My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (34 page)

“So,” he says eagerly, licking his lips as he opens his briefcase, “what have you done to mitigate your circumstances?”

Gab opens her own briefcase and presents an affidavit certifying that we have terminated Emo’s employment. It’s an absurd document—This
is to certify that I have fired my own aunt—but
the city insists upon it if a violator has any hope of leniency.

“Are you representing the deli owner?” Patrice or whatever his name is asks Gab.

“I am the deli owner,” Gab says.

This causes Patrice or whatever his name is to raise his eyebrows, a sign that things might be working in our favor. Gab and I had anticipated that the Adjudication Division of Consumer Affairs rarely saw actual lawyers accustomed to courtroom argument.
Well, today for once they’ll get a real fight
, we vowed, for Gab has prepared not just affidavits but taken pictures of the store and gathered documents showing that as shopkeepers we have taken every possible measure to prevent underage sales. She’s pored over Consumer Affairs’ own regulations, highlighting passages in neon pink the way she did with homework assignments in college, then assembled her evidence into a dossier the size and weight of a phone book. And to top it all off she’s put on her most fearsome lawyer’s outfit, a truly sharklike skirt-and-jacket combo, which more than makes her stick out from those grease-stained schlubs in their puffy jackets.

But Patrice or whatever his name is no pushover. After Gab presents her case, he attempts to show that we could have done more. “Is that sign really visible?” he asks, jabbing his finger at one of Gab’s pictures. “Did you give clear instructions to your employees?” Gab, however, is able to parry each thrust, and after half an hour or so she seems to gain the upper hand. Patrice stops probing, leans back in his chair, and smiles for the first time.

“This is very impressive,” he says, lifting up the dossier. “I’ve been here a few years, and I can say I’ve never seen anything like it.” He says that strictly speaking, the tobacco license has to be surrendered whenever there are two violations; however, because of our strenuous efforts to be responsible storeowners, he can see the case for leniency. He promises to inform us of his decision in a few weeks.

On the way home Gab and I can’t help but gloat a little. Patrice’s reassuring demeanor as he shuttled us out left us feeling no doubt that things will turn out as we hoped. To celebrate, we buy a couple
of beers at a deli (wrapped in brown paper bags, of course, as per New York City Administrative Code, section 10-125, “consumption of alcohol in public”: “No person shall drink or consume an alcoholic beverage, or possess, with intent to drink or consume, an open container containing an alcoholic beverage in any public place except at a block party, feast or similar function for which a permit has been obtained …) and drink them in the company of pigeons and seagulls on the Brooklyn-facing side of the Staten Island Ferry as it makes a glorious midday crossing of New York Harbor.

WHEN THE LETTER
arrives, I can almost taste the beer on the ferry coming back up, and wish that the pigeons were around so that I could kick or at least yell at one of them. The city, as Patrice had led us to believe, had given us credit for the measures we had taken to prevent underage tobacco sales, including the firing of Emo. However, says the letter, there was one measure we didn’t take: we didn’t fire the person who originally got us in trouble for selling tobacco to a minor—that is, me. Apparently the city thought that I should fire myself (something I would have been all too happy to do at the time, if it were possible) or maybe it wanted Gab to, which would have required what? Us to get a divorce and split up our assets? Hide the fact that we co-owned the store?
Sell the business to a relative, just as the deli owner at Habib’s suggested?
Regardless, it’s too late now, and the city is denying our request for leniency. We must forfeit our licenses or face criminal charges and a fine of one hundred dollars a day.

AT ANY JOB
the best part of the day is going home, and our deli is no exception. The last hour of the night is invariably the most miserable, taken up by gruesome tasks like fishing fingernails out of
the cash till and wiping down the slicer. At that hour you also get the worst customers of the evening, the drunks, the skeeves and the people who seem to seek out helpless deli workers and other innocent victims who have no choice but to hear about their cat’s digestive problems or a scene-by-scene rundown of the latest Pauly Shore movie. (Salim once said when we asked him why he didn’t keep the store open past one o’clock, “Trust me, you don’t want the kind of customers who come in after one.”) If you stay open even one minute later, you can be sure someone will start banging on the window and begging you to unlock the door, reopen the register and sell them a quart of milk. And if it’s a regular customer, you probably will.

After that you’re free, and not only are you liberated from the store and difficult customers, but at one o’clock in the morning you are physically free to do almost anything you want: drive on the sidewalk, window-shop naked, land an airplane on Atlantic Avenue. New York may be a twenty-four-hour city, but after midnight there is still a big difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and at first the stillness is disorienting, if not a little spooky.

However, the drive on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is nothing if not pleasurable. The police don’t even bother patrolling, and you can drive at speeds that on an elevated highway like the BQE truly feel like flying. Of course, at that time of night most of the drivers are exhausted late-shift workers trying to get home before their eyes involuntarily shut, and you often see the remnants of terrible, fiery accidents that close the highway for hours, but at least until you hit one of those driving the BQE at night is fun, and the ride over the Verrazano Bridge at one-thirty
A.M
. is like jetting silently into space, the perfect way to end the night.

One stifling August evening I stop by the store on my way home from the
Review
to check on Dwayne and Kevin (the college kid who’s still working at the store), have a sandwich for dinner and listen to a few of Dwayne’s stories. At eight o’clock the
temperature still feels like noon. When a hot day ends and relief doesn’t come, you feel cheated, like you’re being toyed with, and in the bad old days of New York, you would turn on the ten o’clock news on a night like tonight, and the first six stories would be about murder or armed robbery, half of which would take place at Domingo’s Mini-Super in Washington Heights or the New Steve Deli on Avenue C. A grim-faced newscaster would hand off to an even grimmer-faced reporter standing outside a doorway barricaded in police tape, with candles burning on the sidewalk and family members bawling nearby. And then they would show The Video, the grainy, silent, eight-shots-per-minute film from the overhead security cam that would make everything look like it happened in slow motion inside an elevator. “Man, I could have dodged that baseball bat!” you would think. Sometimes since the store opened I’ve wondered how I’ll look in silent, grainy super-slo-mo on the ten o’clock news, and then I remember:
Oh, yeah, we don’t have a security camera
. It’s one of those decisions we’ve postponed as we waffle back and forth on the deli’s future.

Tonight, though, the city seems peaceful, almost like a small town. On my way home I can feel the barometer finally dropping and see the lightning on the horizon, and after drinking half a beer in front of the TV I fall asleep before midnight for the first time since we bought the store.

The phone rings an hour later, at one
A.M
. sharp. Lunging across Gab’s sleeping body, I end up half on the floor, pressing the receiver to my ear.

“Hello?” I sputter. “Hello? Hello?”

The caller ID number belongs to the store, but no one is at the other end of the line.

“Who is it?” says Gab.

“The store,” I say, as if the store itself has called to give us a warning. Then in the background I hear a loud crash and shouting.

“Dwayne, is that you? Who’s there? What’s happening?”

Finally, I hear Dwayne’s labored breath—he’s panting, practically wheezing—and he tells me in an awful voice that there’s been an incident, some kind of robbery or mugging, and I better come over quickly because there’s “blood all over the place.” Then he drops the phone and I can hear another crash and a shout, as if the incident’s still going on.

“What’s happening?” Gab asks. “Did we get robbed?”

“I don’t know,” I say, getting dressed. “I’m going there now. Call 911.”

Soon I’m racing in the opposite direction on the same roads I traveled barely three hours ago, now slick with rain. I keep dialing the store with my cell phone, but no one answers. I want information, details, updates—is everyone still alive? have the cops come?—and I can’t wait the twenty minutes it takes to get there. The blood Dwayne mentioned, the blood. Was it his or someone else’s? Is Kevin okay? Who was at the store and who is there now?

Then I remember Dwayne’s gun and feel sick to my stomach. I should have done something. I should have frisked him every day and checked his backpack, and then as a family we should have done everything in our power to make the store a safer place. For instance, why couldn’t we at least have bought one of those fake security cameras that you attach behind the register to make people think they’re being recorded? If Dwayne hurt somebody, what does that mean for us? The more I think about this, the more I need to get there, and then because I am thinking in this selfish way, I feel even sicker.

It’s time to get out. The gong has sounded, and this time everyone in the family will hear it at the same time.

At Atlantic Avenue and Hoyt Street sirens are flashing, and a police car has parked awkwardly on the sidewalk. And yet the scene looks weirdly peaceful, as if whatever happened took place hours
and hours ago. I see the police tape cordoning off a section of sidewalk near where we put out the trash, but not the candles or the wailing relatives or the reporters and their cameramen. It seems like nothing all too serious could have happened here tonight.

And then I see the puddle of blood, two feet long and a foot wide, glimmering on the sidewalk. At its center sits an expensive embroidered Yankees cap that was probably bone white an hour ago and now has the same color as the blackening pool.

Turns out it’s the robber’s cap. At closing time, he and his accomplice—both teenagers from Bay Ridge, a middle-class white community in South Brooklyn—walked into the store. Kevin, who was shutting down the register at the time, appeared, from their point of view, to be the only person on duty. Dwayne had gone back to the stockroom to fill a bucket with mop water, and as the plume beat noisily against the plastic, his hearing was blocked. The teenager in the Yankees cap pointed a gun at Kevin and told him to give him the contents of the register. Kevin, thankfully, didn’t hesitate to comply. He put the entire drawer of cash on the counter next to an aluminum tray of biscotti, and the teens started stuffing their pockets. But then Dwayne turned off the water, and one of the teenagers accidentally knocked over the biscotti.

“Everything okay?” shouted Dwayne.

The robbers bolted, and Dwayne, after sticking his head out of the stockroom and seeing the look on Kevin’s face, started running too.

“No, Dwayne!” Kevin shouted. “They’ve got a gun!”

Dwayne kept going, however, and found the robbers fleeing down Hoyt Street
on bicycles
. The one with the cash had already gotten away. The one with the gun was struggling, though, and when he realized what was coming after him, he must have wanted to die. After a flying leap, Dwayne tackled the slower robber and crashed with him to the sidewalk, both of them landing on the bike. At that
point the robber still had his gun, which during the tussle ended up pointed near Dwayne’s face. He pulled the trigger, and what came out of the muzzle—a BB, not a bullet—bounced harmlessly down the street.

Dwayne then began beating the robber to a pulp, until luckily for both of them, a customer happened by and convinced Dwayne to let up. The robber, in addition to having a broken jaw, would later need fifty-two stitches to close up a single arc-shaped gash running from his temple to his chin. Thus the pool of blood.

(“They jumped me,” the robber would later tell police. “I was just out riding my bike, and this guy came out of the deli and knocked me down for no reason.” He and his friend, whom the police will pick up a few days later, will both turn out to have criminal records.)

Armed robbers on bicycles wielding BB guns. It would be a joke if not for that hideous puddle. For days afterward I keep thinking about the blood and wondering how so much of it poured out of somebody who managed not to die. Fifty-two stitches doesn’t seem like enough. It makes me wish that I had seen the robber, who has been handcuffed and is already on his way to the hospital when I arrive. I ask Dwayne to describe the incident, expecting the usual amount of exuberant detail, but that is the most surprising part of the evening: Dwayne seems shaken, as if he’s as unaccustomed to violence as, well, me. When I come into the store he acts as if nothing had happened by continuing the mopping, but then I notice that he’s forgotten to put cleaning detergent in the water, and I say, “Dwayne, why don’t you go home. I’ll finish up.” Initially, he refuses to even look at me, but I won’t take no for an answer—something I’ve never done before with him—and finally he stops resisting. Outside, after forcing him to accept a case of Heineken, I watch him shamble down the street toward the projects without the usual swagger, his head hung low for once.