HIS FIRST JOB AT SHAKE & Bake was as a “punch kid,” the worker who would take tickets as people entered the Bake. He was promoted right around the same time he got sober. Shake & Bake’s management saw something in Anthony, a natural leadership ability and an understanding of how the business worked. The biggest obstacle to Anthony’s success was Anthony. Could he show up on time? Could he quit his addiction and stop letting it run his decision-making? Many people tried to help him, but it was his grandparents, whom he called Dollbaby and Grandpop, who finally held an intervention for Anthony. “They told me they knew I would be gone if I didn’t get right. They worried they would lose me and I would throw away my future.” He knew it was them, them and Shake & Bake, that saved him.
He often thought back to the day he’d first shown up there looking for a job. He was nineteen and desperate for work. A part-time job, temp work, anything that could provide some income, which he needed to support the heroin and cocaine addiction he’d first developed in eighth grade at Herring Run Junior High School in Northeast Baltimore. The same addiction that clouded his entire high school experience until he was informed by his math teacher that he was going to fail and would not be permitted to graduate. Anthony couldn’t figure out how he could possibly fail math. He loved math, loved numbers. He had a natural knack for analyzing and retaining statistics. So the surprise to him was not just that he wasn’t passing a class he’d always loved, but how far gone in his drug addiction he was that he hadn’t seen it coming.
But once he got the gig at Shake & Bake he kicked his drug habit, his life anchored by his work at the skating rink. He had held almost every position at Shake & Bake and was now general manager, the one in charge of everything. He was Shake & Bake, for all intents and purposes, and had been so for years. For close to nineteen years he had been in charge of all operations at Shake & Bake, and this East Baltimore boy had very much become one of Pennsylvania Avenue’s most recognizable faces. He thought by now he’d seen it all from those white steps. But he was wrong.