Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [18]
Mac Arthur Alexander, the restaurant’s owner, knows nothing about food. His niece, Sharon McKennie, who manages the store and is in charge of the cooking, says, “He wouldn’t know wheat bread from white bread.” When I ask Alexander his favorite dish, he tells me that it’s the liver, which “they deep-fry and then bake a little, or something like that.” Alexander, who is fifty-eight, went to Vietnam in 1968 and returned eight months later without his left leg below the knee, the result of a mortar round that he believes was friendly fire. He now wears a prosthesis, and though he has a limp, most people don’t notice. After coming home, he opened a record store, Mac’s, even though he didn’t know much or care much about music; then he began investing in real estate in Austin, my father-in-law’s old neighborhood. He did well for himself, and decided he wanted to give back to his community. And so in 1997, he opened Mac Arthur’s—in part because there wasn’t a decent restaurant around, and in part because he could hire people from the neighborhood. He now employs sixty-two people. Word has since gotten out on the West Side: Mac Arthur Alexander believes there are second acts in life. “Mac,” says one employee, “aims at the people who’ve had it hard. That’s where he gets his joy. He’ll give ’em nine or ten chances.”
Alexander is reserved, almost shy. He arrives at work each morning, usually in a flannel shirt, and then disappears by the time lunch hour rolls around. Too many people want to talk with him, he says, often about work. Periodically, Alexander gets letters from people in prison, asking him for a job when they get out. Alexander usually obliges, although he knows many of them won’t make it. The turnover, he concedes, is high. But that seems okay with him. There’s a Zen-like quality about Alexander, and when he tells me the story of how a number of years back one of his employees stole three thousand dollars from him, he seems more bemused than agitated, even though he says he has a good idea who did it. (He couldn’t prove it, so he never confronted the employee; he simply had fewer people handle the restaurant’s money.) “I’ve gotten had several times,” he tells me. “But it’s hard for me to fire someone. They usually fire themselves.” People don’t like to disappoint Alexander, so more often than not those who have done so just stop showing up for work.
One morning, I stopped by the restaurant but Alexander wasn’t there. I ended up having coffee with the kitchen manager, Lewis Mosby, whom everyone calls “Cornbread.” Mosby is thickly built from his years lifting weights in prison. He told me that he was fifteen when he first met Alexander; he’d hang around the record shop. Alexander took a liking to him, but Mosby subsequently got in and out of trouble so many times that he grows increasingly soft-spoken and reticent with the telling of his story. As a teenager, he was adept at hot-wiring cars, and he became the in-house car thief for the Disciples, a street gang. He’d acquire an auto—using only a screwdriver—when the gang had to move drugs or guns. Mosby soon got caught, and he served three years for car theft and possession of a gun. He was released, then got arrested again, for possession of a gun, and did another five years. He was released, and then he was involved in a gang shootout, in which a girl was accidentally injured in the crossfire. Mosby, who was arrested for the shooting, had thirteen hundred dollars on him that he couldn’t explain away. He had his attorney call Alexander as a witness, hoping that Alexander would testify that he worked for him at the record shop. But when Alexander took the stand, he refused to lie; he testified that he knew Mosby was a gang member, that he hung out in front of an active drug building, and that he drove a Cadillac that had a television set in the back. Mosby