“Does our generation have a Johnnie Cochran?” Eartha asked.
“Probably not,” Malone said. “We don’t even have an O.J.”
Eartha balked. “We’ve got like, thousands of O.J.’s.”
“I think that proves my point.”
Calvin sucked butter from his fingers and shook his head. “We’re not hiring a lawyer to get equipment. The market has spoken. We’ll just pay out of pocket.” He rubbed his hands on his apron, picked up God’s pussy, then walked to one of the aging ovens. “Let’s just get this over with,” he said as he punched a temperature into the appliance.
“Wait,” Eartha said when the oven chimed 5 minutes later. She had a proposal: Instead of using God’s pussy for a depressing Eucharist, what if they raffled it off?
Malone opposed. They’d sell a dozen tickets, tops. And they’d look hypocritical. He quoted, at length, Calvin’s oft-repeated spiel about the difference between a spot and a business.
A spot, Malone said in a voice that cast Calvin’s baritone as grave and self-serious yet very dumb, is a place that needs you rather than tolerates you. “Okay!” Malone said to himself, portraying Calvin’s interlocutor as an even bigger dumbass. When you’re in a spot, Malone said, you might throw some dollars around, but it’s like ceremonial spending. “Like an offering,” the conversant chimed. Hell yeah, Malone-as-Calvin said. An offering to the space. To the vibes. On the strength. “Thank you for your service type-beat,” said the dolt. Yeah, yeah, Malone’s Calvin agreed. A spot has a few unspoken rules, of course, he clarified. “Like don’t call bitches bitches.” Exactly! Or, something simpler, like no card purchases under $10, or pourovers served only between ten and two. “Word, I know spots like that.” Right, or like, no bare feet. “No stank feet.” No dogs. “Don’t pet the cat.” BYOB. “No sex in the champagne room.”
“Are you two done?” Calvin asked. Eartha’s torso was sprawled across the front counter, laughter rippling through her. “Let him finish,” she managed.
Malone resumed speaking as Calvin. Businesses though? Don’t get me started on businesses.
“What you got against businesses?” Malone replied to himself. Mock Calvin’s response: Man, more like what do businesses got against me?
“Y’all niggas fools,” Calvin said.
Malone became himself again. “My point is, that moment has passed. I’m so over it that I didn’t even tell y’all that the caterer at Trevor’s wedding was serving God’s pussy. She’s for the streets.”
“Wow,” Calvin said, impressed that someone could make the biscuit waffle at catering-scale. “Was it good?”
Malone rolled his eyes. “Don’t insult me.”
That was a no. Calvin agreed that it was generally better to move forward, but he liked the raffle idea. They could use the money and one batch could pay for itself several times over. It was also a chance to get rid of the cake flour Malone had overstocked. “Let’s do it,” he said as he dropped the former final biscuit waffle into a trash bin. “Give us strength, Johnnie.”
◆
They sold a hundred and fifty raffle tickets within two hours.
“You need me to convert that to baker’s dozens?” Eartha gloated as she hauled fresh sticky buns to the front of the bakery.
Malone continued flattening the butter for the next day’s croissants, easing a worn wooden roller back and forth. Calvin followed Eartha to the front, where a crowd had formed. He recognized only a few of the customers.
He took and filled orders as Eartha restocked their display case. As Malone had predicted, the regulars denounced the reversal.
“I thought y’all were done selling pussy,” heckled Sayida, their letter carrier. She bought four tickets and a biscuit.
“These niggas pimpin’ pastries,” said Lamont, the sweet-toothed leader of the shopping plaza’s skate crew. He took a prolonged look at the display case then bought one ticket, a cookie, a brownie, and a sticky bun.
“My mama says raffles are scams,” offered homeschooled triplet Alicia. Her household consumed two baguettes a week. Calvin bopped her sister Keyshia on the head with a loaf then handed a second one to Felicia. “Tell Nicolette I said hi,” he said.
The newcomers generally asked how long the shop had been around and requested help picking a good. Calvin nudged them toward the apple fritters, which hadn’t been popular lately because of some viral video denouncing cinnamon.
“Does this mean the wiscuits are coming back permanently?” an unfamiliar man asked Eartha as she replenished the snickerdoodles. She turned to Calvin.
“Nah, fam,” Calvin said, making sure to glower at the tank-topped guy for saying wiscuit. The ire was short-lived. After the man bought a croissant and told Calvin to have a very blessed day, the baker found a smile and told him to come back soon.
People kept filing in. Calvin tried not to think about numbers when he was away from the books, but at $5 a raffle ticket, things were looking up.
Teabag, Brookland’s pickup basketball champion and a banana bread fiend, showed Calvin a video in which hands pulled apart a loaf of So Much Bun challah and mouths received the torn wads. Neither of them understood the modern internet, so they just rewatched the clip until the person behind Teabag complained that they needed to get home to their dog, which suffered from separation anxiety, gum disease, and waking night terrors.
“God bless you,” Teabag said to the woman.
Calvin requested Teabag’s order. “You want the usual?”
“Nah, let me get some of that challah.”
◆
Calvin returned to the prep area, where Malone was monitoring their feeble mixer. They called it DJ Khaled because its longevity defied expectation. Calvin peered into the bowl, which appeared to be churning biscuit waffle dough.
“I thought you used to fold these by hand?”
“Did I?” Malone said.
Calvin grabbed the recipe binder off a shelf and flipped through it, flour, sugar, and oil accumulating on his hands like mold. The recipe was not there. “Jesus Christ. You threw it away?”
“Nigga, you said never again.”
Calvin coughed dryly. He meant to laugh, but his body declined. He tried repeatedly. His throat grew thick and warm. He sifted through the binder with the resolve of a prospector in a riverbed. He found four muffin variants, breads leavened and unleavened, Belgian and American waffles, cakey cornbread for Juneteenth, buss up shut for Trinadian Independence Day, the pretzant, and the struffin. Even the speculative scagel was recorded. But the biscuit waffle had been stricken.
“We’re cursed,” Calvin said. Malone told him they’d thug it out, but Calvin could commit his faith only to the worst outcome. Their improvised recipe would be inferior to the OG. The disappointed raffle winners would condemn the whole enterprise. The anti-cinnamon faction would somehow find Isis and interview her, ask her how she knew the bakery was a scam. Her institutional deadpan would float over mundane but somehow damning footage of the bank episode. “He told my colleague the biscuit waffles were gluten-free,” Isis would say. DJ Khaled, the real one, would score another surprise hit. And another one. Finally, all the ovens would explode, killing three police officers.
Eartha called Calvin’s name. An authoritative hand descended upon his shoulder as he turned to respond. It belonged to a living police officer.
“Mr. Washington?” the cop said. He was even taller than Calvin. “We need to talk.” His hand lifted from Calvin’s collarbone and pointed toward the backdoor.
Calvin frowned at Malone then led the cop out.
In the fifteen steps to the door, Calvin’s inner Johnnie Cochran drafted a defense. The case against Calvin was ass. Sure, he had fled the scene earlier that day. Shit, he had literally run out the bank. But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the glove did not fit. The smoke was coming from the lender, who had turned down Calvin for no particular reason, an act that betrayed the ever-present omni-reason: Calvin was black. And for reasons that eluded even the accomplished legal resources of the Cochran Firm, anti-blackness had to deputize all the officers it could—white, black, federal, state, crooked, straight, curvy, compliance—to keep niggas from inhaling and exhaling and making struffins without disturbance. Why? That was a question far beyond the jurisdiction of this court (and the retainer agreed upon for this case), but if Calvin, humble baker and occasional shroom consumer, were to hazard a guess based on personal experience and occasional clicks of ProPublica articles, he’d wager that shell companies, tax havens, fraternal orders were in play, games within games within systems within matrices—a scale that only a term like omni-reason could convey, the Macguffin of a phrase capturing the Hitchcockian magnitude of the plot, the capacious silliness of the conspiracy, the megalopolis sprawl of the grift, which everyone with a brain understood was lunacy, fiat, cap, but still invested in it, raffle contestants clutching ticket stubs, permits, licenses, invoices, spreadsheets.
“Sorry for the little show,” the cop said as he slapped $40 into Calvin’s hand, “but I just wanted to skip the line.” He spoke into his shoulder radio and slid back inside the bakery.
Calvin stood in place, coughing.
It took a few wheezes, but the laughter finally came. Calvin hinged at the waist and gushed air and noise and saliva, his body a hiccup. The bills glided to the ground and landed atop a mound of cigarette butts and chicken bones. The dumb sight prompted another wave of guffaws and spasms and jerks, this one rocking him like an inflatable tube touched by a breeze. “I hate money,” Calvin said aloud.
After a spell, Malone poked his head out. “What was that about?” he asked. “I know your bank’s not coming after us over a little track meet.”
“Nah, fucker just wanted to skip the line.”
“That’s crazy, fam. You good?”
Calvin nodded then scooped the fallen notes up. “Yeah, just counting my blessings.”
“Measuring cups are inside. A line, too.”
“I know. I’m coming,” Calvin said. He stood still.
Malone opened the bakery door wider. Sound and heat leaked out. He tipped his head toward the bustle. “Business is good.”
“I know, that’s why I’m so pissed.”
Malone shrugged. “Better a raffle than a GoFundMe.”
“You wouldn’t be this chill if you had to go to all those banks.”
“I’ve been to a bank before. No smell. Air conditioning. Fake plants. ATMs. Rent-a-cop-ass security guard. I miss anything?”
Calvin frowned.
“Didn’t think so. Look man, I know you wanted this to be our starter home and all that, but that shit is made up. When me and you decided to buy this joint, we agreed to bake, not to build.” He shut the door.
“This,” he said as he outstretched his thick arms and pancaked his body against the back wall, “isn’t a food truck, or a ghost kitchen, or a food-hall stall. It’s a neighborhood goddamn bakery.” He smushed his face into the wall and rubbed his nose in its grooves, humped the wall once, twice, thrice, clockwise, counter. Then he peeled himself away and barked a question into Calvin’s face. “Calvin, what do neighborhood bakeries do?”
“They bake,” Calvin muttered.
“They bank, you said?” Another bark.
“They bake,” Calvin growled.
“For who?” Malone whooped.
“The neighborhood.”
“Who dat?” Malone crowed.
Malone extended his hand for a dap.
Calvin reciprocated the pound, opened the door, then walked inside their shop.