My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  AS SPRING COMES on and we prepare for Emo’s arrival, the deli finally gets a taste of stability, one of the most vital conditions for a successful store. Rising temperatures mean more pedestrians, particularly on weekends, which seems to correlate with about a 10 percent increase in revenue. Salim had promised us this would happen, yet for some reason I didn’t quite believe him. Maybe because there’s an air of unreality to publishing—the work is so much about what goes on inside people’s heads; words, sentences, ideas—the idea of being affected by something as elemental as the weather seems almost quaint. In any case, it’s refreshing.

  Meanwhile, we’ve also settled into a routine. Now, I am no fan of repetition; I can have an existential crisis if I see the same TV commercial more than once an hour. But routine is essential for a small business—you simply can’t start making those teeny-weeny profits that are the lifeblood of your business until you know more or less exactly how much Diet Mountain Dew to order every week, where to find a parking space whose meter you won’t have to run outside and feed every hour, and how much change to have ready when Joe Commuter marches into the store for his bagel at 7:06 A.M. sharp.

  Another development in our favor is that Gab, after tracking down Salim in Nevada, has negotiated a compromise with him and the government whereby our remaining debts on the purchase will be forgiven in exchange for paying off the tax penalty, which the state reduces by half. Also, her bluff to Bienstock seems to have worked, as for now the threatening phone calls have stopped.

  However, new threats have begun to appear around us, including the arrival of two new convenience stores in the neighborhood and a sudden barrage of ambush-style government inspections. This spring we’ve been visited by undercover NYPD officers trying to catch us selling liquor on Sundays before noon (11:57 A.M., to be precise); Consumer Affairs personnel trying to catch us selling cigarettes and lottery tickets to minors; Consumer Affairs, again, seeing if we pad our scales or use a cat to catch mice; even the Drug Enforcement Agency, looking for contraband sales of cold medicine. No one has caught us yet, in part because Dwayne has an uncanny feel for when an inspection is under way. (It’s a sixth sense, and goes with his ability to look at someone and tell if they’ve been to prison. I have a sixth sense too, but it isn’t much use at the deli: I can look at someone and tell if they’ve been to boarding school.) However, it’s only a matter of time before they do. And when it happens, it has the potential to be devastating, because like everything in New York, the city’s fines are murderously expensive.

  Kay is particularly worried, since a few months ago an old friend of hers from Seoul who owns a deli in the Village called and asked if she wanted to buy his business. No thanks, she said, my hands are already full, but why are you selling? After all, the man owned a successful store, and to show off how proud of it he was, he had given it the kind of name it deserved, like the Garden of V.I.P.’s Diamond Deli, or something along those lines.

  As it turned out, the deli’s awning, with its boisterous name followed by a long list of products the store sold, caused it to violate Paragraph A of Section 52-542 of the New York City Zoning Resolution, which forbids business from creating “visual clutter.” The fine was twenty-five hundred dollars. The cost of replacing the flashy old awning with a more demure one amounted to five thousand more. This, coming on top of endless violations that no one could remember anyone ever being cited for, like having spoons positioned incorrectly in the potato salad (for some reason they’re supposed to face down), and others that he couldn’t control, like litter outside his door, had convinced the man that it was time to get out of the deli business.

  He isn’t alone. All spring we’ve been hearing about store owners hit by obscure and unreasonable fines. New York always increases its collection of things like parking tickets when the economy slows, and with the city now in its second year of recession following September 11, there are fewer tourists and less in the way of Wall Street profits to pump up revenue. Ninety percent of the city’s businesses—about 220,000, all told—employ fewer than thirty people, and the government is saying to them, We need you to contribute a greater share.

  Puritans and their descendants tend to be pro-authority by nature. They’re into structure and consensus; they like doing things as a collective, like group prayer and public stoning. Even when they were taking the radical, ultimately suicidal (for many in the group) step of abandoning Mother England to follow their religious convictions, the Pilgrims did so as a nice, orderly club, spending years meticulously planning their escape. Once they got to Plymouth, they set up a government that was no champion of individual liberty, either. They liked to intrude on one another’s affairs, sending tax collectors and the equivalent of child welfare inspectors into their own homes with onerous frequency. Unlike Thomas Jefferson’s belief that a government’s job is to do as little as possible, the Puritans were the sort of people who believed that society was at its best when smothered within a government bear hug.

  Growing up, I had a vague appreciation for government, because unlike most of the big, abstract forces in America that people talked about—religion, capitalism, mass culture—it didn’t seem like much of a threat. But then again, how would I know? It’s not like I had any personal experience dealing with the state, other than the six early years I spent in public school. Like most products of the Boston suburbs, I had managed to avoid incarceration in a U.S. prison, was not pressured by my parents’ social circle of 1960s-era college professors and hippie musicians to join the military, and had never been in a jobs center, a veterans’ hospital or a staterun foster home. The one continuous up-close contact I had with the government was garbagemen, who deliberately spilled trash all over our sidewalk every Tuesday morning. There were also occasional encounters with the toll collectors on the Mass Turnpike, whose dead-eyed expressions made me want to drive away from them as fast as I could. (And for only fifty cents, they let me.) Add it all up and you’ve got about eighteen seconds of face time with the government a week.

  Of course, for a small business owner, it’s your duty to hate the government with an all-consuming passion, no matter how big a fan you are of, say, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You’re supposed to become a rabid, red-faced Contract with America–spewing zealot with a violent hatred of trial lawyers and, above all, tax collectors who think “government” is a synonym for a Mephistophelian leech sucking the hard-earned dollars out of America’s last honest citizens. New York doesn’t help matters by never apologizing for taking your money. It’s an adversarial city. “Everyone wants a piece of us,” says Gab. There’s no union or lobbyist to stick up for you. The city itself doesn’t care. And with all the adversaries besides the government lined up against you—competition, the economy as a whole, the weather and even something as random and frequent as street repairs—the last thing you have patience for is some multichinned bureaucrat waving a clipboard. And sometimes you just want to know, as Gab said to me recently, “Who’s watching them to make sure it’s fair?”

  I DRIVE OUT to Queens to pick up Emo at the airport. She’s on the red-eye from LAX, sprinting across the country in response to Kay’s summons. After hardly talking for years, the two of them have been on the phone almost every day, and at last Kay had asked her to come out and help with the store. Within days Emo had quit her job, broken her lease and gotten rid of most of her possessions. It makes me wonder: What would someone in my family do if I asked them to drop everything, relocate and come work at a convenience store? Probably resort to the grand old Wasp tradition of installing “difficult” relatives in McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.

  I look for Emo in the arrivals area. This will be the third or fourth time she and Kay have lived together. Their fighting is so constant and predictable and, above all, so petty (“You think you know about America? You know nothing! I’ll show you how to make s’mores”) that you would think they really dislike each other. Of course, the truth is, they can’
t stand to be apart. For the last twenty-odd years, they’ve both led peripatetic lives, moving every other year, and eventually they’ve always ended up in the same place, if not the same house. The last time they were in the same city they even worked together at a lunch counter Emo owned in Manhattan—that is, until they got in an argument and Emo fired Kay (or Kay quit—depends on who you ask), which was awkward given that their bedrooms were across the hall.

  “What were they arguing about?” I remember asking Gab.

  “I don’t know—probably who had the ‘real’ recipe for turkey tetrazzini,” said Gab. After that, Emo sold her lunch counter and moved to L.A.

  They don’t look like sisters. As I scan the passengers coming out of the terminal, I’m looking for a tall and slender-shouldered former high school beauty queen who jogs, counts calories and doesn’t drink or smoke.

  “Emo!”

  Amid the slumping, shuffling, strung-out-looking crowd (this is the red-eye, after all), I see one person moving at a distinctly faster clip, head erect and eyes focused. She sees me and darts over.

  “Where are your bags?” I ask.

  “Oh, this is everything,” she says in her excellent English, while holding up a handbag that couldn’t contain the contents of a glove compartment. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Thinking she means “let’s go home,” we get in the car and I start driving toward Staten Island. But she means let’s go to the store.

  “I didn’t come here to sit around,” she says, and when I try to protest, she won’t hear a word. So we go to Brooklyn, and as a result, Emo, who’s nearly sixty (though she looks twenty years younger), works an eight-hour shift at a deli after flying across the country in the middle of the night.

  And so it starts, this new phase in the store’s life. Emo takes over the morning shift and within weeks has it running smoothly, even to the satisfaction of those finicky commuters. This frees up Kay to focus on things like protecting ourselves against the onslaught of inspectors and adding new products to the inventory. Meanwhile, Gab starts work at the bank, and, true to her promise, finds energy to hold down the night shift once or twice a week, plus weekends. She does not find the return to legal work mind-numbing, at least for now. Overall, things seem to be settling down, and the summer looks promising. The only one who hasn’t found his footing is me.

  NAKED WITH DESIRE

  AT THE PARIS REVIEW, ABOUT A MONTH AFTER THE DEBACLE with the anthology, I find out my punishment: I am being sent to Chicago.

  George wants two editors to attend the Chicago Book Fair, a summer festival billed as “the largest book fair in the Midwest.” There’s an old tradition at the Review of attending large open-air book fairs—I think George has this fantasy that away from the hoity-toity confines of Manhattan publishing, we’re going to mix it up with everyday Americans, who are suddenly going to develop an insatiable desire for highbrow literature and subscribe to the Review. Generally, the staff hates it for the same reason. Not that we don’t want everyday readers as subscribers—we do, we absolutely do—but because the act of selling it to them in person tends to reveal just how depressingly unrealistic such aspirations are.

  I arrive in Chicago with Brigid on a June morning on which it is simultaneously scorching and snowing—snowing dandelion fluff, that is, or some other kind of white, cottony, intensely allergenic weed. It is good to be out of New York, good to be in the Midwest, good to be on the majestic Great Plains. However, after invading my nostrils, the drifting spores, whatever they are, make my head feel like a giant mound of half-baked dough, just like the goo-covered cinnamon rolls we keep being offered on the concourse of Midway Airport. (“Would you like a gooey slab of uncooked bread drizzled with gooey vanilla-cinnamon-marshmallow frosting?” the employees of the fast-food chain selling them keep jumping in my way to ask. No thanks, I say, trying to be nice about it despite my throbbing head.)

  Things get worse at the fair. In the morning, after setting up our booth, we sell exactly one subscription—an exchange with the editor of another literary magazine with a name like Thin Paper. There seem to be two fairs going on today: one featuring Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, and Elizabeth Berg, author of Ordinary Life and nineteen hundred other bestsellers I’ve somehow never heard of, which is attracting throngs of sweaty, fun-loving, kid-towing Chicagoans. The other fair, the one that Brigid and I are a part of, is a ghetto of literary magazines like Thin Paper, as well as some writers’ workshops and eco-Marxist publishing collectives exiled to a quiet street three blocks away, near the Porta Potties.

  Occasionally someone from the other fair, the one with the crowds, drifts in our direction by accident.

  “Did you come all the way from Peeeh-ris?” one woman asks, stopping to look at our booth. She holds two snot-nosed children firmly by the shoulders, not letting them advance to within five feet of us, as if she fears that if they get any closer they will be turned into louche, café-dwelling Euroweenies. Another man, older and wearing a John Deere cap, comes over and announces that under no circumstances will he buy a subscription from us unless we do something about our country’s cowardly stance on the war on terror.

  “We’ll take it up with the prime minister,” Brigid sighs.

  By noon, beaten down by the midday sun, the pollen and the indifferent-to-hostile crowds, Brigid and I have retreated to the farthest corner of our booth and buried ourselves in manuscripts we brought with us. (The nice thing about working at the Review is that you can always lose yourself in a great story and forget what a terrible career choice you’ve made.) Brigid’s pile of manuscripts, incidentally, is five times larger than mine. She has the worst job in the office, maybe in publishing as a whole. Normally managing editors are scary people who specialize in invading other editors’ dreams at night and making them feel tiny and fearful: they’re the designated ass kickers whose job is to make sure the rest of the staff brings in copy on time and generally meets deadlines. But George has never wanted a magazine that meets deadlines. He wants a magazine that gives him the flexibility to make last-second decisions, fuss over the wording of a sentence and do strange things like send senior editors to book fairs where they accomplish exactly nothing. So he appointed Brigid, an exceedingly fair-minded and somewhat shy poetry fan from Buffalo who would never be mistaken by anyone for Attila the Hun. Her job, amid all the gamboling, towel snapping and other tomfoolery that passes for work at the Review, is to somehow put out four issues a year, which sometimes seems a task beyond hopeless.

  “I’m quitting,” she suddenly blurts out, putting her manuscripts down.

  “What?” I say, caught off guard. “Why? When?”

  “After the next issue. I can’t take it anymore. I’m burned out.”

  “Is this because of the anthology screwup?” I wasn’t the only one who had gotten in trouble. Brigid had taken heat, too.

  She shakes her head. “It’s not that. It’s just time. I’ve been at the magazine for seven years, and I don’t enjoy it as much as I used to. I used to like the fact that it wasn’t an uptight place, but now the magazine has a lot of problems that need to be fixed, and I think it’s someone else’s turn to try.”

  “Why not stick around and fix them yourself?” I beg, panicked by the idea of the Review without Brigid.

  “Well, for one thing, because whoever it is is going to have to fight with George, and I’m not up for that. At the end of the day, it’s his magazine.”

  “And a lot of the problems are caused by him.”

  Brigid shrugs. “We’re all so invested in it and think we know better. It’s a good time to move on.”

  “Don’t you think you should at least talk to George before you quit?”

  Brigid groans. “Have you talked to him lately?” She tells me a story. Recently, an English journalist had called the office and offered to conduct an interview with the heavy-duty French experimentalist author Alain Robbe-Grillet—who isn’t the kind of writer George normally likes to publish, b
ut this time, for whatever reason, he agreed. However, he had forgotten to tell Brigid or anyone else, and he had forgotten as well that fifteen years ago the Review had already published an interview with Robbe-Grillet (who, evidently, had also forgotten).

  “The worst part of it was that George figured it out on his own and felt awful, so he wanted to make it up to the poor journalist with an enormous kill fee, which we fought over because it was way more than we can afford.”

  Suddenly Brigid’s cell phone rings, and she looks at the caller ID panel. It’s George.

  “You take it,” she says, thrusting the phone at me.

  “Me? You’re the managing editor!”

  “You owe me,” she says. “The anthology?”

  I take the phone from her hand.

  “Hullo?” I say meekly.

  “Hi ho!” booms the voice at the other end of the line. George is apparently in an excellent mood, vastly different from the last time I saw him. It’s hard to make out what he’s saying, but he seems to have been out at some posh event the night before and wants to talk about fireworks (his most favorite thing in the world), writers, parties—the usual, in other words.

  I interrupt him. “George, it’s kind of busy at the fair right now. Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Well, I should like to know how it’s going,” he says, changing his tone.

  “How it’s going?” I look around our booth, trying to come up with the best way of describing the catastrophe I am witnessing. It is busy at the fair, to be sure; there are certainly plenty of people. But if they are paying attention to us, it’s generally to mock us with questions like whether we have any freedom fries or when the last time we showered was.