My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (27 page)

THE GOOD DWAYNE
—a courageous, loyal and street-smart watch-keeper—is almost always followed by an appearance of the scary Dwayne, however.

On another hot night around the time of the blackout, a man walks into the store while Dwayne and I are on duty and starts taking off his clothes. It’s always sort of surprising how popular the practice of shedding one’s garments in convenience stores is. This is our second naked customer of the evening. However, unlike the previous one, this person is ripped with eerily twitching muscles, has a look on his face that suggests he just finished chewing on a high-voltage wire, and refuses to get dressed or leave until we provide him with a bottle of Heineken.

“Friend, you better get out of here before you get in trouble you can’t get out of,” Dwayne growls. To which the man only laughs in response—a ghoulish, soul-chilling cackle. Then he lifts up a dirty bandage wrapped around his shoulder and shows off a gaping, blood-encrusted bullet hole above his heart that could not be more than a few hours old.

“My friend, can’t you see?” he says with some kind of Slavic accent. “I come from trouble.”

At which point Dwayne bolts for the stockroom, where he keeps the mysteriously heavy backpack.

“Please leave,” I beg the naked man while he’s gone. “Just get out of here.”

“I want beer,” the man states firmly, holding his ground.

A few seconds later Dwayne returns holding not a gun but an aluminum bat known around the store as “the Thunder Rod.” He’s about to take a swing when I jump in front of him.

“Wait!”

Dwayne looks at me as if I’m crazy.

“It’s not worth it,” I say. If they start fighting, I reason, the best
that can happen is that Dwayne somehow subdues the naked man, but even if he does we’re likely to end up with a crime scene, a bloody mess, ambulance chasers and one big hassle. Better just to give the naked man what he wants.

“Listen,” I say, turning to him. “If I let you have one beer, will you promise to leave?”

He nods solemnly, looking almost sane. So I start toward the beer refrigerator in the back of the store, until I get to Dwayne.

“You can’t,” he growls, blocking the way. “That’s not how it’s done.” The Thunder Rod is still over his shoulder, but now Dwayne’s stance is rotated in a different direction: toward me.

“Come on, Dwayne! Give me a break.” He just stands there, though, clogging the canned goods aisle and glaring at me. Finally, after five or so excruciating seconds, he inches aside ever so slightly.

I dash to the beer refrigerator and remove the first bottle I see, then pass it to the naked man. “Now leave,” I say. “You promised.”

However, he just stands there in his nakedness and looks at his beer. In my haste to avert a bloodbath I had given him a Rolling Rock, I realize. “I asked for Heineken,” he says.

“LEAVE!” I shout, grabbing the Thunder Rod from Dwayne. “GET OUT AND NEVER COME BACK, YOU CRAZY BASTARD!” I chase him out of the store and stand there on the sidewalk, trembling, until he’s disappeared.

When I come back, Dwayne is still seething, and for the rest of the night we don’t speak, pretending to ignore each other while I try to forget that image of him standing in the aisle with the Thunder Rod cocked toward my head.

DO WE HAVE
to fire Dwayne? It’s a question we’ve been asking since the day we bought the store. Kay and Gab have their own objections to his conduct. Personally, here I am trying in various ways to upgrade the image of the store, and there he is (despite
admonitions to behave otherwise) commenting graphically on the appearance of female customers, or yelling at people for calling the store a “bodega” (“This ain’t no Puerto Rican store, amigo. Go down to the projects to get your
arroz con perro.”)
or screaming at his daughters over the telephone, promising to practically toss them out the window when he comes home. There are the X-rated phone conversations with his numerous girlfriends (“We gonna do it tonight? ‘Cause I ain’t puttin my ass on the train to Far Rockaway if you ain’t puttin’ …”) broadcast to crowds of mortified customers as he casually spreads mayonnaise on a hero.

But we can’t fire him, for a very simple reason: the neighborhood would go nuts, which Dwayne understands as well as anyone. This is why sometimes I wonder if we own the store or the store owns us. After Salim left, the neighborhood saw Dwayne as the one and only legitimate thing about the store, not only because he had stood behind that cold-cut counter for seventeen years, but because he embraced the role of neighborhood advocate, whether it was on behalf of the kids coming out of jail, Alonzo the street plumber, Mr. Chow or the lottery customers. He’s beloved for being an old standby during a time of change, and also because of his own personal story of redemption, which apparently the entire neighborhood knows. Everyone is aware that Dwayne has struggled with addiction and violence, that he had two children at a young age by different women—none of which makes him so out of the ordinary here. What is exceptional is how hard he has fought to crush his demons and buck the stereotype of young urban deadbeat dads. Everyone knows that Dwayne waged a long and ultimately successful battle for full custody over his seventeen-year-old daughter Keisha, whom he’s been raising on his own now for seven years. The store was integral to that turnaround. It is his anchor, and from his pulpit behind the glazed honey ham he preaches the gospel of self-sufficiency, involved parenting and honest work.

As with all preachers, though, you can often see vanity coming into play; Dwayne
needs
that pulpit. Yet you can also see that he doesn’t rest on whatever laurels he earned as a thug. He doesn’t portray himself as someone who
used
to be hard. On the contrary, he takes pains (especially for the benefit of the male members of his audience) to establish that he is
still
whoever he used to be, maybe more so. Thus the cringe-inducing treatment of women, the frightening displays of rage and, well, the gun.

In a store as small as ours, you don’t really have the luxury of keeping someone at arm’s length. Can you share the space and share lives without becoming co-opted one way or the other? And what does Dwayne want from us anyway?

One night Dwayne asks if I can do him a favor: he wants me to drive him somewhere after work. Since Dwayne never asks for favors, not only do I say yes, I don’t even ask where he’s going. The question occurs to me only after we get in the car and start driving.

“Bed-Stuy,” he mumbles, pointing vaguely toward the heart of Brooklyn.

Bedford-Stuyvesant:
one of the biggest, poorest and scariest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Kay would not be pleased. We have a rule about coming straight home with the proceeds of a shift, and right now I’ve got two thousand dollars in a paper bag wedged under my seat.

“Any place in particular?” I continue, trying to sound relaxed.

“Just drive,” Dwayne says coldly. His mood has changed since we got in the car. Usually I can’t get Dwayne to shut up, but now all of a sudden he won’t talk. He just sits there in the passenger seat and fidgets with his phone.

At first the landscape we pass through is familiar, and I pretend we’re on an ordinary supply run to pick up diapers or cigarettes. When you work with someone like Dwayne every day, it’s easier than you would think to pretend, and forget that he or she may be
a violent sociopath—until you get in a situation where you feel utterly exposed and vulnerable.

Now the question
What does Dwayne want from us?
comes back to me. Because until recently I thought I was starting to get an idea what it was. Trite as it sounds, he wanted the store to be about more than just work. He wanted that connection with the neighborhood, that loyalty and sense of purpose—and from us he wanted the same thing.

“I want you to come to the Founders Day picnic,” he had said to me in the spring, then asked and asked again. Before that it was “Let’s go down to Baltimore and eat some rock crab this weekend” and “How about we go to Pennsylvania and hit one of them Dutch kitchens?” Maine for lobsters, Chinatown for the late-night all-you-can-eat buffet, even his annual Mother’s Day party.

Somehow I managed to turn them all down.

In part this was because as I saw it, Dwayne and I didn’t need to go on any extracurricular bonding expeditions. We were already doing the equivalent of a cross-country road trip every week. Dwayne’s efforts at bonding cross some sort of invisible line. He just wants the job to be about more than work, and all I can think of is,
Hasn’t anyone told him that it’s a just shitty service job paying $10.50 an hour?
He should be pushing for health insurance, not to have me come taste his barbecued chicken.

Gradually, as the rejections have piled up, his sociability has cooled. Dwayne has also been having a difficult summer within that sliver of his life that falls outside the deli. His rent recently went up, and he’s juggling more girlfriends than ever, it seems, while coping with the material demands of two teenage daughters who happen to be on summer vacation. At least the turmoil at the store is over, the possibility of it closing or being sold, which threatened to turn his life upside down as much as it did ours. But I wonder if Dwayne senses that his days at the store are numbered—after all,
the neighborhood might throw a fit if Dwayne ever got fired, but what if it didn’t matter? The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be. Given how rapidly things change and people move in and out, it’s arguably not even a neighborhood anymore.

Maybe he’s plotting to get some of his blood and sweat back, I think as we drive deeper and deeper into Brooklyn. Earlier in the evening Dwayne’s friend Monty the low-level drug dealer had come in the store, and he and Dwayne had an argument out on the sidewalk—about what I’m not sure. Dwayne’s been hanging out with a more Monty-like crowd recently and quelling whatever tension he’s feeling with multiple six-packs of Heineken consumed over by the projects in the early morning hours after work. When we first got the store, Dwayne told me he avoided the projects. Could the old Dwayne be making a comeback, I wonder? Could he be drifting back toward his thuggish old self? And what does that have to do with this crazy joyride we’re on?

“Dwayne, how long is this trip going to take?” I shout at him. We’re now so far into Brooklyn I don’t know what neighborhood we’re in, or if we’re even in the borough anymore. We keep passing dark, windowless buildings, weed-filled lots and derelict storefront churches with patently inappropriate names like Bright Horizons and New Beginnings.

He still won’t answer, and internally I’m starting to freak out. What could possibly be out this way, and why won’t Dwayne tell me what it is? I wish I had called home and told someone in Gab’s family what we’re doing. Actually, I wish I’d just said no to his request. And I wish he wasn’t inside my head with all his loyalty-and-community-ties BS. I wish you could just coexist with Dwayne and not have to be continuously challenged by him—but of course none of that is possible. Dwayne changes the store just by being in it. And he changes us.

“TURN! TURN, I SAID!” he suddenly shouts, as if he’s just woken up.

It’s an awkward spot for a turn. Dwayne wants me to make a left, which would require cutting through three lanes of opposing traffic. What’s more, since we’re going fifty miles per hour, there’s no time to slow down—we’ll just have to go up to the next intersection and make a U-turn.

But Dwayne won’t wait—he reaches across and grabs the steering wheel, guiding us right into the oncoming headlights.

BA-BRUMP!

The car makes a horrible metallic scrape as it rides up over the sidewalk. Whatever Dwayne was heading for, we missed it, and probably flattened one of our tires as a result. But we missed the cars heading toward us and somehow ended up in a parking lot. The question is where.

“Dwayne?”

Dwayne is laughing. “Who taught you to drive like that?”

“Dwayne, where are we?”

Dwayne, however, has already gotten out of the car and started walking away, leaving me to either follow him or hang out alone in a dark parking lot with two thousand dollars in a damp paper bag. I look around. We seem to be sitting directly beneath some kind of pulsing neon light, almost as if we’d arrived at a midnight carnival in the heart of Brooklyn.

Then I get it. He won. By kidnapping me, he’d finally gotten me to go on one of his trips.

“White Castle?!” I yell. “You dragged me all the way out here so you can get some food?”

But Dwayne’s already inside making an order. For both of us.

THE FIRST TIME I WALKED BEHIND THE CHECKOUT COUNTER I
felt a little buzz of excitement, and nine months later it has yet to wear off. Who’d have thought that being a checkout clerk would have such addictive properties? Maybe it’s the Puritan upbringing and the absence since twelfth grade of any real psychotropic agents, other than the occasional Men’s 4-Pac, that makes me susceptible. But that buzz is real, and for that reason most of the mistakes I make occur during shift changes.

Buzz
. I just started the evening shift, and Kay and Gab are telling me at the same time what to do and what not to do when vendors stop by to collect bills tonight. Meanwhile, the lottery
machine is chattering away and a dozen or so customers are milling about the store, having their own conversations, listening to ours or, in one case, sighing loudly in protest when a customer pays for her groceries with a stocking full of pennies. I can feel my brain being pulled in eight directions at once, its awareness reaching out like octopus tentacles to snatch bits of information from all corners of the store. Some organizational genius, some supreme cognitive database, is taking in all that information, processing it and making appropriate choices about how to respond, and I almost don’t feel like it’s me. After all, if I tried to do eight things at once, I couldn’t. But somehow, since I’m not trying to, I am. I’m in the fabled “zone,” a state of equipoise wherein I become my environment and my environment becomes me:
I am a convenience store
. I’m even dimly aware that
outside
the deli, where it’s getting dark, a group of men and women have been loitering on the corner as if waiting for something to happen.