Travis Erwin

The Feedstore Chronicles Travis Erwin

Welcome to Pearl's Feed and Seed Most coming-of-age stories are fraught with symbolism, hidden metaphors, and a heaping mound of other literary devices. Not this one. Not mine. You see, I came of age while working at a dusty Texas feedstore. A place where To Kill a Mockingbird involved a twelve-year-old and a BB gun. Of Mice and Men was a problem easily solved with rat poison. And David Copperfield was nothing more than a dude that made shit disappear. In the spring of 1989, I went to work at Pearl's Feed and Seed for a man named Doyle Suggs. On the surface Doyle and I had little in common: I was a rosy-cheeked boy of sixteen; he was a twice-divorced, thirty-year-old high school dropout. I had yet to go on my first date; he was trading sex for horse feed in the back room. Sure, Doyle was a lout, a liar, and a lecherous derelict. To this day, he remains the most morally bankrupt man I've ever met, yet my life wouldn't be half as blessed, had I missed out on his misguided education. The Feedstore Chronicles is a mostly true account of those days and when murderous ex-wives, well-hung bulldogs, and feed room fornication were all part of a normal day at Pearl's.