My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  “I’m done,” I say in quiet voice. There’s nothing to do but stand here and wait.

  “Don’t worry,” says Brigid. “We’ll defend you. It’s not the end of the world, and there was a reason you did what you did.”

  “Thanks, but spare yourself and don’t bother. I’ve been on his shit list for a while. There’s no point in fighting anymore.”

  Meanwhile George, led by Elizabeth, has stalked up to the balcony. Strangely, I can’t help feeling worried for him. He’s so furious that he looks like he might explode all over the leather chairs and mahogany desks of the Mercantile Library, and for once in his life you can see that he has absolutely no idea what to say. It’s obvious that he wants to say something, but George just doesn’t express his anger well; he’s not enough of an angry person. Yet he has every reason to be upset—in fact, he should be outraged, because this isn’t about just one screwup; it’s deeper and more personal. Professionalization is just the outer layer of a conflict between George and some of the editors. Yes, we all revere him, but we also look down on him in a funny way, and not just because he’s old and occasionally daffy, but because George is an icon of a different era—that clubby era of guilt-free privilege. He’s a dilettante (in the best sense of the word), and he doesn’t seem to have the slightest inclination to feel bad about any of it. For people who make a fetish of cultivating guilt, that makes him a fraud. Because unlike us, he can never see himself as a fraud—he lacks that power of introspection.

  “George, I—”

  A glare and I know better than to even apologize. He’s actually trembling and, judging by the snarl in his lip, thinking something unpleasant, possibly murderous.

  And then, just like that, he storms out of the library, hails a taxi and disappears into the Manhattan night, leaving me to wonder what sort of punishment he will devise. It will have to be pretty imaginative to make me feel worse than I’m already feeling, and I have no doubt it will be.

  MONDAY IS ALWAYS the worst day at the store. No one buys anything. They stay at home eating leftovers, I guess, or maybe they dine out, or maybe they just starve themselves. It’s one of the mysteries of the convenience store business, like the phenomenon of customer waves, whereby the store goes completely dead for a few minutes—you can hear the cockroaches scurrying—and then all of a sudden twenty customers walk in at the same time, as if they’d been conspiring outside on the sidewalk, huddling in the manner of a football team, with formations and schemes and plans of attack to make sure that not one night will ever go by when I do not commit a huge, pressure-induced mistake.

  Today during the day shift we make six hundred dollars, which comes out to sixty-six dollars an hour—in revenue, not profit. Take away overhead and inventory costs and you’ve got less than what a babysitter makes on the Upper East Side, or a dog walker, or a low-level drug dealer. And a babysitter is a damned solo practitioner—our lousy twelve dollars an hour results from the labor of an entire family.

  Vultures are circling. Wolves are hovering in the distance. Someone who identified himself as in the market for distressed property stopped by our store the other day and said he’d heard that our store was for sale (which it is not). A few days later a documentary filmmaker dropped in and asked Kay if he could interview her for a film he’s making on gentrification.

  “As a longtime resident of the neighborhood who’s been left behind by privatized hypercapitalist development, your perspective is important,” he said. “Huh?” Kay replied. “We only been here two month.”

  This afternoon, when I trudge up Hoyt Street to start my shift, I see one of our lottery customers, a friend of Chucho’s, sitting on one of our milk crates next to some bric-a-brac he’s laid on the sidewalk, apparently with Chucho’s blessing.

  “CDs, VCR tapes, stereo equipment,” he says to the crowds passing by. “Women’s clothing.” When he sees me, he smiles—an expression so foreign and welcome to me right now that it literally stops me in my tracks. Then he asks if I can go inside and fetch him a beer.

  “I’m working,” he explains. And indeed he is: his crowds—for used shoes, a pair of salad tongs and one yellowing copy of The Death of James Dean—are larger than ours. So I go inside and get him a beer.

  It is now seven-thirty P.M., and the store has been comatose since the night shift started. This isn’t right. It’s not natural. Even on Mondays the store has commuters coming in at this time of the evening. Thus I start doing what no store owner should ever do: I stand at the window, anxiously watching people walk by. No one will even make eye contact with me. They know. They can see that the store is empty, because one of my recent “moves” was to declutter the store’s facade, thinking that rather than malt liquor ads featuring half-naked nymphets wearing boa constrictors, the public would like to see what kind of store they are walking into before they come through the door. And I think they do appreciate the move. They’re saying, “Thanks for letting us see that your store has no customers. I think I’ll walk an extra block and go to the deli that doesn’t make my skin crawl.”

  I should at least try to look busy, so I go back to the stockroom and try to burn off some of the fifteen or so pounds I’ve added since the store opened. Empty cardboard boxes are all over the place—I’ve got to break them down, fold them up and pack them into bundles, a painful (like ripping phone books with your bare hands) and, best of all, loud activity that serves as a suitable accompaniment to horribly depressing thoughts, until I realize that another human being has come into the store without my hearing and is standing next to me.

  “Excuse me. You the owner?”

  From my knees, I look up and see a baby-faced Latino kid wearing a weight belt and holding a clipboard.

  “Yes?” I pant.

  “Delivery.”

  Delivery? “At this hour?”

  “We’ve never been to your store before,” he apologizes. “We had a little trouble getting here.”

  “Oh. I understand. Do you need my help unloading? The store’s empty, as you can see. Put the boxes anywhere.”

  “I just need you to sign here,” he says, passing me the clipboard.

  “Okay. Who are you, by the way? Which company?”

  “Steinway Foods.”

  I must look confused because he says the name again, then adds, “You know, gourmet and imported delicacies?”

  The name doesn’t register with me. Then it hits. “Yes, of course! I placed an order, didn’t I?” It was weeks ago, and it’s finally here!

  “So where do you want us to put this stuff?” the cherubic deliveryman asks. He really looks like he should have wings.

  “Where? Anywhere! Right here is fine.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff.”

  “There is?” I swallow.

  “You ordered”—he studies the invoice, counting in his head—“twenty-seven boxes of food.”

  Twenty-seven?! My God, am I insane? Will our shelves even hold twenty-seven boxes? What could I have been thinking, ordering twenty-seven boxes? Gab is going to go crazy. She’ll lose her mind. We don’t have that money. We won’t be able to pay. We’ll get sued. Kay will want to kill me. George already wants to kill me. What am I going to do?

  No.

  I will not panic. This was the right move. We need this food.

  “I’ll make room in back,” I say, “and in the meantime you can start unloading right here.”

  Three other deliverymen—much coarser and flabbier than the angel boy—suddenly burst into the store wheeling dollies loaded with boxes. Boom—there’s another one. Boom—another. Stacks begin forming; the door cannot stay closed.

  “We’ll need that space in back,” the choirboy calls.

  My God, those shelves of ours won’t be empty any longer. It’s here! It’s finally here! There is a god who listens to the prayers of small, previously irreligious (but willing to be open-minded!) business owners, and today he looked down on us in our hour of need and delivered. I’m thinking of calling Ga
b at home and fessing up just so I can get her to come over and we can share this joy together.

  Meanwhile, the flow of boxes goes on and on.

  “Do you want to check what’s inside?”

  “Huh? Wha?”

  “I said, Do you want to check what’s inside?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Most owners just check. Once it’s here and we leave, we can’t take it back.”

  “Oh.” What am I thinking? I’m acting like I’ve never done this before. Of course I should check. I should make sure that what’s inside the boxes isn’t damaged, that it hasn’t been tampered with, that it didn’t fall off the truck. Most important, I should see if it’s what I ordered.

  What did I order?

  Yes, what exactly did I spend all that money on? The phone call is a blur—I got so excited (twenty-seven boxes!) that I wasn’t thinking straight and just started calling out SKU numbers. I was in the grips of anxiety and hysteria. It was a frenzy.

  “No need to check,” I tell the deliveryman.

  “Okay, then sign right here.”

  “I thought I already did.”

  “No, you forgot.” He hands me the clipboard again, and this time I sign very deliberately, and as I’m signing I see the little number at the bottom of the invoice.

  It’s our total, nearly fifteen hundred dollars.

  Never have I seen an invoice so large. Most deliveries cost around one hundred dollars, and with fifteen to twenty of them a week, that expense has been our downfall so far as a business. This is the same as all our deliveries put together.

  Just then, as the cherub is leaving, Dwayne walks in.

  “New inventory?” he says, weaving his way unsteadily through the stacks of boxes. He’s drunk. It’s his day off, and he’s been drinking all day. Nevertheless, as the delivery truck drives away, he starts helping me open the boxes.

  Start small, I hear myself say. Like a little boy on Christmas morning, I need to control my emotions. There is too much drama, too much joy and too much sorrow at the same time. Pace yourself. Save the big stuff for last.

  The first box is like a cruel joke: one whole case of organic Sesame Street soup. A Brooklyn special. For kids or adults? Not clear, and no, it does not make me warm and happy inside to see Big Bird right now. The only way I’d like to see Big Bird at this moment is if he’s in the soup.

  Next, atop the biggest pile of boxes, is a parcel barely the size of Big Bird’s beak. I pry open the cardboard flaps and pull out … four bottles of hot sauce! From Oaxaca! Now, that’s more like it. I take out the bottles and search for a temporary place on the shelves, which ends up being next to the Glazed Donut Holes. The bottles look a bit incongruous and lonely there, so I tear immediately into another box, this one big enough to contain Big Bird’s head. What will it be? I can barely control my shaky hands as they rip apart the stiff cardboard.

  More hot sauce! From Yucatán this time! Which is great, because as everyone who likes hot sauce knows, it’s not the heat, it’s the taste. You need variety. And now if the store fails, we have enough hot sauce to open a taqueria.

  Don’t think about it. Open another box. Maybe if I get them all open tonight I can fill up the shelves with new inventory and have the store looking like it had a makeover. That’ll win over Gab and Kay, and they won’t even care how much it cost. Now, let’s see what we have in here …

  More sauce! Not hot sauce this time (thank God) but, rather, some new barbecue sauce—a “legendary Texas-style hickory bourbon slow-cooked over smoky mesquite with real old-time flavor” that “goes great with beef, pork, chicken or fish.”

  Wonderful. Except we don’t have any beef, pork, chicken or fish. Unless you want a roast beef sandwich.

  “Is this turning into a sauce store?” says Dwayne, peering over my shoulder into the bottomless box of slow-cooked Texas flavor.

  “Can it, Dwayne, okay? Just can it. Just because there’s no Beefaroni you don’t have to get snotty.”

  Dwayne belches and grabs himself a Heineken.

  Time for another box, and it better contain something of a nonliquid consistency. Fucking sauce store. I did not jeopardize my career and mortgage my future to open a sauce store. I rip open the package and pull out … cocktail rounds. I ordered cocktail rounds? Jesus. Pardon the sexism and ageism, but I really thought you had to have been a housewife in the fifties to actually buy cocktail rounds. Well, now we’re covered in case the Greenwich Yacht Club decides to host a luncheon in Brooklyn.

  The phone rings.

  “It’s Gab,” says Dwayne.

  Shit.

  “Hello?” I say, trying not to sound as depressed as I feel.

  “Hi, it’s me. I’m doing the bills right now and wondering, did you make a large order of merchandise recently?”

  No!

  “I’m sorry? What did you say? There are a lot of people here in the store.”

  “I said, Did you make a large order of merchandise recently? Because there’s an invoice here in the mail from—”

  “Gab, I’m going to have to call you back. We’re getting a customer surge.” Dwayne looks at me and clucks, wagging his finger.

  “—didn’t we agree that we’d spend nothing on new inventory except what we’ve already been getting? Didn’t we? And this is ridiculous. It’s almost fifteen hundred dollars. For what? What did you buy? It better be good. Good-bye.”

  Click.

  It’s only eight-thirty.

  I still have four and a half hours until I can go home and fall asleep.

  And when I wake up, it will only be Tuesday.

  “This kind of a store is a death tomb,” one of the characters says in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, a novel set in a Brooklyn deli grocery during the 1950s. “If you stay six months, you’ll stay forever.”

  Which would be worse? I wonder. Closing tomorrow and having this travesty over our heads for the rest of our lives, or being here forever? I can’t decide, in part because I don’t want to make choices, so instead of thinking about it I go back to opening boxes, grateful for something to do with my hands.

  Back to appetizers, this time creamed herring. To go with the cocktail rounds? Unbelievable. I’ve gone certifiably insane. I don’t know what’s worse—the money I shouldn’t have spent or the stuff that I was crazy to buy. Maybe I should just eat as much of it as I can before tomorrow. That would be an appropriate sentence, because even I don’t eat creamed herring. In fact, I don’t even have the faintest idea who I was buying them for.

  And then it’s jelly—case upon case of Keiller & Son Dundee marmalade (three-fruit, orange, ginger) and Bonne Maman fruit preserves (blueberry, strawberry, cherry, quince, red currant and fig). And spreads (Nutella, organic peanut butter) and some marinades (Soy Vay Veri Veri Teriyaki) and some chutney (Major Grey’s) and some salad dressing (eleven cases of Annie’s Naturals from Vermont) and all this is before we’ve even gotten to the mustard, which, suffice it to say, spans an entire spectrum of browns and not just the plain yellow stuff.

  At the eleventh box I finally take out something I remember ordering: those Chessmen cookies.

  “Hey,” says Dwayne, “you can get those from our regular Pepperidge Farm distributor—you know, the guy who brings us the devil’s food cake and the Goldfish. I think he’s got some Sesame Street stuff too—Elmo cookies or some shit.”

  “I didn’t know that, Dwayne,” I murmur, sinking into the darkness of thought once again. Only this time it’s a more concrete thought: I’m hungry. In fact, I’m starved. What to eat? The space in my belly is like an infant demanding to be fed, wailing its bright red head off, a miserable snot-nosed wreck. And yet even with this new and glorious shipment of food, there isn’t a thing in the whole goddamned store that I feel like having. Which brings up a question: What if it isn’t food I want?

  At that point the door swings open and I reflexively jerk my head to see who it is, expecting Jesus, Buddha or maybe even Big Bird himself (
at least a pizza deliveryman), but it’s nobody, just another faceless customer. There’s nothing to do but get up and serve him, this stranger, while praying he won’t be the last of the evening.

  PART TWO

  PACKS

  THEY SAY IF YOU WANT REDEMPTION YOU HAVE TO SURRENDER something, some piece of your self. It would have to be an important piece, presumably, one you didn’t want to give up; otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice. But what if the decision to let go was the easy part, and the challenge was figuring out which part? Every now and then I think of that platitude you hear in graduation speeches about “stepping outside yourself”—well, great. Sounds like a plan. But what if you don’t even know what “yourself” is and can’t figure out what to step out of? What do you do then?

  Of course, if redemption takes place in a memoir, the process necessarily includes a third step, which is that along the way the author must stand up to the Nazis or become the first white shaman of a reclusive Amazon tribe—none of which is going to happen here, alas. But the first part, the disassembly of my old self, has been under way now, I realize, since we moved in with Gab’s family (how quickly one’s identity begins to crack when there are no New Yorkers stacked next to the toilet!) and only accelerated after we bought the store. I feel like I’ve bonded with the deli, sort of the way you bond with your seat on an airplane during an eighteen-hour flight. It’s cramped, it’s miserable and when you get up you feel like a piece of boiled meat, but you’d fight to the death with anyone who tried to steal it from you. However, I also sometimes feel like a lab rat in some cosmic sociological experiment to judge the effect of precipitous class descent via a kind of Wittgensteinian wormhole of reverse immigration. (Somehow I have started to go native in a foreign country with people who are actually newcomers too, in a country that turned out to be my own, or something like that.) The worst of it is coming to realize that principles I used to believe in as staunchly as anything, like that wide-open embrace of the world and those tried-and-true Strunk and White rules, haven’t been of much use during the ordeal we’ve been experiencing; in fact, if anything they might have been counterproductive.