The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (22 page)

Dean was in the middle of divorcing his second wife, and he and Ryan moved into the
main house while Dean’s mother took the apartment in back. Dean realized that it was
just like
The Andy Griffith Show
, with Andy, Opie, and Aunt Bee living together under one roof. Dean made his family
house, the house where his father had slapped him down, into his own. He hung carved
mottoes around the rooms:
DREAM
on the fireplace mantle,
SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY
on the stone chimney above it,
SEE THE POSSIBILITIES
over the opening between the living room and study. The Gettysburg Address hung on
the wall over his bed, Robert E. Lee’s definition of a gentleman stood on a table
in the living room, and in the study there was a framed tobacco leaf. His mouse pad
showed a picture of white-haired Thomas Edison from the eyes up: “There is always
a way to do it better … find it!” On his bookshelves were classics like Emerson’s
essays and
Tobacco Road
, biographies of Carnegie and Lincoln, books on entrepreneurship, and
Think and Grow Rich
. A couple of old but functional twelve-gauge shotguns leaned in doorways. For heat
he burned wood pellets in a woodstove hooked up to the chimney. His garage was cluttered
with farm machinery, vintage signs, and a framed copy of his favorite Bible verse,
Matthew 7:7. It was the house of a man with his eyes turned to the future and the
past.

By 2003, Dean was starting to hate the convenience store business. He was better at
conceiving and starting a business than running one, and the daily operation of the
stores bored him. He had gotten into this business to be able to farm and sell his
own produce, but no one had told him about the fifteen-hundred-mile Caesar salad.
This wasn’t real entrepreneurship—all it took was a calculator and a good profit-and-loss
statement. He had two hundred employees, poor blacks and white trash, many of them
single mothers, and he hated paying them close to minimum wage with no health benefits—how
could you raise kids on that?—but when he tried to get a better class of workers by
pushing the pay up to ten or twelve dollars an hour, the performance never improved
and it took him two years to get the wage back down by attrition. You were totally
taking advantage of people in this business, but there was no way around it—fast food
drew the lowest of the low, people with no ambition, and the quality of the food reflected
it. He knew that some of his employees were stealing from him, and a lot of them were
doing drugs. They would stay up all night and come to work high at six in the morning.

Once, a customer called Dean and said, “I just left one of your restaurants.”

“Really?” Dean said. “How was it?”

“I went in, got me a cup of coffee, asked the waitress, ‘How you doing today?’ She
said, ‘I’m doing just fucking great. I’m working at a damn Bojangles’.”

Dean always relied on a partner to oversee the stores and take care of the books.
That had been his brother-in-law, but after he and Dean’s sister divorced, Dean had
to buy him out for fifty thousand dollars, and he needed a new partner. His closest
friend was Chris, the guy he’d lived out of a VW bus with in California. They had
been each other’s best man, and Chris had gotten into the bar business and lost everything
when he developed a drug problem—bar, wife, child. Chris was a kind, bighearted guy,
and Dean tracked him down in Florida and asked if he wanted to come back to North
Carolina and make a new start by helping to build Red Birch into a southeastern chain.
He always felt that a good bartender would be a good fast-food person because of the
speed of the work.

Dean and Chris were business partners for several years, until June 6, 2003, which
was Chris’s thirty-seventh birthday. That day they played golf together, and then
they went out for dinner with another guy to a restaurant in Martinsville. Dean was
the designated driver, and Chris had been drinking beers much of the day. In the middle
of dinner, Chris got up and left the table. Dean thought that he had gone to the bathroom,
but after fifteen minutes Chris hadn’t returned, and Dean started to worry. He checked
the bathroom, but Chris wasn’t there. He walked outside and looked around the parking
lot—no sign of Chris. He got in his truck and drove the roads around Martinsville
for two and a half hours, and he still couldn’t find his best friend. He called Chris’s
wife, his second wife, and said, “You’re not going to believe this but I have lost
your husband.” The wife came to meet Dean and said, “Why don’t you just go on home
and I’ll call you tomorrow, let you know what happened.”

“No,” Dean said, “I want to know tonight. I’m responsible.”

So Chris’s wife got in Dean’s truck and she directed him to a broken-down house on
an abandoned street near the center of town, with rotting boards nailed across the
windows and two black guys sitting on the front porch, smoking what looked like a
joint. It was one in the morning and Chris was inside and Dean couldn’t get him to
come out.

It was worse than a sucker punch to the gut, because Dean loved Chris. He drove home
to Stokesdale and stayed up crying the rest of the night. It turned out that Chris
had left the crack house after Dean went away and in the middle of the night he let
himself into the Red Birch office behind the Bojangles’ restaurant in Martinsville.
There, Dean believed, Chris took some cash and a check out of the safe to cover his
fix. Dean concluded later on that Chris had been stealing from him for quite a while.
Early the next morning, he called Chris: “I want you to meet me at Fairy Stone State
Park.” That was a park near Bassett where Dean planned to whup the shit out of Chris
with a peachtree stick. Chris was messing with the lives and families of all the people
who worked for them, along with his own and Dean’s, and he needed to be taught a lesson.
But Chris wouldn’t meet him.

Dean agonized about what to do. Napoleon Hill had a theory that he got from Andrew
Carnegie, about the “Mastermind,” which was the coordination of effort between two
people for a definite purpose. Just as hydrogen and oxygen combined to make something
new—water—the blending of two like minds created a third mind, which had a divine
power or force. With the Mastermind alliance, ideas could be caught out of the air
that wouldn’t have appeared to someone working alone. Dean and Chris had been like
that. But Napoleon Hill didn’t have instructions for what to do if one of the minds
turned out to be a crackhead.

Then Dean remembered a story about Abraham Lincoln. One day, Lincoln was sitting under
an old oak tree outside his log cabin and he saw a squirrel run down from a branch
into the middle of the tree. That seemed strange, and Abe climbed up to look down
into the place where the squirrel had disappeared, and he found that the whole center
of the tree was hollow. He had to make a decision. Should he leave the tree standing,
because it shaded his house from the sun? Or cut it down in case a strong wind toppled
it? It pained him, for he loved the tree, but Lincoln cut it down. “And that’s what
I had to do with Chris. I had to cut him loose. It devastated his life.”

Dean and Chris never spoke again. Last he heard, Chris had gone back to Florida and
opened a shoe store around Fort Myers, but within a few years he disappeared again,
one step ahead of his creditors.

When Dean looked back on that period, losing Chris was the first of a string of blows
that came one after the other. In a way they ended up getting him out of the convenience
store business. But first came the only windfall he ever enjoyed, and it appeared
in the form of two brothers from India, Dave and Ash. They had been in the country
for twenty years, living in Burlington, North Carolina, and they owned a hot dog stand
in Florida called Hot Diggity Dog. One day not long after Dean sent Chris away, Dave
and Ash stopped by the store in Stokesdale and left their names and number. Dean called,
and the Indians said that they were interested in buying the Stokesdale truck stop.
This led to a series of eight-hour meetings at Red Birch, with Ash compulsively punching
numbers in his calculator the whole time, even when numbers weren’t at issue—it was
his security blanket. But there was a sparkle in his eyes.

Dean wanted to sell. He had always been overleveraged, playing the same game that
people were playing with houses but on a commercial scale, taking on more debt as
he built his stores from the ground up. He and the Indians went back and forth, going
over every detail of the business. In the end, Dave and Ash paid him a million and
a half dollars. It would have taken Dean twenty years to make that kind of money.

He might have gotten out of convenience stores right then—sold his other two truck
stops to Dave and Ash, or found some other Indians looking to buy a piece of the American
dream. Instead, he turned around and spent part of the money on a Back Yard Burgers
franchise across from the Piedmont Mall in Danville. Back Yard Burgers was oriented
more toward a white middle-class clientele than other fast-food chains, with a charcoal
grill taste. Dean hired his three sisters to run the restaurant and sent them to corporate
headquarters in Nashville for training. He planned a grand opening two weeks before
Christmas in 2004.

That Thanksgiving, Dean and his sisters and mother brought a plate of food to his
father where he worked, in a guard’s booth at the entrance to the parking lot outside
Unifi Manufacturing in Mayodan. His father had been divorced by the wife in Burlington,
and at age sixty-five he was living alone in a rental apartment in Mayodan, in a little
yellow house next to a shuttered mill. Unifi, a windowless concrete building hundreds
of yards long, was the last mill in the area still doing any volume. His father was
lucky to hold on to a job there. He was slobbering, barely coherent, and had to wear
Depends because the painkillers had worn away his stomach lining.

Dean opened the Back Yard Burgers in Danville on December 13. Three days later, his
father shot himself in the heart with a .357 in his bed. His last words were left
behind on paper in chicken scratch handwriting: “I can’t take it any more.”

Pete Price was buried on the Price tobacco farm, in the grave next to his father Norfleet’s,
under a stone cross inscribed with the words “Just a sinner saved by grace.” Years
later, Dean stood over the grave and said, “That was his whole mind-set. That was
what was wrong with it. He thought he was a sinner. When he was really a child of
God—could have done anything, and had powers he didn’t even know.”

A few months before the suicide, Dean and his father and Dean’s boys had gone on a
family vacation to Walt Disney World in Orlando. One day, Dean and his father were
sitting under the Tree of Life, and they began talking about religion and the Bible.
One thing that always struck Dean was where the Bible said, “And the word became flesh
and dwelt among us.” At Disney World he told his father, “And what that means is that
your thoughts and your words become your reality, and you need to protect your thoughts
and guard your words, and never say anything you don’t want to see come to fruition
in your life. You stay positive.” And perhaps because Dean seemed like a big success,
with a lot of cash on hand from the sale of the Stokesdale store, and perhaps because
his father’s way of believing had led him downward to this point, they sat there under
the Tree of Life and his father listened—for the first and last time in their lives
together, he listened.

*   *   *

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005. That morning, seven
hundred fifty miles away, Dean watched on TV. By Friday, with oil refineries shut
down all along the Gulf Coast, the price of diesel had spiked from $2.25 to $3.50
a gallon, and Dean was running out of fuel at his truck stops in Martinsville and
Bassett. Commerce on Route 220 pretty much came to a halt, and the North Carolina
public schools nearly closed for lack of fuel in school buses. Dean struggled to keep
fuel in the ground any way he could, selling off-road diesel from his on-road diesel
tanks. Independents like him were accused of price gouging, but they were only protecting
what little fuel they had—if they kept the price low they’d run out in a matter of
hours. It took two months for the region to emerge from the crisis.

Dean called Katrina “my come-to-Jesus moment.”

He had long known that independent truck stop owners like him were hog-tied. Margins
were so low that a small-scale distributor made less than a dime on the gallon. “From
day one I’ve struggled with the business, always undercapitalized, always trying to
leverage everything I had. Between the credit card companies, the big oil companies,
the taxes, the employees stealing, with twenty-something percent unemployment around
here, I just never had a chance.” But Katrina almost put Dean out of business, and
it drove him to realize that he had to do something different to survive. He had to
make his truck stops energy independent—that would be his competitive advantage over
all the other truck stops up and down 220. He was startled to learn how dependent
America was on foreign oil, imported from countries that didn’t like the United States,
countries that sent terrorists to kill Americans, countries where Americans were now
fighting and dying. “And it pissed me off that our government, George W. Bush and
all the rest of ’em, would let this country get into a position where it is actually
threatening our very existence. And all because of greed, and the almighty dollar,
and putting our faith in these multinational corporations that clothe us, feed us,
and fuel us.”

A month before Katrina hit, Wal-Mart had opened its first Supercenter in Rockingham
County. Two more were coming within six months, including one that would occupy 158,000
square feet in a mall on the highway between the center of Mayodan and Route 220.
Three Wal-Marts for a poor rural county of just ninety thousand people: that would
wipe out just about every remaining grocery store, clothing store, and pharmacy in
the area, and because Wal-Mart also sold discount fuel, eventually it would kill the
truck stop owners. Two thousand five hundred people applied for the 307 “associates”
positions at the Mayodan store, which paid an average of $9.85 an hour, or $16,108
a year. On January 31, 2006, the mayor of Mayodan and Miss Rockingham County were
on hand to roll out the red carpet for the grand opening on Highway 135.