Glenn was preoccupied, and when Dave wrote to complain about Shobi, his brother blew him off. "I can't fix this," Glenn wrote in one e-mail. Dave was furious. "There was no violence," Glenn says now, "but he was a fraction of an inch away from it. I could see it in his eyes, in his body posture. He'd come into my office, and he'd just be beside himself. He'd stand over my desk, shaking and shouting. I tried to stay calm—that was the only way I knew to keep him from escalating. Then, we'd go back to our corners and try to stay out of each other's way. We'd e-mail each other. It was no way to run a company."
The three partners—Glenn had given his brother and son equity in 2007—began meeting with a family-business counselor. They did roughly a dozen sessions, some up to three hours long, and they all emerged feeling cleansed.
"I started with mistrust," says Dave. "I figured that Shobi was nothing but a little brain who hated his cowboy uncle. But then Shobi said, 'When I was in college, all I wanted was to get out and work with my dad and you.' I broke down. I was like, 'OK, Shobi's human.' "
"We came up with better boundaries, better job definitions," says Shobi. "And we hired an operations manager, too, to streamline things." The company improved the margin on DKB by buying flour in larger volumes and producing larger batches of bread.
"We're doing a lot better now," Glenn tells me one morning when I meet with just him. "I don't think we would have made it without help." He goes on to talk in kind tones about his brother. "Dave rocked our establishment," he says, "but we needed that. We needed his creativity, his energy."
Glenn hopes that, over the next five years, NatureBake can triple its sales of Killer Bread, to better than 100,000 loaves per week, largely by penetrating the still scarcely tapped Seattle market. He believes that Dave can stay clean. "It's been 10 years," Glenn says. "But if he did relapse? The company would suffer, tremendously. Even if we kept it secret, we'd lose his creativity. Morale would go down. I'd do everything I could to stop that from happening. We'd get help -- therapy, whatever was needed.
"Dave's a good guy," Glenn continues, "and I was probably just too headstrong at times dealing with him. I should have listened, even when he wasn't patient."
"Glenn." Dave shakes his head with disdain. "Glenn—Glenn just doesn't get it. I wasn't patient? Right! Glenn doesn't even understand what we were fighting about. People just didn't want to help me do my job. It was like, 'It's Dave's bread. Let him do the damn work.' "
Dave is in his apartment now, on the couch, hunched forward, hands on his knees. "I can't figure Glenn out," he continues. "I mean, we grew up together, and then I went to prison, and I feel like I looked at life from so many different angles. I had so many different experiences, and then I come back to the bakery, and it's almost like—" Dave throws his head to the side, miffed. "Oh, I can't go there. We still butt heads. In any company, you're going to have people who can't stand each other; they just make it work. But these people are my family. I have to do more than stand them. I have to love them."
Now, Dave gets up and pads across the aqua shag carpet of his living room to fetch a beer out of the fridge. Aside from a StairMaster in the corner, the place is nearly naked—almost no furniture, nothing on the walls. It's basic. It's just a two-bedroom he's renting for $900 a month, after living for a spell with Melanie, the ex-dancer. (A short while later, he will buy his first house.)
When he comes back, Dave picks up his acoustic guitar and plays, leaning back, his eyes asquint with ardor. "Everybody's telling me about Jesus," goes the first song, "sanctimonious sisters/ pedophile priests/ prepubescent pissers."
The next song is vengeful—"I'm gonna draw blood/ I'm gonna break bones"—and then Dave gets plaintive and blue, singing, "I don't even have the strength to cry/ I don't even have a heart/ How many times have I caused someone grief?/ How many hearts have I broke?/ Just leave me alone with my guitar/ Because if I make it, it's gonna be…/ Because of the music in me." There are no songs without anguish in them. "I just haven't gotten to a new place with my music yet," Dave explains.
After a while, we go out to the patio area behind Dave's apartment so he can smoke a couple of cigarettes as dusk falls. "I guess Glenn and I are still figuring out how to deal with each other," he says, almost dreamily. "You're always figuring things out—that's life."
We sit there in the darkness a few minutes more, hearing the whoosh of cars on the freeway nearby, and Dave keeps talking. "We're going to start making things happen in the Idaho market," he promises. There's an edge to his voice sometimes, a certain hunger, and you know that his old demons are still rattling inside him somewhere. But at times, he is quiet. He is ruminative. He sits there in a halo of smoke, saying nothing, looking weary, like a prizefighter who has just stepped out of the ring after a long, bruising battle to realize anew the sweetness of everyday life.
He smokes. He gazes serenely off into the distance. He seems happy. You want it to last.
Bill Donahue is a writer who lives in Portland, Oregon.
