Hot Glazed Now

The reek of sugar hits as soon as you turn your car into the lot. Then, when you actually step inside the shop, it’s this soft wall you pass through—sickeningly sweet.

It’s 1998, I’m sixteen, and I work at the brand new Krispy Kreme, in the parking lot of a mall in Phoenix, where my family just moved from Southern California. Ours is the first Krispy Kreme in the state of Arizona, and people drive for hours for our signature hot glazed donuts.

My main job is boxing. I dip my plastic stick in the donut’s hole and swoop the still-sizzling dough off the conveyor belt and through the air. Plop the donut in the box.

When the donuts are this hot, they are vulnerable. You have to be careful not to jab them and break the skin. The corner of the donut box jams the soft flesh of my arm, which feels bruised the entire two years I work this job, though no mark will ever become visible.

What is visible is me. One of Krispy Kreme’s gimmicks, other than our hot-off-the-oven donuts, is that you can watch the entire donut-making process from behind a glass wall.

It is admittedly fun, from the customer’s POV. The many donuts coming down the belt in neatly crowded rows, the shimmering glaze curtain they pass through, like something from Willy Wonka. The machine is a marvel of the industrial age, based on Henry Ford’s assembly line. And, at the end, there’s me: khaki corduroys, striped shirt, latex gloves, Krispy Kreme baseball cap. Cardboard box in arm, gathering up their donut prize.

If I don’t go fast enough, the donuts tumble off the belt into a large industrial trash can. I alone stand against donut suicide, and if I lose any, I’m in deep shit.

Men love to tap the glass and taunt me, Don’t let them fall!

The job is physically grueling, and boring. But my boredom can never show. My manager orders me to smile whenever a customer catches my gaze through the glass, so I avoid eye contact. Focus on the donuts, head down. Stuck like that for hours. Neck aching, back aching. Crowds gather to watch me work. I ignore them. But when I do accidentally catch someone’s eye, it’s the customer who is usually smiling at me.

The smile of the Krispy Kreme customer is kind of a lot. It exists somewhere between a child’s open grin and a leer. Like they are horny for donuts. I can tell by their smile the customers feel I know them, like really know them, deep in their grubby baby souls.

I’m just trying to get my seven bucks an hour. I didn’t sign up to stare into the abyss.

Before there was work, there was time. Before there was time, there was only sun, milk, play, stars, sleep.

The living face of my doll. Cherries falling from the tree, rotting into earth. I placed them in my slobbering mouth, ate that sweet mold, and, like my doll, lived.

My parents taught me the twelve calendar months. These unfurled in my mind like a ribbon, wrapping itself around in a circle. After I saw time, I could not unsee it.

A door I had not known was there, slammed itself in the distance.

Each turn of the ribbon of my childhood, each January 1, my mom threw out her Precious Moments calendar. I dug it out of the trash, the paper stained with orange juice, encrusted with oatmeal. Took it back to my room, where I lay on my bed observing the child angels with huge liquid eyes, haloed heads aglow with golden light.

You can’t see where the light comes from. The calendar frame cuts off before you get to the source.

Heaven, mom said, when I asked.

If heaven is where the light comes from, is heaven also where time comes from? I said.

In heaven there is light but no time, she said. Time only exists here on earth.

The Precious Moments angels kept watch over days and months that were mostly blank. My fundamentalist parents had read the signs—the fires, pestilence, and famine in distant lands. They’d decoded the barcodes, tracked the suspicious abundance of credit cards, these marks of the beast. Bill Clinton was the Antichrist, they thought, Jerry Springer and Sally Jesse Raphael harbingers of the world’s slide to the end. They called it that—“the world.” Something other. But where were we if not inside it? In something smaller, an air pocket on a sinking ship.

They pulled me out of school, and my family retreated. Stockpiling canned food. Filling canisters from the garden hose. They stacked these items in dark corners of the garage, where my gaze wandered when I went in there to feed my pet rat, Jessica.

These empty days of my childhood stretched with no tasks to fill them, only those I invented for myself. My favorite was collecting the spiky seed pods that fell from the Sweetgum trees. They’re called witches burrs, although I was not allowed to say witches.

I’d tug my red Radio Flyer through the neighborhood, collecting fallen burrs, which I’d place on the street where I predicted the tires of future cars would go. Hide in a bush or a tree on the median, that space between worlds that is itself a world, which people (adults) overlook.

Waiting felt like forever. Until a car eventually came through my sleepy Southern California suburb, and, if I was lucky, ran over my burrs, flattening them like pennies on a train track. Then I’d fill my wagon back up with the squashed burrs, satisfied, having transformed something of this world.

I never thought of my burrs as a job. If someone had hired me—even if they paid me infinity money, the amount I always asked for as a child, knowing I would not get a dime—I would have suddenly hated my work.

There are different kinds of boredom. It is boring waiting for the world to end. I flattened my burrs because I was bored, but my play was boring too. And yet how marvelous my game. I’d think, I’ll squash all the burrs in the world, and then I’ll squash the people and the rocks and the trees and the houses and the mountains and then the world itself—and I’ll hold all of it in my hand, like a tiny seed.

My favorite thing to do at Krispy Kreme to stave off the boredom is stack the donuts on top of each other and then squish them down into a “sandwich.” When they are hot, they flatten in an extreme way. I can get about twelve in the pile before things get messy. Some days, this donut sandwich is all I eat, other than maybe one other thing, a giant slice of pizza from Sbarro or orange chicken from Panda Express in the mall across the vast parking lot, which I pay for with my meager tip money. I also drink excessive amounts of the whole chocolate milk we sell. This anorexic, sugary diet means I weigh just under 110 pounds and am always jittery.

I get home at night bone-exhausted. Peel my shoes from my swollen feet, dirty white Vans I got at Journeys in the mall, skater shoes that reek of sweat but also sweetness. The donut smell baked into the shoe’s material. Years later it will still be there when I finally throw those shoes away.

At Krispy Kreme, I watch the clock so much sometimes not even a minute passes and I wonder if the clock is broken or if time has stopped.

In this way, work-time resembles childhood-time, when I told my mom in full confidence, I had finally done it, I had paused the sun with my mind.

But this lull in time’s flow at work is not something I choose, and therefore, it is evil.

Here, in the hot room, time is imposed on me. There is no sun. There is only a clock.

One of my jobs is to fill the creams and custards. Out of sight, in the way back. I go where the air is even hotter, where the floor is always wet, where there is a sound of water dripping, though no one can find the leak. I go to the cream machine.

It’s set at five; a lower setting won’t squirt out enough cream to fill the donut shell.

Any higher, and the donut will explode.

There are no windows back here. Only thin strips of fluorescent light. Everything drenched in bilious yellow. But no customer can see me, so I don’t mind the gross light.

Alone one day, I turn the machine all the way to seven. Jam the stainless-steel protuberance into the donut’s tiny, cream-ready hole.

In my gloved hands the donut shell swells, hardens. The top shudders, like something large moving beneath the surface of a lake. There is a rupture—white cream pushes through. I lick it unthinkingly. Dump the disaster before a manager sees.

The next day, I turn the machine all the way up to eight. The donut shell rips violently, white cream jizzing on the floor and on me. I am terrified of getting caught. I am ecstatic.

A tire catapulted a burr into a stranger’s yard; I dug in leaves of wild mustard; lifted oranges dusted with black mold; yanked up cold Bermuda grass, like I yanked the hairs from my Barbie’s head; like human flesh, hunks of moist earth came up, affixed to the grass; red worms suicided themselves midair; one all the way down my shirt; all throughout my body, I felt its slick wriggling; I stuck my hand down there and flung it free; ants crawled across me as I crawled across the bright green, and I never found that seed pod again.

Another seed pod ricocheted off a spinning tire and arced backwards through the air, whacking me dead in the face. It hurt. It hurt so bad. The driver didn’t see me. I screamed with happiness.

A woman screams at me, But I drove all the way from Tucson just for hot donuts! It took an hour! I was bored.

I tell the woman we don’t have hot donuts 24/7, it’s not a guarantee. The glaze, falling in its constant cascade, builds up on the trays and in the grates and needs to be cleaned out several times a day. During those times, the machine is off. She’ll know there are hot glazed donuts when the sign glows red.

It’s on the outside of the building, but the woman follows my finger as I point to the inside wall, behind which the sign hangs. The wall is covered in flattened donut boxes signed by celebrities who have visited our shop. The most famous is singer Natalie Cole, the daughter of Nat King Cole.

Right now, the HOT GLAZED NOW! sign isn’t glowing, I say, as the woman stares at Natalie Cole’s swooping signature.

Now she does that thing where she refuses to look me in the eye. Anyone who’s worked retail knows this power move. Customers staring at you is annoying, but customers totally avoiding your gaze is worse. Of course, people avoid eye contact for different reasons, it’s not always about dominance—but when it is, you know.

The unhappy woman orders some not-hot cake donuts and our extra creamy, full fat milk. I ring her up. She throws crumpled, sweaty cash at me. It lands on the counter.

I serve her donuts and change, and she stomps off to a table. Scatters wadded-up napkins everywhere. Doesn’t pick them up when she leaves.

As she goes out the door, I feel her mind closing to this place, which has brought her back to some room of her childhood, a wound still hemorrhaging behind dusty, forgotten toys; I look down and see a dark spot on the floor. Strange. I thought I cleaned that. I am to clean the floors every hour. I am not allowed to sit; to read; to talk too long with coworkers about non-work things; to eat the donuts while I am still inside the store; to stare blankly into space. I am to wipe and rewipe the counters when there is nothing to do, even when they are already clean.

The window at the front of the shop, also clean, because it was cleaned by me, looks out onto a row of cars. The woman is getting into a white SUV. The mall in the distance. From here, I can see the AMC 24 next to the Journeys, a Radio Shack.

The unhappy woman settles in her SUV, appearing like a normal adult, except for the powdered sugar dusting her upper lip and chin.

The machine starts up again.

I resume boxing.

The faster I go, in as few movements as possible—unfold box, shift box to arm, pick up stick, scoop donut, donut in box—the more I become a part of the machine. The less I think about how trapped I am. I have found something like escape in the mechanical. A machine can’t get stuck inside time, a machine just goes until it breaks.

But this tale actually ends another time. In that time, which is really a place, I run. I run out of the hot room. Because I am still near the donut shop, the air still smells sickly sweet, but it’s not the only smell out here: there’s flowers, running water, electricity. I’m in the Krispy Kreme parking lot, which is also the woods. It’s both somehow, a parking lot and the woods—which is better than just being a Krispy Kreme inside a mall parking lot surrounded by freeways surrounded by desert surrounded by cold dark infinitely expanding space. The air is moist, thick. It feels good. Like being inside a cloud. But then I catch another smell, a smell that’s coming, but it’s not here yet. Burning human flesh.

I’m caught in headlamps so I can’t see the driver, but I sense someone watching me. This is confirmed when I kneel in front of the tire, and they blast the horn in my face. But I won’t rush this. I do my task, the one I made for myself a long time ago.

When I’m finished, I step aside. There is a tree. The unhappy woman tears off in her SUV, burning metal so close I can feel the skin singeing off me. It hurts. It hurts so bad, but I don’t move.

The flattened donut, steaming with heat, clings tightly to the earth.