My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store (7 page)

But maybe it’s better not to reflect. I have a feeling that if I think too long about Salim’s deli, or perhaps much at all, I’ll have second thoughts.

DESPITE THE RUSH
, we manage to set up a deal in a more or less orderly fashion. We skimp on things like the observation period, wherein the new owner traditionally sits behind the register with the old one making sure that the business stands up to the owner’s claims. Usually the observation period lasts a week. Kay pronounces herself satisfied after one shift. Half a shift, actually.

It looks, nevertheless, like it’s going to be a smooth transition. Then one day Salim calls and says he wants to modify the deal. He says he wants us to send part of the money we owe him to an associate in Lebanon.

“Ha ha, that’s funny,” I laugh. “You mean like in the Middle East?”

“I’m not kidding,” Salim says. “What do you think I mean, New Lebanon, Pennsylvania?”

Swallowing my amazement—things were going much too well, I realize—I try to picture how I would send thousands of dollars to a country I’ve never visited halfway around the world. Does he mean to a bank? Do they have banks in Lebanon? Would it be to some kind of money changer at a bazaar?

“Western Union will be fine,” says Salim, while assuring us that this is just a normal way of doing business. Part of me knows that it is, but you know what I’m thinking:
This couple thought they were buying a convenience store in Brooklyn and ended up laundering money for an international crime ring that sold kidnapped American children into slavery and invested the profits in pornography and heroin. Tonight, Steve Kroft will take you to Auburn state prison in upstate New York and interview the husband, a former literary magazine editor who says he was framed …

And then I feel guilty. Guilty because during all thirty seconds that I have such paranoid thoughts, I am prejudging Salim, am I not? Would I be suspicious if Salim were Swiss and asked me to send money to Switzerland, which is also a country I’ve never been to halfway around the world?
Yes, and if he were
Swiss and
asked me to send all that money there I’d say, You’re out of your mind!
But somehow in Salim’s case, because Gab and I don’t want to entertain even the possibility of prejudging him, we say okay, despite the alarm bells going off in our heads.

“Listen, it’s pretty hard for me to imagine Salim involved with anything nefarious,” Gab rationalizes. “Would you spend seventeen hours a day selling Yummykakes if you had the power to be an international crime lord? Besides, he’s too nice a guy. I can’t see it.”

Neither can I. It just doesn’t add up.

Then Salim calls again. He’s changed his mind: instead of sending the money by Western Union, he wants us to send it to the Middle East with his cousin Farouk, who’s going there on business in a few days. Which of course we say yes to, plus a series of other last-minute requests. Things keep changing, taking us out of our comfort zone.
Now the money is going with Farouk as a cashier’s check. Now it’s going to Salim’s accountant, a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights. Now some of it is going to the hopelessly fickle-minded Salim at the closing
. But it’s not as if Salim isn’t helping us too.

First of all, he’s letting us pay him some of the money we owe him over the course of twenty-four months, with money we earn at the store. And he’s not charging us interest. “Muslims don’t believe in interest,” he says. “It’s un-Islamic.” Though I wouldn’t have guessed that Salim was religious, I could not be more grateful.

On the day of the closing, Gab goes to meet Salim at his lawyer’s office in downtown Manhattan, while Kay and I prepare to open the store.

The countdown has begun. In three hours we will become deli owners. When Gab arrives at the lawyer’s office, Salim seems to have suddenly gotten jittery. He keeps jumping up from the conference table where papers are being signed to look nervously out the window at the traffic on Broadway while yelling into his cell phone in Arabic.

“Everything okay?” Gab asks.

“My wife is outside in the car, but there’s nowhere to park, and the police keep telling her to move. They’re harassing her.”

Gab is horrified. “Tell her to park in a lot. You know what the
police here are like.” Ground Zero, barely a year old, sits only two blocks away.

But it turns out Salim’s wife doesn’t drive.
Oh no
, Gab thinks.
Something’s going wrong again
.

But then, for whatever reason, the police leave Salim’s wife alone, and Salim stops fretting. Meanwhile, it gets dark outside. Salim’s lawyer taps his foot and makes small talk while Gab signs paperwork.
Something else will come up
, Gab thinks.
It always does. There always has to be something
.

“We’re done!” Salim finally says, handing over the store’s primary set of keys. (Kay and I have the backup over in Brooklyn.) “Congratulations. Welcome to the wonderful world of small business.”

Gab isn’t sure if this is a joke.

“Where are you off to?” she asks as they exit the building.

“Arizona,” Salim says. “I have a cousin out there who owns a gas station.”

He gets in his car—a brand-new SUV plastered with Day-Glo orange parking tickets—and waves. “Don’t let it kill you,” he says, and he and his wife ride off through the maze of security checkpoints, into the night.

TODAY IS MY FIRST FULL DAY AS A DELI OWNER, AND I’M
standing next to the cash register, trying to figure out what is missing. A few minutes ago, at four o’clock, the day shift quietly ended, and now there’s a lull. After walking in I slipped behind the cold-cut display and felt a surprising shiver of excitement as I entered the narrow space where the cashiers stand. Where I am now is like a stage (it even has a little platform), but so constricted is the space that it feels like the gap between two cars in a parking lot, without the headroom, thanks to the overhanging illuminated Marlboro display. Behind me is a sink filled with wet coffee grounds; to my right is a vinegary-smelling deli slicer covered with bits of lettuce
and ham; to my left is a lottery machine spitting out scraps of paper and sputtering like an angry robot. Yet my first thought upon entering this space was not that it was filthy, cramped or unpleasant, but that
something
that I can’t quite put my finger on isn’t here. Finally, after a few minutes, I figure out what it is: I’m looking for a chair.

After so many months of searching for a store, this is how the next phase begins. It seems unreal to be on the other side of the checkout counter. Is the store really ours? Could Salim somehow change his mind and take it back? Now that we’re here, all I want to do is to put our stamp on this place and make it our own. There’s no time, though, for even now, during a brief moment of calm between shifts, as the wave of evening commuters prepares to crash over us, there’s an endless list of things to do, and it’s all I can manage to stay out of Kay’s way.

“Excuse,” my mother-in-law says after hip-checking me into the sink. She and Gab have been here since six
A.M.;
now Gab is going home to collapse, leaving me till one
A.M
. with her mother, who has yet to stop moving for a single second.

“The checks for the deliverymen are in the cash register, under the drawer, and there are three of them, just in case the beer guy shows up,” Gab says before leaving. “Not the beer guy who delivers Heineken, but the beer guy who delivers Brooklyn Lager. Next to the register is the price list, and I’ve attached instructions for making a void, in case you have to. Don’t forget to refresh the cash supply every few hours, and don’t try to do the lottery machine yourself, or put too much meat on people’s sandwiches, or too much sugar in their coffee. Don’t forget to ID anyone who looks underage and, oh God, am I forgetting anything? Yes! Turn on the awning lights when it gets dark or people will think we’re closed, and if anyone from upstairs comes in, ask if they can turn up the heat—it’s freezing. And your parking meter! Did you park on the street? The fine
is one hundred and five dollars as of this week. Can you keep all that in your head?”

I nod and make a cocky face like
Who, me?
But the truth is, I have never felt so ill-prepared in my life. Yesterday, while Gab was at the closing, I got a small taste of the action in the store, but Kay made me spend the whole time stocking (Kay is now the boss, and we’re not supposed to disobey her—not that I would be inclined to), and when we got home Gab advised me that today would be much, much harder. I had no doubt that she would be right. Still, at that point I wasn’t nervous. When you live in New York you shop at delis every day, and you become accustomed to seeing what clerks do. It’s easy to think,
I can pour a cup of coffee. I can butter a bagel. I can punch a lottery ticket. So can anyone
.

It is only after stepping up to the register that I realize how wrong I am. A deli worker is lucky if he gets to focus his attention on
just
buttering a bagel, pouring coffee or punching a lottery ticket. Much of the time he has to do at least two of those tasks at once, while in his mind he has to be doing at least seven, no matter what’s going on with his hands.

And then there’s the cash register, the bane of every clerk-in-training’s existence. Ours, a Royal Alpha 9150 cash-management system with fifty daunting, multicolored keys, conspicuously lacks one of those nifty handheld price scanners I was looking forward to beaming against customers’ behinds. The cash register has an effect on me similar to quadratic equations and French movies—that is, it makes me yawn uncontrollably and feel instantly and hopelessly defeated. Kay says I only need to learn how to use about five out of those fifty keys, but every time I look for them I get lost in a sea of “CONF-L”, “
” and
MULTI-TAX LEVEL T
.

Embarrassingly, though, my biggest struggle is with the money itself. I have always had a hard time handling cash: my hands go
meaty and numb when I touch it. It started at a young age, when my parents caught me strutting around our house triumphantly showing off a couple of dollars I’d saved. “Put those away!” they barked at me. After that I noticed that my parents were always washing money in the laundry, leaving it in places where they would never find it, or storing it in undignified locations like sock drawers. They weren’t intentionally careless, but they seemed careful not to be
too
careful with it either.

“Here,” Kay says, handing me a stack of twenties. “Count this.”

As soon as I start counting, the bills squirt from my fingers and land on the floor. Kay gasps. Both of us bend down, taking our eye off the open till of the Royal Alpha for a dangerous second.

“Try something else,” she says, handing me a Snickers bar. “I want to buy this. Pretend I am customer.”

Taking the bar, I turn unsteadily toward the register, where the first symbol I see looks like a Mayan hieroglyph.

“Some kind of problem?” Kay says, watching me stand there with my mouth hanging open, a single digit frozen in midair.

I turn to her and wince. “How much is it?” I ask. “The candy bar, I mean.”

“You don’t know? I thought Gaby gave you price list.”

Our store has over a thousand different products, only a third of which have price tags. For someone like me who struggles every day to remember his own debit card PIN, this is going to be a serious challenge.

“She did,” I admit. “I just haven’t had a chance to memorize the candy bars yet.”

“Sixty-five cents,” Kay says, trying not to sound impatient. Then she shows me which buttons to press, a sequence scarcely less complicated than the one presidents use to unlock the nation’s nuclear arsenal, and at the end of it all the cash drawer pops open.

“Well, there, we did it,” I say, trying to summon a jocular air. “I guess we can go home now.”

Kay frowns. If this was an audition, I just failed.

SHORTLY AFTERWARD, MY
first customer arrives, a man with a sour expression and a wispy comb-over. I can’t help thinking how tired he looks, how sad and beaten down, the way his gray suit bunches at the elbows and magnifies the smallness of his shoulders. His tie is twisted.
I wonder if he has a family to go home to. God—to be drab and middle-aged and not have a family? Is this all he’s having for dinner—corned beef hash and a loaf of Wonder bread? I can’t bear it, just the thought of him in some dismal little studio smelling of grease, sitting on the edge of a cot and eating of fa Styrofoam plate
.

“You new or something?” the man asks.

“Huh?” I’ve been turning the loaf of Wonder bread over and over in my hands, absently looking for a price tag. Now I discover, with some help from Kay, that it’s printed right on the plastic wrapper.

“Sorry,” I say.

The man smiles benevolently. “Don’t worry about it. Everybody here is new at some point. That’s what makes New York so great. What country are you from?”

If only
, I think.
Then I’d have a decent excuse
. I glance at Kay, who is appraising me skeptically over folded arms. I’ve never been a great worker, but not because I don’t work hard. I just tend to focus on the wrong things, like how people look, what they’re wearing and whether they use words like “fortuitous” properly. Gab once called me a “big-picture person,” which can be read two ways: either as a straightforward compliment or as a euphemism for having one’s head up one’s ass. I think she might have meant both.