My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store

by Ben Ryder Howe

  “What, you couldn’t find someone whose eighteenth birthday is tomorrow?” I snap. “How about the center on the local high school basketball team? Just give him a cane and a fake beard and some orthopedic shoes.”

  “What were you expecting?” Detective Lumpy snaps right back. “This is New York.”

  He’s right: did I think they were going to send in Dorothy and Toto? Little Orphan Annie sucking a lollipop? Harry Potter?

  “Besides,” he adds, “I didn’t need to do any of that. You were easy.” He tosses me the sheaf of paper and leaves. Out on the sidewalk, I watch him take out a Newport from the pack I just sold the boy in the oxford. Against the cobalt blue light of Brooklyn at dusk, its orange ember makes a brilliant contrast.

  FOR YEARS NEW York has had this ridiculous rule about not carding people unless they look college age or younger, but now I understand it. In a sense, everyone in New York is adept at visually processing strangers’ faces in a matter of seconds. We do it in the subway, we do it on the sidewalk, we do it in bars and restaurants. What’s the difference between those situations and the couple of seconds you have at the register to decide whether someone falls into that eighteen-to-twenty-five threshold?

  One difference is that if you screw up while selling cigarettes, you can wreck your business and lose your livelihood. Because in keeping with its treasured image as the city that makes nice to no one, New York City metes out merciless punishment against businesses caught selling tobacco to minors: the first violation costs a thousand dollars or so, which for a deli owner can easily amount to a week’s profits. The second, if incurred during a two-year probationary period, costs a few thousand more plus the loss of the tobacco license and potentially the lottery machine, which will wipe out most stores like ours.

  Of course, nothing could be more honorable than preventing children from smoking. But if the goal is so important, why not simply force everyone who buys tobacco to show their ID, which would eliminate innocent mistakes?

  Maybe because such a system would be too effective. Convenience store clerks will never card everyone unless they have to, because it slows down the checkout line and incites a surprising number of people to raise trouble (apparently because they resent being told they look young). However, since they don’t want to make a deadly mistake, either, clerks come up with elaborate rules for who and who not to card, like Has a walker. Talks about grandkids. Buys denture cream. Now, call me cynical, but something tells me this is exactly what Big Tobacco would want, to have the convenience store clerks of America deciding who does and doesn’t get access to tobacco. Such a system would be designed to fail at least part of the time, would it not? And who would benefit? The tobacco companies, for one, and the agencies giving out fines, for another, both of which get to make money from tobacco sales while looking rightfully concerned about teen smoking.

  One late night after the sting, in a fit of conspiracy-minded pique, I do some heavy-duty Googling to see if my theory has merit. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I find a smoking gun proving that Big Tobacco induced the government of New York City (or anywhere else with a similarly self-defeating law) to knowingly create flawed regulations. However, I can tell you that since at least the mid-1990s tobacco companies have been enmeshed in the crafting of legislation governing youth access to tobacco, and one of the things they’ve pushed hardest against is mandatory age verification. Not surprisingly, they want to appear as if they’re deeply concerned about teen smoking, so they publicly support “retraining programs” to “educate” retailers on how to prevent underage sales. Rather creepily, in fact, Philip Morris and the tobacco companies actually administer “We Card,” “It’s the Law” and other programs that are part of the punishment for getting caught selling tobacco to minors in many states. Meanwhile, many retailers’ associations actually support mandatory age verification, because the so-called retraining programs and the associated laws cause so many inadvertent mistakes.

  “You’re arrogant,” the guy with the bad facial hair who wouldn’t leave the store had shouted at me. “You’re judging people based on how they look.” And he was right: deciding whether to card someone is a kind of profiling. Unfortunately, I’m just not very good at it.

  AROUND THIS TIME there’s a change in New York City’s official rules for street vendors, the people who sell things like hot dogs and roast nuts on the sidewalk (who presumably do it not because of a passion for the great outdoors but because they can’t afford actual stores). Since we’re not a street vendor, the change doesn’t affect us, but it’s worth mentioning because of what it says about the mentality of small business owners.

  The change is an increase in the city’s fines for violations such as not wearing paper hats, standing a few inches (literally) too far from or too close to the curb, and leaving carts unattended while making bathroom visits. Overnight, the fines go up from two hundred and fifty dollars to one thousand, and since most vendors receive an average of seven violations a year—often three or four at once—many are facing ruin. (The kind of sudden and capricious ruin that the cart vendors, many having fled despotically run Third World countries, know all too well.) No public hearings or debates in the city council have been held on this calamitous change for twelve thousand or so of the city’s most economically challenged families. And the only way to fight the tickets is for the vendors to go to an obscure court called the Environmental Control Board, fill out forms and wait for hours while losing more money—this for people who epitomize the embattled yet scrappy New Yorker everyone claims to love. Some street vendors earn as little as thirty-five dollars a day.

  Dread is the nature of small business. You’re gnawed by fear that something is going to come out of nowhere and flatten you before you’ve even had a chance to shout, whether it’s a blackout or a government inspector. The urge to seize control of your own destiny, even if it means doing your own precious business harm, can be difficult to resist.

  “You cannot survive without tobacco, trust me,” says Habib, one of our cigarette suppliers, when I go to pick up smokes a few days after the sting. “It will be the end of your business.”

  “Yes, but what are we going to do?” I reply somewhat desperately. We haven’t decided yet if we’re going to contest the violation or plead guilty. I ask Habib if he has any suggestions, and he shrugs. A leather-faced old man with an Abe Lincoln beard the color of a tangerine, he’s standing inside a steel cage lined with probably a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tobacco—Mores, Vantages, Lucky Strikes, Virginia Slims. If you want to buy something you have to accompany him inside, where it’s actually quite comfortable—you can sit on a couch, watch TV, and get yourself something cold to drink from the refrigerator. (No smoking, though—a little fire could turn Habib’s cage into a tobacco-flavored human barbecue in about three seconds.)

  “Why don’t you transfer the business to a relative?” says another deli owner who’s been standing there listening to our conversation. “Have the relative get new licenses for the tobacco and liquor, wait for the one-year probation to end, and then have the relative transfer the business back to you. Whenever people have trouble with the city that’s what they do.”

  It’s not a crazy idea. Of course, by law you’re not allowed to sell a business for the purpose of evading punishment, but is the law ever enforced? According to Kay, until recently the city barely enforced any of its regulations governing the business of a convenience store, in contrast to now. And in a way, that approach benefited the city: being somewhat hands-off made it possible for immigrants from places where informal, off-the-books, underground economies were the norm to find their niche and replenish the city’s entrepreneurial spirit generation after generation.

  Instead, though, we decide to stop selling cigarettes altogether, voluntarily surrendering a hundred dollars a day in earnings, or about one-third of our daily profits. Maybe it’s the small business person’s pigheadedness that motivates this decision, the feeling that “I’d r
ather put myself out of business than let someone else do it.” Or maybe it’s forward thinking. After all, if we get caught again, which seems inevitable, given the tenacity with which the city is stalking us and its penchant for ruthlessness, we’ll eventually lose the tobacco license anyway and have to make the same adjustment. This way we’ll at least get to keep the lottery machine! (What a statement—being desperate to hold on to a device that drives everyone crazy and earns only three dollars an hour.)

  Either way, suddenly everything is jeopardized. The summer is over. For the last few months, I realize, I’ve been looking forward to each day rather than counting off the hours. Every morning, the first thing I did was check the logbook in the kitchen where the profits from the previous day are written down. Tomorrow was our friend—not that the numbers were so stupendous; it wasn’t like watching a portfolio of Google stock. It was just a sense that we as a family were doing our jobs and making good choices, and the future would turn out okay—all backed up by the apparent reality of numbers. Now it’s over. We’re headed back into survival mode, and I’m the reason we’re there.

  A RARE CAT

  AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FALL GEORGE STORMS INTO THE office, directly after returning from a month-long vacation in the Hamptons, and with his suitcases still in the hallway and sand still stuck to his shoes, he summons the staff for an emergency meeting right there next to the luggage—no cocktails, no sandwiches, no merry round of storytelling to get things started.

  “I’ve just finished reading the material you all gave me to consider for the next issue,” he says, waving a pile of manuscripts, “and it is dreadful. In fact, it’s the worst pile of submissions I have ever seen.” Then he looks directly at me. “Ben, would you care to defend this?” He starts reading from one of the stories I gave him, a very solid piece from a reputable literary agent. The young female author had written a sort of McEwanesque horror story about a young woman being absorbed—consumed, really—by pregnancy and marriage into a libidinous and depraved upper-class family. George, reading it in the most lugubrious voice imaginable, gives it the sort of treatment no story could survive.

  “You call that writing?” he sneers after a few paragraphs. “Tell me why. I want to know.”

  I falter, unable to respond, in part because I know that despite what he says, George does not really want to know. He’s not interested in a debate. He wants to make a point, and he knows that if he fights dirty, none of us will do so back.

  He continues reading, making more and more of a mockery of my selection.

  “How could you call yourself an editor and fall for that?” he taunts. “Really, it’s shameful.”

  Then, seemingly becoming aware of how vicious he’s being, he steps back. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot this way, but I just have this feeling that … things are not right here. We’ve gone astray, and we have to get back on track. Everything is on the line! We must do something. I want to shock you all into action.”

  Then he goes upstairs, and the staff confers.

  What to do? To some of us, this isn’t about the magazine per se or even just the fiction; it’s about George showing us who’s boss after being away for a while. Or it’s his way of coping with the distress that his memoir is causing him, a display of bravado intended for himself as much as anyone. He just needed an audience.

  That night I stay up late writing a defense of the story George rejected, a passionate appeal for reconsideration, which I’ve never attempted before. It will be the opening move, I’ve decided, of a larger campaign to talk with George about the magazine before it’s too late.

  SCARCELY A WEEK later, I get a phone call at Kay’s house from the Review at an oddly early hour. I know everyone claims to experience this at such moments, but something really does tell me not to pick up the receiver, that bad news awaits at the other end of the line, and that if I don’t answer the news will reverse itself or simply go away. But the phone rings and rings—someone seems to have turned off the Paks’ answering machine—and eventually I have no choice but to pick up.

  It’s Brigid, who’d gone into the office early because she was fretting over some last-minute detail concerning the fall issue, which she and George had just sent to the printer. As she was coming down East Seventy-second Street she saw an ambulance pull to the curb and paramedics rush into George’s townhouse, and when she stepped inside George’s sister was already there, and she stoically reported that George had not woken up that morning. The rest of his family was upstairs. Soon afterward the paramedics came down and quietly went back to their vehicle, and people started going up to George’s bedroom to say good-bye.

  On the express train to Fifty-ninth Street I sit numbly, waiting for the flood of emotion. It doesn’t come. I don’t feel like I’m in denial—not after watching George’s health decline over the last year and worrying about him as much as we all have. Yet it doesn’t seem possible that George, of all people, is gone, and part of me truly believes that when I get to the office it will turn out to be one of his stunts, an elaborate hoax for some magazine piece he’s writing.

  Of course, the fantasy crumbles as soon as I walk into the office and see the faces of the staff, a moment that unleashes the flood I had been expecting. As I sit there at my desk, a basket case, I think of the last conversation I had with George, up in his kitchen, and wonder if he was in even worse shape than I realized. This fills me with regret for not doing a better job of helping him, and for probably making him worry about the Review a lot more than he needed to at the time. It’s hard to feel too much gloom and despair upon the death of someone as essentially lighthearted as George, yet there really was a melancholy tinge to his being, and it was something I now knew he wished he could have expressed more openly. Most of all I just feel an implacable sadness at the idea of not seeing him anymore.

  That morning, without George, no one in the office has any clue what to do except cry. Eventually we decide to call all of George’s friends (a job that would literally take days were we to be even halfway successful) and tell them the news before it reaches them via some impersonal medium such as the Internet. They, in turn, of course want to know what the cause was (which in a day or so we’ll know to have been a heart attack) and whether anything had happened to George, a trauma of some kind. However, as far as we can tell, George had had a normal evening, wandering the city and drifting from party to party. It was the way he lived, alone but out in the world, totally private and public at the same time. He must have had fun (didn’t he always?) because he came home late, then died peacefully in his sleep, a fitting end for a life like his, except that I really think he would have preferred to fall into the polar bear’s cage.

  Over the next few weeks the shock wears off and is replaced by a period of collective self-examination. As if George’s loss isn’t a big enough tragedy, the Review has to answer all sorts of fundamental questions about its own existence and whether to go on without him and, if so, how. What did George mean to the Review, and can he be replaced? Is it enough to have his genes embedded in the institution, or does it require his touch, his instincts? Maybe the magazine died with him; maybe it died a long time ago. Essentially these are academic questions suited for a biographer or a symposium on little magazines, except that jobs are on the line, not to mention one of the great names in American letters.

  George himself had long resisted thinking about the future, despite his exhortations to us, the staff, and his own occasional morbid tendencies. He didn’t groom a successor, and every now and then he hinted that should he pass suddenly, he would like the Review to shut down. No one believed him, though, one reason being that he had recently assented, at the urging of his lawyer, to the creation of a board of trustees that would do exactly the opposite—namely, ensure that the Review survived in his absence. The board consists entirely of George’s friends in the publishing industry, writers, editors and arts patrons who could be counted on to open doors and sign checks if needed, but who would
otherwise stay out of George’s way. They were not supposed to be involved this soon, but now with George gone they must decide how to move forward. And for those of us on the staff who’ve long been frustrated by George’s quirks as a boss (which is to say, nearly everyone) their presence is a huge relief, because they of all people—outsiders from the real world—should grasp the need for professionalization. In fact, one board member tells us right away that the Review needs to “grow up.”

  The irony, of course, is that because of the deli, my appreciation for whatever you want to call George’s approach—amateurism, dilettantism, Walter Mittyism—is much keener than it was a year ago. Now when I think of book fairs, the slush and having all these twenty-five-year-olds do jobs they’re patently unqualified for, I see something positive and altogether rare: the ability to remain small, open and full of passion. But it’s not an easy philosophy to articulate. You end up sounding like you’re arguing against progress or success. And after years of wishing that George would let the magazine “grow up,” I’m not about to hinder that process anyway. Not without solid, well-defined reasons and a coherent strategy.

  In any case, there isn’t time. As soon as George dies and the decision is reached to go on without him, there’s a feeling that a statement must be made quickly. Literary magazines are so ephemeral that missing even one issue would, in the board’s eyes, jeopardize its existence. Unfortunately, this rush forward distracts us from the personal struggle to come to terms with George’s death. We spend so much time thinking about what he meant as a mentor and a boss that we don’t really think about him as a friend and a human being.

  But of course when someone is gone, you continually find yourself bombarded by little reminders of his or her presence. George had presence to burn—the shock of white hair, the old Boston face, the extra few inches in height. He had everything needed to draw attention. What I realize now that he is gone, however, is that George, like my father-in-law, was one of those people who entered a room so quietly you didn’t even notice. All you’d hear was the soft groan of a door hinge and the padding of socked feet. Then the rustle of paper, a vigorous scratch of the belly. Are you busy? Don’t mind me. I would hate to … You are? Well, then, come upstairs and let’s shoot a game of pool. Come on, put that book down.