"Yeah," says Dave. "I drove this stolen van that got, like, seven miles to the gallon. I think the owners were glad to see it go."
Both brothers laugh—once, tautly—and then, for a second, it's quiet. You can hear the ticking of the lighting system overhead.
NatureBake was started, in 1955, by James Dahl, a onetime Navy sailor who had been raised a Seventh Day Adventist, and his wife, Wanene. James was, in his own estimation, a "blockheaded Norwegian." He got angry in the bakery sometimes, throwing pots and pans at the wall, and if anyone dared insult his two loves—the church and the American flag—he went ballistic. When each of his four kids turned 9, he put the kid to work, paying roughly a dime an hour. "When I was 11 or 12 and my friends invited me on a weekend camping trip," recalls Glenn, "I couldn't go. Sunday was baking day."
In his early 20s, Glenn thought a couple of times about walking away from the bakery—of joining the Air Force and becoming a pilot. But there was a problem: For all his rigidity, James was a sloppy business manager. Often at NatureBake, receipts would end up in the trash and under the ovens. "I knew that if I left," Glenn says, "the business wouldn't last." He bought NatureBake in 1988 and let his dad stick around. The pretense was that James would develop new bread recipes. He never did. Tired and bereft of confidence, he mostly just grumbled, saying things like, "Why did you have to move the salt?"
To Dave, it was pathetic. "I hated my dad," he says. "He was a hypocrite; he never even went to church." Several times, Dave got in shoving matches with his father, who died in 1997. Once, when James was 65 and Dave was 25 and coming off a long meth jag, James shook his son awake, saying, "Go to work." Dave clocked him. "He was down on the ground, saying, 'Stop, stop!' " Dave says, "and I just left and got high."
As a kid, Dave says, "I hated the bakery, and I hated the sissy hairnets we had to wear." He was insular and morose; he had almost no friends. He found catharsis in playing heavy metal on his guitar—Judas Priest, Black Sabbath—but he didn't find true escape until, at age 21, he discovered crystal meth. "That first marvelous injection of poison," he writes on his MySpace page, "jettisoned me into an exciting, depression-free nirvana. For the first time in my life, I had no inhibitions, no worries."
Dave began dealing the stuff and living large. He sold up to a pound of meth a day and carried thick wads of hundreds. He packed a .380 semiautomatic and floated
from woman to woman, fathering a couple of daughters, one of whom—21-year-old Jessica—helps sell DKB at farmers' markets. (Her 24-year-old half-sister rarely talks to her dad.)
"Basically, for a number of years," says Glenn, "he just disappeared." Glenn was concerned, but he kept his distance. There were letters between the brothers and a few phone calls and also the odd, awkward home visits spliced between Dave's four prison bids—like, for instance, the time Dave came to join Glenn's young family for a picnic and blighted the day by getting nabbed shoplifting cigarettes. "It was hard to stay close to him," says Glenn. "I didn't know what to say."
By the late '90s, Dave felt so isolated and so depressed, lying in his cell, that for months he could scarcely sleep. "I thought of cutting my wrists," he says, "but I'd seen guys who'd tried that, only to be carried out on a stretcher and 'saved.' "
Finally, in desperation, Dave talked to a psychologist. He began taking antidepressants, and he enrolled in a drafting program. He excelled; he began teaching other inmates. "For the first time ever," he says, "I felt good about myself without drugs. I was developing a skill. I started feeling like I can do whatever I set out to do.
"I was having these nightmares then, and in them I'd slipped. I'd just killed someone—I didn't know why—and I was hiding out. But the cops were onto me; my life was over. It was the most dreaded situation, but then, blessedly, I'd wake up and realize I was in prison. And I was happy."
"He did something amazing," says Glenn. "He found a way to be free in prison, and when I visited him, he had dreams for his life. For the first time, he wasn't blaming people."
Dave entered a six-month drug rehab program for inmates. The two brothers talked about working together again, and Dave imagined a time of pure fun and camaraderie. Glenn, meanwhile, had a calmer hope. "I just wanted to hire him," he says, "so he could settle into civilian life."
But three weeks after Dave came home, Glenn left his wife of 20 years. He moved out of his suburban home into a spare apartment in Portland. Dave felt stung: "I wondered, Why didn't Glenn tell me he was going to do that? Why did I even come back to the bakery? I felt resentment toward Glenn."
But Glenn didn't have time to salve his brother's wounds. He had to reinvent his business. Partly, NatureBake needed to grow, to make room for Dave and for Glenn's son, Shobi, who was about to finish college and join the company. But mostly, the brand lacked pizzazz. It was uncool; it was for graybeards. "No young people knew who we were," says Glenn, "unless they were deeply immersed in organic culture."
When Glenn went to the grocery store one day, he says, "I didn't see anybody with tattoos or piercings picking up our bread." He yearned to reach the alternative crowd, so he envisioned a new brand—and talked to Dave. "What about a picture of you with your guitar, right on the bag? What if we sell your prison past?"
