My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (9 page)

I have discovered one thing about Edward in the last year, though. Before we moved into Kay’s house I used to think that the job of a self-employed commercial refrigerator repairman belonged in the hierarchy of hellish occupations somewhere near coal mining, which it shares quite a few traits with, actually, starting with
the fact that HVAC men spend a lot of time wedged inside dark, narrow spaces filled with hazardous gases and sharp objects. But it’s actually worse. Refrigerator repairmen are the only people in this world standing between civilization and the Dark Ages—they’re the ones keeping the food fresh. Like gods, they have the power to turn us back into cavemen eating berries and insects, and thus their work never ceases: they remain on duty so long as their clients, the shopkeepers of the world, have things like sushi and potato salad that need to be refrigerated. In Edward’s case, it’s less the sheer amount of work that makes the job brutal than the frantic telephone calls at ungodly hours from hysterical deli owners, and being the only car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on Christmas morning. Sometimes he doesn’t get any service calls for a few hours, but it’s never long enough that he can take a real vacation or venture far from the Tri-State Area. In fact, I’ve only seen him outside a forty-mile radius of Times Square once, and that was for our wedding in New England.

The odd thing is, I don’t think Edward minds his job. In fact, I don’t think he’d trade it for the world. Why would he? As a refrigerator repairman, you get to indulge in three of life’s greatest pleasures: driving, smoking and tooling around with machines. Add to that virtually unlimited time for listening to music while becoming familiar with every inch of New York City’s roadways, as well as membership in the great urban fleet of repairmen, town car drivers, deliverymen and tow truck drivers, and you have what for some people amounts to something very close to The Good Life.

Nevertheless, this year Edward will turn sixty, and the Paks have begun trying to coax him into a line of work with less lifting of heavy objects and less time spent around poisonous gases. Edward may be quiet, but he can also be impossibly stubborn, and like most independent operators, he’s less than the ideal judge of when to let go. (There’s also a bit of a martyr’s streak: for instance, Edward
refuses to wear a gas mask when he’s around toxic fumes, out of fear that he might unnerve his clients’ customers.) Yet honestly, I don’t know what we’d do if he decided to retire right now. Kay’s household needs funds. Not only is the house itself heavily mortgaged, but inside it are four adult mouths needing sustenance—and often many more, given the steady stream of house guests. At the moment the store isn’t bringing in any money, and it won’t until we pay off our debts. Sure, I make a contribution, but my already paltry earnings are down sharply this year because there’s no time to pursue the freelance magazine work I usually supplement my meager editor’s salary with. Gab, of course, made quite decent money when she was a lawyer, most of which got eaten up by student loans we’re currently scheduled to continue paying off till the year 2037, and the rest of which we successfully garnished into the nest egg that became the store. That leaves Edward carrying most of the load. Lately he’s been seeking out additional jobs, adding to his client base and not coming home for days, worrying everyone with the impact this will have on his health. He sleeps in his van and eats at his clients’ stores. The only way anyone can see him is to call him and tell him that one of our refrigerators is broken, and even then, if you’re not paying attention, he might come and go without your realizing it.

THE HOLIDAY SEASON COMES AND GOES, WITHOUT QUITE THE
oomph in beer and lottery sales Kay had been expecting. Part of this, I hypothesize, is that Boerum Hill, being popular with young, single New Yorkers who tend to come from other parts of the country, sees its population drop over the holidays, as people go home to visit their parents. Kay has a different explanation: it’s freezing outside, and after Christmas we had a blizzard. “People not want to go out even for beer,” she rationalizes. Although it’s frigid in the store as well (there’s only one radiator, whose functionality I have yet to determine; I have a feeling we’re being kept warm by the carafes of stale coffee on Salim’s coffeemaker), I notice that Kay is
wearing only an orange T-shirt with cut-off sleeves. Maybe she keeps warm thinking of what the shirt says:
COSTA RICA!
(A place she’s never been to, incidentally.)

After a week at the register, I’m making fewer mistakes but hardly at ease. The store has a regular crowd of customers, people who come in and hang out and sometimes watch an old color TV propped above the cold-cut display. It’s never the same crowd, or at least it hasn’t been since I started trying to remember faces. Some people have gone out of their way to be welcoming, which is weird, I guess, because they’re welcoming us to our own store; others, more disconcertingly, act as if we’re not even here. Tonight, after a long day at the
Review
, I come in and find one of the largest crowds I’ve seen yet, watching a movie. I’m not in a very crowd-friendly mood. I had a pile of unread mail and manuscripts on my desk at the
Review
, only a fraction of which I was able to dispose of, and some of which I’ve brought with me to the deli.

“What’s on TV?” I ask, trying to be upbeat. A cheerful deli owner.

No one answers, so I take off my backpack and drop it heavily next to the coffee machine. The people watching TV are blocking the aisles and creating a gauntlet of cigarette smoke and malt liquor breath for the enjoyment of customers who come in to actually buy things. Meanwhile, on the TV voices are screaming, blood is splattering and some sort of electric knife or chain saw is droning painfully. It’s not exactly a scene that puts you in the mood for a sandwich.

“Scarface
again?” I sigh, not really to anyone in particular.

“Chucky Two,”
a voice from the crowd shoots back.

“Oh. Thanks.” I look around the store. In the beer aisle a man in a wheelchair has fallen asleep with a smile on his face and is snoring blissfully, emitting soft liquid sounds. Next to him is a woman in a subway booth operator’s uniform, who had evidently grown tired
of watching the movie on her feet and made herself a pillow out of hot dog rolls, is laughing hysterically.

“Man, I’m glad I don’t have to live with Chucky,” she says. “He’s so bad.”

Maybe I can hide in the stockroom and read
, I think wishfully. But as I venture back I hear voices there too and smell something pungent and sickly sweet, like an air freshener—except it smells as if it’s on fire.

“What’s going on back here?” I demand, sweeping aside the stockroom curtain.

The stockroom is not a real room but an alcove walled off from the main part of the store by the refrigerator. It is inadequately lit and filled with stacks of cardboard boxes and bags of leaking garbage. I try to spend as little time in there as possible, because the floor feels about as sturdy as wet tissue paper and the shelves are lined with thousands of pounds of beer and other liquids.

No one answers, so I squint, and in the smoky haze I begin to discern bodies: three, maybe four, seated on milk crates.

“Can I help you guys?” my mouth says, not because I want it to but because sometimes my mouth says things without asking me first, to fill up awkward silences.

“I don’t know,” someone finally says. “That’s not the question.”

“What’s the question?” I ask the figure, who appears to be made out of smoke.

“The question is, Can we help
you?”

The voice has an undeniable element of nastiness, and now one of the other bodies is standing up. Clearly, I interrupted something—a card game? some sort of business transaction?—and my entrance wasn’t very diplomatic. Who am I anyway? To someone who’s never seen me before, I probably look like just another customer—only demanding information I’m not entitled to.

Suddenly a door in the back of the stockroom creaks loudly and opens halfway. The bathroom. A vigorous rush of liquid. Then a voice, unmistakably African-American and young.

“Ben, that you?”

“Yes, hello, Dwayne?” I cry. Dwayne is one of Salim’s old employees, the only one we have kept on. It must be him back there in the bathroom, I reason, but whoever it is doesn’t reply. Or, rather, he lets his vigorous dialogue with the toilet bowl reply for him, while the rest of us wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, a human Brinks truck waddles out into the stockroom. He is dressed like a farmergangster (Oshkosh B’gosh overalls, oversized New York Rangers shirt, red bandanna) and walks a bit stiffly, like a rusty robot samurai, but with instantly recognizable authority.

“Yo, Marvin, sit the fuck down,” Dwayne says. “That’s Ben, the new owner.”

Marvin sits down, fast and hard. But another man even bigger than Dwayne stands up.

“You mean the new owner
of this store?”
he grunts.

Everyone looks at me as I nod dumbly, feeling as if I’ve just been identified as the perpetrator of an unspeakable crime. My center of gravity has suddenly dissolved. The floors are tipping from side to side. I want to spread my feet wider or put my arm against the wall, but there is nothing for me to hold on to except smoke.

The man takes a menacing step forward, halving the distance between us, and not even Dwayne moves to stop him. Then he lunges, wrapping me in his arms like a terrible bird, and as I surrender the battle to maintain my balance, my face collapses into the base of the giant’s neck, where at last I identify that odd scent I had first detected outside the stockroom: a French Vanilla–flavored cigar, undoubtedly one of the Dutch Masters we sell ourselves.

I met Dwayne once before. He is thirty-four and has worked at
the store since he was eighteen. Half of what he says I can’t understand, either because he says it too fast or because what he says turns my brain inside out. Two hours after I met him, though, I knew his life story: where he grew up (three blocks from the deli, in the Gowanus Houses), where he was shot (around the corner) and what he’d ordered in the mail the previous week from the ninja supply company (eight throwing stars, five knives, a pair of nunchakus, some kind of truncheon and a pair of slingshots with ball-bearing ammo—one for him and one for his sixteen-year-old daughter, Keisha).

The first thing Dwayne said to invert my cerebral cortex was that he has a cousin with some gifted children.

“They’re so smart they can tell you the square root of a doughnut.”

“What?” A second earlier we seemed to be having a discussion about hubcaps. The segue to the cousin’s kids eluded me.

“They’re so smart they can tell you how fast it takes spit to fall off a roof.”

Huh?
I looked around—was the cousin or one of his kids nearby? Is he a hubcap designer? I would soon learn that this is quintessential Dwayne, though. As he would say, my brain moves “slower than water going uphill,” while his brain moves like Renee, the drunk down the block who drinks Colt 45 “like a snowball going down a snowhill.” After touching on the cousin’s kids and hubcaps it was on to why you can’t eat Chinese food after drinking beer (“You’ll mess up the alignment of your stomach”) and how to escape from a police choke hold. Only a genius (like Dwayne) can see the connections.

As for the interaction in the stockroom, it’s easy to see why Marvin sat down so obediently. Though built like a steroid-enhanced turtle, Dwayne is hardly the biggest person to walk through the
front door. (That would be the rapper Biggie Smalls, who, according to store legend, was so big that Dwayne had to come out from behind the register and rearrange several racks of snack food so he could move around.) What makes Dwayne menacing is his aura, a radiant hum of pure aggression. Dwayne’s body also bears evidence to back up the threatening air—scars, contusions, welts, burn marks, swelling, some of which looks recent. As with a fighting dog, everything you could grab on him in a struggle seems to have been shorn off. And yet at the center of it all is this dapper little mustache, almost military in its trimness, perfectly balancing the rest of his plumlike face, plus a bookish little pair of spectacles that has to stretch so wide to get around his head that looking at him makes me wonder when they’re going to
snap!
, sort of like Dwayne himself.

Salim made us promise to keep Dwayne on, and said we’d be sorry if we didn’t, but left us to guess why. There are several possible reasons. One, as anyone who has lived in New York knows, African-Americans almost never operate or work at delis. The reasons aren’t clear, but the deep-rooted enmity between Korean-Americans and blacks is certainly part of it. (Many Korean deli owners simply refuse to hire African-Americans.) For that reason alone, it would certainly not endear us to the store’s many African-American customers if we came in and immediately let go of Dwayne. We also wonder if Salim’s insistence could have to do with the deterrent power of Dwayne’s physical presence or his ties to the community after so many years in the store.

Almost immediately, though, we realized that if these are reasons at all, they are deeply secondary. After one shift with Dwayne, Kay called him the best worker she has ever seen. He is energetic, takes initiative and seldom makes mistakes. As Dwayne himself would say, some workers tend to “sleepwalk,” but Dwayne is as
perky—and still talking a mile a minute—when he gets off work as when he gets on. Most striking of all, though, he seems to be omniscient, to have almost complete awareness of things happening in and around the store, whether it is the presence of shoplifters, undercover inspectors from Consumer Affairs or someone silently struggling to find canned olives on the shelves.

To Kay and Gab’s delight, Dwayne’s powers of observation also extend to other workers, including, of course, me. He can spot my mistakes while simultaneously engaged in three other tasks, then remember to point them out several hours later or even the next day, when customers aren’t around. “You know, Ben, you charged that lady from the real estate agency tax on her milk, but dairy products are tax-free. Just FYI for the future. You can chew on it now and taste it later. Swallow it now and digest it tomorrow.”