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LefT Behind From business owners to bartenders, artists to undocumented immigrants, our neighbors are trying to figure out—and survive—the coronavirus’s economic chaos P. 10

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April 15, 2020

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Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 15

S o c i a l ly D i s t a n c e d

W

Trying to cover the coronavirus with a small staff and no freelancers— our sacrifice to the COVID-19 gods—has been a lot like drinking from a firehose. No matter how much you do, there’s always more you could have done, always more you should have done. (As I’m writing this note, at nearly 6:00 p.m. on Monday, well past our deadline, there’s a story I’ve been itching to break since Saturday and probably four more queued in my inbox to edit.)

CONTENTS NEWS 8

How does a stay-at-home order work for those without a home?

9

The CDC changed its mind about masks. These Triangle residents got to work. BY SARA PEQUEÑO

BY THOMASI MCDONALD AND LEIGH TAUSS

FEATURE 10 Across the Triangle, business owners and bartenders, artists and immigrants are trying to figure out—and survive—the economic collapse.

MUSIC 15 Dan Bryk's lost hits and near misses.

BY BRIAN HOWE

Closed by one crisis, Torero's reopens amid another.

18

Make your own Kingfisher cocktail.

I imagine that for some people, working from home is great. It’s easy. You don’t have to shower every day, even every other day. You can start drinking at noon and no one’s there to shame you. (I’ve done neither of those things, honest.) The commute is basically a walk from the bedroom.

But for me, all of that is kind of a problem.

See, it’s six o’clock, and I just realized that I haven’t gotten off the couch today.

I mean, I haven’t gotten off the couch today. As in, I haven’t taken my morning medications (whoops) or brushed my teeth or showered.

I worked. I kept working. I lost track of time.

FOOD + DRINK 17

e didn’t put out a newspaper, but damned if last week didn’t feel busier than ever.

BY SARAH EDWARDS

BY SARAH EDWARDS

In this weird dystopian existence, there’s no separation between work and life.

And when they smush together, life becomes work because work is always there and that firehose never runs dry.

In the grand scheme, though, I guess I shouldn’t complain. I haven’t lost my job, haven’t taken a pay cut, haven’t had to lay anyone off.

But more than a half-million people in North Carolina have filed for unemployment in the last month. State unemployment benefits are going out, but they’re crap. Federal help is on the way, hopefully soon, but this recession will stick around for a while.

DEPARTMENTS

And right now, there’s a lot of confusion and anxiety—and a lot of people left out in the cold despite the government’s attempts at a stimulus. That’s where we turned our attention in this week’s feature story, to those left behind or wondering how they’re going to make it through until the world turns right-side-up.

4 Soapboxer 5 15 Minutes 6 Quickbait

I’ve been fortunate so far, and if you’re like me, consider giving what you can to the funds supporting artists and hospitality workers and others who are struggling.

And when this is all over, I don’t think I’ll ever be happier to have an office job that requires me to, like, put on pants.

7 A Week in the Life

COVER Design by Annie Maynard, photo by Sazzad Aryan / Unsplash

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Staff Writer Thomasi McDonald

EDITOR I AL

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Editorial Assistant Cole Villena Contributing Food Editor Nick Williams Theater+Dance Critic Byron Woods Voices Columnists T. Greg Doucette, Chika Gujarathi, Alexis Pauline

Gumbs, Courtney Napier, Barry Saunders, Jonathan Weiler Contributors Jim Allen, Jameela F. Dallis, Michaela Dwyer, Lena Geller, Spencer Griffith, Howard Hardee, Laura Jaramillo, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Josephine McRobbie, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn, Neil Morris, James Michael Nichols, Marta Nuñez Pouzols, Bryan C. Reed, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Eric Tullis, Michael VenutoloMantovani, Chris Vitiello, Ryan Vu, Patrick Wall

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April 15, 2020

3

BACK TA L K

Oh, hey there! It’s been two whole weeks since we emptied out the old mail sack, and in the

It’s Biden’s Party Now

meantime, we’ve been

Joe Biden views himself as a bridge. To where, exactly?

writing a whole lot about all kinds of stuff. Let’s see what goodies await.

First up, SCOTT, responding to editor Jeffrey C. Billman’s story about a One America News Network report that insinuated that UNC-Chapel researchers designed the novel coronavirus because of, you know, the deep state or something: “Jeffrey Billman can F off. Get the F out of my State Dipshit. F U Jeffrey. The last place your lame ass should be, is in the publics ears. Get off Trumps ass. You are a Million times worse.”

Listen, Scott, you can say the F-word around here. We promise we won’t think any less of you.

“You are as crazy as the liberal elites!” adds RITA M, exclamation-point lover. “To say calling this virus a Chinese Virus is ‘racist’ is totally insane!

YOU may be screwed, but the American people aren’t. We are blessed to have this president, and as soon as this crisis is over, you will see!”

We also reported on how gun nuts forced Durham to declare gun shops essential businesses during a pandemic. We also called the gun nuts “gun nuts,” which sent the gun nuts over the edge.

JOSE: “You say, ‘The gun nuts won.’ A lot of Americans died fighting for our basic civil rights, now we have extremists hijacking this disease to push their agenda of disarming the people. We should all be disgusted. The Bill of Rights doesn’t have a ‘unless there’s a virus’ exclusion at the bottom. Clearly ‘we the people’ won this one.”

PAT ORSBAN: “Awwww, poor wittle leftist commrats got stopped from disarming more victims.

Democrats disarm victims, violate the law abiding, all while protecting more criminals. Stop the evil, never vote Dim again.”

ZZ: “A liberal rag that hates guns lol.”

We are absolutely making that one a T-shirt.

WANT TO SEE YOUR NAME IN BOLD?

indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com @IndependentWeekly @indyweek 4

SOA P BOXE R

April 15, 2020

INDYweek.com

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

O

n January 20, 2021, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. will be 78 years and 61 days old. If he wins in November, he’ll not only be the oldest man to ever become president, he’ll also be the oldest man to ever be president. Ronald Reagan completed his second term just before his 78th birthday.

On January 20, 2025, Biden will be 82 years and 61 days old, older than all but eight presidents when they died.

There’s no indication that Biden is physically unwell. (For the record, if Donald Trump completes a second term, he, too, will be the oldest president in U.S. history—and, well, he believes exercise drains your life force.) Last year, the American Federation for Aging Research assessed the health, longevity, and survival prospects of presidential candidates.

It gave Biden a 79 percent chance of living through his first term and a 70 percent chance of surviving his second. (Trump has an 85 percent chance of making it another four years.)

And contra the memes about Biden’s allegedly declining cognitive state, there’s no evidence that he’s mentally unwell, either—at least beyond innuendo linked to his stutter.

That, of course, won’t stop the Trump campaign and its army of bots from plastering social media with memes about an infirm and addled Biden. Trump’s job over the next six months is to make the former VP as disliked as he is.

Biden will spend that time reminding disaffected lefties that two liberal Supreme Court justices are in their 80s, contrasting his reputed decency with Trump’s amorality, and trying to make the election a referendum on the incumbent.

Maybe that will be enough.

With Bernie Sanders suspending

his campaign last week and endorsing Biden on Monday, Biden is the nominee. On paper, he’s also the likely next president of the United States. A CNN poll last week had him up by 11 points over Trump, 53–42. A Quinnipiac poll had Biden winning 49–41.

But Biden has chinks in his armor that we shouldn’t ignore and need to be addressed—one of which has historically been an especially bad omen: There’s no palpable energy about Ridin’ with Biden on the No Malarkey Express. (A campaign whose agenda boils down to unplugging the country and plugging it back in hardly invigorates.)

Relatedly, Grandpa Joe never caught on with Millennials and Gen Zs, who have little interest in reverting to the ante-Trump status quo.

To his credit, Biden knows he represents the past. “Look,” he said at a campaign event with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, California Senator Kamala Harris, and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, “I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me.

They are the future of this country.”

There’s also the disturbing sexual assault allegation lodged by former Senate staffer Tara Reade. Other women have said Biden touched them inappropriately but in ways that didn’t rise to the level of assault. Reade’s 27-year-old claim won’t be fatal to the campaign unless more allegations like it surface, and Biden’s been fortunate that it’s been drowned out amid the coronavirus. Its pall, however, will allow Trump to deflect from his own sexual misconduct.

Biden’s pledged to pick a woman as his running mate, which is smart.

Despite the drama that surrounds VP picks every four years, they tend not

to matter much. They don’t swing elections. At most, an effective choice fills a resume gap or sends a signal to tenuous supporters.

Given the circumstances, though, Biden might be the exception that proves the rule. He needs someone who can forcefully articulate a vision, infuse his campaign with energy, and, ideally, liaise with progressives. And as a soon-to-be octogenarian, he also needs a very plausible replacement.

To my mind, all of that should point to Elizabeth Warren. But I doubt that’s where Biden’s headed. Warren is 70, which is older than Biden wants.

She’s also well to his left.

And he has plenty of viable alternatives. There are women of color, including Kamala Harris, who, despite her much-to-be-desired history as a prosecutor, has a solidly progressive voting record; the electrifying but inexperienced Stacey Abrams of Georgia; and Asian-American Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who lost both of her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.

There are also women from swing states (though the home-state advantage is a myth), including the Trump-antagonizing Governor Whitmer; Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, who would be the first (openly) LGBTQ person on a national ticket (hey, James Buchanan); and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the darling of editorial boards.

Honestly, I don’t know if Biden’s pick will mean anything in November.

If we’re in the Second Great Depression and Trump’s approval is in the 30s—even if we’re limping out of a recession and he’s in the low 40s— probably not.

But if he views himself as a bridge to the political future, his choice will say a lot about what he thinks that future looks like. W

15 MINUTES

PHOTO COURTESY OF SCHQUTHIA PEACOCK

Schquthia Peacock, 49 Nurse practitioner, Preston Medical Associates, Cary

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

What’s a typical day like for you now?

It’s ever-changing. It’s not very consistent.

It’s always a new fire or dilemma or piece of education to share. We re-educating our staff on how to put on N95 masks because we started wearing them in the office with patient care. So Monday was educating everyone on the process to put on the mask and take it off because we have to make sure they aren’t cross-contaminating. I consider myself now the infectious disease patrol.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about washing hands?

That they can do it and not think about it again. You can’t have a false sense of security. You have to always be on alert as to what you touch. When was the last time you washed your hands and what are you going to touch again? It’s something you have to always keep in the back of your mind. Your hands are dirty until you wash them.

You conduct tests for COVID-19 in the clinic’s parking lot. Walk me through that process.

It’s out of my routine. I have to think about— do I have everything before I go out? Do I have my mask, my gloves, my gown? Do I

have everything I need to conduct a visit because if I have to come back into the building, I need to come out of all my dirty gear, and that can extend a visit if you go back and forth—it can really slow the process.

I have to make sure I have a clear head so I can remember everything I take with me.

Then, walking up to the patient, I’m a little concerned as to what I’m going to approach or how anxious they are going to be, as many of them are. I need to make sure I have a cool head about me so I can give them the perception of calm and cool. I don’t want to excite them more than they already are.

More patients are extremely thankful we are offering the service of coming out to the parking lot. Some have offered me flowers, which I often decline because I’m not sure what risk of contamination that could be.

When we conduct a visit, I try to get as many vital signs as possible—temperature, oxygen level, heart rate. We address what their concerns are. Before we go out, we do a telephone triage where we assess their symptoms so we don’t have to worry about documenting them. We do a swab based on patients’ concerns and how at-risk they are because we are limited as to how many we have. We don’t have many [tests] at all, so not everyone may meet the qualifications for swabs. W KeepItINDY.com

April 15, 2020

5

Q U ICKBA I T

Essential Business

ABC Sales By Month, 3/19–3/20

W

20

Wake County Durham County Orange County

17.5

15

(in millions of dollars)

e had a hunch.

It was obvious that the second Governor Cooper ordered dine-in restaurants and bars to shut down by 5:00 p.m. on March 17— St. Patrick’s Day, as it happened—cocktail sales would plummet to basically nothing.

But we also suspected that the second the order came down, everyone hauled ass to the ABC store and stocked up. (Not that we did anything like that, mind.) Fortunately— this was cause for concern in the INDY Slack when the stay-at-home mandates started coming down—the state declared ABC stores essential, probably more essential than they’ve ever been, in fact, so it turns out we didn’t have to hoard all of the Basil Hayden’s Dark Rye. Anyway, after taking a long, gin-soaked bath in data from the state ABC Commission and the Wake County ABC Board, our hypothesis—well, take a look and judge for yourself.

12.5

10

7.5

5

2.5

0

3/19

4/19

5/19

6/19

7/19

8/19

10/19

11/19

12/19

1/20

2/20

3/20

March ABC Sales by Year*

March Weekly Sales, 2019/20, Wake County ABC Board* 5

Cooper shut down bars March 17.

$13.7 million Total Sales, March 2020

$16.6 million

4

3

15 12.5 10 7.5 5 2.5 0

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2018

2019

2020

2

1

0

Week 1 Week 1 2019 2020

Week 2 Week 2 2019 2020

Week 3 Week 3 2019 2020

Week 4 Week 4 2019 2020

Week 5 Week 5 2019 2020

*Source: Wake County ABC Board *Retail sales refer to sales made in ABC stores. Mixed beverage sales refer to liquor sales to bars and restaurants licensed to sell mixed beverages. Prices include taxes.

April 15, 2020

Wake County Durham County Orange County

17.5

(in millions of dollars)

(in millions of dollars)

20

Total Sales, March 2019

(in millions of dollars)

Retail Mixed Beverage

6

9/19

Month

INDYweek.com

135

North Carolina 120 105 90 75 60 2016

2017

*Source: North Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE

4/7

The state NAACP sued to force Governor Cooper and the state Department of Public Safety to release AT-RISK INMATES from state prisons.

Cooper put new restrictions on LONG-TERM CARE FACILITIES after 60 residents of an Orange County nursing home came down with COVID-19 and two of them died.

An ANONYMOUS DONOR gave Wake County $100,000 to put toward its coronavirus efforts.

Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson signed off on a consent order releasing nine state prisoners, part of DURHAM COUNTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY SATANA DEBERRY and other local officials’ efforts to reduce the prison population.

4/10

A third death was reported at the PRUITTHEALTH nursing care facility in Orange County. By Monday, there would be reported outbreaks at nursing homes all over the Triangle.

4/12

More than 137,000 people filed for UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS in North Carolina, bringing the state’s total to more than 400,000 in just three weeks.

The Durham County Board of Commissioners voted to move 250 people from HOMELESS SHELTERS into the Marriott hotel in Research Triangle Park.

VERNETTA ALSTON resigned from the Durham City Council to move to the General Assembly, where she’ll take the seat left vacant by state representative MaryAnn Black, who died last month.

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR DAN FOREST said on a Wilmington talk show that the state’s news media is overhyping the coronavirus to sell advertising, an astoundingly ignorant statement given the fact that, with businesses closed, there’s no one to sell advertising to.

An outbreak of the coronavirus was reported at a LONG-TERM CARE FACILITY in Knightdale, the first such outbreak in Wake County.

CHARLES RICHARD ROOTES became the first inmate at the Butner Federal Correctional Institution to die from COVID-19 complications. More than 80 people at the facility, including 22 staff members, have tested positive for the coronavirus.

4/13

4/9

North Carolina’s CORONAVIRUS DEATH TOLL jumped by 13 from 11:00 a.m. Monday to 11:00 Tuesday, the largest one-day rise to date. Blacks and African Americans, who comprise 22 percent of the state’s population, accounted for 38 percent of cases and 31 percent of fatalities.

Governor Cooper issued an EXECUTIVE ORDER offering a childcare subsidy for some essential workers.

ProPublica reported that in 2018, SENATOR RICHARD BURR sold shares in an obscure Dutch fertilizer company shortly before its stock fell in part because of changes in Trump administration policy. Burr has been roundly criticized for unloading up to $1.7 million in stock just before the coronavirus market crash.

Citing the looming recession, the RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL abandoned its “moonshot”—an ambitious bond proposal for Dix Park and other parks and greenways.

A legislative economist predicted that state revenue would decline by $1.5 BILLION TO $2.5 BILLION over the next two fiscal years.

4/8

(Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

New rules took effect restricting the number of shoppers allowed inside RETAIL STORES and requiring nursing homes to take further measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

The DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY announced that it would begin releasing some prisoners early, including pregnant women, offenders over 65 with underlying health conditions or a release date in 2020, and female inmates over 50 with underlying conditions and a release date in 2020.

Cooper said that lifting the STAY-AT-HOME ORDERS “wholesale” would be a catastrophe.

d goo

bad

ul

f aw

NC NAACP The state’s initial reaction to the coronavirus was to lock down its 50 prisons—no visitors at first, and then, earlier this month, an announcement that it would no longer accept transfers from county jails. Uh-huh. But what about the county jails? Besides, the virus was already in at least six prisons, and with corrections officers coming and going, there’s not much chance that number won’t grow. The truth is, when they’re crowded, prisons are a virus’s playpen. So all over the country, states have begun addressing releasing elderly, vulnerable, and nonviolent inmates. But not North Carolina. Last Wednesday, the state NAACP and other groups filed a petition with the N.C. Supreme Court on behalf of four inmates and an inmate’s spouse demanding that the DPS get on the ball.

By Monday, the DPS got on the ball with a plan to release pregnant women, offenders over 65 with underlying health conditions or a release date in 2020, and female inmates over 50 with underlying conditions and a release date in 2020, and others.

Dan Forest One day, Lieutenant Governor/Professional Nincompoop Dan Forest will say something that doesn’t make us want to smash our heads into the wall. Last Thursday was not that day. Forest was gabbing on some conservative talk show in Wilmington about ending the coronavirus shutdown when he said something truly remarkable even by his standards: “The media, the newspapers and the TV stations, they’re in the business to sell advertising, and panic and fear gets people watching, and that sells advertising for them.” So, in Forest’s big brain, the media ginned up coronavirus panic to sell ads. Neat. Except that by ginning up that panic, we convinced the governor to shut down all of the business we sell ads to, which is why—and Forest would know this if he paid attention—local media is in an acute state of crisis. Later that day, in fact, The News & Observer’s parent company furloughed 4.4 percent of its workforce and sacked the N&O’s publisher.

Raleigh Rickshaw Look, we get that the shutdown is frustrating, especially if your livelihood depends on all the stuff that is now closed by government order. Heck, that’s us! But there are appropriate ways to vent that frustration. This was not one of them: On Thursday, Don Mertrud, the owner and operator of the 13-year-old company Raleigh Rickshaw, posted on Facebook that he’d offer free advertising to “the first 3 downtown Raleigh businesses bars or restaurants to re-open for dine-in.” Wake County and the city of Raleigh, he continued, were not “lifting a finger for small businesses or developing a recovery strategy for small businesses,” so “all business should be planning re-opening for the coming week.” Setting aside the fact that reopening amid an order to close is definitely illegal, let’s pause to think about the public health ramifications of hundreds of DTR businesses saying the hell with it and getting back in the game during the projected peak of the crisis in North Carolina, even while trying to be “careful.” Anyway, after being roundly mocked in the comments, Mertrud deleted the post and declined to comment on his views about the stay-at-home order.

KeepItINDY.com

April 15, 2020

7

N E WS

North Carolina

When No Place Is Home Being homeless in the time of the coronavirus

BY THOMASI MCDONALD AND LEIGH TAUSS editors@indyweek.com

R

obert Arrington has been homeless for more than a year after losing his job as a carpenter’s helper.

When he was working, he says, he wasn’t making a killing, but he earned enough to rent a room in his employer’s apartment.

“He got fired,” Arrington explains. “I was left out in the cold.”

Arrington stands outside of a West Durham convenience store, leaning on a cooler that’s not in use, cigarette in hand. He has a pronounced wet cough. He struggles with alcohol, but it’s hard to turn down a momentary escape from his grim reality, he says.

He sleeps in an abandoned car parked in an apartment complex and spends his days doing odd jobs for which the convenience store pays him $5 a day and the occasional pack of smokes.

“They give me a little money,” he says. “Every now and then they give me something extra. They won’t let me go hungry.”

In March, stay-at-home orders were rolled out in Durham and Wake County, then statewide. They’ll be in effect through the end of April, if not longer. But for those without stable housing, it presented a unique problem: Where do you stay when you have no place to go?

An estimated 27,900 people in North Carolina experienced homelessness at some point in 2019. Left unchecked, officials say, COVID-19 could spread like wildfire among the state’s homeless populations. The homeless tend to have underlying conditions that make coronavirus infections more dangerous, and they lack regular access to medical care.

Last week, Governor Cooper announced a FEMA-funded plan to partner with hotels and motels, colleges and universities, trailer owners, and other large-scale facilities—16,500 units total—to shelter people with unstable housing situations who have tested for COVID-19, are at high risk, or may have been exposed to the coronavirus.

Health officials have not yet determined how many homeless individuals across the state have tested positive for COVID-19.

“We’re hoping to have a data point soon about positive cases in people who are homeless or who have worked or stayed in a homeless shelter recently,” says state Depart8

April 15, 2020

INDYweek.com

“Housing is the answer right now for this crisis.” ment of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Amy Adams Ellis.

Days after Cooper’s announcement, the Durham County Board of Commissioners approved a $1.6 million plan to move at least 250 people staying at the Durham Urban Ministries and Families Moving Forward shelters into the Marriott Hotel at Research Triangle Park. Wendy Jacobs, who chairs the board, says the decision was made to adhere to social distancing guidelines.

“It’s not possible to do that in a shelter,” Jacobs says.

“Any congregational setting is ripe for the spread of the virus.”

The county’s plan does not include those who have found refuge at the privately operated Durham Rescue Mission, which shelters about 270 men each night. The Rescue Mission, the state’s oldest and largest homeless shelter, has secured two houses and rooms at the Good Samaritan Inn to isolate clients who have COVID-19 symptoms. By late last week, the Mission had tested 10 people for the virus. The results all came back negative.

Wake County has also taken a proactive approach, says Lorena McDowell, director of housing affordability and community revitalization. Of the county’s nearly 400 cases, only two have come from people experiencing homelessness.

“We acknowledged these folks were vulnerable early on,” McDowell says. “Should COVID-19 get into that population, they are very close-knit and sleep in close quarters, in tents

or in shelters, and they are the ones who have a higher likelihood of serious health risks and concerns with COVID-19.”

The first step, McDowell says, was thinning out the shelters, which are almost always full. That, in turn, makes social distancing impossible. The county identified the most vulnerable individuals who were still healthy and asymptomatic and moved them to hotel rooms, creating enough space in shelters for social distancing.

Shelters also started serving meals in shifts to avoid having large gatherings at once and began to offer lunch, which they hadn’t served previously, to encourage people to stay in the shelter during the day.

Oak City Cares, a downtown Raleigh hub that helps connect people experiencing housing instability to community services, had initially closed because it was almost entirely run by volunteers, McDowell says. But it partially reopened to allow people to use its restrooms and shower.

Wake’s response has come with tough choices, including suspending the lottery system used to offer bed space to those currently on a waiting list and cutting down on the number of people circulating in and out of the shelter.

At the same time, the county has ramped up efforts to provide meals. As of last week, county officials have served over 200,000 meals “just to help people eat through this crisis because a number of these soup kitchens have closed their doors,” McDowell says.

Meals are important, but they can only go so far. “Housing is the answer right now for this crisis,” McDowell says.

In Durham, you’ll still find the homeless along deserted streets near downtown or sleeping with their heads on the grass along sidewalk curbs. For some, “home” is a collection of flattened cardboard boxes and blankets secreted away behind a grocery store.

Arrington is relatively lucky. The convenience store gives him a place to be every day. He chats with customers who know him as a fixture. But he still wants a home, even if it’s temporary.

After learning about the county commissioners’ decision to relocate the homeless to an RTP hotel, he waved down a reporter on Friday night.

“Hey! You heard anything yet?” W

N E WS

North Carolina

Masked Crusaders We need more masks. Here are two North Carolinians filling the gap. BY SARA PEQUEÑO spequeno@indyweek.com

Stuck at home?

Quail Ridge Books is offering free shipping on books for the month of April.

Mystery Boxes available, starting at $30!

O

n April 3, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention backtracked on a February claim that masks were ineffective in battling the novel coronavirus, sending folks scrambling to buy or make them. The CDC has guidelines for making no-sew masks, but for North Carolina’s resource-strapped healthcare workers, those solutions won’t cut it. Local hospitals have asked for mask donations—even handmade ones. Here are two stories of North Carolina twentysomethings (both with ties to N.C. State’s engineering programs) working to fill the gaps.

AIMAN HUSSEIN, 21 Rural areas are the last to be affected by the coronavirus. They’re also the least prepared.

Burke County has seen 63 reported cases and three deaths. Aiman Hussein, a Morganton resident and N.C. State student, saw a way he could help.

Hussein began 3-D printing in high school through Western Piedmont Community College. In college, he started ADH Creations as a way to explore design outside of college. Using his own 3-D printer, he mostly worked on interior design projects. But with a pandemic on the horizon and a return home after N.C. State went virtual, he saw an opportunity to help medical professionals in his hometown.

At first, he tried making a flat mask that would fit over a PPE mask to keep it in place. But as supplies decreased, he reached out to the 3-D printing community for ideas. That’s how he created the Maveric-1, a mask with an interchangeable filtration system that can be molded to the wearer’s face—a key difference between N95 respirators and surgical masks that affects safety the most.

“Of course you have the N95 masks that are the best for the cause,” Hussein says.

“But when that’s no longer available, what do you go to?”

On March 31, Hussein began crowdfunding. With $3,600 raised so far, he’s been able to create 100 masks and distribute 50 of them. To keep up with demand, he has eight 3-D printers running every day in his family home, making 30 to 40 masks a day.

RYEN FRAZIER, 23 Ryen Frazier kept getting texts from her parents.

“Have you gotten a mask? Have you made a mask?”

The grad student grew up sewing for herself and friends and studied textile engineering at N.C. State. With some scraps of fabric and elastic left over from a previous project, she hand-stitched a yellow mask with a flap to insert a filter.

When she showed her roommates, they encouraged her to create more. So she did what you do when the world is in the midst of a pandemic and “word-of-mouth” no longer exists: She posted on Instagram.

She only expected a couple of friends to ask for the $5 masks. Now, she says, she’s gotten orders for “upward of 530,” and the number keeps growing.

Frazier says she and her roommate/new business partner Nell Crosby began working every day to keep up with demand, but they’re focusing their efforts on health care workers.

While Crosby doesn’t sew, they’ve developed a workflow where she cuts fabric and Frazier stitches the pieces together. Their roommate Rachel will take breaks during her full-time job and join them on the sewing machine she brought from her parents’ house.

Frazier says they’ve been able to send out 208 masks and have asked buyers to provide feedback so they can fix design flaws. They hope to help their community more as the pandemic continues.

“I know that this project is going to end,” Frazier says. “It’s not one of the types of businesses that starts, and that’s the beginning, and you go on. I guess we just adjust based on how people react.” W

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April 15, 2020

9

From business owners to bartenders, artists to undocumented immigrants, our neighbors are trying to figure out—and survive— the coronavirus’s economic chaos

The

LefT Behind

10

April 15, 2020

INDYweek.com

W

hen the economy crashed in mid-March, Congress rushed in to save the day with the $2.2 trillion CARES Act. It offered bailouts for big corporations, of course, but also, on the surface, hope for the little guy.

There was nearly $350 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, which offered small businesses forgivable loans to cover two months of payroll and expenses if they kept people working, and an expansion of the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, or EIDL, which would provide businesses with up to $2 million in low-interest loans direct from the Small Business Administration.

The feds also kicked in emergency unemployment help, adding $600-a-week to typically chintzy state unemployment checks through July, making the self-employed and independent contractors eligible for federal benefits, and extending unemployment benefits for up to 39 weeks. And, of course, everyone would receive $1,200.

But—as might be expected of a massive rescue package cobbled together in days—the rollout was a mess of red tape and uncertainty. The PPP chaotically opened to applicants on April 3, with federal rules changing until the last minute and banks overwhelmed by demand. As of Monday, a little over a half-million loans have been approved, but almost no money has been dispersed—and for small, cashstrapped businesses, time is very much of the essence.

The EIDL program, meanwhile, has also been overrun.

Last week, the SBA announced that the top loan amount was no longer $2 million; now, it was $15,000, and desperate applicants have waited weeks to learn if they’d been approved.

State unemployment offices have also been crushed as some 17 million people applied for benefits in the last three weeks, including more than 400,000 in North Carolina.

The $600-a-week federal benefit is supposed to become available this week, but it will take longer for the system to accept independent contractors and the self-employed.

In other words: Some people can’t get help. Some people are anxiously waiting, hoping the cash arrives before their luck runs out. And some people don’t know what’s going on, or what they should do.

Here, we tell 13 of their stories: business owners, artists, photographers, bartenders, restaurant workers, undocumented immigrants, all trying to get by amid an unprecedented economic collapse and a frantic, confusing government response. —Jeffrey C. Billman

Kae Diaz When they’re not behind the bar at Night Rider, Wicked Witch, or Ruby Deluxe, Kae Diaz is booking shows and promoting queer artists. March was supposed to be a killer month, with a beefed-up calendar promising to be one of the year’s busiest. Then the coronavirus happened, and all of Diaz’s work vanished into thin air.

And when Governor Cooper closed the state’s bars on March 17, Diaz was laid off.

They immediately tried applying for unemployment but weren’t able to log on to the government website “because it was so busy all the time.” A week later, they finally submitted their application. That was three weeks ago. They still haven’t heard if the application has been approved.

“It’s really hard to have any kind of emergency fund at all, so we’re running on fumes,” Diaz says. “It’s scary.”

While Diaz scraped together enough money to pay March’s bills with help from their former boss and donations from a fund for the venue’s staff, that won’t cover April’s rent. The four roommates with whom Diaz shares a downtown Raleigh home were also in the service industry and are in the same boat.

While their landlord said she wouldn’t kick them out “right away,” she asked for at least a partial payment for April, Diaz says. But with no unemployment benefits—and still waiting on their $1,200 check from the federal government— Diaz is worried paying rent will mean forgoing other necessities, like food.

That looming dread, however, is eclipsed by another fear: Once the pandemic passes, things will never be the same.

“It feels like the day they said the bars were closed, that was the last day of that life,” Diaz says. —Leigh Tauss PHOTO COURTESY OF KAE DIAZ

aaron earley Cricket Forge spent most of 2019 idling.

In late 2018, Aaron Earley and two other employees bought the two-decade-old sculpture, metalwork, and custom-furnishings company from its retiring owner and began moving it from a 90-year-old building in downtown Durham to a newer, larger space near Bennett Place Historic Site. The move itself took months; issues with the landlord, the city-permitting office, and the realtor delayed things even more. All told, they were down for eight months, and by year’s end, their cash-flow projections were a wreck. They hoped the busy spring season would get them back on track.

The coronavirus had other ideas.

They got their ducks in a row so that when PPP launched, they were ready. But the federal guidance kept changing.

“We’ve gone through three iterations since two weeks ago,” Earley said Friday. “We’ve been eligible for three different numbers. Each time there’s a new iteration on the decreasing side. It dropped $20,000, then $30,000, now less than half. It’s not even enough to cover our operating costs for eight weeks.”

Part of the problem is a rule about how much has to go to payroll. Originally, it was half. But the feds changed it to 75 percent. Spend less than that, and the loan won’t be fully forgiven. With a large building and eight employees, Cricket Forge spends equally on rent and payroll, and more still on materials. That kept them from applying for as much money as they really needed.

They sent their application off on April 6. They haven’t received an approval notice yet. They’re probably going to apply for an EIDL, too. “At this point, we’re working with our advisers finding any and all means of survival,” Earley says.

The owners furloughed their employees, some of whom have worked there for 20 years. Earley and his two partners are working without pay. Most of the retailers that sell their tables and chairs and wall hangings have closed.

The company is scraping by on custom jobs: people working from home who are updating their houses.

And they’re waiting.

“Our future’s not looking too good,” Earley says. “We’re doing what we can to skate by.” —Jeffrey C. Billman

alan Gill

PHOTO COURTESY OF ALAN GILL

For most people, Wednesday is distinguished only by its distance from the weekend. But for comic-book collectors, it’s the pinnacle of the week: the day that the omnipotent Diamond Comic Distributors ordained long ago as new-comics day. When the distributor halted shipping on April 1, it shut down the industry, resulting in the first weeks anyone remembers without new comics since weekly comics were born. (Not even World War II pulled that off, according to a report in The Daily Beast.)

“It’s not only that they’re not shipping, they’re not even printing,” Alan Gill says. “People are creatures of habit, and when you’re unemployed or depressed or in a breakup, you always had comics on Wednesday as a constant. Now that’s gone?”

As the owner of both Ultimate Comics—which has shops in Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Cary—and NC Comicon, Gill is in the thick of this unprecedented publishing gap. His stores are closed, and he’s laid off all but three of his staff, gambling that they can do better through unemployment than backed-up payroll relief.

He’s been able to keep his warehouse open because, as a distributor of packing and shipping supplies, it’s an essential business. With people stuck at home with no new comics to buy, he’s doing brisk business in backstock online, and his largest expense—buying new comics—is gone. So far, Marvel and DC have suspended digital publishing, the bane of physical retailers. It’s tenable, but only if it’s temporary.

“I don’t want to paint a rainbow picture,” Gill says. “I want my people to come back to work, and I miss working in the store. I’m doing a lot of work to make 30 percent of the money.”

If Diamond starts shipping or the big companies resume digital publishing before the shutdown ends, though, Gill might be in trouble.

“I could ship, but it’s gonna be a clusterfuck and probably not worth it,” Gill says. “I would do it because I want my customers buying my physical books and not going to digital.”

And while Ultimate might weather the storm better than smaller independent shops, NC Comicon represents a huge potential loss. The Raleigh edition in May is off, and Gill has doubts about November in Durham.

“When the Raleigh Convention Center said they’re not going to open, that’s great, I get my deposit back,” Gill says. “But I’ve got to find a way to pay back all my vendors. Their money was used to pay advertising and other stuff I’m not getting back, and I can’t just declare bankruptcy and tell all these vendors, my friends, hey, I’m not going to pay you.” —Brian Howe

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April 15, 2020

11

Freddie Lee Jacobs Freddie Lee Jacobs was born and raised in West Durham, and he’s been a barber in the neighborhood since 2000. He was having a tough time even before the coronavirus shut down Blonthell’s, a beauty salon on Chapel Hill Road where he rents a chair.

The soft-spoken barber says he and the shop’s stylists were told they’d be fined if the place remained open after Durham’s stay-at-home order took effect on March 26. Jacobs says he was just starting to rebuild his clientele—last June, the building where he’d run his own shop for the last 19 years was sold—and his old customers had started to return.

“Now I’m just laying around the house, getting fat, eating, and sleeping,” he says.

Jacobs says his girlfriend of 15 years has been his anchor during the shutdown.

“She tells me, ‘Just hold on. We’ll be all right.’ She’s out of work, too,” he says. “If it weren’t for her, I’d be up dookie creek.”

—Thomasi McDonald

KathLeen MaKena

Maria At 22, Maria (not her real name) crossed the border from Mexico hoping to get an education and secure a better life for herself and her young daughter. In the two decades since, she’s stayed under the government’s radar and avoided immigration authorities.

She lives in Raleigh with her daughter. Because it was difficult to find work beyond low-paying hourly jobs, she started a baking business. But when the coronavirus shut down the economy, her customers disappeared. Unlike other self-employed workers, PHOTO COURTESY OF MARIA Maria had nowhere to turn for help.

She pays taxes, but she won’t receive a stimulus check because she doesn’t have a social security number. Even if she could access benefits, she says, she wouldn’t risk alerting authorities of her whereabouts.

“It is truly a myth that my community lives off of government assistance, and I encourage anyone who believes that myth to try applying for assistance with a fake social security number,” she says. “It is truly impossible.”

With no money coming in, the bills are starting to pile up. Maria hopes her landlord will cut her a break, but she hasn’t worked up the courage to ask.

“I had some savings that allowed me to get through, but I’m definitely at a breaking point,” she says. “I was able to pay my rent last month, and it certainly helped that there has been a pause on utility payments, but I know I have to pay those back, and next month, I’m definitely not going to make it.” —Leigh Tauss

“

The bad news is that it’s been a month since Kathleen Makena saw her last client on March 17. The good news is that she’s confident her clients—most of whom come in for monthly facials at her private solo practice—will be waiting for her on the other side.

“I have the most amazing clients in the world, and I have been able to have a very busy, successful business,” she says.

Some clients have sent money or offered to pay for future appointments in advance— offers she’s turned down. “So many people are in the same boat, and it can always be worse,” she says.

Makena has seen the anxiety of other estheticians and beauty providers, who, like her, have not received word about their unemployment status and don’t have the crowdfunding resources other industries have seen. Because Makena’s bank, Wells Fargo, stopped taking PPP applications, she’s applied for one through Radius Bank. She also applied for an EIDL. “I went through a lot financially in 2008 when we had the last craziness,” Makena says. “I worked very hard to get myself in a position that if something major happened again, I would be OK for a few weeks. Not indefinitely, but I’m definitely OK for a few weeks.”

She feels lucky not to have pre-existing debt, and she’s thankful that her dog, Carter, who just had surgery, will not require the additional $4,000 operation that the vets anticipated. Now that her paperwork is out the door—unemployment, her EIDL, her PPP—she’s home caring for Carter. And waiting.

“Raleigh is a really strong community, and we were built by helping each other and being a community,” Makenna says. “I have every faith that we will get back to that.”

—Sarah Edwards

It’s a full-time job being unemployed.

12

April 15, 2020

INDYweek.com

braiMa Moiwai Before the lockdown, Braima Moiwai had a full slate lined up: residencies, afterschool programs, drum circles. And just like that, it was gone.

A native of Sierra Leone who moved to Durham nearly 35 years ago, Moiwai now spends his time applying for federal assistance and state unemployment benefits.

He’s nearly completed a small business loan application, and he’s applied for funds from NorthStar Church of the Arts.

A drummer, storyteller, and fabric artist, Moiwai says he’s struggled with anxiety since learning that a close friend is battling COVID-19 in London.

“He has kidney issues and hypertension,” Moiwai says. “This is really taking the juice out of me. He’s alone. His loved ones can’t go near him. Once they take you [into the hospital], that’s it.”

Moiwai has worked for over a decade conducting drum circles with patients admitted to the psych ward at UNC hospitals. That’s his main source of income. A hospital official recently sent him a check for $200 to purchase groceries.

He’s also been on the phone with his internet provider and car insurer to make sure he can stay connected and drive legally.

“People should know that if you pick up the phone, they will work with you,” he says. “After this month, I don’t have rent money. I have to hold on to my little change for food.” —Thomasi McDonald

season Moore Portrait photography is personal. You can use a wide-lens camera, but ultimately, the details—fixing lipstick smudges, tucking hair, adjusting positions—require a more intimate touch than six feet of distance allows. And so Season Moore, a Raleighbased portrait photographer, has been out of work since the beginning of March.

She’s checked with her landlord about suspending rent (no), with her bank about applying for a PPP loan (also no), and sought unemployment (unclear).

“Right now it’s a full-time job being unemployed and trying to access any of this so-called help we’re supposed to get,” Moore says.

Applying for unemployment as a self-employed person has proved a bureaucratic nightmare.

North Carolina doesn’t give benefits to the self-employed or to independent contractors, although the CARES Act Congress passed in March will award them federal benefits, likely beginning later this month.

To get benefits sooner—and to get the combined state and federal money, rather than just the $600-a-week from the feds—Moore had to set up an account as the owner of her business, and then wait for account approval via snail mail so that she could declare herself, as her only employee, unemployed. When she received the approval, it listed a deadline two days prior. The penalty for a late application was an increased unemployment tax rate.

“I think I’ve spent the last four days talking to my accountant, talking to the bank, and sick to my stomach,” she says. “When all your friends are business owners and they’re all in it—you know, there’s grief, there’s panic.

On Monday, I finally decided that I’m not getting any help. It is what it is.”

Moore has a lot on her mind. There’s her husband, who works for a small defense contracting company facing financial problems. There’s her 17-year-old son, who is spending his senior year as an unprotected worker at Harris Teeter. There’s her social-butterfly daughter, who is preparing to spend her Sweet 16 in isolation. And then there’s the community she has made over 16 years of taking portraits. She’s frustrated by the dissonance between the people treating the shutdown as a vacation and the other small business owners she knows, none of whom have received unemployment yet.

“I want people to understand that the news is reporting it like, small businesses are fine, they’ve gotten help, they’re OK,” she says. “We’re not OK.” —Sarah Edwards

PRESEN

Nicole oxeNdiNe

PHOTO BY THE INDY

As a small business owner, Nicole Oxendine’s revenues plummeted with the shutdown: no more live classes, studio rentals, or summer camps at downtown Durham’s Empower Dance Studio, and major disruptions in arts-consulting jobs for Rocky Mount Mills and the company that owns Northgate Mall.

Still, she’s relatively sanguine.

That’s because Oxendine is a detail-oriented person with five years in business to help her navigate the ever-changing sea of relief acronyms. She says she can’t imagine what it’s like for less-experienced, less-organized entrepreneurs. And even if she receives all the aid she’s pursuing, it will only be a fraction of her usual income.

“If this would have hit me a few years ago, there’s no way I would have been prepared to have the information and documents they’re asking for,” she says. “If you have it, it’s easy to send off the PPP, if you have a relationship with your bank. If you didn’t have that already, it’s difficult to get access.”

The application for the PPP changed several times after she first submitted it on April 7, requiring additional information. If she receives it, it won’t be enough to cover her payroll, any more than the EIDL, from which she says she could receive up to $10,000, will cover her $66,000 in projected revenue.

In the meantime, there’s plenty of work to do. Empower has started online classes to keep students engaged and employees paid, but tuition has been slashed by 50 percent.

Virtual learning doesn’t work for everyone, and enrollment is down.

“We found it was harder to engage the younger group,” Oxendine says. “I had to comfort a three-year-old because she didn’t understand how dance was going to be in the computer.”

Oxendine is preparing to launch an Empower YouTube channel, too. Optimistically, she’s thinking of virtual dance classes as an investment that will pay off beyond the shutdown, though it comes with costs: paying for Zoom and microphones; she also wants to get a greenscreen.

But Oxendine says she doesn’t want to lose sight of the long game in the short panic.

“I want to stay on top of whatever assistance is out there, but I also want to think about what my business is going to look like after this, so it’s a delicate balance,” she says. “This has forced me to slow down, release the schedule, and be present. It’s actually been a little liberating. Some days, it’s super frustrating, and it’s like, I’m not going to do a loan application today, just be.” —Brian Howe

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April 15, 2020

13

Kenneth Yowell

Allie Pfeffer

PHOTO BY ZOE LITAKER

As artists and servers facing the coronavirus wipeout go, Allie Pfeffer has it OK. Though she’s a dancer, she didn’t have money tied up in a dance project when the world shut down. She’s a bartender at Pizzeria Toro and Jack Tar, and her employer, Gray Brooks, is providing his laid-off staff with regular meals and CSA-style groceries. Those with benefits, such as Pfeffer, keep them. And her unemployment checks have already started coming.

The state unemployment checks she’s getting now amount to a third of her usual income, but things should improve once the $600-a-week federal benefit kicks in. It runs through the end of July. Who knows how long the shutdown will last—or what the new normal will look like?

Pfeffer’s situation illustrates the difference that a caring employer can make as employees navigate the unfamiliar, crashy waters of federal and independent relief.

“How do you transcribe high-pitched maniacal laughter?” Pfeffer says, remembering her first reaction to the shutdown. “It was surreal tinged with mild panic. I’ve never been laid off before, so I didn’t know anything about the process of filing for unemployment.”

Like many others, Pfeffer weathered a day of 15-minute page loads and failures before she got her unemployment application through by getting up in the middle of the night.

She also applied to several local relief funds for service workers. So far, those time-consuming efforts have netted her $100 from the Service Industry Relief Fund North Carolina. It was a single downloadable form instead of a website to navigate, but other local funds had overloaded sites. The low-return toil takes a psychological toll.

“It feels kind of demeaning to sit in front of my computer hitting refresh,” Pfeffer says. “It’s hard, virtually begging for money from no one in front of my blank computer screen.

I can’t even, like, make my case to a person.” —Brian Howe 14

April 15, 2020

INDYweek.com

Kenneth Yowell doesn’t want to be the government’s middleman.

As best he can determine, that’s what filing for the PPP program would make him. Small business owners jump through hoops to get the loan, but the money they get is redistributed to their employees and landlords; because he’s an owner, he’s not eligible for state unemployment, though he will be eligible for expanded federal benefits.

“So we have to hope that federal unemployment comes through at some point in the future,” he posted on Facebook on April 6, three days after PPP applications opened.

“Until then, enjoy your new job as an unemployment funds distributor. And BTW, if you mess up any paperwork while trying to do the right thing by your staff, you can be held liable, and it will convert to a loan that you’re on the hook for.”

Then, by the end of June, his restaurant, Oak City Meatball Shoppe, would have to be fully staffed again. But that presumes that the restaurant industry has fully recovered by then. Fat chance. “You want to hire every one of your employees back, but you don’t have the sales to support that,” he says.

If he violates the terms, he’ll have to pay back part of the loan over just two years—before the feds rewrote the rules, it was supposed to be 10—without the sales to meet that obligation. All the while, he’ll be living off credit cards.

“I think what ends up happening is, your corporate fastfood places are going to survive, your super-high-end-experience-dining restaurants are gonna survive,” Yowell says.

“Places like us are gonna have a tough time coming back.

Landlords will have gotten paid, utilities gotten paid, but restaurant sales will be 25 percent of what it was before.”

Because restaurants operate on tight margins, he adds, even at 50 percent of pre-coronavirus revenue, “it’ll be a bloodbath in the business.”

Despite those trepidations, he applied. But Wells Fargo quickly stopped processing PPP. So he went to North State and got things rolling.

When everything shut down, Yowell was also in the process of turning his other restaurant, Calavera, into an event space for weddings, drag brunches, ghost kitchens, and so on. This was the nail in its coffin. For the time being, he turned over the space to a group producing and donating masks to hospitals, homeless shelters, and other places that need them.

Oak City Meatball Shoppe is fortunate to do decent takeout and delivery revenue, he says—about a quarter of what it saw before. If you want delivery, Yowell says, don’t go through a delivery app. For starters, they take 20–30 percent commissions on top of a delivery fee—and have refused to reduce them amid the crisis. Besides, if an Oak City driver delivers your food, that’s someone else Yowell can keep employed.

“We are still trying to stay open and keeping staff employed,” he says. “Trying to navigate all of this is still difficult—trying to hold everything else together, keep the doors open every day.” —Jeffrey C. Billman

JesicA sAncheZ

PHOTO COURTESY OF JESICA SANCHEZ

Jesica Sanchez always wanted to be a tattoo artist. After working for years as a cook, she finally scored an apprenticeship in Raleigh. She lived out of her car and moved around, learning the trade. She had recently gotten a job at Golden Coils, a new tattoo and piercing parlor in Raleigh when the coronavirus pandemic forced the business to close.

“I was actually more prepared for this than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know what I’d do if I hadn’t just reached that point of mild stability,” Sanchez says.

She’s been out of work for almost a month. So far things have been pretty quiet. Some coworkers have applied for unemployment benefits but haven’t been approved. She doesn’t have a computer, so she hasn’t been able to file the paperwork. She hasn’t tried the phone number; the state’s website is vague about that process, she says.

Besides, she’s not yet in dire straits. She’s single and rents a room—no kids or mortgage payments to worry about. She OK for now, but she’s not sure what will happen if the shutdown continues much longer.

“I don’t have a lot more than a month and a half of bills saved up,” Sanchez says. “We’re all pretty much paycheck to paycheck. None of us have worked since [the outbreak], and I don’t expect them to let us go back to work, so we are just kind of in the dark.” —Leigh Tauss

lindA ZuKowsKi Social distancing is, of course, impossible in the massage business. So on March 14, with the coronavirus beginning to close bars and restaurants, Linda Zukowski closed Metamorphic Massage for Women, too.

“I can be up to 60 percent prenatal massages in my business. That’s a high-risk population,” Zukowski says. Her second biggest clientele group: women over 50. “Another high-risk population. I didn’t want to be responsible for spreading it.”

A week later, when Governor Cooper shut down all nonessential businesses, she started her unemployment application. But as a small business owner, the process was complicated, she says. She finally finished it last week.

“As small business owners, we don’t know what’s going to happen with us,” she says. “We don’t know if we’re going to get any money, and if we do, what we’re going to get.

I’ve applied, but I’m in limbo with the system, and I know the system is overwhelmed, so it’s probably going to take them a while to get to people, especially those of us who are self-employed.” —Leigh Tauss W

M U SIC

Dan Bryk

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Almost Famous Dan Bryk’s life in false starts and near misses as told by his Wikipedia page BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

A

dam Schlesinger, who died of COVID-19 complications on April 1, is best known from Fountains of Wayne, but that was just one of his adventures in the music industry.

Another was Scratchie Records, the label he cofounded with some other alt-rock stars, including two Smashing Pumpkins, James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky.

Dan Bryk, an idiosyncratic Toronto singer-songwriter who would eventually settle in Durham, was signed to Scratchie. In 1999, he got a call from Schlesinger, who was working on the soundtrack for Loser, a teen comedy starring Jason Biggs and Mena Suvari.

According to Bryk, the obvious theme song, Beck’s “Loser,” had fallen through, and Schlesinger wanted to know if he had anything in his pocket. Naturally, because this is Dan Bryk, he sure did have a song with the words “I’m a loser” in it. He demoed it quickly, FedExing the CD-R off to New York.

Here, narrative form calls for a decisive triumph or defeat. But that just wouldn’t be a Dan Bryk story.

Bryk is a gifted indie piano man, a nerdy-Ben-Folds-meets-louche-Randy-Newman type whose off-kilter confessions come swathed in a sweet voice and a sweeter falsetto. His 2001 album Lovers Leap got an A-minus from Robert Christgau in Rolling Stone when that still

mattered. It’s a lost indie-pop classic full of cockeyed odes to computer programmers and “chunky girls”—“the kind who’s just my size,” Bryk sings—where even tender ballads like “Memo to Myself” make room for a little heavy petting and Leonard Cohen. (Weight is a recurring theme in Bryk’s songs; he used to call his home studio Flabby Road.)

Lovers Leap was a commercial high-water mark, and it took him as far as Japan with Stephen Malkmus. Still, it sold poorly, a textbook victim of what Bryk aptly calls the “the major-label faux-indie-rock gold rush.”

It’s not on modern streaming services for the same reason. He made a great record in the wrong place at the right time. Classic Bryk.

Regarding “Loser,” Schlesinger reported back that the movie folks were looking for a finished master, not a demo, though they liked the song. “I’m sure they didn’t, lol,” Bryk wrote, in his usual self-deprecating fashion, when he posted the demo on his website several days after Schlesinger died.

“But Adam was master of the soft letdown.”

After Lovers Leap foundered, Bryk kept at it, off and on. During his first stint living in the Triangle, in the mid-2000s, he earned local notoriety with a song about Cherie Berry and made a Christmas record to benefit Raleigh music education. He released Pop Psychology, his last record to date, on his own label in 2009, had a kid, and promptly abandoned album promotion to be a stayat-home Dadvocate in New York. After one year in Tanzania (Bryk’s wife, Erin McGinn, works for an NGO) and two in Washington, D.C., the family landed back in Durham, where they’ve lived since 2016.

Bryk has been fairly quiet since then, but that changed on April 5, when he released the 1999 “Loser” demo and a 2019 demo called “The Elements of Style.” Since then, he’s released an archival track per day, conjuring projects and albums that might have been if not for label-and-immigration woes, wrong turns and bad luck, and his lifelong insecurity, which he’s been reconsidering in light of discovering that he has ADHD. It seemed like the perfect time to introduce you to the best local singer-songwriter you’ve never heard. We decided to do so by drawing our questions from Bryk’s surprisingly detailed, surprisingly accurate Wikipedia page. When you’re a real original adrift in the music industry, truth is stranger than fiction, but these tracks might spur a second or third act in Bryk’s career. With any luck.

INDY: At age eight, did you briefly receive piano lessons from Earl Mlotek at the Toronto Royal Conservatory of Music but drop out due to hyperactivity and unwillingness to practice?

DAN BRYK: I think it’s pronounced “mo-tek.”

Maybe this is where the ADHD story comes in. I’ve started some mindfulness training to combat something which really seems to have been a self-limiting factor my whole life.

The amount of negative messages a kid gets because of ADHD—I’ve dealt with some crippling insecurity and lack of confidence in my musical work, sort of self-sabotage.

Where do you think Wikipedia got the idea that you stopped because of hyperactivity if you’re only discovering that in recent years?

I feel like I wrote that in a blog entry a long time ago. There’s a super-long interview I did with PopMatters, I think some of this came from that. There are a bunch of Toronto people that are really possessive or proud of me [laughs]. I know some of them are really active on Wikipedia and Discogs and stuff.

Did you establish a recording club and record your music under the name The Cunning Linguists at St. Martin’s High School?

Yes! The Cunning Linguists was me and my friend Mike Feraco. We were really into New Romantic synth stuff: The Associates, Depeche Mode, Human League. Kids today are so spoiled because they’ve got every synth in the world on their laptop. If I had the resources back then that I have today, I might have actually sounded decent [laughs].

Did you give an edgy solo debut performance at St. Martin’s 1988 Battle of the Bands that was censored by Mississauga Cable 10 community-access television?

This is true! I spent so much time in the music department without being in a music class. The music teacher kind of tolerated me because he could tell I was creative, even if I was a two-fingers-with-each-hand style of songwriter. I always had better ideas than discipline to practice.

I was supposed to play this battle of the bands with a three-piece band of older guys I’d befriended in Toronto. But as we got closer to the date, I think they realized, oh, man, we’ve gotta actually go up to Mississauga and play at a high school? So they canceled, and I scrambled and sequenced a set. Stayed up all night, hooked up drum machines. I KeepItINDY.com

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had one song which was kind of like a rap.

It had a four-bar loop from “It Takes Two,” and I swore, which probably wasn’t cool with the school. When people realized cable was going to broadcast it, it became a thing, like, we’re gonna get to see Bryk swear! But they just cut off my set before the last song.

Did you hungrily devour jazz and popular music under Prof. Howard Spring at the University of Guelph?

Yeah, once again, I was the person who was in the music department without being in it. The only 100 I ever received was from him. Later on, I said, why? And he said, in the years I offered this course, you’re the only person who wrote the essay on country music in the final exam. Instead of doing my studies, I spent a lot of time in the library going through microfiches of Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. Professor Spring’s course was like a slingshot into country music, which I liked in that snotty-undergrad “Hank Snow not Garth Brooks” way.

I didn’t actually graduate from Gulph then.

I got hired as a graphic designer when I was in school, and they were like, you could finish your degree and pay for that, or you can come learn stuff here. That bit me on the ass much later, when I moved to America.

Did you move to downtown Toronto in 1994 and break into the scene with Dan Bryk, Asshole?

Totally, as any aspiring bohemian would. I did Dan Bryk, Asshole as a cassette and also an eight-track. That was a bit of a stunt, but it picked up a bit of press.

Did a CBC Radio 2 RealTime session in 1997 result in you signing to Scratchie?

Yeah, I had called in periodically to this live Saturday-night national radio show which focused on big Canadian indie music. They were marvelous people and took pity on me. They started playing Asshole a bit, and they were doing a series, sort of like Peel Sessions, and asked me to do one. My manager was like, I could put a band together for you, and I’d already been playing with Kurt Swinghammer. He’s one of my heroes in Toronto, so the fact that he played on my stuff was kind of like Brian Eno and Gordon Lightfoot rolled into one being a fan.

Those were the songs I handed to [label cofounder] Adam Schlesinger after a Fountains of Wayne gig. A month later, I’m at work, and my coworker’s like, James Iha is on the phone for you. He was really cool and low-key. He really just wanted to talk about Randy Newman. Mojo used to do “The Best Thing I’ve Heard All Year” every Decem16

April 15, 2020

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ber, and Adam gave my CD-R as his favorite thing of the year, and it picked up steam.

So his label, Scratchie, offered me a deal, and the best of intentions turned into a real textbook music-business story.

Adam, honest to god, was the hardest-working man in show business. He turned me on to so much stuff and always had an iron in the fire. If I’d had his works habits, I would’ve—I don’t know what [laughs].

[Major label] Mercury wanted Scratchie because those guys were hot, and then they started to be less hot, and the deal cooled, but I was stuck in that deal. Scratchie was this artist-centered label, but the contracts were Mercury boilerplate. The whole experience was of the era, the major-label faux-indie-rock gold rush. Mercury and Universal and Polygram merged, and everyone responsible for the Scratchie deal was fired. It turned into a mess, and I ended up sitting on Lovers Leap for years while they were trying to extract themselves. They weren’t going to push any of the records, so Adam was like, there’s no point in putting this record out and letting it die.

It’s really hard to have a business relationship with your hero, which is why Adam passing without us having more than cordial hellos in a couple of years is really rough. To other people, he was a genius, but to me, he was like a mentor. Losing him and Daniel Johnston in a year—that’s like my alpha and omega, my yin and yang. That’s my fucked-up side and my professional side, and I’m always stuck in the middle. I haven’t been able to listen to any Prine, any of Adam’s stuff. I don’t know if I can handle it yet.

When Scratchie finally independently released Lovers Leap in 2000, did it receive a positive review from Robert Christgau in Rolling Stone and meager sales?

Yeah, all the people at Scratchie who worked on the Fountains of Wayne stuff had to take better jobs. So I ended up with the really well-meaning but less-connected people.

I remember the day that Adam called me and said, Christgau’s coming to your gig at The Knitting Factory tomorrow, don’t fuck up [laughs]. And I was on tour when someone called and said, hey, man, you got an A-minus from Christgau. After being this gadfly, like who does that guy think he is, in Toronto, to rate with Christgau was such a huge deal.

Did you tour Japan with Stephen Malkmus and have radio hits there?

Yeah, it was awesome and surreal. I felt like Thom Yorke, sitting in a room for five hours a day of interviews. I took Erin, my then-girlfriend, now-wife, and I think she got a really unreasonable expectation of what the

trajectory of my career would be, based on being spotted in the street and playing for thousands of people. Once again, in Canada, it was like, oh, they like him somewhere else, maybe we need to pay attention to him.

Did you move to Durham but settle in Raleigh in 2003, and what’s up with that weird equivocation?

We rented in Durham and then decided to buy a place in Brier Creek. I had been in Toronto, still on Scratchie, doing demos.

Adam kept saying, we’re doing this deal with New Line Cinema, so hang in there, because if that happens we’ll have a decent budget.

Then Erin got offered a gig in RTP. I was in this other band called The American Flag. It was these two high school kids that had made a record Bob Pollard put out on Rockathon. These kids put together a band of Toronto scenesters they were fans of, so that’s how I ended up in that. We opened all these gigs for Guided by Voices on U.S. tours. Because of that, I had a musician visa that lasted a year, and then you renewed it. But 9/11 happened, and they started yanking visas from Canadians.

I came down to New York City for a wedding and the guy at the border stopped me with my suitcase of recording gear. He said, how do I know you’re not going to New York to record bands and make money? So I was refused entry. Then you have a flag on you, and my musician visa expired, and it became a real headache. I realized if I was going to stay with Erin, I needed a job. I had to finish my BFA to get an actual work visa. I could literally only be a graphic designer. I couldn’t play any shows or act as if I was a musician, including online. So in the nascent Myspace days, I had to be really low-key. It took a few years until I got a green card in 2006.

Did you get dropped by Scratchie after it was acquired by New Line?

New Line asked for more demos, and the first set I gave them is on my Bandcamp as Mississauga Rattler. The word I got back from Adam was like, there’s not really any ringers here, I want you to dig deeper and give me elemental Dan Bryk songs. New Line didn’t hear the ca-ching of any cash registers.

If I’d stayed in Canada and been more active in that time—well I shouldn’t say I was inactive. I put out a handful of good records by other people on my label, Urban Myth.

Did you give a song about Cherie Berry to WKNC as Tha Commissioners and only admit it was you when the e-mails were found to originate from your computer?

I think that was the story [laughs]. The

co-hosts goaded me into the pseudonymous pretense. They started playing “Cherry Berry” six times a day, and it picked up steam. It actually turned into a heartbreak for me, because Swinghammer had written a song, “The Signature of Marilyn Churley,” about being seduced by the signature of the minister responsible for elevators [in Toronto]. On some level, I forgot that that was the inspiration, and Kurt got really mad, like I stole his idea. And because it turned into this media cause célèbre, people perceived that it was more of a success than it was.

It’s kind of weird getting the front page of The News & Observer over this goofy thing I did in an afternoon. But it’s typical Dan Bryk luck. Every silver lining has a black cloud.

Is The Old Ceremony’s song “Stubborn Man” about you?

I think it’s a composite. I remember Django [Haskins] saying something like, oh, man, there’s a song you’ll hear tonight, I think you’ll know what it’s about. (Haskins says: Ha! I’ve never heard that. No, it was about— wait for it—me. But in another sense, it was about every one of us who continues on this path despite the obvious difficulties. So I guess it is about him as well. I do love DB.”) Does “Stubborn Man” reflect you?

Um, yeah, probably. I’ve probably erred on the side of thinking that “recalcitrant and prickly” was good promo, and it probably hasn’t been. It comes back to this whole ball of ADHD stuff; over the years I’ve made a persona which has more to do with being fundamentally insecure. There’s not a day in the music business without a small indignity. But I guess I’m having the last laugh, because what music industry?

Tell me about these “coronavirus archives” tracks you’ve been releasing.

It sounds silly saying I’m a perfectionist because part of my whole thing is that it’s a bit off-kilter. But I just haven’t been able to part with a lot of things. I don’t play guitar after all these years, lord knows I’ve tried. I’m still just a keyboard player. So I have a lot of things that are done except guitar. I’m releasing one a day until I run out or the songs start sucking too much.

I figured I’d do this for a couple weeks and see if anyone was interested. Honestly, losing a bunch of people to coronavirus and other stuff has made me realize that if I died tomorrow, I do have a lot of stuff that people might find interesting while I’m alive. This situation was enough to kick me out of a sense that I’ve got to have all this stuff right.

I’d rather just have it out there, I guess. W

FOOD & DR I NK

Reopening

Left to right: co-owners Emmanuel Martinez, Jose Arias, and Francisco Equihua

TORERO’S AUTHENTIC MEXICAN CUISINE

800 W. Main St., Durham | torerosmexicanrestaurants.com

PHOTO BY JEFF BRAMWELL

Why Not Now? One year ago, Torero’s closed amid tragedy. Now, it’s reopening amid another one.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

A

year ago last week, a gas leak in Durham’s Brightleaf Square exploded, killing two, injuring 25, and damaging 15 businesses while leveling a city block. It’s taken a year for Torero’s Authentic Mexican Cuisine, nestled at the corner of Main Street and North Duke Street, to be ready to reopen. There were countless inspections, building delays, and finally, an opening date—late April or early May. And then came the coronavirus, which leveled the entire restaurant industry at large.

“We’ve wanted to open since the end of last year,” says Torero’s co-owner Emmanuel Martinez. “But there was still work to do, repairs inside, and we couldn’t. After that, the coronavirus came. We still want to reopen because we love to serve customers and the community. And we also have to pay bills, to pay rent.”

The Durham Torero’s, which represents one-sixth of the Triangle restaurant chain, has been open since 1994.

If you stepped inside prior to April 2019, you’d find a clay-red interior brightly speckled with murals. The menu, which boasts that it’s the “best Mexican cuisine in

Durham,” was filled with generously portioned traditional dishes. Heaping plates of yellow rice and refried beans.

Fajitas swimming in sauce. A whole fish fried with salt and lemon. For $10.99, you could get toasted on a pitcher of margaritas. It was a community spot and, for Durham’s Hispanic community, something like a second home.

A year after its closing, Martinez says he can still spot a regular and remember their order.

“There’s a Hispanic atmosphere around,” he says. “I like the restaurant, I like how we work.”

Martinez was in Torero’s, alongside five employees, when a contractor around the corner struck a gas line on April 10, 2019, while boring into the sidewalk. Martinez was preparing to write a check, he recalls, when a firefighter came in and the explosion detonated. It could be heard for miles around. No one on staff was injured, but the damage was considerable: The ceiling ruptured, the windows shattered, and the building was ultimately condemned.

And so Martinez, alongside co-owners Jose Arias and Francisco Equihua, began a year-long journey of rebuild-

ing what they had lost. In January, neighboring restaurant Saint James Seafood—which had also been condemned—was able to reopen, backed by an outpouring of community support.

Torero’s was preparing to follow suit when Governor Cooper announced that all dine-in restaurants had to close on March 17. The first week after the news broke, a wave of fundraisers swept the community, as people rallied to support service workers, many of whom are uninsured and underpaid. Many area restaurants pivoted immediately to takeout and delivery, although this model—championed nationwide as a way to keep local economies afloat—is not without fault lines.

For one, takeout still puts restaurant workers, both those making the food and those delivering it, at risk of exposure. Modifying the menu has its complications.

Delivery containers, like toilet paper and hand sanitizer, are in short supply. Most of all, it is difficult to make the operating costs balance out the profit.

Next door, Saint James opted not to experiment with takeout.

Restaurant analysts predict that 75 percent of independently owned restaurants will not survive the coronavirus closure. This is a bleak forecast for the food and service industry and, in particular, for restaurants like Torero’s—colorful community gathering spaces already operating on a tight margin. In The New York Times, the restaurateur David Chang put it bluntly: “Without government intervention, there will be no service industry.”

Still, Martinez says that he is hopeful that Torero’s can pull through. Opening the restaurant is an act of faith. He has been at Torero’s for the long haul: He began work as a waiter at a different location in 2007 and worked there until 2016 when he joined the restaurant as an owner.

Martinez says he hopes to rehire most of the original staff that the restaurant had last April, and he feels optimistic about community turnout. He plans to open with a takeout menu and operate that way until restaurants are allowed to open their doors for sit-down meals.

“We have regular customers that ordered takeout,” Martinez says. “Some that have been there for 25 years. They know the menu, they know how it works. We feel confident that we’re going to have customers.”

Since the explosion, the outpouring of support has been tremendous. Most people write the restaurant to express a simple message: They love Torero’s and can’t wait to come back and sit in one of the colorful booths. Others ask for recipes; they want to recreate Torero’s meals at home. When the restaurant first posted, back in September, that it would open in the spring, the post was greeted with a flood of likes and comments.

“Good news,” wrote one commenter, “that the corner will be alive again!” W KeepItINDY.com

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FOOD & DR I NK

Recipe

The Ritual Kingfisher is closed, but its owners still want to show you a good time

BY SARAH EDWARDS

sedwards@indyweek.com

S

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ean Umstead and Michelle Vanderwalker know the power of a ritual.

When the pair opened downtown Durham cocktail haunt Kingfisher in July 2019, they wanted it to be a spot that reflected the community and the joy of celebration. In normal times, there are women-led events on Sundays, jazz nights on Tuesdays, with talks and tastings sprinkled throughout.

“The community shifts and changes,” Umstead says. “Because we try and program in a particular way, hopefully it means that anytime anyone walks in, they feel like they can be part of the community.”

Kingfisher closed down two days before the statewide mandate of restaurant and bar closures. It wasn’t an easy decision; for bar owners, the shutdown means treading a lot of water. Vanderwalker has continued to make pottery—she makes all the ware in the bar—and generates some revenue that way. Still, there is no take-out option, no certain way to make ends meet.

The day they closed, Umstead and Vanderwalker decided to crack open a cold one.

They opened Instagram Live and began a virtual happy hour—part mixology class, part daily hang. They haven’t missed a happy hour since.

So while all semblances of normalcy may have dissolved, if you go to Kingfisher’s Instagram Live story at 4:30 every day, you can find the pair mixing drinks and dishing out cocktail tricks. It’s a warm ritual and boozy reprieve.

Virtually, the barflies gather, genially heckling Umstead or debating mixology questions in the comments. But while the cocktail community can sometimes feel like an intimidating top-shelf group, Umstead’s ethos is all about improvising and shaking the pantry down. Trade this liquor, swap this herb out, stir, rinse, repeat.

Kingfisher’s Pantry Swizzle PHOTO COURTESY OF KINGFISHER

“The ritual is super important and gives people something to look forward to,” Vanderwalker says. “It gives a marker for each day. For us, too—we have to get dressed!”

Pantry Swizzle

3 oz Boissiere Extra Dry Vermouth .5 oz White Tea Syrup (can be swapped for other teas) 1 oz lime juice 12 young mint leaves (can be swapped for other herbs) Combine the white tea syrup and mint leaves in the bottom of a tall glass. Lightly press the mint with a muddler or wooden spoon for 5 seconds. Add the lime juice and dry vermouth. Top with crushed ice and lightly agitate until the liquid level comes to within 0.5 inches of the top of the ice.

White Tea Syrup

1 bag white tea 5 oz water 4 oz sugar (by weight) Bring water to a boil. Remove from heat and let rest for 1 minute. Add a teabag. After the tea steeps for 1 minute, discard the tea bag and add sugar. Stir to dissolve. W

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HISTORY TRIVIA: • The Medical Society of North Carolina, the oldest professional organization in NC, was established on April 16, 1849 with Dr. Edmund Strudwick as the first president. One of the goals of the society was to help professionalize the practice of medicine.

• On April 20, 1898, NC’s first long-distance transmission of electricity took place when the Fries Manufacturing and Power Company transmitted electricity to Arista textile mill, 13 miles from the hydroelectric dam on the Yadkin River.

• On April 24, 1913, the Durham Bulls, formerly the Durham Tobacconists, played their first baseball game as the Bulls at Hanes Field on the Trinity College Campus (now Duke East Campus). The Bulls defeated the Raleigh Capitals, 7-4.

• On April 26, 1865, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army in the largest troop surrender of the Civil War on James and Nancy Bennett’s farm, today’s Bennett Place.

Courtesy of the Museum of Durham History

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