My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (3 page)

“How hard can it be?” Gab exclaims. “Is New York City not filled with delis? We aren’t looking to open a whole supermarket. All we want is our own little space.”

“Maybe it’s a message,” Kay says. “Buying store is mistake.”

But we’ve already considered the alternatives, such as a Subway or a twenty-four-hour photo shop or a fishmonger’s, and ruled out each one, because the Pak family’s expertise lies in convenience stores.

Then the owners of the Brooklyn store call. They tell Gab they’ve decided not to sell after all and, in keeping with their mysterious ways, offer us no explanation. Perfectly polite and friendly, but perfectly strange at the same time. In a month or so we will drive by their business, just to see if they were telling us the truth, and we will confirm that indeed it has not been sold, but neither is it open. The place is dark and shuttered. A little after that Kay will hear through the Korean grapevine that the old man had suffered a heart attack and the family had moved to parts unknown.

“Now what we do?” Kay says in disgust. “I’m not be having energy anymore. This drive me to be the crazy person.”

We all look to Gab, who is slumped on the living room couch and seems in fact to be sinking into it, sucked down by some
depressive force emanating from below the house. She says nothing for a while, but then:

“I can look at one more store,” she says. “Just one. After that I’m finished.”

Kay gets the Korean newspaper, and there in the classifieds it is:
“Busy street, bright store, new refrigerators—Brooklyn. $170K.”

That was how we found out about Salim’s store.

AS I PREPARE TO BECOME NEW YORK’S NEWEST DELI OWNER
, I take comfort in still having my job at the
Paris Review
, where I’ve worked for five years. Being an editor at America’s premier literary journal is like an anchor, holding me fast no matter how far I drift. Yet I’ve been free in how I talk about the deli—too free. I’ve told too many people, when the truth is that you never know how people are going to respond. In professional baseball they say that when a player gets sent to the minors, an invisible wall forms around him in the locker room; one second he’s a teammate and then
poof!
Suddenly he’s a ghost, a leper, a virus. I’m afraid that when people hear about the deli, they’ll say the right things (“That’s wonderful!
I’ll be sure to stop by when you’re working!”) but be afraid to go near me for fear of catching the curse and ending up the manager of an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt at the mall.

I didn’t tell everyone, just some friends and people in the office. But maybe that’s too many, for the one person I haven’t told—my boss, the famed writer, editor and bon vivant George Plimpton—is the one person whose reaction I fear most. George isn’t an ogre or anything. Far from it. Basically he’s a kindly, lovable old man who likes to walk around the office in his boxer shorts and rarely fires anyone. He’s certainly not one of those pathological magazine editors who overworks their staff until they slump over their desk dead of a heart attack at age thirty-six. If you’re going to slump over your desk at the
Paris Review
, it had better be dead drunk, not dead dead. But there is one issue that would cause George to fire his own family, and that’s loyalty. When it comes to allegiance to the cause, he’s like a Mafia boss. And while a deli is not exactly competition for the next Lorrie Moore story or a National Magazine Award, it might be construed as competition for a certain senior editor’s passion and commitment.

What’s worse is that lately I have taken a lot of time off, and I suspect George has noticed. Now, it’s hard to take off too much time at the
Paris Review
, where editors have been known to not report to work for up to an entire year.

“Where were you?” says George sternly upon their return.

“I had to go to Europe to find myself,” says the editor.

“Very well then,” says George. “Carry on.” Other valid excuses included skiing, finishing my novel, and working off a brutal hangover.

My excuse isn’t something I want to share with George, however. It’s called burnout, and call me paranoid, but that seems like the kind of thing you soldier through rather than confess to your boss. Admitting to your boss that you’ve lost the passion for work
would be sort of like admitting to your wife that you’ve lost the passion for, well,
her
, would it not? (“Now, honey, don’t take this
personally
 …”) Doesn’t seem like a good idea.

I started feeling burned out about a year ago, I think. There was no single moment when it began, no crummy experience that set it off, just a deadening feeling that what had motivated me to become an editor no longer did the trick. The most worrisome change was that at some point I noticed that I wasn’t all that interested in what we published. I didn’t care what went in the magazine. Sometimes I read it, sometimes I didn’t. If it was a story or an interview I brought in, I took it as a professional responsibility to back it as vigorously as I could through publication. But otherwise I had a hard time caring. And this is weird because like everyone else at the
Review
, I supposedly do what I do
because
I care, not for the money, which there isn’t any of. People at the
Review
care enough not only to accept measly little salaries but to work at tiny little desks with ten-year-old computers in the basement of George’s town house. They care enough to reject superlative, wondrous stories by the most famous authors in the world because they have a single lousy sentence or half-assed scene, or because
it’s not his or her best work
. They care enough to get into shouting matches over the serial comma, em dashes and whether you can begin a sentence with “And” or “But.” But now I can no longer experience outrage upon seeing a ho-hum story accepted or
The Chicago Manual of Style
‘s guidelines on the italicization of familiar foreign words flouted. Little things that used to make me crazy don’t anymore. This isn’t the material’s fault, incidentally: the
Paris Review
is famous for having introduced the work of Philip Roth and Jack Kerouac, among others, and it continues to publish the great writing of the day. Maybe the problem is that there’s no risk involved.

Risk—what would that even entail? I’m not sure I know. Not simulated risk, not managed risk, not the sort of risk you get
whizzing down a zip line in Outward Bound. (Wheeee!) I’m talking about the real world, dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed. Not that literary publishing doesn’t entail risk on an individual level—you might start a new magazine and end up publishing only two issues, or you might write a book and get an embarrassing review. You might lose your job. These are obviously real and painful outcomes, and greatly to be avoided. But fear of getting fired or embarrassed doesn’t always get you out of bed in the morning (or if it does, it doesn’t do much more), and on a larger level, since publishing is a losing enterprise so much of the time and failure is almost expected (Donald Barthelme: “What an artist does, is fail.… There is no such thing as a successful artist.”), “risk” becomes a relative concept. (Possibility of failure versus the possibility of ruining one’s life, having to flee the country, etc.) Moreover, some might say that publishing is insulated, even rigged; everyone comes from the same upper-middle-class background, and it’s all very social, very dependent on things other than sheer talent, like networking and personality. When those are the kinds of skills that matter, you can never really be sure of your successes, or your failures.

Disaster—have I ever faced disaster? No one to catch you if you fall? No safety net? What would that be like?

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t want to take any foolish risks. Nothing rash, nothing imprudent. And I feel fairly certain that this funk, or whatever it is, will eventually pass. I can’t even conceive of quitting the
Review
or letting myself get fired by George. Which is why this deli business has me worried.

TODAY IS MY
day off, and at the end of the afternoon I get a call at home from Tom, George Plimpton’s assistant.

“George is looking for you,” Tom says.

“Me?” I blurt out. “Why me?”

“I don’t know. But I think you should come to the office as soon as possible.”

I look at the clock, trying to decide how quickly I can make it to the Upper East Side. It’s the end of the afternoon and I am sitting in Kay’s basement in my pajamas. I tell Tom it’ll have to be tomorrow. “By the way, did George say what he wanted?” I ask.

“Nope,” says Tom.

“How did he seem?”

“Agitated.”

“Agitated? Really?” This isn’t good. “Can you describe the agitation?”

Tom sighs. “He came in the office and asked, ‘Where’s Ben?’ three times. Does that seem agitated enough?”

“Okay, okay,” I say. This isn’t good at all, so I make plans to visit the office the next day, screwing up plans I had already made with Gab to see the new store, which agitates
her
greatly. Lately a tone of desperation has entered Gab’s voice. She’s been taking our inability to find a store awfully hard.

“There are fourteen thousand delis in New York City,” she says, shaking her head. “We can’t even find one to buy, let alone fail at owning. What kind of immigrants are we? Maybe we’ve been in this country too long.”

I have no answers. All I can say is “Let me sort out this business at the
Review
and find out what’s wrong with George.” We decide that I should drive to the
Review
in Kay’s Honda (normally I would take the ferry and the subway, a two-hour trip) so that I can return to Staten Island as quickly as possible.

ON MY WAY
to the Upper East Side I practice groveling for my job. “Please, George, don’t fire me. I’ll do anything to avoid this right now. You don’t know how low I’m sinking.” Or maybe he does know, and that’s the problem. In any case, whether it’s because someone
told him about the deli or because my desk has been unoccupied for too many days, I intend to make it up with a dramatic offer: to read the slush pile again, the monstrous heap of unsolicited, occasionally brilliant but for the most part punishingly unreadable stories that arrive at the
Paris Review
each day by the duffel bag. That will impress him. Reading the slush is like getting lobotomized with a giant magnet. It’s something only interns can handle.

On my way I duck into a store, a deli, to get change to put in the meter.

“Can I help?” the owner says. It’s a closet deli, one of those stores that make you feel like you’ve accidentally fallen into a coffin. It’s a deli I’ve tended to avoid over the years while working a few blocks away, largely because of the cat hair (one hoped it was cat hair) that the store owner gave as a bonus with every purchase of fresh fruit or a pastry. There was also the owner’s off-putting demeanor, which could best be described as funereal.

“Just a minute,” I say. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, just getting a few quarters and biding my time before the confrontation with George, but the store is empty of customers (as usual) and to just walk out would be rude. The owner goes back to watching a black-and-white television the size of a toaster.

Just pick something and get out of here
,
I think
.

“Here,” I exclaim, grabbing the item nearest to the register, a packet of harmless-looking energy pills.

“And a Red Bull,” I add. The owner retrieves one from a little refrigerator behind the counter.

Energy will be good, I think as I leave the store. For this performance I need to be on my toes. In top form, so I can charm George’s socks off. Only after I have consumed the contents of the package and started to feel a disconcertingly pleasant buzz in my lower abdomen do I realize that in addition to the Red Bull I have just swallowed the Men’s 4-Pac, a “natural” male performance enhancer.

GEORGE PLIMPTON IS
seventy-five years old, as tall as an NBA small forward, as pale as New England fog, and usually covered with gashes and scrapes, as if he’s just emerged from a rosebush. Some of the wounds result from being old and having unfortunate Wasp skin, which I share, but beyond that George lives in a tall man’s goofy world and is constantly crashing into things, tripping over them, or causing them to fall on him simply by being in their presence. Once, after those of us who work for him thought we had seen all of him there was to be seen (I wasn’t kidding when I said he liked to walk around the office in his boxers, although usually only after hours), he took the opportunity to show the office an MRI of his testicles, which had been injured at a writers’ conference in a late-night collision with a golden retriever.

Lest I create the image of a clown, however, let me be clear in saying that George is anything but. Funny, yes. Refreshingly juvenile for a seventy-five-year-old—that too. But George also has a formidable side. You don’t become a bestselling author, friend to numerous presidents, real-life action hero (it was George who tackled Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel after the assassination of Robert Kennedy), and remain in the public eye for fifty years without a certain amount of gravitas. George can be goofy, but you never know if the tree branches in his hair and the giant rip in the seat of his pants are the result of an accident or a ploy to put people at ease. He’s wily—plus, he can drink anyone under the solid mahogany pool table in his living room. He still plays tennis to the death with men one-third his age.