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.
“No, you little brats,” a lottery customer with a Russian accent shouted at her wailing children, before dropping on the counter what appeared to be change she’d scraped up from inside the couch. “There’s no money for breakfast.”
But if preying on people’s vices is to be avoided, we’d have to shut down the store. Our shelves would be barren. Our cash register would be empty. The regulars would launch an insurrection. Therefore, when Glenda comes back, I tell her we’ve decided to keep the l
ottery machine a little longer.
ANOTHER REASON I dislike the lottery machine is that I can never seem to operate it without exposing my incompetence. Anyone can butter a bagel or pour a cup of coffee, but with the lottery there’s a whole specialized vocabulary—the daily double, the day-night combo, the fifty-fifty split, box, straight—that tends to out the unversed. Every time I step up to the machine, I have this terrible feeling that I’m going to give myself away and the regulars are going to start calling me Dead Poets Society or Silver Spoon.
Not that I’ve misrepresented myself. I certainly haven’t told anybody things that aren’t true. But then again I haven’t had to, since no one at the store talks about their personal lives except Dwayne. (Dwayne’s personal life is the store.) In fact, it amazes me that some of the regulars spend as much time as they do with us and I have no idea whether they’re married, single, wanted for murder or Nobel laureates. (Maybe they went to boarding school too: Mumbles of Groton; Toilet Paper, St. Paul’s ‘74.)
But it doesn’t matter. There are things you know, things you pick up. The details always tell.
Tonight a young man with one of those unsettling neck tattoos comes into the store. The regulars give him a wide berth, as if he’s displaying gang colors I can’t see or the telltale bulge of a weapon under his hooded sweatshirt, and suddenly everyone in the store becomes very quiet, except Dwayne, who’s having a telephone conversation in the stockroom. Rubbing his hands, the young man announces that he has just gotten out of jail and would like to see someone named Lucy.
“Lucy?” I look at the regulars, but their faces are even blanker than usual. Dammit, it’s the moment I feared: my unmasking! I rake my memory for the name Lucy and come up empty-handed. Was she a clerk who used to work for Salim?—a thought that for some reason triggers the mental image of a dimpled Rosie Perez look-alike with a glorious derriere. Or might Lucy be the exotic dancer with a receding hairline who lives around the corner and glares at me every time she comes in?
Maybe if I drag this out, Dwayne will sense trouble and get off the phone in time to come to my rescue. “Lucy” sounds like code for something illicit. I’ve heard about delis with side businesses in things like illegal numbers. Maybe massages? Knockoff handbags? Drugs?! I almost blurt out, “Of course we don’t have that here! Are you crazy?” But then I tell myself, Play it cool. Lucy’s not here, man. She’s gone. No more Lucy. Which, of course, relies on the assumption that we don’t have Lucy. However, what if we’re a Lucy emporium and I’m the last to know? Now half of me wants to say, “sure,” just to find out what Lucy is, and the other half is afraid that upon my saying so, a troupe of dancing hookers will appear from nowhere with rubbing oil and hooded towels and then I’ll really be in trouble.
In the end, however, I just don’t want to reveal my ignorance. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I say, “but Lucy’s not here. She”—I have to stop myself from winking—“doesn’t work here anymore.”
The young man stares at me as if I’m insane, then exits the store shaking his head. At which point Leslie, one of the regulars, comes up to me and, laying his hand on my shoulder, says gravely, “Ben, who’s Lucy? ‘Cause I really want to meet her.” The whole group then bursts out laughing, especially the regular named Floyd, who keeps saying, “Is she loosie? Is she loosie?”
“What’s going on?” Dwayne asks, coming out of the stockroom. Leslie explains, and Dwayne starts heaving with laughter too.
“Lucy ain’t a person,” he says. “It’s a ‘loose cigarette.’ “ He takes a Newport out of his own box and waves it at me. “That guy was asking if he could buy one of these.”
“Oh.”
“Lucy, Lucy, show us your—” chants Floyd.
“Don’t worry,” says Leslie. “If you’re not a smoker, you wouldn’t know.”
But I did use to be a smoker. In fact, I lived in New York and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes every day for almost ten years. How could I not know what a loosie is?
THE NEXT EVENING I decide that it’s time to make myself more comfortable in the store. On most days the radio plays during the morning and afternoon, and the television comes on at night. I’ve been working to the sound track of murder, mayhem and steel-cage matches, or music that somebody else chose, but tonight and from now on we’re going to listen to what I want to hear, which will involve at least a modicum of peace and tranquillity. So I arrive early for my shift and change the radio station. From now on there will be no more smooth jazz, no more adult contemporary, and no more crunk; no more Creed, Mystikal, Chingy, O-Town or Parade of the Most Annoying Songs Ever Recorded. Tonight we are going to listen to public radio until the voices of Robert Siegel and Linda Wertheimer make people’s ears bleed, and in the meantime, until All Things Considered comes on, we’re listening to one of New York’s classical stations. Ah, music that doesn’t make me want to jump under a train. It’s as if my brain has exited a twelve-lane freeway and is now driving down a sun-dappled country lane, past farmhouses, through covered bridges and next to burbling streams. I feel peaceful and centered, instead of like a character under attack by robots and aliens in a video game.
Then Dwayne explodes through the door.
“Yo, B, what you listenin’ to classical music for?” he says. “It ain’t dinnertime.” This is followed by a burst of static as he jerks the dial from the classical station to Power 105.1, WWPR (“R&B, Hip-Hop and Back in the Day Joints”) and doubles the volume.
“Dwayne!” I shout (more to my own surprise than his) and immediately switch back to the Mozart, but it’s futile. All night, every time I get distracted, one of the regulars creeps over and retunes the station. Finally I bark at Super Mario, “Who keeps changing the station?”
Super Mario, a goateed Dominican building superintendent from an apartment complex over on State Street, looks at me innocently.
“You mean on the radio?” he says. “I think one of the customers.”
“The customers?” I shout, surprised again at the increasing shrillness of my voice. “What are you talking about, ‘the customers’? You’re a customer. Or do you work here and I am not aware of it?”
Super Mario whistles through his teeth and shrugs. I suppose that once you’ve seen enough overflowing toilets, it takes a lot to get flustered. But over in the pet food section, an older female customer frowns at my tone.
“I have an idea,” says Mr. Chow, a kindly parking lot attendant. “Why don’t we turn off the radio and watch TV instead?” Mr. Chow is the Mystery Man of Guangdong, a sphinxlike presence who drinks himself into a stupor every night and grins lugubriously even when passed out in the stockroom. He’s mysterious in many ways, one of which is that I can never find his empties, even though he drinks four or five bottles of Guinness a night.
“Say, isn’t it time for the news?” says Barry, while massaging an apple he hasn’t paid for and will soon put back on the shelf. Like many of the regulars, Barry, a nearly blind cab driver, could be in the store during a famine and he would still never spend a dime.
“Yes, it is,” I say, grabbing the remote control and turning on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “Let’s see what’s going on in the world.”
At the sight of dour, makeup-less Jim Lehrer talking to a panel of guests about foreign policy, the regulars look puzzled.
“Is this American TV?” one of them asks.
“Is he gonna read the lottery numbers at some point?” says another.
I turn up the TV so loud you can hear it through the walls. This will be the first time in New York history that a noise complaint is filed because someone was blasting The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Nevertheless, despite my efforts to control the environment, by eight-thirty a half-dozen men are hanging out in the store, lounging against the merchandise, holding open the door so they can spit on the sidewalk (and letting in drafts of frigid air) and in general making me paranoid, as there is too much going on for me to notice anything improper. Occasionally a paying customer walks
in and does a double take upon seeing so many bodies, wondering if they’ve stumbled upon some kind of gathering at which they’re unwelcome (or maybe too welcome). Someone lights a cigarette directly under a NO SMOKING sign. Bottle caps drop on the floor. More bodies attracts more bodies, including people I’ve never seen during the three weeks we’ve owned the store. What kind of person goes out to buy milk and comes home three hours later, saying, “Sorry, honey, there was an awesome party in the convenience store, and I just couldn’t resist hanging out”? The greater their numbers, the more I feel like an incidental presence, a lonely chaperone on a field trip who the kids only pretend to obey. I want to assert myself somehow, but what if everyone ignores me? What do I do then—kick them out? Would anyone listen?
At nine Andre, a dishwasher at the prison, walks in. Andre is a regular, but he’s quieter than the others, a smallish, polite and vanishingly unobtrusive presence. (Dwayne says Andre weighs “a buck seven soaking wet with eight bucks in your pocket,” which I can’t quite decipher but sounds about right.) He has the look of a guy standing on a corner trying not to garner attention. “Hey, I didn’t do anything,” his posture says. When he does talk, Andre likes to discuss issues, which also distinguishes him from the regulars, who generally act as if having a political view would somehow taint their manhood. Dwayne once called Andre “a black man with too much education,” which confused me. “Andre is a dishwasher,” I replied. “I don’t think he has much education at all.” “Exactly,” said Dwayne.
After Andre comes one of my least favorite customers, the unctuous Floyd. A cable TV installer, Floyd is the regulars’ lead raconteur, a regaler of riveting tales, such as those about seducing married female customers whose homes he visits. Floyd likes to tease me in front of the regulars (“What’s the matter, Ben? Stand up straight and quit acting ashamed of your pecker”), hit on Gab and confuse me about how many wine coolers he’s taken from the KustomKool. Tonight he has something rare with him, though: a living, breathing member of the opposite sex. He’s on a date. And she’s pretty.
My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store Page 9