The Weekly Screed (#578)

The great one-percent doughnut heist
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — The “one percent” staged a heist here Sunday and got away with most of our dough. I was there.

It happened at an unpretentious doughnut joint on Lafayette Avenue called — yes, really! — “Dough,” which sells, absolutely, the yummiest fresh doughnuts in all of Brooklyn. They cost $1.25 each but they’re worth it.

“Dough” is barely a year old but its reputation has spread so fast that it seems not to suffer at all from its location in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a somewhat (although decreasingly) notorious neigborhood. “Dough” sits kiddy-corner from a thriving charter school and a big public housing complex called Lafayette Houses, which includes the ironically named Billy Martin Child Development Center.

(I mean, if Billy Martin had developed properly as a child, he probably would have thrown fewer tantrums as a grownup, and might’ve been able to hang onto a job for more than three or four years at a stretch. But I parenthesize.)

The arrival of the gourmet beignet hereabouts is a harbinger of many things, mostly the gradual gentrification of northwest Bed-Stuy. The neighborhood has become a crazy-quilt of diversity where ethnic and economic changes seem to occur almost daily, greeted by older residents with an unflappability unique to New Yorkers.

“So, the Ukrainian Scientologists are turning the old Lutheran church on Bedford Avenue into a beauty spa for nudist vegetarians? So?”

So, about 9 a.m. Sunday, I walk in. I’m visibly salivating. It’s been almost a month since my last “Dough” doughnut (oh doh dee oh doh). Imagine my dismay when — in a display case usually bursting with glazed, frosted, sugar-coated, drippy, gooey pastries — I see… nothing. Well, there are three doughnuts, the store’s least popular variety, slathered with some sort of coral-hued passion-fruit confiture. A woman is just fleeing the store, apologetically, with the last half-dozen non-passion fruit options. Even these are not the doughnuts she really wanted; they were simply all that was left. The guilt-ridden woman is not the reason for this unprecedented, inexcusable doughnut dearth in mid-morning on the day that the Sunday Times arrives with the editors’ implicit assumption that it will be read in pajamas with a mug of fresh-brewed coffee and the best pastry available within a ten-block radius. No!

“What’s goin’ on here?”

I say this to a courteous young man from the neighborhood whose expression is one of heartfelt and helpless chagrin. His meek reply is that “Dough” is handling a “special order.” Sheepishly, he adds that no new doughnuts (save those three unsightly orphans on display) will be forthcoming for at least 30 minutes. I avoid the kid’s lying eyes.

Meanwhile, a veritable legion of workmen is hustling an obscene abundance of variegated, fresh and fragrant “Dough” doughnuts onto trays and carts and pallets. They haul them hurriedly, shamefacedly to the curb to be taken away from us in great, rumbling truckloads. It’s as though Mitt Romney had been thunderstruck with a ravenous urge not just for doughnuts, but for the best ones in New York City, and he decided to share the quenching of his hunger with the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Meanwhile, a cluster of foiled customers — for whom a Sunday doughnut or two, and another week without finding a tumor in our bowels, is all we ask of God — stood befuddled. I left “Dough” without registering a peep of protest. As I staggered down Lafayette toward my local ghetto supermarket to buy a consolatory Entenmann’s, the incredulous words of Arlo Guthrie came to mind: “We had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset…”

As I fled, I realized I had just experienced a microcosm of the great social clash of our times. Here I was in a bad corner of a bad economy. Yet, even in Bed-Stuy, there are signs the economy is getting healthier. Among these is the success of “Dough” in a neighborhood too dubious for Starbucks or even Dunkin’ Donuts to risk a franchise.

But along with this burgeoning prosperity comes the one-percent. Somewhere in Brooklyn now, there’s a new penthouse-dweller. He’s richer than Gates and eager to somehow articulate his wealth. How better to achieve this than to corner the market on one of the neighborhood’s rare luxuries, to buy up every “Dough” doughnut and hoard them in his condo? Better yet, he could feed them to his lhasa apso.

Our plutocrat knows, from experience, that “Dough” will accommodate his selfish order. It probably escapes him that his little spasm of excess will come at the expense of a thousand of his powerless, frustrated, hypoglycemic neighbors. The doughnut holocaust at “Dough” serves as a perfect illustration of the inability of the one percent to grasp the consequences of their narcissism. There’s nothing illegal, or even immoral about stealing the small joys of everyone else’s Sunday. But it’s mean, and you have to be numbed by opulence — you must belong to the club and you must believe that only club members matter — to do it, and not think afterwards about what you’ve done.

If the bewildered patrons of “Dough,” who’d never heard of a doughnut joint closed by “special order” on Sunday (national day of the doughnut), had wanted to stop this absconding of our breakfast, we would have had to mobilize, organize, go door-to-door and hold meetings. It would take days or weeks. And by that time, a thousand more batches of sweet rolls would’ve been baked and sold and eaten. People would say, “What’re you complaining about? There’s lot more doughnuts where those came from.”

We would cry, “No! That’s not the point!” We’d be left defending a principle, tilting at windmills, trying to turn doughnuts into a metaphor for social inequality.

In short, we’d lose. But the fact remains that any week Donald Trump or Sheldon Adelson can saunter into “Dough” and deny Sunday doughnuts to everyone in Bed-Stuy and Clinton Hill. They can do it every Sunday. No need to organize, hold meetings, talk people into agreeing with them, or raise money nickel-by-nickel to keep the cause alive. They’re the one-percent and they can just do it. They can take it all. It’s theirs.

Today, it’s doughnuts. But tomorrow? They might want our Entenmann’s, too.