My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  “We’re in a hole,” Gab says. “There’s no money in the bank, and based on my calculations, we owe our creditors more than I can see coming in. And we have things like tax coming up.”

  “What do you mean tax? It’s only February.”

  “Sales tax, stupid, not income tax. As a business, you have to pay sales tax every three months. Our assessment is coming in a few weeks, and if my calculations are correct, it will be another few thousand dollars.”

  “A few thousand dollars?!” The lethargy has worn off. A new feeling has entered my body—not panic or despair, but something more like the shock of being diagnosed with a serious illness. How would we pay off Salim and our other debts if there wasn’t money coming in—not now and apparently not for quite a while? Our business is sick—isn’t that what Gab is saying? We’re in danger of becoming one of those stillborn, turn-your-head-away stores that close right after opening. We’d been counting on the deli to pay off our debts, but instead those debts have increased, and now, like any insolvent enterprise, we’ll shortly be shutting down.

  For a moment I feel almost overwhelmed. Then it occurs to me that this is what I had been craving—namely, risk and consequences. The real. Vital contact. And despite the chill in the bar (all of New York seems to be frozen right now, as the commerce-killing cold spell goes on and on), I suddenly feel hot with shame. The folly of it all! The way I invested what should have been a dispassionate business decision with foolish emotions and ideals! But it soon passes, in part because I notice that Gab is staring at me with an oddly composed expression.

  “Why aren’t you freaking out?” I ask her.

  “Because I have a plan,” she says confidently.

  I look at her in terror. A plan? But of course—I should have known. Gab and her plans. She proceeds to take out a hard copy of the spreadsheet she’s been working on all day and outline the sort of brutal austerity program University of Chicago economists used to be famous for imposing on Third World economies. The plan has several components, which she ticks off one by one after ordering another drink. The first is:

  We’re going to be living in Kay’s basement awhile longer. “How long?” I ask. “I don’t know,” says Gab. “There are a lot of people the store owes money to, and we’re at the back of the line.” In other words, until we pay off the orange juice guy, Chucho, Glenda the lottery saleswoman, the snack cake thugs and the rest of them, I will not be sleeping aboveground. And since paying them off means fixing the store first, that seems like it could take a long time indeed.

  We’re going to have to continue working at the store—in fact, we probably have to work there more. This is automatic as long as we’re living with Gab’s parents. How can we ignore a crisis while it’s going on in the same house? Gab will continue doing daily shifts while taking care of things like accounting, and I’ll go from four shifts a week to five, primarily at night. There is one change, though: until now Gab has been paying us all minimum wage. Now we’ll be working out of the goodness of our hearts—that is, providing free labor at a store we supposedly own.

  Also, no more free food. No more eating off the shelves. Consuming your own product may be cheaper than paying full price, but there’s a cost to it nonetheless, and once you start doing it, your coworkers do it, and pretty soon your customers do it as well. Yet it’s a hard impulse to control. Here you are in a virtual jail cell created by beer and snacks that you bought. How can you not feel entitled to a little sampling? (Though I’m not a junk food fiend, I find myself tortured by a desire to sample all the various Hostess and Entenmann’s snacks I haven’t tasted since childhood—Sno-Balls! Donettes! Guava Cheese Puffs!—a craving I certainly would not feel if I did not have to look at them all day.) In fact, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I can carry out this plank of the austerity program.

  But it’s the next part that really stings. For the last few weeks I have been scrutinizing our customers, analyzing our inventory and gauging the flow of money throughout the day, all the while becoming more convinced that the store must radically overhaul its inventory. If we can’t serve two populations with different tastes—and we can’t, because our space is too small—then we have to go with the one that appears to command the neighborhood’s future. That would be the crowd at Sonny’s, the people buying sorbet, sourdough baguettes and veggie burgers. It’s not an issue of what I like to eat. If Boerum Hill was becoming Hasidic, I tell myself, then we’d find a way to serve kosher food; ditto if it was becoming Albanian or Sri Lankan or Korean, for that matter. As it happens, the people taking over Boerum Hill have the same taste in food as my own, a fact that will truly mark us as boneheaded if we don’t adapt to the change.

  Gab had accepted this—unlike her mother or me, she was agnostic on the issue of inventory—but requested that the process proceed in a timely and sensitive fashion. An item here, an item there. No more big changes when it comes to products like coffee. If we could afford to get rid of the lottery machine, then it would go last.

  Now, though, she insists that the process come to a complete halt until our money woes get resolved. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know this interferes with your plan.” Her mother, too, is henceforth to stop making changes. What this means is that Gab and I aren’t just stuck in the basement and stuck working as checkout clerks; we’re stuck in that scruffy milieu of lottery tickets, wine coolers and penny candy—trapped in Salim’s deli, as it were, rather than the deli I had envisioned it becoming. This, to my surprise, I find the most intolerable aspect of the entire situation.

  C IS FOR “COOKIE”

  DRIVING TO BROOKLYN THE NEXT DAY, I FIND MYSELF ASKING, When did I get so emotionally invested in the deli? Was it the moment I stuck my head in the refrigerator, or had it happened gradually, by stealth? This was supposed to be a temporary gig, and a reluctant one at that, to appease my long-suffering wife. At some point, though, deeper convictions had come dangerously into play. Maybe it was ambivalence about my “real job,” which was nothing of the sort. The Paris Review was not a real place—or at least sometimes that’s how it felt. It was fantasy, a make-believe world (poems! stories!) inside a bubble of privilege. It survived by existing in a gravityless world (“society” and “the arts”) where the normal laws of supply and demand did not apply.

  The deli was an antidote: pure struggle. Which brought about the biggest seduction of all: rash and imprudent action. The Hail Mary pass that rescues us all. There was also a certain Calvinistic tendency to see salvation as coming through work and family, which is something Puritans share with Koreans, and as we look to survive this period of crisis, I find myself clutching those twin talismans to get us through.

  THE THING ABOUT an austerity program is that it has to be enforced, but in a family business no one is the boss; or, rather, everyone is. Gab’s solution is a voluntary system of fines: screw up at the register, owe the difference. Get a health code violation, pay it yourself.

  “This is absurd,” I protest. “I refuse to participate in a kangaroo court.”

  “I thought you were committed to saving the store. I’m doing it. My mother’s doing it.”

  “But you’re not the ones getting fined!” Which is true. Whereas the two of them have spotless records, Kay has already reported me to Gab once for accepting a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and twice for not wearing those ridiculous cellophane gloves for making sandwiches, and meanwhile she’s been eyeballing me constantly for signs that I’m sneaking food off the shelves. (Which of course I am. I refuse to give up one of my last sources of pleasure, though technically this makes me guilty of shoplifting in my own store.)

  The tension becomes essentially unbearable when we close for renovations. I’ve been looking forward to renovating since we opened, seeing it as a turning point—maybe the turning point—in the transformation from gnarly bodega into trendy gourmet market. My plan is to repair the hole in the ceiling, retile the dishwater-colored floor and rearrange the refrigerators to make walk
ing through the aisles less like squeezing into an airplane bathroom. I’d also like to spruce up the place by installing some lighting that doesn’t come from fluorescent tubes and putting in a window so we can occasionally circulate the air. It’s a lot to accomplish, but I figure we can get it done in a week if everyone pitches in.

  Kay, however, gives us only one day, and this amounts to a bitter concession on her part, because originally she wanted to close the store for only a single shift.

  “No time for make pretty,” she insists, as if what I want is to paint the store pink and decorate it with flowers. “We need to be making money every day, every hour.” She doesn’t say this in a greedy way; she says it in a feverish, panicked way. It’s not just the bills she’s worried about; she thinks that if we close for any significant length of time we will permanently lose more of our regular customers.

  Nothing gets on my nerves like Kay’s impatience. The second she thinks of something it has to be done, usually by herself. She’s a compulsive nonprocrastinator: waiting isn’t in her repertoire, and idleness, the act of not doing anything (which many people know by the term “relaxing”) causes her actual physical pain. “I do anything not to be the lazy person,” she says. “If I’m not doing something all the time, whole body hurt, feel like sick or something. Want to die.” And since her internal clock runs somewhere between an hour and a whole day ahead of the rest of the planet (she routinely shows up early for things normal people tend to avoid, like car inspections and dentist appointments; once she got fined by the sanitation department for putting her garbage out too soon), there’s no way to keep her satisfied unless you, too, are the kind of person who does all your Christmas shopping in September.

  Of course, Kay’s not the only one with compulsive tendencies. Where I come from, not hurrying is practically an article of religious faith. America’s grown-ups don’t rush; they throw their arms around the world and try to make it stand still. There’s a stubbornness about it, a refusal to give in to the forward motion of time, as if the future itself is just a fad. Nobody drives where they can walk, nobody vacuums what they can sweep, and nobody microwaves (God forbid) what they can cook on an old-fashioned burner. “Fashion” and “technology” are dirty words. Not surprisingly, when it comes to big projects—fixing up a house, say, or the type of renovations we’re engaged in at the store—nothing but the most exacting, time-consuming process will do.

  On the appointed day, undeterred by Kay’s ticking stopwatch, I arrive early with a detailed plan, and things get off to a promising start. Edward, to my surprise, shows up with his occasional partner Ling, a Cantonese electrician, as well as Gab’s uncle Jinsuk, who happens to be a professional carpenter. Wonder of wonders, I think, with all this extra manpower, we might actually accomplish some things! However, as I soon discover—to my horror—these people, all being small business owners themselves, are just as hardheaded and independent-minded as Kay. There’s no cooperation. There isn’t even a plan. People just start taking things apart and rebuilding them willy-nilly. Soon the store is filled with the racket of a construction zone and a great choking cloud of sawdust. For a while I try to organize things and at least get people to coordinate; but there’s a big difference, I realize, between me and the trio of Edward, Ling and Jinsuk: they have power tools and I don’t.

  Meanwhile, as my dreams for the store disintegrate, through the haze I see Kay standing there with her hands on her hips, hounding everyone to go faster, faster, faster.

  “Can you please get her to lay off a little?” I ask Gab, feeling as if my stomach is writhing with poisonous snakes that want to come out and bite everyone. “It’s stressful enough in here.”

  “I’ll try,” she says wearily. Once again Gab is serving as a sort of human buffer zone between two silently warring parties. Kay and I never argue—not directly, anyway. Oh, we clash over just about everything, from coffee to the renovations, and we criticize each other as brutally as any son-in-law/mother-in-law combo, often while standing in the same room, but because of the language barrier there’s no need for diplomacy. After all, when we need to communicate and be respectful (something that’s especially important for me as the son-in-law), we can rely on Gab to act as a filter.

  This puts a terrible burden on Gab, however, and on top of all the other stress she’s dealing with, it’s beginning to take its toll. We’re all strung out, but Gab looks particularly miserable.

  As the day goes on and Kay’s deadline nears, paranoia creeps in. Gab and her parents are conferring in Korean, and I’m watching them from a few feet away, hoping to pick up a few words. It’s indicative of how crazed the day is making me that I consider for a second “accidentally” knocking down part of a wall or cutting some wires to make finishing today impossible. No, of course I won’t do that. That would be sabotage. But then hadn’t I recently discovered Kay deliberately undermining one of my goals? After finding an old box of CaféAmerica under the sink, she’d started secretly offering it to longtime customers, brewing a whole separate pot and selling it at the old price of ten cents less than the new coffee.

  I was outraged. “Your mother is impossible. I can’t work with her anymore,” I railed at Gab, who promised to stop Kay from freelancing. But freelancing is exactly what small business tends to bring out. If I don’t do it, no one will is what you constantly end up saying to yourself. Sometimes the attitude is helpful. For instance, since we opened the store we’ve been getting extorted by our snack food distributors, Mr. Yummykakes and Mr. Tortilla Chip, who’ve been trying to strong-arm us into buying more merchandise than we need and “forgetting,” if we don’t honor their demands, to make scheduled deliveries, or claiming we haven’t met their quotas (which are much lower than what they actually want us to purchase). As a result, some of our shelves have gone empty, and customers are asking where their favorite foods are. It’s a game of chicken, and much to the consternation of the snack food thugs, who probably thought they could walk all over this roly-poly Asian grandmother manning the day shift, Kay hasn’t blinked. In fact, she’s banned some of them from the store. My mother-in-law knows all the distributors’ tricks, whether it’s dumping eight dollies of the new and soon-to-be-discontinued no-calorie beer next to the cash register and driving away before we can open the boxes, or sticking us with a freezer full of ice cream that got too warm in the back of the truck. (Refrozen ice cream has the texture of snow dislodged from the underside of a delivery vehicle.) Besides being fierce, she’s paranoid and inexhaustible, a scammer’s worst nemesis.

  But these aren’t qualities that can easily be switched off, and as Kay herself will eventually admit, the stress of the last few weeks has brought out a kind of demonic single-mindedness in her. She’s gone into crisis mode, which means that come hell or high water, she’s going to get us through this turmoil. As a result, there’ve been times when she’s been almost as fierce with us as she has been with Mr. Yummykakes and Mr. Tortilla Chip. Using all the weapons in her arsenal (the guilt trip, the nag, the tantrum), she’s been pressing us to stay focused on survival—making it to the next day, then the next pay cycle—without committing unforced errors like getting fancy with the renovations. No one else in the family has this kind of strength or takes on the same amount of responsibility. Other than Edward, who’s not involved in the store every day, Kay’s the only one who knows what it takes to get through a crisis. But as I keep telling myself, bullying is bullying, whether it’s for a good cause or not.

  So after watching Kay browbeat everyone some more, I order the whole family, plus Ling and Dwayne, out of the store. Since no one else will stand up to tyranny, I will is something like the thought going through my head.

  “Can you stay here for a second?” I say to Kay, putting my hand on her arm as she’s about to leave the store too.

  “Me? Why?” She looks surprised.

  Instead of answering I close the front door, which, like the rest of us this morning, has come slightly unhinged and immediat
ely wedges tight against the frame.

  Now’s my chance. I have prepared a speech, something direct but not disrespectful, firm but not inappropriate. If only the sawdust wasn’t so thick and my eyes weren’t watery and bulging, and my face wasn’t red with exertion and I didn’t look like a man who just lost his wits!

  “We need to talk—” I start to say, but before I can finish the sentence Kay screams as if she’s in a horror movie and runs for the bathroom. Now, my mother-in-law has the loudest voice I’ve ever heard. She used to be a wedding singer, and in Korea they train singers to project their voices by making them practice next to waterfalls. Kay’s shriek isn’t a whole lot less piercing than Uncle Jinsuk’s table saw, but luckily her voice is set to stun, not kill, and I may only be temporarily deafened.

  The people outside start pounding on the door, though.

  “Hey, what’s going on in there? Is everyone okay? Open up!” Their alarm is magnified by finding that the door won’t budge.

  Oh, great. This looks wonderful. I knock on the door of the bathroom, but Kay won’t come out. She’s locked herself in and is still screaming for help.

  “I just want to talk!” I shout at her in a voice that sounds remarkably like Quasimodo’s. What happened to my mother-in-law the bully? Now she’s acting all ladylike and scared, leaving me to look like the bad guy. What kind of person, I can hear any sensible observer of the situation saying, terrorizes a defenseless grandmother? I almost believe she’s faking it, playing victim, except she really does seem terribly frightened, and after pleading with her unsuccessfully to come out of the bathroom so I can explain (“Please! I wasn’t going to hurt you!”), I give up and do what I can to help the rest of the family open the front door instead.