The Last Jelly Donut
Preventing a fight over a defective jelly donut.
It was around 2 am. I’d been working late, and I was starving. Driving home, I realized I probably had nothing to eat at home, so I started thinking of places that might be open at that time of night. I was on 24th Street in the Mission and I couldn’t think of much: the diner on Church near Market, maybe somewhere in the Castro… Then I remembered the all-night donut shop in Noe Valley and headed up there, hoping to score a jelly donut.
I parked on 24th Street and entered the store. There was one guy behind the counter, another in the back making donuts, a table full of 20-somethings that had clearly just come from the bars, and a few other random people filling the other tables.
I asked for a jelly donut, paid, and since there were no free tables, left. On the way out, I took my first bite of the jelly donut and immediately realized there was a problem: there was no sugar. I was eating a jelly piroshki.
I turned around and went back in. I told the guy who’d sold it to me about the missing sugar and asked for another jelly donut. He said no. He said they couldn’t possibly have made a mistake with the donut. I assured him that there was indeed a problem with the jelly donut and suggested that he take a bite himself (I had only taken one bite, so most of the donut remained pristine). He said there was no need for that, since they could not have possibly made a mistake. I insisted that he check for himself. He insisted that he didn’t need to since there wasn’t a problem with the donut. He further implied that I was trying to rip him off. I said, “That’d be a lot of work for a single free bite of a jelly donut.”
Both of us were getting agitated about the donut, so I decided to throw it away and leave. I looked around and my eye landed on a tall garbage can against the wall on the other side of the counter. The angle wasn’t great, but I thought that if I threw the donut hard I could hit the back of the can. I was off by about three feet, and the donut smashed into the white wall, covering it with red, dripping jelly.
The guy behind the counter tried to say something, but it was fruitless. Every patron in the store had been closely following the jelly donut saga. There was now a moment of complete silence, followed closely by the beginning of a chant: “Give the man his jelly donut. Give the man his jelly donut.” The chant rose in volume until a particularly large drunk man got up his table, went up to the counter, and screamed: “GIVE THE MAN HIS JELLY DONUT.”
Things were getting out of hand and the guy behind the counter recognized it. He mumbled something about giving me a jelly donut and went to get it. But there were no jelly donuts left. The crowd started booing. I immediately spotted and pointed to a sugar donut which, while it’s no jelly donut, is still an acceptable type of donut. He gave me the sugar donut and once again a hush fell over the store. I stood in the middle of the store, took a bite, and declared it “OK.” The crowd went wild as I marched out of the store.
