My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (12 page)

“No, you little brats,” a lottery customer with a Russian accent shouted at her wailing children, before dropping on the counter what appeared to be change she’d scraped up from inside the couch. “There’s no money for breakfast.”

But if preying on people’s vices is to be avoided, we’d have to shut down the store. Our shelves would be barren. Our cash register would be empty. The regulars would launch an insurrection. Therefore, when Glenda comes back, I tell her we’ve decided to keep the lottery machine a little longer.

ANOTHER REASON I
dislike the lottery machine is that I can never seem to operate it without exposing my incompetence. Anyone can butter a bagel or pour a cup of coffee, but with the lottery
there’s a whole specialized vocabulary—the daily double, the day-night combo, the fifty-fifty split, box, straight—that tends to out the unversed. Every time I step up to the machine, I have this terrible feeling that I’m going to give myself away and the regulars are going to start calling me Dead Poets Society or Silver Spoon.

Not that I’ve misrepresented myself. I certainly haven’t told anybody things that aren’t true. But then again I haven’t had to, since no one at the store talks about their personal lives except Dwayne. (Dwayne’s personal life
is
the store.) In fact, it amazes me that some of the regulars spend as much time as they do with us and I have no idea whether they’re married, single, wanted for murder or Nobel laureates. (Maybe they went to boarding school too: Mumbles of Groton; Toilet Paper, St. Paul’s ‘74.)

But it doesn’t matter. There are things you know, things you pick up. The details always tell.

Tonight a young man with one of those unsettling neck tattoos comes into the store. The regulars give him a wide berth, as if he’s displaying gang colors I can’t see or the telltale bulge of a weapon under his hooded sweatshirt, and suddenly everyone in the store becomes very quiet, except Dwayne, who’s having a telephone conversation in the stockroom. Rubbing his hands, the young man announces that he has just gotten out of jail and would like to see someone named Lucy.

“Lucy?” I look at the regulars, but their faces are even blanker than usual. Dammit, it’s the moment I feared: my unmasking! I rake my memory for the name Lucy and come up empty-handed.
Was she a clerk who used to work for Salim?—a
thought that for some reason triggers the mental image of a dimpled Rosie Perez look-alike with a glorious derriere. Or might Lucy be the exotic dancer with a receding hairline who lives around the corner and glares at me every time she comes in?

Maybe if I drag this out, Dwayne will sense trouble and get off the phone in time to come to my rescue. “Lucy” sounds like code for something illicit. I’ve heard about delis with side businesses in things like illegal numbers. Maybe massages? Knockoff handbags? Drugs?! I almost blurt out, “Of course we don’t have that here! Are you crazy?” But then I tell myself,
Play it cool. Lucy’s not here, man. She’s gone. No more Lucy
. Which, of course, relies on the assumption that we don’t have Lucy. However, what if we’re a Lucy emporium and I’m the last to know? Now half of me wants to say, “sure,” just to find out what Lucy is, and the other half is afraid that upon my saying so, a troupe of dancing hookers will appear from nowhere with rubbing oil and hooded towels and then I’ll
really
be in trouble.

In the end, however, I just don’t want to reveal my ignorance. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I say, “but Lucy’s not here. She”—I have to stop myself from winking—“doesn’t work here anymore.”

The young man stares at me as if I’m insane, then exits the store shaking his head. At which point Leslie, one of the regulars, comes up to me and, laying his hand on my shoulder, says gravely, “Ben, who’s Lucy? ‘Cause I really want to meet her.” The whole group then bursts out laughing, especially the regular named Floyd, who keeps saying, “Is she
loosie?
Is she
loosie?”

“What’s going on?” Dwayne asks, coming out of the stockroom. Leslie explains, and Dwayne starts heaving with laughter too.

“Lucy ain’t a person,” he says. “It’s a ‘loose cigarette.’ “ He takes a Newport out of his own box and waves it at me. “That guy was asking if he could buy one of these.”

“Oh.”

“Lucy, Lucy, show us your—” chants Floyd.

“Don’t worry,” says Leslie. “If you’re not a smoker, you wouldn’t know.”

But I did use to be a smoker. In fact, I lived in New York and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes every day for almost ten years. How could I not know what a loosie is?

THE NEXT EVENING
I decide that it’s time to make myself more comfortable in the store. On most days the radio plays during the morning and afternoon, and the television comes on at night. I’ve been working to the sound track of murder, mayhem and steel-cage matches, or music that somebody else chose, but tonight and from now on we’re going to listen to what I want to hear, which will involve at least a modicum of peace and tranquillity. So I arrive early for my shift and change the radio station. From now on there will be no more smooth jazz, no more adult contemporary, and no more crunk; no more Creed, Mystikal, Chingy, O-Town or Parade of the Most Annoying Songs Ever Recorded. Tonight we are going to listen to public radio until the voices of Robert Siegel and Linda Wertheimer make people’s ears bleed, and in the meantime, until
All Things Considered
comes on, we’re listening to one of New York’s classical stations.
Ah, music that doesn’t make me want to jump under a train
. It’s as if my brain has exited a twelve-lane freeway and is now driving down a sun-dappled country lane, past farmhouses, through covered bridges and next to burbling streams. I feel peaceful and centered, instead of like a character under attack by robots and aliens in a video game.

Then Dwayne explodes through the door.

“Yo, B, what you listenin’ to classical music for?” he says. “It ain’t dinnertime.” This is followed by a burst of static as he jerks the dial from the classical station to Power 105.1, WWPR (“R&B, Hip-Hop and Back in the Day Joints”) and doubles the volume.

“Dwayne!” I shout (more to my own surprise than his) and immediately switch back to the Mozart, but it’s futile. All night,
every time I get distracted, one of the regulars creeps over and retunes the station. Finally I bark at Super Mario, “Who keeps changing the station?”

Super Mario, a goateed Dominican building superintendent from an apartment complex over on State Street, looks at me innocently.

“You mean on the radio?” he says. “I think one of the customers.”

“The customers?” I shout, surprised again at the increasing shrillness of my voice. “What are you talking about, ‘the customers’?
You’re
a customer. Or do you work here and I am not aware of it?”

Super Mario whistles through his teeth and shrugs. I suppose that once you’ve seen enough overflowing toilets, it takes a lot to get flustered. But over in the pet food section, an older female customer frowns at my tone.

“I have an idea,” says Mr. Chow, a kindly parking lot attendant. “Why don’t we turn off the radio and watch TV instead?” Mr. Chow is the Mystery Man of Guangdong, a sphinxlike presence who drinks himself into a stupor every night and grins lugubriously even when passed out in the stockroom. He’s mysterious in many ways, one of which is that I can never find his empties, even though he drinks four or five bottles of Guinness a night.

“Say, isn’t it time for the news?” says Barry, while massaging an apple he hasn’t paid for and will soon put back on the shelf. Like many of the regulars, Barry, a nearly blind cab driver, could be in the store during a famine and he would still never spend a dime.

“Yes, it is,” I say, grabbing the remote control and turning on
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
. “Let’s see what’s going on in the world.”

At the sight of dour, makeup-less Jim Lehrer talking to a panel of guests about foreign policy, the regulars look puzzled.

“Is this American TV?” one of them asks.

“Is he gonna read the lottery numbers at some point?” says another.

I turn up the TV so loud you can hear it through the walls. This will be the first time in New York history that a noise complaint is filed because someone was blasting
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
. Nevertheless, despite my efforts to control the environment, by eight-thirty a half-dozen men are hanging out in the store, lounging against the merchandise, holding open the door so they can spit on the sidewalk (and letting in drafts of frigid air) and in general making me paranoid, as there is too much going on for me to notice anything improper. Occasionally a paying customer walks in and does a double take upon seeing so many bodies, wondering if they’ve stumbled upon some kind of gathering at which they’re unwelcome (or maybe too welcome). Someone lights a cigarette directly under a
NO SMOKING
sign. Bottle caps drop on the floor. More bodies attracts more bodies, including people I’ve never seen during the three weeks we’ve owned the store. What kind of person goes out to buy milk and comes home three hours later, saying, “Sorry, honey, there was an
awesome
party in the convenience store, and I just couldn’t resist hanging out”? The greater their numbers, the more I feel like an incidental presence, a lonely chaperone on a field trip who the kids only pretend to obey. I want to assert myself somehow, but what if everyone ignores me? What do I do then—kick them out? Would anyone listen?

At nine Andre, a dishwasher at the prison, walks in. Andre is a regular, but he’s quieter than the others, a smallish, polite and vanishingly unobtrusive presence. (Dwayne says Andre weighs “a buck seven soaking wet with eight bucks in your pocket,” which I can’t quite decipher but sounds about right.) He has the look of a guy standing on a corner trying not to garner attention. “Hey, I didn’t do anything,” his posture says. When he does talk, Andre
likes to discuss issues, which also distinguishes him from the regulars, who generally act as if having a political view would somehow taint their manhood. Dwayne once called Andre “a black man with too much education,” which confused me. “Andre is a dishwasher,” I replied. “I don’t think he has much education at all.” “Exactly,” said Dwayne.

After Andre comes one of my least favorite customers, the unctuous Floyd. A cable TV installer, Floyd is the regulars’ lead raconteur, a regaler of riveting tales, such as those about seducing married female customers whose homes he visits. Floyd likes to tease me in front of the regulars (“What’s the matter, Ben? Stand up straight and quit acting ashamed of your pecker”), hit on Gab and confuse me about how many wine coolers he’s taken from the KustomKool. Tonight he has something rare with him, though: a living, breathing member of the opposite sex. He’s on a date. And she’s pretty.

“You brought your date to the deli?” says Dwayne. “What, AutoZone was closed? The bait-and-tackle store had a velvet rope?”

“Shut up, Dwayne,” says Floyd, not laughing. The woman’s name is Audra, and not only is she exceedingly lovely, she acts as if there’s nowhere else in the world she’d rather be than a sausage party at the deli, and the regulars treat her with respect and adoration. Floyd, in turn, positively glows, and refrains from peppering me with his usual taunts. I let him put two big cans of Japanese beer on his “tab.”

Later, after the regulars have finally left, that feeling of poise and tranquillity I experienced at the start of the shift begins to return. Late at night, when Brooklyn is so quiet that you feel like you’re tucking the city into bed, back in the stockroom I begin filling a noisy plastic bucket with steaming water and what’s left of a jug of Pine-Sol (which, no matter how much you put on, never seems to make much of a difference on those gray tiles, but maybe
it would be worse if we didn’t at least try to clean them), and as I’m bumping around in the murk I accidentally step on somebody’s hand or foot, a body bedded down in the corner among the empty cardboard boxes. After yelping in surprise or pain, a dumpling-shaped old man with a Fu Manchu rises from the recycling area.

“Mr. Chow,” I say tersely. “You startled me.”

As usual at this point in the evening, Mr. Chow doesn’t say anything, just grins, but then he starts making a motion like he’s going to leave.

“You can stay there all night if you want, Mr. Chow. I’ll leave off the burglar alarm. I just need another jug of Pine-Sol.” Using a footstool, I reach up to a high shelf, attempting to coax a bottle that must weigh fifteen pounds into falling, when POW! Something—not the Pine-Sol—hits me right between the eyes, then bounces from my face to the ground, where it shatters. Wincing, and checking my forehead for blood, I hear the distinctly recognizable sound of a glass bottle—another one, not the one that already fell—rolling down a wooden shelf, picking up speed, and then POW! I look up just in time for another direct hit, this time right on the boniest part of the supraorbital ridge.
What kind of barrage is this?
I think, cowering, as two more strikes glance off my shoulder. Broken glass is now all over the stockroom, but not all the projectiles have shattered, and as I look down I see one of them spinning on the stockroom floor: a Guinness bottle, empty. Who would think to put empties in such a place, where eventually they’d be dislodged and rain down like meteorites? Who?!

“MR. CHOW!” I shriek while holding my now-misshapen head in my hands.

But he’s already gone, fleeing out the front door faster than I would have thought him capable.

“What is it?” says Dwayne, hurrying back from the register.
Initially he sees the incident as amusing, but after a few days, when Mr. Chow doesn’t return, he grows concerned and says that when Mr. Chow finally shows his face I should be nice to him, because “what he was doing he’s only been doing for about twenty years.”

Mr. Chow, however, never comes back.

WHEN WE FIRST MOVED INTO SALIM’S STORE, I WAS TERRIFIED
to touch one bag of peanuts or modify the arrangement of Pringles cans, lest we upset our longtime customers. But eventually it feels safe for some minor changes, like shifting the bread rack a few inches to the left so that people standing at the ATM don’t block traffic exiting the beer section, and hanging the display of lottery numbers in the front window instead of next to the cash register. These are small changes, trivial changes, the kind of adjustments surely no one will notice.