My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (35 page)

THE NEXT DAY
at the dinner table Gab says, “I’m calling the Korean newspaper and placing an ad for the store. Anybody have any objections?” No one does.

It takes less than a month. In what appears to be some sort of ethnic paradigm shift, at first all the potential buyers who visit the store are Bengali Indians—stout, mustachioed men who show up in pairs wearing pin-striped suits. But the first buyer to satisfy Gab’s price is a Korean-American family that came to America about ten years after the Paks and has slightly younger children, a pair of boys, who want to purchase the store so they can give it to their parents.

On our last day Kay goes to Consumer Affairs in Manhattan and pays off a thousand dollars in fines that she’d
procrastinated
on (deliberately, but still) for as long as possible. Gab, Kay and I go to Jetro and use our store-owner privileges to buy enough toilet paper to fill up the trunk of the car. Then, for the first time when there isn’t a blackout or a blizzard, we close early, and stand there around the cash register, the three of us, silently eating take-out Thai food. Customers bang on the door—“Let us in!” “We need lottery tickets!” “A cup of tea!” “Change for a twenty!” “Where’s Preach?” Awkwardly and unconvincingly, we pretend not to hear them.

IT’S BEEN SIX YEARS SINCE WE SOLD THE DELI, AND DURING
that time I’ve forgotten a lot of things about it, like the price of a Coors Light tallboy and everything I once knew about how to operate the lottery machine. Occasionally I see a former customer on the subway or at a restaurant, and I stare at them, trying to remember what the connection was.
Did we go to college together? Did I work with her? No, that woman likes roast beef and American cheese on white bread with ketchup—cold
. Sometimes these people stare back, as if they’re trying to remember too. But I’m afraid to say that most don’t even look twice. In an America that people say is becoming less neighborly and more self-segregated, a convenience store
might be one of the last places where you spend significant time with people who aren’t “you,” so to speak. However, it’s by nature an ephemeral, shallow community, and only once did I ever make a friend at the store.

One thing I haven’t forgotten, though, is the pleasure of the job itself. Sure, nine-hour shifts are physically and psychically demanding, and doing it every day is arduous, and knowing that you’ll likely be doing it forever is as demoralizing as the gulag, but according to at least one prominent definition of a satisfying job—the one laid out by Karl Marx in his
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
, which I must have written at least five papers on in college—running a convenience store isn’t half bad for the soul. Marx said that under capitalism workers were not “self-actualized” because they merely worked as the equivalent of bolt tighteners or zipper checkers on an assembly line and never saw the fruits of their labor consumed by a living, breathing community. Even in a neighborhood like Boerum Hill, though, where the old community, the one with roots, was feeling more and more embattled, and the new one was composed mainly of young transients, there was no lack of face-to-face connection, especially on those nights when you felt like you were conducting an informal survey of all the different flavors of halitosis. Yes, we were cogs in a way, not having harvested our own shade-grown coffee or baked our own homemade Twinkies, but never did I feel like a mere soda machine waiting to have someone insert a dollar bill in my mouth. The work was varied and challenging, and it took a certain expertise to get each facet of it right. The challenges evolved. There was never a moment in which I didn’t feel mentally stimulated by the tasks at hand. The labor itself even had, dare I say, a transcendent moment or two.

Paradoxically, it was this pleasant and even exciting feeling that ultimately convinced me that I was not cut out for the deli business. While I have certainly become less fearful of the marketplace
since we bought the store, Kay was essentially right about me at the beginning: I do not love money. Not enough, anyway. And I probably never will, alas. And while I liked the feistiness that shopkeeping brought to life, I was concerned that it was boosting an already healthy sense of paranoia. At some point “Think for yourself” turns into “Trust no one,” and this paranoia goes against the communal part of shopkeeping that I enjoyed.

AT THE
Paris Review
there was no future for the editors who stayed on after George’s death. A few eventually quit, disillusioned by changes that were either happening or not happening, and the rest, including me, were let go. The board brought in a new team, most of whom were old enough to have had significant experience elsewhere in the media. The office was moved from its cozy little bubble on East Seventy-second Street to a commercial building downtown, and things like marketing and business (hopefully contracts, too) were handed off to specialists in those fields, I’m sure for the better. I have no idea whether the magazine itself is doing well or not, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it. I get jealous when I think about the excitement that the new editors, whoever they are, must be experiencing whenever they have
that
moment and a manuscript comes out of the slush with an unlikely return address—Zook, Kansas; Auburn Correctional Facility; Staten Island—and the person holding it feels the rush of The Discovery: first their heart quickens, then they start clenching the pages, then they can’t do anything in the world except read (a firework could explode right next to them and they wouldn’t turn their head), and then all of a sudden they have to get up and find someone, interrupt them, take the phone out of their hands and hang up, whatever, and say, “Read this.” The slush is an affirmation that great literature isn’t about anything—not what writing program you attended, not how blessed you are in the cheekbone department,
not who your friends are—but words themselves. Strange to say, but somehow I ended up missing the part of the
Review
I dreaded most.

THE ONE FRIEND
I made at the store was Dwayne, although as I discovered after we no longer worked together, being friends with Dwayne entailed certain challenges. As a coworker I could count on Dwayne for almost anything; the first time I met him he announced that he was on “Asian-people time, not black-people time,” and then went on to never miss a day of work, never show up late (except for the incident with the tooth and the pliers) and always return phone calls promptly. However, as a friend, Dwayne was the opposite. Calls went unreturned for months. When we made plans to get together, sometimes he showed up and sometimes he didn’t. When he did finally call, you had to spend hours on the phone with him, hearing about his new side career (he was moonlighting as a bouncer), his new girlfriend (a librarian) and the newest addition to his arsenal (a kind of crossbow that shot explosive multitipped arrows containing nerve poison, or something like that). There was endless detail, of course. But I couldn’t help wondering if he was leaving something out.

That’s because even though he wouldn’t say so, Dwayne’s life seemed to be falling apart. After we sold the store, Dwayne stayed on under the new owners, who never seemed comfortable with him and let him go after a few months. He then got a job at a deli closer to the projects, which lasted until the store was shut down for running an illegal numbers game. He was subsequently out of work for a while, hunting for jobs, and at one point I met him at the Ale House, a restaurant on Atlantic Avenue, so we could go over a job recommendation I had written. (I had been drinking for an hour by the time he showed.) He said nothing was panning out, not even the openings for minimum wage jobs, but he tried to put a brave face on it.

“Maybe I’ll just go back to what all the rest of them brothers doin’, standin’ on a corner with some product in my pocket. Go back to the roots, to what got me where I am,” he laughed.

“What about the new Applebee’s”—Dwayne’s favorite restaurant—“that’s opening at Atlantic Yards?” I asked.

“Do I look Mexican to you? C’mon.”

Dwayne didn’t seem troubled, but I was. It didn’t seem right that someone so smart and hardworking should have to struggle for employment. In an ideal world, he should have been able to find not just any job, but one that capitalized on his vast talents. But at the very least, he should have been able to find a job in the neighborhood where he’d spent his entire life.

“Dwayne, why don’t you open your own deli? You don’t need to work for someone else, and if you need a loan or something, people will help you. You could do anything.”

But Dwayne’s ambitions were different.

“I don’t want to be no astronaut,” he said. “I just want to work, watch my kids grow up and lay back in peace. You ain’t noticed that about me yet? After thirty-six years I ain’t in jail or stuck on no drugs, and I ain’t dead. I think that’s pretty good.”

A few weeks later I called Dwayne again and got a message that his phone had been disconnected. I waited another month, then went to Boerum Hill and started asking people if they knew where he was. No one could tell me anything except Alonzo, the now retired plumber.

“He moved,” he said. “He living down in Far Rockaway.”

“Far Rockaway?” I repeated in disbelief. “Dwayne moved to Queens?
Dwayne left Brooklyn?”
It didn’t seem possible. After that, I began to panic. It was the same dynamic as with the gun: if anyone could take care of himself, Dwayne could, but also, if anyone could get himself into trouble …

A few weeks later, he called. As soon as I picked up the phone
he started talking as if I had seen him yesterday, telling me what he’d eaten for breakfast that morning, how long he’d waited for the A train the previous night, a plot summary of a show apparently called
Extreme Factor
, which he’d watched when he’d gotten home, how he would live his life if he only had one arm, and—

“Dwayne!” I interrupted. “Where have you been? You had us worried sick. Alonzo the plumber said you moved to Queens.”

This seemed to offend Dwayne.

“I ain’t never leaving Brooklyn!” he barked. However, he admitted it was partially true—he had moved from his longtime apartment on Smith Street. “The landlord raised the rent,” he said glumly. “I didn’t like that neighborhood no more anyway.” Part of the week he was spending with his girlfriend the librarian on Bergen Street.

In general he sounded okay. However, Dwayne
always
sounded okay if you let him get going. My worries about him continued. At the store, Dwayne had worked a staggering number of hours, often more than sixty a week, and now to make the same amount of money he was working part-time jobs all over the place: Coney Island, east midtown, the West Village, even Hempstead, Long Island. The traveling was brutal; at least when he’d worked at the store, his apartment had been three blocks away. Now he spent all his time sleeping and eating on trains, which for someone whose lifestyle habits were already lethal (two six-packs of Heineken a day, one pack of Newports, extreme quantities of fast food that probably made him weigh eighty pounds more than he should) was painful to consider. And there was the work itself. Since leaving the deli world, Dwayne had become something of a professional inflictor of violence. His day job was in security at department stores in midtown, where he scowled at and occasionally tackled robbers the same way he’d done at the deli. At night came the dirtier work as a bouncer at a string of nightclubs in Brooklyn and
Queens. One night I visited him at a bar under the BQE, near Jetro, where he was manning the door and where the clientele consisted mainly of falling-down-drunk Central American migrants. Here Dwayne wasn’t so much a deterrent as an in-house brawler taking on all comers. The fighting was guaranteed, and after one of the drunks came at him with a broken bottle, Dwayne would sit on the poor fellow until his friends came and peeled him off the sidewalk. It was bloody, sordid work, and for all the risks involved it didn’t pay particularly well. But the dirtiest job of all, according to Dwayne, was what he did on weekends, working as an umpire for Little League baseball in Park Slope.

“The parents are some crazy fuckers,” he said, shaking his head. It was so bad that he’d bought himself a pit bull and started taking it with him to games.

But were three jobs enough?

“I ain’t never leaving Brooklyn!” he continued to shout at me every time I managed to track him down, even after he’d broken up with the librarian and was calling me from Kingsbridge, up in the Bronx, where he’d “temporarily relocated.”

“I ain’t never leaving Brooklyn!”

That was what he shouted at me, again, the last time I talked to him. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was that time—he’d started out on a train bound for Hempstead and slept past the stop; now he couldn’t tell which town he was in.

“I’ll call you back,” he said wearily.

He never did. We went through our worst period of not communicating after that, a good six months where he didn’t call. Finally, Gab went to one of the department stores where he worked and asked a cashier what Dwayne’s hours were, so she could come back and find him. The woman covered her mouth and ran away, and Gab knew. When the cashier’s supervisor came back holding Dwayne’s funeral program, she was already crying.

Dwayne had had an aneurysm just two weeks before. He’d been pingponging around the city more than usual, bouncing from his kids to his jobs to his girlfriend (he was trying to get back together with the librarian), and one night something inside him just gave. He was up in the Bronx when it happened, and a friend who was with him called an ambulance right away, but like everything with Dwayne, the rupture was so massive that he never had a chance.

Everyone said the same thing about his funeral: it was the most varied group of people they’d ever seen—blacks, whites, Asians, Mexicans, old people, young people. Everyone. And nine months later I find myself still thinking that one of these days he’s going to call.

THE SAME MONTH
as Dwayne’s death, Gab and I finally moved out of Kay’s basement. Like everyone who moves back into a parental household, we’d gone to that subterranean netherworld thinking our stay would last only a few months, then watched as somehow eight years passed by. During that time almost a dozen of Gab’s other relatives came and went too, some of whom also stayed longer than they’d intended. But none stuck around as long as us. We were the champion malingerers, the winners of the homeliness sweepstakes, and after a certain point it began to feel like we would truly never leave.