The ceremony took place in the main hall of a natural history museum, under the suspended skeleton of a fourteen-million-year-old whale. There were other dignitaries besides Perriello, and other recipients besides Dean and Gary (on this occasion Dean wore a yellow jacket, a yellow shirt, and black pants), and by the time Perriello got up to speak, most of the energy had seeped out of the room. Wearing a flag lapel pin on his charcoal suit, and looking half the age of every previous speaker, Perriello took the podium with a kind of angry restlessness.
“The next big thing this area can be known for is clean energy,” he said, and he gave a shout-out to Red Birch, calling Gary and Dean “freedom fighters and entrepreneurs.” “Instead of driving by their truck stop and leaving three or four cents on a dollar spent, you leave ninety cents at theirs. When things are ‘too big to fail,’ maybe they’re a little too big to be the model in the first place. We are right on the cusp of a transformation, and that’s why it’s so exciting. This is a kind of industrial revolution moment.” He blamed both parties for policies that favored big corporations and made America’s small producers less competitive. “I’m sick of it, I’m sick of buying everything from China and overseas, and sending our dollars to petrodictators. We’re the only country in history to fund both sides of a war!” His voice was getting louder. “Politicians from both parties have never been to a farm—only for a photo op. They think it’s the jobs of the past, but I’m here to tell you they’re the jobs of the future. This is a region that’s been hit hard, but it’s a proud area that wants to stand tall and compete again.”
News crews shot video. Reporters swarmed around to interview Dean and Gary. The grant was like an affirmation from on high that a biodiesel truck stop was not a harebrained scheme, that some of the most powerful people in the country found it worthy. That day—January 14, 2010—was the high-water mark for Red Birch Energy.
After the ceremony, Dean drove back to North Carolina, and Gary went to the plant to have lunch with Flo Jackson, a black woman in her midforties whom he had hired to write a new business plan and who was visiting Red Birch for the first time. Flo was a former college basketball star with an MBA from James Madison. She had managed a Target and a Wal-Mart, and Gary wanted to bring her on to whip Red Birch into financial shape.
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.
Shawn switched over to Big Daddy Kane, a legendary Brooklyn rapper with a bus tour, and was given the mic at intermissions, rapping as Jay-Z for his meals. Everyone who heard Jay was blown away by his verbal cleverness, his confidence, his speed-rhyming in that high outer-borough deadpan—so good so easy he didn’t take it all that serious. When the tour was over he went back to hust
ling.
His crew extended their distribution chain down to Maryland and D.C. where the profit margins were high, riding Lexuses up and down I-95, moving a kilo of cocaine a week. His loyalty was to his money, but he had a fear of running the streets into his thirties, of being nothing. One day in Maryland in 1994 a rival fired three shots at him point-blank and missed—“divine intervention.” After a decade of hustling he decided to see if he could make as much money selling records as he did selling rocks.
I figured, “Shit why risk myself I just write it in rhymes
And let you feel me, and if you don’t like it then fine”
A Brooklyn producer named DJ Clark Kent put him with a Harlem promoter named Damon Dash, who was skeptical until he saw Jay’s Nike Air Force 1s. But none of the labels wanted Jay-Z—maybe it was too crafty, maybe too real—so he took his hustling profits and started his own label with Dash. They called it Roc-A-Fella, in case anyone doubted their intentions. They were going to take over the world.
Reasonable Doubt came in 1996, twenty-six years in the making. It was complex and sinister, dense with rhymes laid over lush samples from the records his parents had loved in the seventies, a portrait of the rapper as a young hustler from the next, lost generation, ready to kill and live with regrets and sick thoughts or die trying for big money, diamonds, Rolexes, fine champagne, fine girls, escape.
The Unwinding Page 29
