My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (4 page)

After letting myself into the Plimpton townhouse I go upstairs and knock on the door.

“George?” I call out. The door is open, but the Plimpton apartment seems empty. “Anybody home?” No answer. I check the kitchen and living room and, finding no one, decide to rest a moment on
the couch.
Jesus, what do they put in the Men’s 4-Pac?
I am feeling strangely … handsome, which doesn’t seem at all appropriate to the occasion.

I take a moment to savor being in the Plimpton apartment, with its astounding 180-degree panoramic view of the East River (seen from the same distance and height as a passenger on a luxury liner), its de Kooning and Warhol posters, its trophy kills from safaris in Kenya. Many times since Gab and I moved to Staten Island and our year of sharing bathrooms and eating in front of the television began, I have come up here to remind myself how it’s possible to live. Not to be a jerk, but it’s a nice change every once in a while to be in a house where food isn’t stored on the front porch. Coming to George’s from Kay’s is like going from the set of a Korean
Married with Children
to one of those three-page foldout magazine advertisements for Ralph Lauren.

Suddenly I hear a noise from the far end of the apartment—a snort or a roar, like a wild animal coming out of the bush.

“Hello, George?” I get up from the couch in a hurry, not wanting to be seen taking my leisure as an uninvited guest in the home. It’s bad enough that if I ever come back here it’s likely to be as a delivery boy with a sandwich order.

“Snuphuluphuluph!!”
The beast erupts again, sounding this time more like a sleeping bear. I creep (it’s hard to creep in the Plimpton apartment because it has old oak floorboards that groan underfoot like the mast of an ancient schooner) through the second living room, around the pool table, under the glare of a mounted African water buffalo, past the temptation of a quick shot of Tanqueray from the open bar, and into George’s office, where I find the old man dead asleep, passed out in a swivel chair in his boxers and a misbuttoned oxford while watching
SportsCenter
.

“George!” I blurt out.

George makes a noise like a vacuum cleaner that just inhaled a
gerbil. Then his eyes pop open like two window shades with their drawstrings plucked.

“Who’s there?” he commands, bleary-eyed. “I say: reveal yourself.”

“George, it’s me, Ben.”

For a split second his eyes narrow and his brow deepens in an expression of what appears to be fury, but then I realize that he’s only trying to get his bearings, which he does, gradually, while remaining splayed out in a pose that would be sexy if George were, say, female and half a century younger.

“Ben …”

“George, is this a bad time? I can come back.”

“…  late night, with Norman at Elaine’s, too many …”

“I see.”

“Snuphuluphuluph!!”
He gives himself a good vigorous scratch on the belly, which seems to wake him up.

“Okay,” he says finally. “Shall we have our little discussion?”

“Sure.” I take a breath. George pulls close a chair and rotates it to face me, interrogation-style. I feel like I’m back in boarding school—the sense of guilt, the illicit chemicals flowing in my blood—only this time the headmaster isn’t wearing any pants.

“Ben—”

“George—”

“I—”

“You—”

“The Vollmann—”

“The what?!”

The Vollmann—a piece by the acclaimed novelist William S. Vollmann—was something I had recently brought to the magazine and was scheduled to run in an upcoming issue.

“It’s a fine story,” George says, “but it needs work. Let’s go through it line by line.”

So that’s what this is about?
Here I am fearing for my job, my sense of self-worth as a human being, and all he wants is to do a little line editing? I almost want to howl with relief: a reprieve, a reprieve! I’m still an editor! For the next half hour George and I huddle over the manuscript together, and honestly it’s just as much of a thrill as it was when I first came to New York after college, as ready to be dazzled as a Nebraska farm girl stepping off a Greyhound bus in Hollywood. (The detour into porn would come soon enough.) George is a brilliant line editor, especially of dialogue, and rather mysterious in his methods. Sometimes the cuts are obvious, and sometimes not, but the results are almost always an improvement.

“You’re a genius, George,” I tell him after we finish. “Can I go now?”

He looks at me solemnly. “Actually, there’s something else.”

Uh-oh.

“As you know,” he continues, “I do not aspire to be the sort of boss who arouses fear or intrudes on personal lives, so when I say this, don’t think of me as an elder but rather as a pal, a concerned pal. I hope you will not mind my saying that for a while now you have not seemed your usual lively, intense, if somewhat too anxious self. You’ve been a bit, how shall I say,
blue
. Down in the dumps. And I wanted to ask, Is everything okay?”

Startled by the question, not to mention the exceedingly gentle way in which it is asked, my initial reaction is to answer it honestly. But then, knowing that the worst thing I can do is to admit that I’m burned out, I dissemble again:

“I’m fine, George, really, there’s nothing—”

“THEN WHY HAVEN’T YOU BEEN COMING TO WORK?” he thunders, and at that point I realize I must tell him something, and it better not be a promise to read the slush, so I begin by describing my life on Staten Island, the indignity of our new
surroundings, the basement, the extended family from Korea wanting to share beds and clothes, and George, to whom all of this is news, listens raptly, inert, his jaw dropping lower and lower until he says:

“You poor, poor chap. What a wretched existence. I had no idea. Is there any prospect of an exit?”

So I tell him about Gab’s fast-fading hopes for a business that, in addition to repaying her parents, would provide the income necessary for regaining our independence. George’s reaction is curious. His ears prick up, his eyes brighten and he leans forward:

“Did you say a deli?” he asks.

I nod.

“As in a corner store, selling lottery tickets and the like?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Marvelous.”

“I’m sorry?” I cannot have heard that right.

“I said marvelous. Wonderful. Enchanting.”

I almost swallow my tongue.

“Incidentally, can I work there? I’ve always wanted to be a stocker.”

“Stocker?”

“Yes, a stocker—one who puts stock on the shelves. You can’t tell me you don’t know this—it’s your line of business, for Pete’s sake!”

“You mean
stockboy
.
”

“Oh, is that what they’re called? Whatever. Let me be your stocker. Just for a day.”

“Okay,” I say, “it’s a deal.” And I think to myself,
How could I have ever misjudged this man so harshly? He’s a saint
. After that George and I go into the living room, where he mixes us a pair of drinks and we watch the barges drift by on the East River in the late afternoon. It is a favorite pastime of mine, watching the barges
at the end of the day, when they always seem to be fighting against the fierce East River tide, as if in a struggle against the very immensity of city life.

“We’re hosting a party tonight, in case you weren’t aware,” George says. “It’s going to be a grand occasion. You’ll be staying, won’t you?”

Glumly, I tell George I have to get home. I’m not sure if Gab managed to schedule a visit to Salim’s tonight, but I promised to bring her the car.

“Ah, I see,” says George, “reporting for duty. It begins already, your double life.” He smiles and drains his cocktail.

“That is what you’re proposing, you realize?” he continues. “A double life. A divided existence, schismatic even. Let me give you a bit of advice about such endeavors: they are even trickier than they look. You must be careful. One half is always threatening to swallow the other, to consume it, to wipe it out. Sometimes a double existence is more than impractical; it is fundamentally an impossible feat—a folly—and in the end you may have to give one side up.”

“Yes, George.”

I wait for him to express hope that it will be the deli I relinquish and not the
Paris Review
, but he doesn’t. Then he puts down his drink and goes off to get ready for the party, leaving me to watch the barges.

IN THE RETAIL WORLD, LOCATION IS EVERYTHING—UNLESS
you’re a Korean deli owner. “Location who care?” my mother-in-law often says. “If owner work hard, what difference make? All store same.”

I can’t tell if this attitude is what makes Koreans so successful or what keeps them from taking over the world. Indifference to risk is admirable, but it can also get you in trouble. Gab once told me that the best way to understand Korean national character was through Korean Air, which at one point held the distinction of being one of the most accident-prone airlines in the world. Korean Air
pilots frequently crashed because, according to Gab, they didn’t see little things like mountains and cockpit emergency lights. “The company was so hell-bent on success,” she said, “they became oblivious to safety. Their attitude was ‘Get this plane in the air! I don’t care if it’s missing a wing. Start flying!’ ”

This may explain the preponderance of Korean-run businesses in high-crime districts. After all, if your attitude is that all businesses are the same and only the owner’s work ethic determines success, why would you pay more rent to sell oranges in a fancy neighborhood?

Most of Gab’s relatives have spent significant time working in bad neighborhoods, and many have been assaulted, robbed and threatened more times than they can remember. Strangely, when they’re not working, they’re the most security-obsessed people I know. They fortify their houses with trip wires, moats and floodlights and practically dead-bolt the doors when they go out to get the mail. When it comes to business, though, the Paks seem willing to go anywhere.

Of course, as much as any suburban kid raised on Ice Cube and Snoop, I love the ghetto. Yet as much as I want Gab to fulfill her dream of buying a store for her mother, I don’t want to die for it.

There is something that scares me even more than us getting a store in East New York or Brownsville, and that’s the possibility of ending up in a perfectly safe part of the city, on a perfectly okay block, in a decent building even, but in the local loser store. The loser store—every neighborhood has one—is the store in your neighborhood that inexorably fails year after year under different owners, first as a sports memorabilia shop, then as a florist, then as a Pan-Asian bistro or “wrapperia.” Sometimes the source of bad luck is straightforward and obvious, such as being next to the local methadone clinic or probation check-in center, but often you have
to wonder if there’s an abandoned cemetery under the basement or if in a previous incarnation the property held an orphanage that went up in a fire.

After our failure to get the North Korean deli, a kind of gloom settles over Kay’s normally frenetic household. Over the previous few months we’d seen thirty or forty stores; now we stopped looking, except for Salim’s deli.

Gab and Kay go into Brooklyn one day and come back from looking at Salim’s store with mixed feelings.

“It was the size of a two-car garage, yet inside it seemed even smaller,” says Gab.

“It was very dirty, very bad condition, but it had lots of customers,” says Kay.

Was it a loser store? Judging by their reports, I’m not sure. Boerum Hill, the neighborhood Salim’s deli is in, is becoming one of the trendiest places to live in the whole city.

A few days pass, then a week. Then two weeks. Maybe this whole deli thing was just talk, I think. But Gab’s family isn’t like that. There’s no “blah blah blah,” as Kay would put it—“just do.” (Like her syntax in English, Kay’s life doesn’t have a conditional or subjunctive tense—only action.) And what about all the loans we’ve lined up, the credit cards we’ve taken out, the money that’s just sitting in our bank account?

Soon Gab and Kay have to start thinking about going back to the lives they left behind before we started the deli search. Gab, when she left her job as a corporate lawyer, was regularly putting in seventeen-hour days, and would sometimes sleep in a hotel next to her office rather than take a fifteen-minute cab ride home to Brooklyn. Kay had been halfheartedly taking classes at a community college so close to the barely cooled-off wreckage at Ground Zero that students wore face masks in class. Neither of them wants to go back.

Two weeks later Gab announces that she thinks we can make Salim’s deli work.

“But you said it was too small.”

“I didn’t say it was too small. I said it was small. What’s wrong with small? Are we such big people? When did we decide to open a Costco?” Small, she goes on, means that Salim’s deli is just right for our family, since we’re only aiming to run a modest business that will fulfill Kay and pay for her house, not make anyone rich. Small is perfect. Small means we won’t have to hire a big staff after the store gets on its feet and Gab and I aren’t working there anymore. Small means we won’t be taking an enormous risk with our savings. (“Maybe we can even cancel one of those credit cards I took out,” Gab says.) Small also means that Salim’s deli, though it is in a sexy, gentrifying neighborhood, is relatively cheap: one hundred and seventy thousand dollars with equipment and inventory included. The rent is a little high (thirty-five hundred a month), but for that little money overall we won’t find any other stores in Boerum Hill unless they have a hole in the ceiling.

Small is beautiful, Gab says. Small makes sense.

We decide to go back to the store on a weekday night. Part of me is intrigued, and part of me wants to make sure that Gab isn’t succumbing to desperation. She isn’t acting desperate—she’s thought about it for two weeks—but still, when you’re property-hunting and you’re running out of patience it’s easy to make bad decisions. New York in particular has a way of making people twist reality in their heads.
Who cares if the apartment is beneath a flamenco studio? I’ll get used to the noise! Yeah, I know the whole apartment has only one window facing a brick wall, but I’m never at home during the day
.