I step into the small corner store and the smell of boiling peanuts floods my nose. It’s a pulpy, soggy odor, wasted of anything identifiable as a peanut. I find it more sickening with each visit.
The market is small. Candy bars are locked behind protective glass. Only a few of each item on the shelves: three boxes of spaghetti, four cans of chicken noodle soup…
I locate the owner in the rear of the store. He hunches over pots of boiling peanuts, stirs them slowly.
The man is ancient. He might be in his 80s, or he might be well past 100. He is bent and rigid, skin taut over bone, yet still wrinkled like worn leather.
I have a check to give him for $5,000. We’re filming on his block for two weeks, and he’s allowed us to use his rear parking lot for staging.
Throughout the shoot, I’ve made it a point to show this man the utmost courtesy and respect. Though I don’t know his history, it’s clear that he has lived a hard life, and my goal is for our production to be an experience he looks back positively on.
And yet, at every point, his manner has confused me. He speaks in short, curt sentences. There’s a bitterness to his voice. His eyes remind me of unlit coals.
The man sees the check. He motions for me to give it to the woman at the register, then returns back to his pots without a further word.
The woman at the register is his literal opposite. She’s about half his age, likely in her 40s. She’s obese, barely able to fit in the small space behind the counter. Where he has been steadfastly quiet and emotionless, the woman is loud and adversarial.
“That’s it?” she asks, eying the amount on the check. “Feels like you’re taking us for a ride.”
“In fact, you’re actually getting more than most business owners on the block because you have such a large a lot,” I explain.
She “hmmphs” me skeptically, resumes painting her nails. Like with the owner, the conversation ends abruptly.
I leave. The smell of the boiling peanuts trails me out, soaked into my clothes, my hair, my skin. I turn back to stare at the store for a moment, perplexed by an encounter that mirrors every previous encounter.
Then, I hear a voice behind me: “You actually gave money to that piece of shit?”
I turn. It’s the owner of the hardware store further down the block, who I’ve come to know during our shoot.
“Bet you think he’s just a kindly old man,” he says. “That man destroyed this neighborhood. For real.”
I ask him to tell the story.
“Back in the 80s, when crack first hit this area, that man’s son, a teenager at the time, became a dealer for one of the gangs. One day, a deal went bad, there was a shootout, and his son was gunned down. Dad over there swore he’d get revenge.
“So he started his own drug operation. He hired everyone that used to work with his son, paid them double what they were making to switch crews. He sold crack for cheaper than anyone else in the hood, because he wasn’t in it to make money. He started taking over the entire game.
“And his ace in the hole? You meet his old lady?” I ask if he means the woman behind the register. “Yeah. That’s his wife. He had her open a bail bond place. So anytime his guys got pinched, they’d call her and she’d have them back on the streets the next day selling.”
“The other gangs started getting mad over the lost business. That’s when the violence started. The killings. People were dying all over the place. Kids in his gang, kids in rival gangs, kids who were using his drugs. It went on long after all the people responsible for his son’s death were taken care of. It was like he couldn’t stop.
“Eventually, they got him. He was given 25 years. Been gone ever since. He only got released last month.
“That’s the man you’ve been so generous with,” he says with a laugh. “Just a kindly old man.”
I later confirm the story with a police officer assigned to our production. For the rest of the shoot, I avoid the owner and his store as much as possible.
But I can’t help notice each morning as the man hobbles to his store at 6AM and begins the process of boiling his peanuts, which he tends to unwaveringly throughout the day until he closes the store in the evening.
And not once in the entire two weeks of filming do I ever see a customer buy a bag of his boiled peanuts.