My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  Moreover, physical health was not the only issue. America had wrought some mysterious changes, like the loss of her sense of smell. And there was the question of why she’d never returned to owning her own business. Was she scared? Intimidated? Had she lost her nerve? Or had she lost the desire and the drive? Was she possibly depressed? No one knew, because Kay would no more discuss her feelings than she would go to a doctor. (She had no trouble exhibiting them, but discussing them was out of the question.) Due to her complex psychology, it was possible, of course, that she was all of those things. However, the only obvious reason why she hadn’t opened a store was money.

  You need money to start a business, and Gab and I, around the time of her thirtieth birthday, were enjoying, for the first time in our married lives, having just a little money in our bank account. It was money we guarded with insane desperation, not even telling each other how much was in the account. The very act of saving was new to us, like a magic power we couldn’t quite believe we had acquired. But even more important, it was that money and that money alone that would eventually buy our freedom from Kay’s house on Staten Island.

  We had moved into the basement nine months before, after the lease on our Brooklyn apartment expired. After living in Brooklyn for three years, we had tired of paying rent to our landlord, a former ad executive from Parsippany who had miswired our brownstone so that everything blew up in our faces. We wanted to own our own space and there were thoughts of starting a family, and when the lease ran out we decided it was time. Kay’s house was to serve as a temporary refuge while we house-hunted.

  Deep shame attended our moving into Gab’s mother’s household, but it was not as bad as moving to Staten Island, New York City’s pariah borough, a place where once-hot trends like Hummers and spitting go to die, a place so forsaken that not even Starbucks would set up a store there, nor even the most enterprising Thai restaurant owner—only immigrants from the former Soviet bloc, people fleeing environmental disasters and the most involuted economies on earth. (Perhaps they found something homelike in the smoldering industrial landscape, a familiar scent in the air.) As Gab and I quickly discovered, friends were uneasy about visiting us in our new borough. “Can you smell the dump where you live?” they would ask. “How long does it take to develop a Staten Island accent?” We promised they wouldn’t have to go back to Park Slope wearing velour sweat suits or smelling like garbage, but still they wouldn’t visit us.

  Our bedroom was in a basement. It had exactly one window, a shoe box–sized portal at ground level that occasionally allowed us a clean, unobstructed view of an ankle. One of our neighbors had a bored old house cat who used to come and sit in the one window and watch us undress. Probably he wondered what kind of deranged animal chose to live its life underground, watching people’s ankles. Above our heads, clomping around day and night, were relatives of Gab’s who’d recently made the trip from Korea and were as surprised to see us as we them. “We can understand living with your parents in Korea,” they said, “but America is a very big country.” Some of them stayed with us for months, squeezing three at a time into beds made for one. Some of them were new immigrants who spoke no English at all, but it didn’t matter in Kay’s house because the television was forever playing Korean soap operas, and the radio was constantly tuned to Korean talk radio, and the refrigerator was filled with bean sprout soup, sea slugs and fermented cabbage. I was the only one for whom it mattered, because I did not eat Korean food and could not speak a word of Korean.

  Gab and I had no sex at all for the first three months. Too dangerous. In an Asian household no one wears shoes indoors, so you never hear anyone coming. And since the general rule in the Paks’ house was that an unworn shirt was your shirt, an uneaten chicken leg your chicken leg, people were always barging into the basement hoping to get into our bed.

  From the day we moved in, we were dying to get out, which gave us the power to save thirty thousand dollars in less than a year. But then came Gab’s thirtieth birthday, and suddenly our misery didn’t matter anymore—in fact, the greater our misery, the better Gab felt. “Don’t worry,” she said to me. “We’ll still be able to move out.” She had a plan. At first, she and I would be the owners of whatever store we bought, and Kay would be the manager. During this period, we would keep the store’s profits and use them to replenish our bank account. Later on, within the six months or so it would take for the business to stabilize, we would transfer ownership to Kay and resume our old lives.

  This plan was so foolhardy, so pregnant with the seeds of its own destruction, that it was almost as if it had come from me, not Gab.

  GAB’S “PERFECT” STORE is in Brooklyn, a borough that, while beloved by many, stirs nothing in the heart of Kay, or that of anyone else in my wife’s family, for that matter. For the Paks, Brooklyn is nothing but a sprawling, dirty, dangerous place with no Korean restaurants or supermarkets and none of the prestige or business opportunities of Manhattan. Except to go the airport or endure a passage on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the borough has no place in their lives.

  “The store is owned by North Koreans,” Gab reports gleefully. This is excellent news because training in the Kim Il Sung school of neo-Stalinist entrepreneurship tends to put one at a fairly severe competitive disadvantage, and we have hopes that the store will be undervalued.

  Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the spectacle we were about to witness. While the store is in a trendy neighborhood surrounded by restaurants with one-word names and menus offering eleven-dollar desserts, the store itself—well, I’ve seen hunting cabins in the woods that were better stocked. The shelves are all but empty, and the place looks like it has been bombed, judging by the rubble swept into the corners and the tattered awning fluttering in the stiff November wind.

  The owners, an older couple and their two silent daughters, are extremely friendly, but things only get weirder after we meet. “Country people,” Kay whispers to me as they lead us on a tour. They are like human beings from a different century, and they have funny accents and use words that Kay and Gab don’t understand. Both have numerous missing teeth and haircuts they’ve obviously given themselves.

  The store embarrasses them, and they apologize for it, offering to feed us as compensation. “Come,” they say, leading us to the kitchen, where a mysterious crimson broth burbles and seethes inside a blackened pot. “No, thank you,” we all say. Next to the stove I see a box of broken-down fruit crates, tree branches and other bits of scrap wood. Gab goes off to use the bathroom and returns wearing an alarmed scowl, having peed in a makeshift closet with only duct-taped cardboard for walls. This place has secrets. I begin to feel like an intruder. And then we ask to be shown the basement.

  The owners look at each other nervously. “Okay,” says the husband. “Follow me.”

  It’s nothing to be ashamed of, really—just violently at odds with the city health code. The owners (or somebody; we don’t ask) turn out to live in the basement, where there are beds, dressers and clotheslines hung with wet laundry. Being basement dwellers ourselves, Gab and I withhold judgment, but Kay is appalled. It looks like the power has been cut off recently, judging by all the candles, and I assume that the kindling I saw by the stove is what they’ve been using to heat themselves. Then suddenly a loud noise fills the basement, vibrating like an earthquake, and a subway car goes by right on the other side of the basement wall.

  “Bet that keeps you up at night,” I say to the male owner.

  “Bet what does?” he replies.

  We go back upstairs and take another look. The store is a full-blown disaster—during the twenty minutes we’ve been visiting, not one customer has come in—but with work it can be turned around, and outside waits a fancy neighborhood filled with big spenders. The owners want seventy-five thousand dollars, which we offer them; then we wait for their response. Nothing happens for several days. We have now been looking for a store for three months, and patience in the Pak family has truly all bu
t run out.

  “How hard can it be?” Gab exclaims. “Is New York City not filled with delis? We aren’t looking to open a whole supermarket. All we want is our own little space.”

  “Maybe it’s a message,” Kay says. “Buying store is mistake.”

  But we’ve already considered the alternatives, such as a Subway or a twenty-four-hour photo shop or a fishmonger’s, and ruled out each one, because the Pak family’s expertise lies in convenience stores.

  Then the owners of the Brooklyn store call. They tell Gab they’ve decided not to sell after all and, in keeping with their mysterious ways, offer us no explanation. Perfectly polite and friendly, but perfectly strange at the same time. In a month or so we will drive by their business, just to see if they were telling us the truth, and we will confirm that indeed it has not been sold, but neither is it open. The place is dark and shuttered. A little after that Kay will hear through the Korean grapevine that the old man had suffered a heart attack and the family had moved to parts unknown.

  “Now what we do?” Kay says in disgust. “I’m not be having energy anymore. This drive me to be the crazy person.”

  We all look to Gab, who is slumped on the living room couch and seems in fact to be sinking into it, sucked down by some depressive force emanating from below the house. She says nothing for a while, but then:

  “I can look at one more store,” she says. “Just one. After that I’m finished.”

  Kay gets the Korean newspaper, and there in the classifieds it is: “Busy street, bright store, new refrigerators—Brooklyn. $170K.”

  That was how we found out about Salim’s store.

  SLUSH PILE

  AS I PREPARE TO BECOME NEW YORK’S NEWEST DELI OWNER, I take comfort in still having my job at the Paris Review, where I’ve worked for five years. Being an editor at America’s premier literary journal is like an anchor, holding me fast no matter how far I drift. Yet I’ve been free in how I talk about the deli—too free. I’ve told too many people, when the truth is that you never know how people are going to respond. In professional baseball they say that when a player gets sent to the minors, an invisible wall forms around him in the locker room; one second he’s a teammate and then poof! Suddenly he’s a ghost, a leper, a virus. I’m afraid that when people hear about the deli, they’ll say the right things (“That’s wonderful! I’ll be sure to stop by when you’re working!”) but be afraid to go near me for fear of catching the curse and ending up the manager of an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt at the mall.

  I didn’t tell everyone, just some friends and people in the office. But maybe that’s too many, for the one person I haven’t told—my boss, the famed writer, editor and bon vivant George Plimpton—is the one person whose reaction I fear most. George isn’t an ogre or anything. Far from it. Basically he’s a kindly, lovable old man who likes to walk around the office in his boxer shorts and rarely fires anyone. He’s certainly not one of those pathological magazine editors who overworks their staff until they slump over their desk dead of a heart attack at age thirty-six. If you’re going to slump over your desk at the Paris Review, it had better be dead drunk, not dead dead. But there is one issue that would cause George to fire his own family, and that’s loyalty. When it comes to allegiance to the cause, he’s like a Mafia boss. And while a deli is not exactly competition for the next Lorrie Moore story or a National Magazine Award, it might be construed as competition for a certain senior editor’s passion and commitment.

  What’s worse is that lately I have taken a lot of time off, and I suspect George has noticed. Now, it’s hard to take off too much time at the Paris Review, where editors have been known to not report to work for up to an entire year.

  “Where were you?” says George sternly upon their return.

  “I had to go to Europe to find myself,” says the editor.

  “Very well then,” says George. “Carry on.” Other valid excuses included skiing, finishing my novel, and working off a brutal hangover.

  My excuse isn’t something I want to share with George, however. It’s called burnout, and call me paranoid, but that seems like the kind of thing you soldier through rather than confess to your boss. Admitting to your boss that you’ve lost the passion for work would be sort of like admitting to your wife that you’ve lost the passion for, well, her, would it not? (“Now, honey, don’t take this personally …”) Doesn’t seem like a good idea.

  I started feeling burned out about a year ago, I think. There was no single moment when it began, no crummy experience that set it off, just a deadening feeling that what had motivated me to become an editor no longer did the trick. The most worrisome change was that at some point I noticed that I wasn’t all that interested in what we published. I didn’t care what went in the magazine. Sometimes I read it, sometimes I didn’t. If it was a story or an interview I brought in, I took it as a professional responsibility to back it as vigorously as I could through publication. But otherwise I had a hard time caring. And this is weird because like everyone else at the Review, I supposedly do what I do because I care, not for the money, which there isn’t any of. People at the Review care enough not only to accept measly little salaries but to work at tiny little desks with ten-year-old computers in the basement of George’s town house. They care enough to reject superlative, wondrous stories by the most famous authors in the world because they have a single lousy sentence or half-assed scene, or because it’s not his or her best work. They care enough to get into shouting matches over the serial comma, em dashes and whether you can begin a sentence with “And” or “But.” But now I can no longer experience outrage upon seeing a ho-hum story accepted or The Chicago Manual of Style‘s guidelines on the italicization of familiar foreign words flouted. Little things that used to make me crazy don’t anymore. This isn’t the material’s fault, incidentally: the Paris Review is famous for having introduced the work of Philip Roth and Jack Kerouac, among others, and it continues to publish the great writing of the day. Maybe the problem is that there’s no risk involved.

  Risk—what would that even entail? I’m not sure I know. Not simulated risk, not managed risk, not the sort of risk you get whizzing down a zip line in Outward Bound. (Wheeee!) I’m talking about the real world, dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed. Not that literary publishing doesn’t entail risk on an individual level—you might start a new magazine and end up publishing only two issues, or you might write a book and get an embarrassing review. You might lose your job. These are obviously real and painful outcomes, and greatly to be avoided. But fear of getting fired or embarrassed doesn’t always get you out of bed in the morning (or if it does, it doesn’t do much more), and on a larger level, since publishing is a losing enterprise so much of the time and failure is almost expected (Donald Barthelme: “What an artist does, is fail.… There is no such thing as a successful artist.”), “risk” becomes a relative concept. (Possibility of failure versus the possibility of ruining one’s life, having to flee the country, etc.) Moreover, some might say that publishing is insulated, even rigged; everyone comes from the same upper-middle-class background, and it’s all very social, very dependent on things other than sheer talent, like networking and personality. When those are the kinds of skills that matter, you can never really be sure of your successes, or your failures.

  Disaster—have I ever faced disaster? No one to catch you if you fall? No safety net? What would that be like?

  Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t want to take any foolish risks. Nothing rash, nothing imprudent. And I feel fairly certain that this funk, or whatever it is, will eventually pass. I can’t even conceive of quitting the Review or letting myself get fired by George. Which is why this deli business has me worried.

  TODAY IS MY day off, and at the end of the afternoon I get a call at home from Tom, George Plimpton’s assistant.

  “George is looking for you,” Tom says.

  “Me?” I blurt out. “Why me?”

  “I don’t know. But I think you should
come to the office as soon as possible.”

  I look at the clock, trying to decide how quickly I can make it to the Upper East Side. It’s the end of the afternoon and I am sitting in Kay’s basement in my pajamas. I tell Tom it’ll have to be tomorrow. “By the way, did George say what he wanted?” I ask.

  “Nope,” says Tom.

  “How did he seem?”

  “Agitated.”

  “Agitated? Really?” This isn’t good. “Can you describe the agitation?”

  Tom sighs. “He came in the office and asked, ‘Where’s Ben?’ three times. Does that seem agitated enough?”

  “Okay, okay,” I say. This isn’t good at all, so I make plans to visit the office the next day, screwing up plans I had already made with Gab to see the new store, which agitates her greatly. Lately a tone of desperation has entered Gab’s voice. She’s been taking our inability to find a store awfully hard.

  “There are fourteen thousand delis in New York City,” she says, shaking her head. “We can’t even find one to buy, let alone fail at owning. What kind of immigrants are we? Maybe we’ve been in this country too long.”

  I have no answers. All I can say is “Let me sort out this business at the Review and find out what’s wrong with George.” We decide that I should drive to the Review in Kay’s Honda (normally I would take the ferry and the subway, a two-hour trip) so that I can return to Staten Island as quickly as possible.

  ON MY WAY to the Upper East Side I practice groveling for my job. “Please, George, don’t fire me. I’ll do anything to avoid this right now. You don’t know how low I’m sinking.” Or maybe he does know, and that’s the problem. In any case, whether it’s because someone told him about the deli or because my desk has been unoccupied for too many days, I intend to make it up with a dramatic offer: to read the slush pile again, the monstrous heap of unsolicited, occasionally brilliant but for the most part punishingly unreadable stories that arrive at the Paris Review each day by the duffel bag. That will impress him. Reading the slush is like getting lobotomized with a giant magnet. It’s something only interns can handle.