My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (11 page)

Such as the slush, for instance, that morass of unsolicited manuscripts sent in by the masses trying out to be the next Jeffrey Eugenides or Ann Patchett (both slush discoveries). Like a lot of the magazines considered its peers, the
Review
can afford to rely on literary agents and published writers to provide its material. Unlike larger places, however, it chooses to concentrate a major part of its office resources on the slush. This comes at considerable inconvenience. We receive something like thirty thousand manuscripts a year, an amount so massive one of the biggest challenges is simply finding space for it. One of the quintessential
Paris Review
experiences is opening a cupboard to look for a coffee mug and having an
avalanche of short fiction land on top of you. You open a closet meant for coats and there’s a stack of cardboard boxes containing unsolicited manuscripts. You sit down at your desk and stretch out your legs, and bump—there’s a whole milk crate of human creativity. There’s slush on the shelves in piles reaching up to the ceiling, slush in the basement in ice coolers and picnic baskets, slush under the toilet, slush over the sink, slush spilling into a rat-filled tunnel that extends from the basement of George’s building all the way up to East Ninety-sixth Street. There’s so much slush it makes you wonder if everyone in the country, instead of watching reality TV and playing video games, is writing short stories. But George insists that we read every submission, because nothing in the world gives him greater pleasure than the Discovery, that once- or twice-per-year moment when you unearth a new talent laboring in the shadows. When it happens, our office is literally filled with joy.

Being small also creates problems, however: just because you don’t have a marketing director doesn’t mean you don’t need one; ditto subscription fulfillment, fund-raising, a permissions department, etc., all of which George doles out to the staff (who are generally as unqualified for such jobs as you would think) on top of their editorial duties. It’s do-it-yourself publishing, and a lot of the time, given the late-boarding-school atmosphere of the magazine, it doesn’t get done.

Lately, some worrying signs have begun to appear. The
Review
has always had an untidy, overcrowded office that more resembled the headquarters of a high school yearbook than a real-world magazine. Six editors share a converted studio apartment so tiny that as they sit there reading manuscripts all day, they can practically communicate without talking. (“Is that your stomach growling or mine?”) In recent months, however, the slush has begun to reach unprecedented heights, overwhelming all efforts at control. It’s like a mutant lab creature run amok, or an invasive weed colonizing a
hapless little pond. Poetry alone—my God, the world produces a lot of poems—is so backlogged that we don’t even read what comes in for an entire year, and the piles just keep rising and rising. Among staffers, the inability to make headway is breeding despair.

Meanwhile, this dysfunction is being broadcast to the world via bloated, error-ridden issues that the editors themselves are reluctant to read in their entirety. Even the
Review
‘s famously well-attended cocktail parties in George’s apartment have gone slack.

So George is absolutely right to worry: the situation at the
Review
feels ripe for a crisis. The issue is whether he worries enough.

MY HANDS CAME BACK
.

After a few weeks behind the register, my hands have returned to being the reasonably obedient appendages they used to be. Money no longer causes them to spaz out and seize up, and one reason is that I’ve accepted that I’m never going to be able to keep them clean, and when someone fishes deep inside their pocket for some cash, as if they were rearranging furniture inside their groin, then hands me a bill so damp it might as well have been underwater, I no longer flinch. Money is money.

Tonight while on duty I meet Chucho, our wheezy, purple-faced landlord.

“I live in this building thirty years,” he says. “Bought it with a lottery ticket back in”—he inhales deeply—“seventy-three.”

“For how much?”

“Forty thousand.”

“Forty thousand dollars? Wow! That’s a lot of money. For a lottery ticket, I mean.”

“Guess how much the building’s worth now.”

“I dunno. A million?” Chucho has already established himself as a landlord who plays hardball—we’re freezing right now partly because he refuses to spend money on heat—so I try to pick a low number. I don’t want him to think that I think the building is nice.

“Seven.”

“Seven
million?”

“Yeah. Easy. No problem. Someone offered me that last week.”

“Wow. Seven million is a heck of a lot of money.”
For a building falling sideways
. I’m not sure I believe Chucho. I could see the location alone justifying one or two million, but with floors as soft as boiled lettuce? It’s a delusion. Even more disturbing, however, is the question, Is he shopping his building?

“You know, my wife got shot where you’re standing.”

“What?!”

“Blam!” he says, pointing a finger at my stomach. “Blam! Blam! I used to own this store.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

He nods and breathes in noisily, evidently lost in memory.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “That’s terrible.”

“Sorry for what? My wife? She lives in Virginia now.”

“Oh.”

“My brother got shot here too, except he was outside.” Another deep breath. “And he didn’t make it.”

Silence.

“So are you gonna gimme a lottery ticket or what?”

I give him a Lotto ticket for free and he goes upstairs.

The lottery machine, a clunky blue cash register–like contraption that as it spits out scraps of paper makes noise like a screwdriver inserted into an electric pencil sharpener, sits next to the actual cash register in the checkout area, forming a bulwark against the reaching arms of shoplifters. A few days after we bought the store I asked our liaison from the state lottery commission, a hennish Indian-American woman named Glenda, how to go about getting rid of it.

“Get rid of it?” fluttered Glenda. “No one ever gets rid of their lottery machine!”

“Why not?” I asked. For a moment I had a vision of the machine trailing me around to the end of my life, like an unkillable parasite. I would never be able to escape the horrible grinding noise, and there would always be an old woman in a nightgown and army boots standing next to me and shouting, “Three! Seven! Two! Four!”

But it turned out that what Glenda meant was that nobody who had a lottery machine in their store would even consider letting it go, because getting one in the first place could be such a struggle. In seeming recognition of the vast power that lottery machines possess, the state lottery commission allows only a certain number of stores in each neighborhood to have them. If you didn’t have one already, you could spend years waiting in frustration for your chance to become an approved vendor of state-sanctioned con games primarily afflicting the poor and needy.

Glenda said she’d start the process of disenfranchising us as lottery vendors in a week or so, but first she wanted us to think about it long and carefully.

“You’re new to the business,” she said. “I don’t want you to make an impulsive decision and lose all your money.”

Yes
, I thought.
That would be like playing the lottery
.

So I study the lottery machine’s impact on the store, how much money it makes for us and what sort of people it attracts. Economically, it’s a no-brainer: for every dollar of tickets we sell, our take is a pathetic six cents, and that’s before you factor in the cost of paying someone to sit there and operate the machine. (Kay once spent an entire hour punching in numbers, and at the end she calculated that as store owners we had barely earned three dollars—the same profit we’d make on a six-pack of beer. And please don’t even ask whether we get a portion of winning lottery tickets; unless you sell the one and only jackpot winner, you get nothing.)

As for the customers, what can you say? The typical lottery customer is apparently someone who woke up and almost got run over by a bus outside their apartment building, then memorized the bus’s license plate number and realized that it had four digits in common with their mother’s birthday, which prompted them to visit their mother’s old neighborhood and play the lottery at the local store using a combination of (1) the number 9, representing the floor of the apartment building where she used to live, (2) the numbers 6 and 3, 63 being the year in which John F. Kennedy (of whom the mother was the world’s biggest fan) died, and (3) the number 2, because that was the TV station that featured her favorite show,
Judge Judy
, which she passed away while watching. This simple, heartfelt tribute—a sentimental and not at all profligate gesture—would be followed by sixteen more tickets involving every permutation of 9, 2 and 63 imaginable, after which the customer would eyeball one of the oranges sitting on the counter, make a comment about how “the fruit looks kinda old in here,” follow that with a shocked, disapproving scowl upon learning that the orange costs a whole thirty-five cents,
and then
, in spite of obvious hunger pangs, request another set of tickets involving every possible combination of the numbers 3 and 5. All this would happen, moreover, as the customer stood in the way of the door, blocking other
people from entering, while having a speakerphone cell phone conversation for the benefit of the entire store with someone who kept saying “What?
What?”

Some of the lottery customers are so difficult and demanding that I have nicknames for them: Mumbles, the Screamer, and Toilet Paper (after the material I was once handed that contained a list of scribbled numbers I was supposed to input). However, as much as I dislike seeing some of them, they are our customers. It’s the culture of the regulars, that group I encountered in the stockroom with Dwayne, an international brotherhood of mostly middle-aged men who in the evening often lend the store an atmosphere similar to that of an off-track betting parlor. Some of the regulars come in around seven, as the evening rush slows down, and don’t leave till after midnight. My first experiences with them have been like that night in the stockroom—ill at ease and mutually suspicious. They wonder if I’m going to kick them out and I wonder if they’re going to in some way complicate our arrival in the neighborhood. The younger ones occasionally do their thug routine
—motherfucker this, bitch that, I’m gonna fuck that motherfucker
up—leading me to half-wonder if some of them don’t get drunk in our deli and then go rob someone else’s. But I’ve gradually come to realize that, for the most part, the regulars aren’t the types to get drunk and knock off convenience stores; they’re the types to get drunk and go fishing underneath bridges. Even the younger ones are too old to get in trouble, and besides, if they got hurt in a fight they might have to spend a night at home, watching TV in their own living room, which would potentially necessitate walking more than three steps to get a beer from the refrigerator.

Today one of the regulars, a grumpy old Italian wearing a porkpie hat and Ray Charles sunglasses, tells me how glad he is that we’re keeping the lottery machine, and I don’t have the heart to tell him its days are numbered.

“The customer he don’ wanna walk all de way down to de Bergen,” he says. (Bergen Street is where the next-closest deli with a lottery machine is located.) “My office is right here.”

“Oh really?” I remark, trying again to be friendly. Though I’ve seen him around a couple of times, I didn’t realize the old man still worked. “So what do you do?”

“I’m a plumber,” he says proudly.

“Oh?” I haven’t noticed any
PLUMBER
signs nearby. “Where’s your office?”

“Right there.” He points at the corner of Hoyt and Atlantic, where nothing larger than the telephone booth stands. Then he walks outside and sits on our newspaper box. So I ask Dwayne what this could possibly mean—was the old man pulling my leg?

“Alonzo’s a street plumber,” Dwayne says. “That’s his corner. He just stands there all day waitin for somebody to ask him to unblock a toilet. He don’t harm nobody.”

“Where are his tools?” I ask.

“He used to keep them at home, but that was when he lived in the neighborhood. Now he lives in the projects in Flatbush, so he keeps them in a basement down the block. One of the antique store owners gives him a little space.”

“When did he move to Flatbush?”

“I dunno. Ten, twenty-five years ago.”

“Ten or twenty-five years ago? That’s how long he’s been standing on that corner?”

“Like I said, he don’t harm no one.”

“I didn’t say he did, Dwayne. I just wanted to know
what
he does for a living. Is he there every day?”

“Every day, all the time.” This bothers me. If the corner is Alonzo’s office, how come I never see him there? Sure enough, when I look outside again he’s gone.

After that I begin reconsidering the lottery machine. For every
Screamer or Mumbles, there’s someone like Alonzo, who’s hardly what you would call a lottery fiend. Of course, as soon as I begin having second thoughts, the lottery machine, being the evil, all-knowing creature that it is, seems pleased and emits one of its random robotic belches. (I swear, every time I look at that thing, it smiles at me and whispers,
You know you want to play. Try it!)
Being connected by wire to some central location from which it receives updates throughout the day—numbers, numbers, numbers pouring into its cold blue shell—it will also occasionally hiccup and go off on feverish fugues that I imagine to be telepathic summons to members of the lottery community. That’s undoubtedly the worst part of the lottery machine: you often feel like you’re hosting an Amway representative or the latest diet guru, a charlatan preying on the feebleminded. The lottery messes with people’s heads. It turns them into twitchy, dart-eyed, pattern-obsessed arithmomaniacs—people crazed by numbers. For instance, on January 2, 2003, we had people with dark circles under their eyes and chewed-down nails spilling out the door, desperate to play variations on 1-2-3 before it reached its quota.