A Heartbreaking Tale of Unfathomable Sorrow

Of the thousands of failed businesses sitting empty in cities across the country, what makes this humble Boston bakery any different? A tale of nearly unbearable sorrow spanning three decades and two states is what. Read on. But only if you’re not naturally predisposed to depression or bouts of soul crushing despair.

The story of this abandoned bakery begins in Harlem in the late seventies. As a wealthy industrialist pulls up to a basketball court, two young African American boys stop playing and climb into his waiting limousine. As they pull away to return to his Upper East Side penthouse, one boy stares after them, shivering in the thin, filthy jacket he'd found at a bus stop. A rather ugly boy, his apelike arms and heavy brow ridge gave him a brutish appearance fitting to the outbursts of violence to which he was prone. The first son of a poor mother and a father he never met, his life had been a series of hardships; one of the most crushing being abandonment by his mother after the strains of caring for him jeopardized her job with the above mentioned industrialist widower. The cruel ironies to befall Arthur Goocherson (named after his absent father so, as his mother put it, “She’d never forget the pain that man caused her”) were just beginning.

Although constantly wracked by guilt over the choice she’d made between her first born son and a return to abject poverty and unemployment, Arthur’s mother had eventually found love again—or so she thought. But certain women have tendencies to serially seek out unstable men, her new love eventually left her as well, leaving her with two new boys she was unable to properly care for. The strain was too much for Arthur’s mother, and although the doctors could find no medical explanation for her death, everyone knew it was the deep and horrible sadness that had killed her.

Realizing that the world moves to the beat of multiple drummers, the wealthy widower took pity on the two young sons of his deceased employee, taking them in and eventually adopting them; he raised them as his own along with his biological daughter whose mother had also died of a sadness based disease. Seeing his half brothers living lives of luxury while he bounced between foster homes was like battery acid on Arthur’s groin, and he lashed out at both brothers, constantly bullying the younger and savagely beating the elder when he attempted to intervene. The final straw was when his privileged half brothers were accepted to Digby, the elite prep school Arthur had always dreamed of attending. Completely oblivious to the great opportunity they’d been afforded by their adopted father’s standing with his alma mater, the ungrateful half brothers quit the school after their ridiculous request of having the school’s century old fight song replaced by a tacky, jived-up version of their own creation was denied. Their idiocy was like salted shards of glass in Arthur’s already chemically burned groin.

But before he could enact his final, murderous revenge on his younger siblings, a strange and wonderful thing happened to Arthur—he fell deeply and totally in love. Arthur’s metamorphosis was complete and profound, and love’s warmth melted away the hatred that had consumed him throughout his life like a poison fudgesicle. His repeated attempts to make amends with his half-brothers for his past bullying were met with scorn; they would never forgive him for his cruelty…much less for stealing the heart of their adopted sister.

After the death of their adopted father, the brothers used their inheritance to make life miserable for their step sister and her maligned lover. Having been disowned by her father over her relationship with Arthur (her father, despite being a man of peace on the surface and his own family being racially mixed, had an entirely different standard of tolerance where his only daughter was concerned, and the thought of Arthur’s rough, dark hands on her lily white skin ate at his mind like acid on groin skin), the youngsters, rich in love but strapped for cash, scraped together the last of their meager resources and ran off to Boston to escape their vengeful siblings.

The two bought a small storefront and some used baking equipment in the up-and-coming Boston neighborhood of Roslindale, so named for its resemblance to the hilly Glasgow suburb of Roslin. Their business, like their love, thrived initially, but the maniacal brothers would never allow them even a hint of happiness and used their fortune and influence to bribe suppliers and city officials to make running their bakery nearly impossible. Unable to afford flour and yeast at the inflated prices demanded by their unscrupulous suppliers, the bakery was on the verge of closing. One day, his love came home bearing a van load of baking supplies, saving their business from collapse. When asked where the money come from, she smiled bravely and stated that it must have been a Christmas miracle, hiding a tear and a shiny gold pendant shaped like a rabbit's head. But the profits made from those supplies couldn’t pay for the exorbitant license fees and taxes charged by corrupt city officials. But Arthur’s true love continued to bring home unexplained cash, and he was so happy to keep his business running that he hardly noticed the string of armed robberies plaguing the neighborhood.

The brothers were relentless in their quest to ruin the lives of the struggling bakers, eventually getting this story’s heroine hooked on the heroin they’d paid thugs to slip into her morning coffee. Arthur, although still alive from a medical perspective, died on the day that the only woman who’d ever loved him overdosed. As he rocked her pale, cooling body, he prayed to God to grant him just one stroke of luck and to take him away to rejoin his love. But God instead gave him a different stroke, hemorrhagic and debilitating. He spent the rest of his days in a semi-vegetative state, mumbling incoherently about "the evil midget," but his state appointed care givers didn't know what he was talkin’ `bout. The only mercy was his inability to remember the brief happiness he knew during him and Kimberly’s early days in Boston.

The elder brother, racked with guilt over what they’d done to their sister eventually turned to a life of drugs and crime as well. The younger brother, his fortune squandered on a pointless vendetta, filed for bankruptcy and was forced to work menial jobs and appear in demeaning cameo roles, eventually becoming a national symbol for lost opportunity. Pretty sad, all in all.