My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (10 page)

The problem is that Dwayne has groupies, devotees and disciples, people from all over Brooklyn and every demographic in the neighborhood who come to see him.

“So, Preach,” as his fans call him, “you goin to the Founders Day party this year?” Or “Preach, what
really
happened to Jam Master Jay? You suspicious?” Or “Is Lil’ Kim trying to make herself a female Michael Jackson? What’s up with that nose?” Or “Dwayne, I’ve been offered a job at a West Coast law firm doing the kind of structured finance work I love, but I’m also on the verge of making partner here, and I don’t want to leave New York. What should I do?” Preach has been performing in this pulpit for years, his métier being the bombs-away freestyle jeremiad, a brilliant, crude and Yogi Berra–ish soliloquy that attracts customers as much as his famously well-fortified sandwiches. As long as his fans show, he’s never going to be shy about responding, and he’s certainly not going to censor himself. He’ll be loud and profane, and not all customers will be charmed. “Did he say what I think he said?” “Who
owns this store, letting people talk like that?” And his friends can be even worse. It doesn’t take someone who can calculate the speed of spit to see troubles ahead with Dwayne.

THEY SAY THE
hardest part of running a business is finding good personnel, but with a convenience store it should be easy, right? We’re not necessarily looking for register gods like Dwayne or Kay. We’re looking for people whose technical competence maxes out at Velcro shoes. The employee we hire could even be the sort of person who, like me, forgets the price of a forty-ounce bottle of Miller Genuine Draft milliseconds after typing it into the cash register, as if the number never even existed in their brain. The only necessary qualification is that they must show up for work every day and not steal our money.

Kay puts an ad in the Korean newspaper, and applications soon start to flow in. Our first interviewee is a cheerful but somewhat down-on-his-luck-seeming middle-aged man whose bald pate and perpetual five o’clock shadow make him look like a Korean Homer Simpson. Because Koreans think it rude to ask someone their name until you know them well, he is simply known as The Man
(ajashi)
. The Man has zero retail experience, but he used to be a computer programmer, which perhaps will translate into register skills. Also, he has a Social Security number and a pulse, so Kay hires him on the spot.

Things go well the first few days; The Man seems eager to please and won’t let anyone else do a speck of work while he’s on the job. But then he starts missing shifts, as if he’s suddenly decided that coming to work is, well, optional. “Oh, my stomach was hurting,” he tells Kay after not showing up one day. “I think I ate too much for breakfast.” Being the bighearted person she is, Kay gives him a second and a third chance; then, being a temperamental, no-nonsense businesswoman, she turns on him ferociously. She gives
him the money he’s earned and kicks him out of the store in front of some disquieted-looking customers. The Man actually has the gall to look wounded as he walks out, but something tells me he’s experienced this before.

Our next hire is also a middle-aged Korean (“The Man II”), but temperamentally he could not be more different from The Man I. The Man II comes from a military background—he served both in the Korean and the U.S. armies—and has his shit wired alarmingly tight. Unfortunately, he’s also a bit opinionated.

“Who did you vote for in the last presidential election?” he demands of a shaggy young woman who came into the store to buy cat food.

“Um, Gore?” the surprised woman says.

“Ronald Reagan is the greatest president ever!” The Man II shouts at her, slamming her 9 Lives Liver and Bacon Dinner on the counter. Later he questions the patriotism of a customer who tries to buy European beer and accuses Dwayne of stealing, and before he can inflict any more damage Kay jettisons him as well.

Our third hire, The Woman
(ajuma)
, has no problem showing up for work and does not have a personality like weed killer. Her only drawback is that she seems to have misled the employment agency about her age, which listed her as a mere fifty-five, the same age as Kay. Now, some Asians do tend to age well (studies show that Korean-American women live longer than any ethnic group in the country), but there’s simply no way this woman was born after the fall of the Chosun dynasty (1392–1910).

“Oh my God,” gasps Gab after watching The Woman totter around the checkout area. “She’s too frail to work in a convenience store.” The Woman looks like one of those sweet little grannies driving a Buick through a crowd of pedestrians in the parking lot at the mall.

“Ready for work, boss!” she announces with crushing enthusiasm
every time she sees me. (This might be the only English she knows.) We position her next to the register and forbid her to go anywhere else, lest a roll of toilet paper fall off the shelf and break one of her collarbones. For a few days we watch as revenue inexplicably plummets during her shifts, until we realize that she’s handing out change like a broken slot machine. So we try giving her a box of drinks and ask her to stock the refrigerator—not too taxing a job, but maybe hard enough that she’ll reconsider working for us (Kay can’t quite bring herself to fire someone older than her)—then watch as she fills all eleven shelves of the KustomKool with the dreaded Diet Kiwi Lemonade, a nonseller. So as a last resort we transfer her to the morning shift, to be a kind of auxiliary coffee server, which seems to go fine at first. Then the morning shift’s revenue starts plummeting as well, and the commuters, our most reliable source of revenue, the bedrock of our business, inexplicably start disappearing, and as panic sets in, one morning an oxlike secondhand furniture dealer from down the block barges in and bellows in an outerborough accent:

“Don’t you people know how to run a store?”

Startled, we ask him what the problem is, and he tells us that every day this week his morning coffee has been either room temperature or flat-out cold.

“I’ve been living in Brooklyn my whole life, and I’ve never seen such an incompetently run convenience store!” he goes on, rattling off a half-dozen other complaints. “You’re unbelievable. How do you screw up deli coffee? It’s not even supposed to taste good. I want the old store back, with the people who used to work here. Your family stinks!”

After the furniture dealer leaves, I touch the hot plate on the coffeemaker, which I shouldn’t be able to do. Cold as a nicely chilled bottle of Diet Kiwi Lemonade. Did anyone tell The Woman that she had to turn on the switch on the hot plate every morning?
No, of course not, because no one would have thought it necessary?
Then I go outside and notice that the trash can on the corner is overflowing with our coffee cups and the sidewalk is covered with frozen coffee. Oh, well.
Good-bye, morning commuters! I hope you find service as shitty as ours at whichever convenience store you abandon us for, and come back to our deli someday!
But I know that’s unlikely.

STAFF MEETING AT GEORGE’S TODAY. SINCE BUYING THE STORE
I have quietly gone back to neglecting my duties at the
Review
, which I’m hoping won’t be revealed in front of my fellow editors. Maybe I should skip this meeting and blame it on the deli. It wouldn’t be untrue in the slightest to say that I am worn thin by working so many night shifts (four a week since we started, plus endless running around during the day trying to get equipment, dealing with distributors, and so on). But again, is it really something I want George to focus on—that my attention is elsewhere, rather than on the
Review?
For all I know he’s forgotten our conversation about the deli already, and will be far less understanding the second time.

Then again, it’s not like staff meetings at the
Review
are all that businesslike. The editors who aren’t off at writers’ colonies or in Paris stalking Kundera file up to George’s living room, plop down on the couches with their yellow notepads, and endure around ninety minutes of gossip from Elaine’s, the famed writers’ hangout on the Upper East Side, with only the occasional feeble effort at following an agenda. Whenever a genuinely pressing issue pops up, such as the
Review
‘s chronic lack of funds, there is invariably the same solution: party. (This always reminds me of the scene in
Animal House
when Delta Tau Chi learns that Dean Wormer has put the fraternity on double secret probation: “He’s serious this time.” “You’re right. We gotta do something.” “Know what we gotta do?”
“Toga party.”)

“But who will help us?” George will then cry. “Who will perform the readings? Who will provide the publicity? Who will find us a venue?”

“Yankee Stadium!” someone on the staff will shout. “Someone call Steinbrenner.”

“No, we’ll have a party inside the Brooklyn Bridge!”

“No, we’ll do it at LaGuardia, and have readings on the tarmac and shoot fireworks at the planes!”

“Call the Port Authority!”

“Call Norman Mailer!”

“Call Swifty Lazar!”

“No, call Bobby Zarem! Swifty’s dead!”

George loves this. No matter how incoherent it is, seeing the staff brainstorming makes him feel like we’re getting things done
and
having fun at the same time. So thoroughly unproductive are most
Paris Review
meetings, so exhaustingly frivolous, that people tend to wander back to their desks afterward in a daze of guilt and have deeply
productive
afternoons—unless, of course,
they’ve had too many of George’s beers, in which case they pass out in one of the slush-reading chairs.

Today’s meeting is different, however. As I’m waiting for it to start, someone asks me if I’ve noticed how changed George seems since his accident. “Accident?” I say. It turns out that the other night George fell at one of his private clubs and smashed his head. He spent the night in the hospital, and since then he’s been, well, with head injuries it’s hard to tell. He’s up and about, but definitely not himself.

When he walks into the meeting, he seems considerably frailer than the last time I saw him.

“As you may or may not have heard,” he begins by saying, while staring at the floor with uncharacteristic vagueness, “I’ve had a bit of a mishap. That blasted floor at the Colony Club is harder than it looks. I mean the Century Club—or was it the Brook? Anyway, that floor was marble, pure marble, I can tell you, and now I’m a bit of a mess, as you may or may not be able to tell.”

George is too modest to realize that right now he looks like a man who got yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, thrown in a van and dropped by the side of the road out in the country, but we won’t point it out for him.

“Are you feeling any better?” one of the editors asks.

Rotating his eyes but not his head (too painful, apparently), he says to her, “I can’t read or write. I can barely talk on the phone. I can’t even make sense of what I’m watching on TV. All I want to do is sleep and drink ginger ale.” He holds up one of those little green bottles of Schweppes.

The staff looks stricken, and George obviously notices. None of us have ever seen him in such awful condition.

“I’m sorry for being like this. It’s damn embarrassing.” At that point I wonder if the meeting will end right there. But George
roused himself from bed for a reason—he wants to say something—and seems to find a reserve of strength.

“Listen all,” he says, perking up. “Being like this has gotten me to do a bit of thinking I wanted to share with you.”

The living room is silent.

“I will recover from this mishap,” he continues, “eventually. But who knows what could happen after that? I could have a stroke while playing tennis, or I could be run over by a bus while crossing York Avenue. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

The staff nods. We’ve heard this speech before. After the bus-on–York Avenue scenario—in case that wasn’t vivid enough—he’d come up with a half-dozen more. (“I could be crushed by a falling bridge. I could fall into the polar bear den at the Central Park Zoo. I could be mortally wounded in a freak trampoline accident.”) Talking this way revealed that even George worried about death and, in particular, the future, which is only natural in a seventy-five-year-old. It wasn’t quite as morbid as it sounds, however: part of him, the bon vivant, the seeker of fun, clearly looked forward to adding death to his repertoire of experiences and the stories he would be able to tell about it afterward.

“I think we get the picture,” one of the editors says after George starts going down his usual path.

“Good, good,” says George. “Excellent. Because what I’m trying to say is that you mustn’t take anything for granted. The cornerstones of reality shift overnight, and things are forever different. Life makes sudden turns without warning, do you hear?”

He looks around the room, to see if we’re all listening.

“Very well, that’s all I’m going to say. Now, has anyone seen Page Six today? I hear there’s an item …”

At this moment I realize that in a funny way, the
Paris Review
is like a deli: it’s a throwback, an institution that doesn’t quite fit in the modern world. It’s not big or corporate. It doesn’t have a lot of
swagger or muscle. There’s no marketing director, IT manager or human resources department. George likes to pretend we’re some kind of global institution—he’s always adding people he meets to the masthead with grand titles like “Moscow editor” or “Special ambassador to the Southern Hemisphere”—but the magazine is tiny and parochial, even a bit homely. (For decades its business manager was a lovable old grandmother named Nicky who worked out of her attic in Flushing and never came into the office. Although she was only a few miles away, many people who worked for George had never met Nicky in person and only knew her by her Queens-inflected warble.) Nestled in the shadows of Manhattan’s media titans—the Condé Nasts, the Times Companys—it’s an amateur among professionals.

But being small can be a virtue: in the case of a deli, smallness means that the person who’s poured your coffee for the last twenty years and whose children you’ve put through college is likely the owner, not some faceless corporation in an office park with square bushes in Odessa, Texas. In the case of the
Review
, smallness means that George has the freedom to make unconventional, ad hoc,
interesting
business and editorial decisions, things that a larger and stiffer, more bottom-line-oriented institution wouldn’t allow.