My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  It takes a while, but eventually we pry it out of the frame, and a few minutes later Gab (after shouting at me, “What’s wrong with you?!” on her way in) coaxes her mother out of the bathroom. Shortly afterward, without talking to me, Kay goes home, along with Edward, Ling, Uncle Jinsuk and Gab, leaving me alone to work on the store with Dwayne, who goes home too after a while. Mission accomplished. The renovations will not be finished today. The store is a bloody mess, covered with debris, half-finished projects and a thick layer of sawdust. It looks like a bomb blew up inside it, which I suppose in a way one did. So much for family.

  AS A RESULT of the fight you’d think I’d be chastened enough to avoid conflict for a little while—and I would, under any other circumstances. Unfortunately, it’s just too important to stick to the plan—my plan, that is, for turning the store into a gourmet market. Thus while Kay and I make up the next day (or, rather, I humbly beg her forgiveness, and to my surprise she mumbles something about being sorry too), the whole cycle of recrimination, mistrust and behind-the-back criticism starts again almost immediately. Kay sees me doing something she doesn’t like and says so to Gab; I see her doing something I don’t like and do the same; and Gab, after hearing from both of us, runs out to the street and screams at the sky, “Jesus Lord in heaven, what did I do to deserve this? I’ll do anything if you let me escape.” (That’s the thing about family business, though—there is no escape. You live with the people you work with, and after putting up with them at work all day, you get to come home and listen to them clip their toenails as they hog the television.)

  To make matters worse, one morning the mail delivers a sleek, expensively produced catalog from a distributor specializing in gourmet and imported foods. At first I hide it from Gab, who would surely throw it in the recycling bin if she saw it. Then I consider burning it in the backyard, or at least blacking out the company’s telephone number, lest I act on some unfortunate impulse. (Remember, Gab just told me no more expensive, nonessential purchases.) But I can’t do any of these things. The spreads pictured in the catalog are too sumptuous, the pictures too beautiful. It’s like walking past a bakery with the smell of hot, crusty, freshly baked bread wafting out.

  “Good afternoon, this is Steinway Gourmet Foods. May I help you?”

  Now, let’s be clear: this really is not your usual brochure. It’s more like an art book, something you could leave on a coffee table. The products it offers—a cornucopia of international delicacies, the kind to be found in epicurean gift baskets and crowded window displays at specialty stores in the West Village—have been assembled into still lifes so mouthwatering you can practically taste them. The variety is astounding—who knew there were that many different kinds of balsamic vinegar? And so many delicious little mysteries—for instance, what does hempseed oil taste like? So much wholesome goodness and so little to feel guilty about; this is, after all, the good side of globalization, the flowering of world culture in all its myriad expressions.

  Yet as I hold the phone to my ear I feel like I have no soul. The back of my neck is damp and my stomach is knotted.

  “Yes,” I say, trying not to sound as sinister as I feel. “I’d like to make an order.”

  “Splendid!” says the female operator in a cool Southeast Asian accent. “However, before we start, I must confirm that you are aware of our thousand-dollar minimum.”

  A thousand? I had assumed that it was only around one hundred, as it is with most vendors.

  “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

  “Very well, then. What is the first item on your list?”

  The first item on my list … what list? I haven’t made a list. All I’ve done is go through the catatog trying not to drool on the pictures. My first item? Well, what does our store need (besides everything)? Which products does it lack more than any other? Flip, flip, flip … I should have made a list. But then I would have thought about it and lost my nerve. And what the store needs is for people to stop thinking. It needs inspiration. Flip, flip, flip … Presto!

  “I’ll have some Chessmen,” I pronounce decisively.

  “Chessmen?” says the operator.

  “You know, those little butter cookies shaped like rooks and queens?” Doesn’t everybody’s grandmother keep a package of stale Chessmen in her pantry for visits by the grandkids? Here, some cookies … from the year before you were born.

  “What’s the SKU?”

  “The what?”

  “Product code.”

  “Oh.” Flip, flip, flip … Now I’m starting to feel it creep up on me: hesitation. Second thoughts. Am I really going to defy my long-suffering wife so I can order some butter cookies?

  “And give me some of those chocolate-covered Chessmen, too.”

  “Next item?”

  Now, having successfully fought off self-doubt, I begin to sense a growing freedom. The shackles are falling off. At first I select a few more bland, conservative, New Englandy cookies, but then I move on to the stuff Steinway Gourmet Foods specializes in: world cuisine. Culinary exotica. Gastronomic nirvana. The word “flavor” pops into my head as I peruse the offerings of Indian, Latin American and East Asian cuisine. How did we ever live without it?

  Picking up speed and confidence, I order and order and order. Give me four cases of … And yes, a whole box of … Okay, multigrain too … Sure, throw in the fat-free as well.

  This feels good, I think. I may be useless when it comes to a lot of things at the store, but I know my way around a Whole Foods. And this isn’t just regular grocery shopping—it’s shopping for the whole neighborhood. What could be more fun?

  The only question is, When Gab finds out, will she ever forgive me?

  DEATH TOMB

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, SOMEONE TRIES TO BREAK INTO THE DELI. It happens after we close; whoever it is jimmies the lock on the roll-down shutters, then tries to shoulder through the door. Luckily, he triggers Salim’s old alarm, which has a siren like the world’s loudest smoke detector and can be heard throughout the neighborhood. Frightened, the robber runs off. However, after he leaves, the alarm continues to sound, and as is their custom in New York, the police do nothing about it, while the alarm company attempts to contact Salim instead of us. As a result, we are greeted the next morning by some very tired and upset soon-to-be former customers.

  Not the ideal start to a Monday. Yet within a few hours it becomes clear this will not be the worst news of the day, or the week, or maybe even the whole year. For that day the mail, which, as a small business owner I’ve come to anticipate with horror (“No, take it back!” I want to say when I see the postwoman coming toward us), brings a letter bearing the dreaded return address of the state department of finance—still a bit early for that tax assessment we’re expecting. We open it and discover that Salim may have accidentally underpaid his sales taxes for the last few years, and as a result the government is levying a whopping eighty-eight-thousand-dollar fine. Which to my unschooled ears sounds like a problem for Salim, not us. But not Gab. She knows. We now own Salim’s business, assets and liabilities; therefore, the government wants the money from us.

  Gab looks like she just saw the noose we’re all going to be hanged with. Then, gathering herself, she reads and rereads the letter, poring over each word. When she was working as an attorney, Gab’s signature was thoroughness—she would stay at the office all night not to rack up billable hours but because she couldn’t bring herself to skim through projects. If she thought she’d been careless, it would torture her every second she was away from the office. Indeed, a point came during the sale of the store when she said to me, “We might be moving too fast.” We’d all been in such a hurry—Kay, Gab, me. And now, looking back on that period, Gab realizes that she might have overlooked some red flags.

  “I should have waited until the state did its assessment,” she says, although if she had, we never would have been able to open by Christmas. “I can’t believe how stupid I am.”

  “Well, we’ll just have
to track Salim down and straighten this out,” I exclaim defiantly. Gab looks inconsolable, however, in part because Salim has already proven rather elusive. Since moving to New Mexico or Arizona or someplace out in the desert, he’s changed his number (as the alarm company found out) and failed to send us a forwarding address. We’re in contact with one of his relatives, a man in Queens who takes payment on what we still owe from the sale, but who is little help in locating Salim and who becomes impossible to contact after employees of a notoriously aggressive city marshal start leaving threatening messages on our answering machine.

  The marshal—in New York, city marshals are a despised class of Old West–style bounty hunters who, despite not being public officials, somehow get to carry badges and guns as they pursue parking cheats and other scofflaws—is named Martin Bienstock, and his quarry are the KustomKools, those sexily purring refrigerators that came with the store. As it turns out, Salim bought the KustomKools last year with a deposit, then struggled to make his monthly installments, causing him to be threatened by the seller with legal action (which we never found out about). As with the tax arrears, this would seem to be a problem for him, not us. However, Bienstock only cares about the KustomKools, which he’s been threatening to come over and seize. As a result, since the refrigerators are basically the only valuable thing in the deli, pretty soon all we’ll have left is a cave filled with junk food to go with that eighty-eight-thousand-dollar debt to the government. (Maybe we can turn the store into some kind of avant-garde performance space and host readings!) Gab has bluffed Bienstock as well as she can, using her best bite-your-head-off lawyer routine, but Bienstock’s lackeys countered by threatening to come over and break down the wall with a wrecking ball. Thus we’ve been forced to look out the window all day, scanning the block for heavy machinery and ninjas and whatever else Bienstock’s posse includes.

  Even if Bienstock doesn’t knock them down, it feels as if the walls are caving in. What happened to us? I feel like asking. Where did so much evil luck come from? None of our hard work or responsible decision making seems to be paying off. Has it always been this hard to start a modest business like a deli? What law of the universe did we violate, which god did we anger? One day I walk into the store and have this feeling that it is turning into someplace else, a place I visited recently but can’t remember. Then it comes to me: with its empty shelves, dirty floors and damp, desolate chill, our store has become the North Korean deli. It has the same atmosphere of decay and despair, the same sadness.

  The hardest question is how it happened so quickly. Salim’s business may not have been run the way they teach at Harvard Business School, and it may not have been terribly profitable, but at least it had customers—loyal customers—and a purpose. The community depended on it. People cared about it. Somehow, despite selling nothing that was good for you, it had the air of a decent place. And it was not in danger of failing before we took over.

  We’d risked more than we intended, I realize. It wasn’t just the money we’d borrowed or our careers; it was the store, with its years of goodwill and place in the community. It was Gab’s family; it was Edward’s health; it was Kay’s house, which we haven’t made a mortgage payment on now for two months. And it was becoming my marriage with Gab.

  OVER THE LAST few weeks, the Review has proven something of a refuge from the chaos of the store. George’s health isn’t great, but as always he seems to be recovering, and the two of us haven’t clashed for a while. He seems to have forgotten that I exist, and I’m doing everything I can to keep it that way.

  Then one morning, an e-mail slides onto my computer screen at home with the following message, sent from the Review:

  “We’re screwed! Get in here now!”

  For the last six months we’ve been working on an anthology that is due out this spring, and according to a fax we’ve just received, one of the authors is denying a request I sent to reprint their interview, which is no big deal. Except the book is already at the printer. George is going to go ballistic—it’s exactly the sort of mistake he’d blame on my being distracted by the deli. He’s going to fire me, and then he’s going to make sure that no one in publishing ever hires me again, which he can do since he knows everyone, and who would hire someone who got on the bad side of George Plimpton, the most affable and lenient boss in New York?

  I rush into the office.

  “Does he know yet?” I ask.

  Brigid, the Review’s managing editor, shakes her head. “He went out early this morning and won’t be back till tonight.”

  Good, there’s still time. I get on the phone and start begging the author’s agent to reconsider, but they’re firm—it’s a piece the author has decided not to reprint.

  “And if you go ahead, we’ll sue you,” says the agent curtly, before hanging up the phone.

  Brigid is standing next to me as this happens, trying not to look panicked.

  “So you’re saying we have a choice between getting sued and not publishing this book? We have to do something.” After hesitating for a few seconds, she picks up the phone and sends orders to shut down the printing machines, just like in the movies. You can practically hear the machinery come to a screeching, car crash–like halt.

  “Now what?” I ask. “Is everything okay? George won’t have to find out, will he?”

  Everything is not okay. Five thousand copies of the anthology have already been printed and are now going to be sent to a place called the “book crisis center,” where they will either be pulped or have the offending pages extracted. Either way, it’s going to cost at least ten thousand dollars. Which means George will have to find out—tonight, in a few hours, at a cocktail party at the New York Mercantile Library.

  He’ll be pissed for two reasons. One, the ten thousand dollars. George may be old money, but the Review has a slim operating budget, and ten thousand dollars is one-half of what we pay our authors for an entire issue. It’s a part-time editor’s salary. It’s a couple of parties. It’s money that sooner or later George, being the Review‘s fund-raiser in chief, will have to go out and make up by tapping his network of benefactors.

  Two, George didn’t want us sending permission requests in the first place. In general, George is rather irritated by the whole idea of permissions, contracts, paperwork, and so on, which is why he put me in charge of it and then instructed me to do as little work as possible.

  “It’s a gentlemanly agreement when you publish with the Review,” he once told me. “It’s not like we’re some cutthroat business making obscene wads of cash. It’s for the greater good of literature!”

  Most authors seem to agree. Rather than contracts, they gladly accept a handshake or a congratulatory phone call from George, and seem fine with an absurdly puny check and access to comely interns at George’s parties.

  When George was young, it was easier to get away with a carefree attitude because publishing was filled with people who had, as the expression goes, known each other forever. To pick but one example, when George published his first book, in 1955, a children’s fable called The Rabbit’s Umbrella, his publisher, Viking Press, was owned by the Guinzburg family, and its soon-to-be head, Thomas Guinzburg, was one of George’s oldest friends. Now Viking is owned by Pearson PLC, a massive multinational media conglomerate specializing in educational software. It’s a different world, and if you don’t put things on paper you’re asking for trouble.

  Thus the staff has been urging George to find religion when it comes to noneditorial aspects of the magazine’s business. It isn’t just contracts. Overall we want the magazine to be less ad hoc. We want it to come out on time at least occasionally, which means better planning and more accountability. We would like things like marketing to be taken care of by people who actually know what they’re doing, so we can concentrate on editing.

  In other words, we want the Review to be more professional.

  However, professionalization is a distinct threat to that spirit of amateur fun so cherished b
y George. George doesn’t want the Review to be disciplined; he wants it to be young. He wants it to be taken seriously as a competitor to larger magazines, but without taking itself seriously. Quaint and clubby this model may be, but it’s the one he’s always adhered to—the idea of publishing as a spirited venture undertaken by a few like-minded individuals—which is the same model that produced the so-called golden age of publishing, when the family-owned houses were churning out one Bellow, Cheever or Roth after another. George’s own record of success makes it hard to argue that he was wrong.

  Yet all institutions need to mature as they get older, and sometimes the Review seems to be getting older faster than any magazine out there. Its image—stately, glamorous and painfully Upper East Side—is inescapably dated, no matter how much George tries to act otherwise. Meanwhile, newer magazines have been elbowing their way into the spotlight, partly with different editorial formulas that seem better attuned to the moment and partly by paying attention to the bottom line.

  At the Mercantile Library the cocktail party has already started when Brigid and I arrive, along with Elizabeth, our editor at large. Elizabeth tells me she’ll break the news to George about the anthology, and that until we see how he reacts I should probably stay at a safe distance, on a balcony overlooking the crowd.

  Luckily, the balcony is where the bar is. After downing two quick cocktails, I watch as Elizabeth gradually works her away through the library’s vaulted hall and snags George’s attention. He seems delighted to see her—Ha! He’s in a good mood. He listens intently, eyes narrowed, not saying a word as Elizabeth lays out the situation. Then his face seems to darken, and his features seem to elongate, and before my eyes George morphs into a grotesque hawklike bird with a fierce brow and an angry beak. Oh dear. He’s scanning the room for a face—mine, presumably; Elizabeth must have told him I’m here—and it occurs to me that I shouldn’t be spying on him like this. I look again: that angry beak is now mouthing the words (I can see it clearly from across the room) “Where is he? WHERE IS HE?! I want to talk to him now.”