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.
THE ACCIDENT
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. Bu
t 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.
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.
LUCY
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!”
My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store Page 8