Jelly Filled Virgin

Jelly filled donuts are both my sword and my shield. There’s something about the glaze that protects the dough from getting bigger than it’s britches. And the jelly inside is familiar. It’s a PBJ sandwich from when I was a kid, but it’s injected into the aorta of a fried bun. The jelly filled donut is so unhealthy, that if it were a living thing, it would be dead by now. It would have passed out in the shower during a diabetic seizure that it caused itself when a person took a bite into it’s crispy, luscious center. I don’t know about you, but when I bite into a jelly filled donut, I don’t fuck around. I wrap my mouth around the center and work backwards.
As a kid, I lived .22 miles from a donut shop that opened at 4AM. It was called Donuts Here, and It was owned by asian people, and my mom didn’t like me going there because “Asians never hold the door for you at Mervyns. And they buy up all the silver.”
But every Saturday and Sunday I woke up around 7. At age 10 I had severe lower back pain brought on by obesity, and I never slept late. I’d go to piggy bank, empty it. .70 cents meant I could have one jelly filled donut and milk. 1.20 meant I could have one jelly filled and one maple bar and milk. But even when I had 1.20, I always impulsively just ordered two jelly filled donuts.
The donut was juicy, and crispy, and chewy all at the same time. My description of the donut is based strictly on the first three bites. After that I don’t remember much about how the event of morning donut inhalation ended. I do remember that this donut shop is where I learned to read the paper, because it was always scattered about. And it’s also the place where as a kid I felt far superior to my family and my community. I did it on my own, the bike ride there, the occasional change stealing from my dad’s credenza, next to where he kept his loaded gun. And I did it before everyone was awake.
Working in television is exciting and I’ve done it since I was 17. It’s exciting because you get to see famous people and you get paid well when you make enough people like you. But what’s kept me in the business so long is the jelly filled donut tray that appears on every single shoot and production office I’ve ever worked in from MTV to Discovery Health.
The donuts are always there, whether I was an NBC Page ushering Kansans to their seats on Family Feud to when I was promoted to my first gig as a producer on the reality show Meet My Folks. For the first time in my life I made more than $75 a day, and the donuts made me feel worth it. Like with them, the donuts were something I did all on my own.