Brooklyn is changing. Just down the street from where I had my Sesame Street epiphany a few years ago, developers from Cleveland have signed an agreement with the government to build one of the largest properties to come to New York in a generation. Skyscrapers, a hotel, a sports stadium and, amid it all, many different “cultural spaces”—this new development, called Atlantic Yards, is going to be so big that its impact will be felt for miles in every direction. Traffic will have to be rerouted, buildings demolished, their tenants relocated. Purely in terms of size and ambition, it seems like the antithesis of the people’s borough. It seems more like … Manhattan.
Maybe, though, Atlantic Yards will turn out to be a good thing for us, by raising the value of our lease. Maybe it will provide the sort of foot traffic, tourism and round-the-clock sales that shopkeepers dream about. Maybe we’ll get that Manhattan-style store we once thought of going for after all. But we won’t have to wait the five or six years that the construction will likely take to find out, for even closer than where Atlantic Yards will be, the landscape is already erupting in a most un-Brooklyn way, sprouting sunlight-hogging apartment complexes with cubicle-sized dwellings wrapped in unfriendly mirrored glass.
You have to try not to be sentimental about it. It makes as little sense to argue against progress and change when it comes to cities as it does with literary magazines. And so one day in 2004, when I open the newspaper and read that a Manhattan real estate developer has bought a parking lot a block away from us and plans to build two hundred apartments and twenty-seven single-family homes there in the coming year, I look on the bright side.
“Think of all the potential customers!,” I exclaim to Gab. “When it’s finished, we’ll be their closest convenience store.”
Gab takes the newspaper from me and reads to the part where I left off. Then she says, “But did you see this?” Right after the part about the two hundred apartments it says that the developer intends to line the block with retail space, “perhaps including a supermarket.”
We look at each and wait for the other to say what we’re both thinking. Is it time? After failing to close the store when Kay got out of the hospital, Gab and her mother have been uncharacteristically indecisive. Given that the store was open, we decided we might as well not tie our hands behind our backs and brought back the cigarettes. Sales then quickly returned to a somewhat normal level, first for wintertime and now by the standards of the spring. The problem is that when you’re not fighting for survival, it’s easy to stop making decisions and fall into the trap of thinking you don’t have to. Ambivalence is a luxury; thinking you can have it both ways is virtually synonymous with being spoiled. That’s why the do-or-die condition that new immigrants find themselves in is a good one for shopkeepers, because it forces you to be a ruthless decision maker, like Kay and Gab are. Or used to be.
Given the need for clarity and decisiveness, we’re again seeing the danger of a family-owned business. On some days Kay will feel depressed and want to close the store, but then she’ll get embarrassed for not being stronger and resolve to tough it out. She vacillates, Gab vacillates, and I vacillate, and as a result nothing happens. What it means is that closing down will take as much will and effort as opening did.
AT THE END of the spring, five months after we bring back tobacco, we get caught in another sting. This time it’s a Dutch Master cigar sold to a minor while Emo is running the store, and we face the maximum penalties just in time for what should be the busiest part of the year, summer. We should take this as our cue to surrender, but there’s no way we’re going out on someone else’s terms—especially not the city’s. Shopkeeping may be a passive trade, but shopkeepers are hardheaded masochists and always try to do things their own way.
Unfortunately, our best hope depends on us persuading the city to give us leniency, which means swallowing our pride and losing some of the adversarial fervor. There’s a stipulation in the city’s administrative code that says that a tobacco vendor can be absolved of an employee’s mistake if he or she can convince a magistrate that the vendor did everything possible to prevent such errors. It’s a long shot, but occasionally plaintiffs do find sympathy, and so after scheduling a hearing, Gab and I march in to John Street in lower Manhattan, where the Adjudication Division of Consumer Affairs occupies a Kafkaesque warren of dim, windowless courtrooms on the eleventh floor of a black marble building.
It is the DMV from hell. Twenty or so grown men—schlubs in their puffy vests and hooded sweatshirts—rock in their chairs neurotically, mumbling to themselves in Urdu, Spanish or Korean while waiting to be summoned to a doughnut-sized hole in a Plexiglas window. We sit like a herd of frightened animals in the center of the room, bunched tightly, surrounded on all sides but one by that humiliating Plexiglas wall. A potbellied security guard with a walkie-talkie the size of a nightstick circles us like a starved cat, looking for new reasons to punish us. “NO TALKING!” he screams when someone’s cell phone goes off, and “NO EATING!” when someone takes half a bagel out of his pocket. Meanwhile, the clerks behind the Plexiglas gorge themselves on enormous foil-wrapped breakfasts obtained from delis down on Wall Street.
I try to maintain an upright pose in my chair, but the seat is made of the same kind of hard slippery plastic as bus-station chairs. After a few hours I give up and slouch like a pouty teenager. Soon half the day is gone, and it takes constant effort not to slide into sleep. As lunchtime ends I approach the doughnut hole in the Plexiglas and ask, “We were supposed to be seen at nine A.M. Why is this taking so long?”
“Some of our judges are very busy,” says a voice behind the glass. “Now go back and sit down.”
We wait another hour, until finally an unsmiling man with a Haitian-sounding name (Patrice or something like that) and the smell of someone who just emerged from a steamy locker room and daubed himself with talcum powder calls us into a windowless office.
“So,” he says eagerly, licking his lips as he opens his briefcase, “what have you done to mitigate your circumstances?”
Gab opens her own briefcase and presents an affidavit certifying that we have terminated Emo’s employment. It’s an absurd document—This is to certify that I have fired my own aunt—but the city insists upon it if a violator has any hope of leniency.
“Are you representing the deli owner?” Patrice or whatever his name is asks Gab.
“I am the deli owner,” Gab says.
This causes Patrice or whatever his name is to raise his eyebrows, a sign that things might be working in our favor. Gab and I had anticipated that the Adjudication Division of Consumer Affairs rarely saw actual lawyers accustomed to courtroom argument. Well, today for once they’ll get a real fight, we vowed, for Gab has prepared not just affidavits but taken pictures of the store and gathered documents showing that as shopkeepers we have taken every possible measure to prevent underage sales. She’s pored over Consumer Affairs’ own regulations, highlighting passages in neon pink the way she did with homework assignments in college, then assembled her evidence into a dossier the size and weight of a phone book. And to top it all off she’s put on her most fearsome lawyer’s outfit, a truly sharklike skirt-and-jacket combo, which more than makes her stick out from those grease-stained schlubs in their puffy jackets.
But Patrice or whatever his name is no pushover. After Gab presents her case, he attempts to show that we could have done more. “Is that sign really visible?” he asks, jabbing his finger at one of Gab’s pictures. “Did you give clear instructions to your employees?” Gab, however, is able to parry each thrust, and after half an hour or so she seems to gain the upper hand. Patrice stops probing, leans back in his chair, and smiles for the first time.
“This is very impressive,” he says, lifting up the dossier. “I’ve been here a few years, and I can say I’ve never seen anything like it.” He says that strictly speaking, the tobacco license has to be surrendered whenever there are two violations; however, because of our strenuous efforts to be responsi
ble storeowners, he can see the case for leniency. He promises to inform us of his decision in a few weeks.
On the way home Gab and I can’t help but gloat a little. Patrice’s reassuring demeanor as he shuttled us out left us feeling no doubt that things will turn out as we hoped. To celebrate, we buy a couple of beers at a deli (wrapped in brown paper bags, of course, as per New York City Administrative Code, section 10-125, “consumption of alcohol in public”: “No person shall drink or consume an alcoholic beverage, or possess, with intent to drink or consume, an open container containing an alcoholic beverage in any public place except at a block party, feast or similar function for which a permit has been obtained …) and drink them in the company of pigeons and seagulls on the Brooklyn-facing side of the Staten Island Ferry as it makes a glorious midday crossing of New York Harbor.
WHEN THE LETTER arrives, I can almost taste the beer on the ferry coming back up, and wish that the pigeons were around so that I could kick or at least yell at one of them. The city, as Patrice had led us to believe, had given us credit for the measures we had taken to prevent underage tobacco sales, including the firing of Emo. However, says the letter, there was one measure we didn’t take: we didn’t fire the person who originally got us in trouble for selling tobacco to a minor—that is, me. Apparently the city thought that I should fire myself (something I would have been all too happy to do at the time, if it were possible) or maybe it wanted Gab to, which would have required what? Us to get a divorce and split up our assets? Hide the fact that we co-owned the store? Sell the business to a relative, just as the deli owner at Habib’s suggested? Regardless, it’s too late now, and the city is denying our request for leniency. We must forfeit our licenses or face criminal charges and a fine of one hundred dollars a day.
AT ANY JOB the best part of the day is going home, and our deli is no exception. The last hour of the night is invariably the most miserable, taken up by gruesome tasks like fishing fingernails out of the cash till and wiping down the slicer. At that hour you also get the worst customers of the evening, the drunks, the skeeves and the people who seem to seek out helpless deli workers and other innocent victims who have no choice but to hear about their cat’s digestive problems or a scene-by-scene rundown of the latest Pauly Shore movie. (Salim once said when we asked him why he didn’t keep the store open past one o’clock, “Trust me, you don’t want the kind of customers who come in after one.”) If you stay open even one minute later, you can be sure someone will start banging on the window and begging you to unlock the door, reopen the register and sell them a quart of milk. And if it’s a regular customer, you probably will.
After that you’re free, and not only are you liberated from the store and difficult customers, but at one o’clock in the morning you are physically free to do almost anything you want: drive on the sidewalk, window-shop naked, land an airplane on Atlantic Avenue. New York may be a twenty-four-hour city, but after midnight there is still a big difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and at first the stillness is disorienting, if not a little spooky.
However, the drive on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is nothing if not pleasurable. The police don’t even bother patrolling, and you can drive at speeds that on an elevated highway like the BQE truly feel like flying. Of course, at that time of night most of the drivers are exhausted late-shift workers trying to get home before their eyes involuntarily shut, and you often see the remnants of terrible, fiery accidents that close the highway for hours, but at least until you hit one of those driving the BQE at night is fun, and the ride over the Verrazano Bridge at one-thirty A.M. is like jetting silently into space, the perfect way to end the night.
One stifling August evening I stop by the store on my way home from the Review to check on Dwayne and Kevin (the college kid who’s still working at the store), have a sandwich for dinner and listen to a few of Dwayne’s stories. At eight o’clock the temperature still feels like noon. When a hot day ends and relief doesn’t come, you feel cheated, like you’re being toyed with, and in the bad old days of New York, you would turn on the ten o’clock news on a night like tonight, and the first six stories would be about murder or armed robbery, half of which would take place at Domingo’s Mini-Super in Washington Heights or the New Steve Deli on Avenue C. A grim-faced newscaster would hand off to an even grimmer-faced reporter standing outside a doorway barricaded in police tape, with candles burning on the sidewalk and family members bawling nearby. And then they would show The Video, the grainy, silent, eight-shots-per-minute film from the overhead security cam that would make everything look like it happened in slow motion inside an elevator. “Man, I could have dodged that baseball bat!” you would think. Sometimes since the store opened I’ve wondered how I’ll look in silent, grainy super-slo-mo on the ten o’clock news, and then I remember: Oh, yeah, we don’t have a security camera. It’s one of those decisions we’ve postponed as we waffle back and forth on the deli’s future.
Tonight, though, the city seems peaceful, almost like a small town. On my way home I can feel the barometer finally dropping and see the lightning on the horizon, and after drinking half a beer in front of the TV I fall asleep before midnight for the first time since we bought the store.
The phone rings an hour later, at one A.M. sharp. Lunging across Gab’s sleeping body, I end up half on the floor, pressing the receiver to my ear.
“Hello?” I sputter. “Hello? Hello?”
The caller ID number belongs to the store, but no one is at the other end of the line.
“Who is it?” says Gab.
“The store,” I say, as if the store itself has called to give us a warning. Then in the background I hear a loud crash and shouting.
“Dwayne, is that you? Who’s there? What’s happening?”
Finally, I hear Dwayne’s labored breath—he’s panting, practically wheezing—and he tells me in an awful voice that there’s been an incident, some kind of robbery or mugging, and I better come over quickly because there’s “blood all over the place.” Then he drops the phone and I can hear another crash and a shout, as if the incident’s still going on.
“What’s happening?” Gab asks. “Did we get robbed?”
“I don’t know,” I say, getting dressed. “I’m going there now. Call 911.”
Soon I’m racing in the opposite direction on the same roads I traveled barely three hours ago, now slick with rain. I keep dialing the store with my cell phone, but no one answers. I want information, details, updates—is everyone still alive? have the cops come?—and I can’t wait the twenty minutes it takes to get there. The blood Dwayne mentioned, the blood. Was it his or someone else’s? Is Kevin okay? Who was at the store and who is there now?
Then I remember Dwayne’s gun and feel sick to my stomach. I should have done something. I should have frisked him every day and checked his backpack, and then as a family we should have done everything in our power to make the store a safer place. For instance, why couldn’t we at least have bought one of those fake security cameras that you attach behind the register to make people think they’re being recorded? If Dwayne hurt somebody, what does that mean for us? The more I think about this, the more I need to get there, and then because I am thinking in this selfish way, I feel even sicker.
It’s time to get out. The gong has sounded, and this time everyone in the family will hear it at the same time.
At Atlantic Avenue and Hoyt Street sirens are flashing, and a police car has parked awkwardly on the sidewalk. And yet the scene looks weirdly peaceful, as if whatever happened took place hours and hours ago. I see the police tape cordoning off a section of sidewalk near where we put out the trash, but not the candles or the wailing relatives or the reporters and their cameramen. It seems like nothing all too serious could have happened here tonight.
And then I see the puddle of blood, two feet long and a foot wide, glimmering on the sidewalk. At its center sits an expensive embroidered Yankees cap that was probably bone white an hour ago and now has the
same color as the blackening pool.
Turns out it’s the robber’s cap. At closing time, he and his accomplice—both teenagers from Bay Ridge, a middle-class white community in South Brooklyn—walked into the store. Kevin, who was shutting down the register at the time, appeared, from their point of view, to be the only person on duty. Dwayne had gone back to the stockroom to fill a bucket with mop water, and as the plume beat noisily against the plastic, his hearing was blocked. The teenager in the Yankees cap pointed a gun at Kevin and told him to give him the contents of the register. Kevin, thankfully, didn’t hesitate to comply. He put the entire drawer of cash on the counter next to an aluminum tray of biscotti, and the teens started stuffing their pockets. But then Dwayne turned off the water, and one of the teenagers accidentally knocked over the biscotti.
“Everything okay?” shouted Dwayne.
The robbers bolted, and Dwayne, after sticking his head out of the stockroom and seeing the look on Kevin’s face, started running too.
“No, Dwayne!” Kevin shouted. “They’ve got a gun!”
Dwayne kept going, however, and found the robbers fleeing down Hoyt Street on bicycles. The one with the cash had already gotten away. The one with the gun was struggling, though, and when he realized what was coming after him, he must have wanted to die. After a flying leap, Dwayne tackled the slower robber and crashed with him to the sidewalk, both of them landing on the bike. At that point the robber still had his gun, which during the tussle ended up pointed near Dwayne’s face. He pulled the trigger, and what came out of the muzzle—a BB, not a bullet—bounced harmlessly down the street.
Dwayne then began beating the robber to a pulp, until luckily for both of them, a customer happened by and convinced Dwayne to let up. The robber, in addition to having a broken jaw, would later need fifty-two stitches to close up a single arc-shaped gash running from his temple to his chin. Thus the pool of blood.
My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store Page 26