Van Dough
After opting for homelessness and exploring the world in his van, Satchel Raye now owns an eccentric pizzeria
Photo: Emily Jourdan
A rusty, decrepit, aqua van rests outside Satchel’s Pizza -- a new soul. The once full-of-life 1965 Ford Falcon has come here to retire. But, it is not dead yet; it may live forever.
Sitting on four flat tires, the van has faded, sky blue side paneling and a dirty, white roof. The back doors and the right side door are always open, inviting customers inside to eat. There are no traditional car seats; just wooden benches and tables. Christmas lights shine through parts of the windows not covered by beige curtains.
Stickers placed randomly on the bumper and windows allude to the restaurant itself. Every part of the restaurant resembles owner Satchel Raye’s life, but the van stands out above all.
Satchel, now 37, lived in that Ford Falcon for about 10 years before he decided to give it to the restaurant.
Living in a van isn’t even the oddest part of Satchel’s life, though. He is full of stories and loves telling them.
Satchel first got the van in 1993 when he traded it for his friend’s pickup truck. He sold it to another friend when he decided to live on the streets of Atlanta. When he wanted it back, it was no longer working, but Satchel didn’t care. He bought a functional Volkswagen > Squareback and traded his friend to get the broken-down van back. Repairing the van cost him thousands of dollars.
“At this point – in my mid-twenties, living in my vehicles, borrowing money from my mom, living on the streets with homeless people for educational purposes – everyone was sure I was going nowhere fast,” Satchel says. “Those were good times, I tell you.”
After traveling and learning about the poor, Satchel chose to be homeless. He had become fascinated with poverty in Jamaica and wanted to experience it for himself. First he tried working at a shelter but realized if he was going to really learn about it, he would have to actually do it. Satchel admits it was insane now, looking back on it, but he got a lot out of the experience.
“I learned how to listen, to not want, to be happy with little. I learned more about friendship than I expected to, and I learned that lots of homeless people are not addicts, but simply choose a simpler way of life, apart from the credit cards, insurance, daily grind and complexities of life as we know it,” he says.
Eventually, Satchel returned to Gainesville, where he worked at a pizza shop named Leonardo’s by the Slice and lived in the van. Leonardo’s became a big part of his life, even giving him a roof over his head -- or under, anyway.
Living On Leo’s
Although Satchel primarily lived in his van while washing dishes at Leonardo’s, at one point someone else had his van, and it wasn’t running. With nowhere to sleep, Satchel lived as close as possible to work -- on the roof of the restaurant.
“The roof is flat and made a perfect place to live,” Satchel says. “I wasn’t much for partying and I liked being alone, so I would go up there around dusk and read or hang out and then put my sleeping bag on one of the big air conditioning vents up there and sleep away under the stars.”
If it rained, he would sleep in a crawl space between the ceiling and the roof.
While Satchel was living on the roof Mark Newman, an owner of Leonardo’s, was dating a woman who was opening a store in Haile Plantation. She needed furniture, and Satchel was the perfect man to build it -- on the roof. He ran an extension cord through the roof entrance in the kitchen and was free to build on the spacious, flat roof. Satchel hoisted materials up the side of the building then put it all together. Then he drilled holes, tied it up and slowly lowered it down.
Naturally, this was dangerous and Steve Solomon, another owner, put an end to it and made Satchel move. Satchel went right back to the van like a lost puppy finding its home.
Near the end of his time at Leonardo’s, he feels the owners unjustly cut his hours and he left on bitter terms. He said the owners of Leonardo’s don’t do well with other restaurants taking their business, so they are probably “mad as hell” that he is succeeding.
“They probably have voodoo dolls full of pins with my face on them because they cannot stand competition,” Satchel says.
But there was one positive thing that came out of the Leonardo’s experience.
He met his wife, Caroline, while washing dishes there. Even though she was living with her boyfriend at the time, she let Satchel shower at her place and park his van in her driveway.
She went to grad school at UCLA, and they went their separate ways. About two years later, he ran into her in Gainesville, and they fell in love over the next eight months, he says, partly because she also enjoyed a similar lifestyle -- one of simplicity.
Honeymooners
After Caroline and Satchel wed in 1998, they went on their honeymoon. While most couples went to hotspots like the Bahamas or Hawaii, the Rayes just went-in the van, of course.
“I remember it was full of balloons and we had no doors on it, and as we drove out of town, toward Micanopy, balloons kept bouncing their way up to the front and out the doors down the highway,” Satchel says.
Their loose plan was to see Florida’s Gulf Coast, but all they found was Honeymoon Island, a state park that rests just north of Clearwater. They paid $10 to get on the island, but left after 10 minutes because the wind was blowing stinging sand at them.
Satchel admits it was a bad idea going on a honeymoon without a plan, especially because they did not find Florida’s West Coast interesting.
“We were having a pretty terrible time, but we were in love, so we didn’t care all that much,” Satchel says.
Satchel's Begins
Their honeymoon in the van represented a time in their life that was carefree. But when Silas, their now 4-year-old son, came along, Satchel realized his life had to change. He wanted to have something to leave his son, and he had always wanted to open a restaurant in Gainesville. The timing was perfect.
Satchel found an old restaurant, which was run down, took out a loan for $30,000, paid $10,000 in cash and bought it.
“When you go to borrow $30,000 to open a restaurant in a freakin’ broken-down place, you realize you’re out on a limb,” Satchel says. “That first night when I was in here, I like broke down crying, man. I was so upset. I was like, ‘What the hell have I just done?’ I just gave this guy $10,000 and I’m in this dirty place – he left the dishes in the kitchen, the sink was all backed up, the carpet was ripped and dirty. I don’t know where my wife was. Nobody was here but me, and I just sat down here crying and I was like, ‘Oh, what have I done, man? I just fuckin’ went off the deep end.’”
Satchel’s Pizza opened on March 7, 2003. Three months after that, The Gainesville Sun wrote an article on it, and Satchel’s has been busy ever since. Satchel never expected it to reach the level it has. He expected a small pizzeria with five or six employees; now Satchel has more than 30.
He said it has been hard to “give up the van” to the customers. But when Satchel’s started bringing money in, he fell in love with the Honda Element, bought a new one and gradually stopped using the van. Originally, Satchel had it in the parking lot before bringing it into the garden, making it more a part of the restaurant. Slowly, more customers started using it.
The van had a new life.
Four months after he last drove it, his friend with a similar van needed a battery, so Satchel gave him his. Three months after that, his friend needed an engine and Satchel was glad to oblige.
“That makes me feel much better, knowing the engine has a new life,” Satchel says. “It’s like a heart transplant to me. I really loved that van and miss driving it, but it makes me happy to see so many families and couples enjoying dining in there, and so many kids playing in there.”
An old black sticker with white text is slapped on the center of the van’s bumper. It is partially torn off, but its message is clear: “Minimalism: It’s the least you can do.”
The Not-So-Simple Life
“Our life used to be real simple,” Caroline says. “We both had a lot of free time and hung out together a lot and it was great. We made a lot of artwork, built stuff and went swimming.”
Satchel used to paint everyday and still considers himself an artist before a restaurant owner. “I don’t know why,” quips Caroline, since so much of Satchel’s time now goes to the restaurant. But the restaurant is a work of art for Satchel.
Mobiles of fish hang from the ceiling between three-bladed fans; art is everywhere. Each chair is different and every table has a different style light. Plates don’t match. Neither does silverware. Nothing is the same; there is no uniformity.
There is a play area for children in one corner, a piano in the other. On one Thursday night, kids play as if they were in pre-school while their parents chatter over wine and pizza. Caroline, Silas and Cada, their 9-month-old daughter, are at the table with friends and their children. One young child is shirtless and shoeless. He appears to be wearing just a bathing suit, but his parents don’t care. No one at the restaurant seems to even notice the half-naked boy. The restaurant is packed with a waiting list, as usual.
With the restaurant’s success comes a lot more responsibility, but it has some positives. Satchel is opening a thrift store right behind the restaurant -- something he has always wanted to do -- and Caroline has started a parenting co-op, which is similar to a pre-school without the curriculum or teachers. It is like a playgroup, she says, but requires a lot of planning and organization and has cost money to start.
“It’s nice to be able to get a new car and open stuff we want to do and have the freedom of money and success, really, but it’s overrated, I think,” Satchel says. “A simple life is always a good way to go.”
TV Free
The only semblance of simplicity the Rayes can maintain is their insistence on not owning a TV, though 98.2 percent of households do, according to Nielson research.
Satchel hasn’t owned one since he was 18 and Caroline hasn’t in about 10 years.
“It’s just so bad. It’s so mediocre,” Caroline says. “It’s such a waste of time. Once you stop watching TV, when you go back and look at it, you just can’t fathom that anybody would spend any amount of time watching almost anything on TV.”
She admits that if they had a TV they’d probably get sucked in, so they choose not to have one in order to live “quality lives.”
“When I visit my mom and see TV, it just seems like the stupidest thing in the world,” Satchel says. “I can’t think of anything more useless than TV.”
But Caroline brings up a show that she watched in a hotel once: “Pimp My Ride.”
The MTV show, in which a shop alters cars to an extreme level, seems so perfect for Satchel, considering his past with cars, but Satchel has no desire to see it.
“It’s like it changed her life or something,” Satchel says. “I wasn’t there and she keeps telling me of what an awesome show it was and how I would have loved it and stuff. I don’t care much about it really, watching a show about pimping someone’s ride. I mean, it might be interesting to me but not something I’m going to seek out. Although I may have to one day just to get Caroline to stop telling me about how great it was.”
Satchel doesn’t need to watch MTV pimp people’s cars; he pimped his own before MTV even existed.
Always the Artist
In high school, he had an “art car” that he spray painted almost every day. Eventually, he started gluing pennies and army men on it before letting classmates cover it with chewed gum. It really got bad when he went to Atlanta for a semester of art school. He layered brightly painted scrap wood on it, bolted trophies on and hooked up a bullhorn. He took the dashboard out and planted cactuses where it was. He took out every seat and filled the car with hay. Then, he cut the roof off.
“It was the craziest thing ever,” Satchel simply says, before sounding thankful that he has a new, more conventional car. “It gets to be a bit of a hassle driving crazy cars around all the time. Even in the van people would talk to me all the time about it. I like to talk, but it gets old. ‘Don’t the cops pull you over?’ I must have heard that about a million times in my life. ‘No, they don’t.’”
Later in life, he cut the top off of a Ford Fairline and built a house-looking structure on top of it. He said it was too bulky and got him too much attention, but Caroline remembers a different story.
“He proceeded to try to drive it across the country, but I think the house ripped off,” Caroline says. “It’s endless.”
Satchel’s stories make up his own version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, sometimes seeming so ridiculous that they couldn’t possibly be true.
But they are.
“He’s nuts,” Caroline says. “There’s no denying what a nut he is.”