My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [104]
And then we’re at the top, having traversed our way to the summit of Mount Switchback, Destroyer of Rental Cars. (Ours is no longer white, but it is still running, thankfully.) Below us, on the other side of the ridge, lie the hot springs, roiling and steaming in all their bubbly glory. (They’re open, though we’re the only ones here.) We clamber down as quickly as we can and immerse ourselves, soaking for a good hour, which feels even better than I imagined. I’m no New Ager, but if you’d told me that all the stress we’ve experienced over the last year, from buying the store to the cigarette drama and now the pregnancy issue, had turned into solid masses that lodged themselves painfully inside my joints and now are melting away, dissolved by the 104-degree heat, I’d have believed it. Because that’s how good it feels, and heck, in 104-degree heat I’d believe anything. After all, what part of the body does not love being wrapped up in 104-degree heat?
As it turns out, Little Bens do not. There’s little need to worry about Little Bens overthinking or being ambivalent after they’ve been subjected to 104 degrees—they’re cooked. Boiled alive. Or so flaccid with heat exhaustion that they can barely wiggle their tails. (The management should really put up a sign warning people about this. It could even be fun, an enticement, particularly at a hot spring. “Hot springs are an excellent way to reduce your chances of an unwanted pregnancy, especially for you men who can’t seem to get the job done anyway.”)
At the time, though, we don’t know this, and we won’t until Gab gets back to New York and reads it in one of her pregnancy books. Which is good because in Steamboat Springs we were able to enjoy ourselves for once without hiding it, like the grown-ups we used to be and someday will be again.
ON THE FLIGHT home from Colorado I’m looking out the airplane window at the great checkerboard of farms across mid-America when suddenly I realize I’m seeing a different checkerboard—the one in our deli formed by all the dishwater-colored tiles spreading out before the cash register. It occurs to me then how much I’m looking forward to getting home. Our three-day trip has taken me and Gab away from the deli for longer than we’ve ever been, and during that time I’ve been thinking about it more or less constantly. I even made Gab call her mom twice a day to find out how much the shifts had made. Gab also misses the store, but she’s too busy thinking about babies to let it distract her. For me it’s the set of pleasures I most look forward to—for instance, the satisfaction of beholding well-stocked shelves after the deliveries have come. Or the anticipatory buzz of a busy weekend starting as soon as I wake up on a Friday morning. Best of all is when the store gets so overloaded with customers that extra people are needed behind the counter and everyone is communicating telepathically, a human assembly line with seamlessly interacting parts, and the customers are happy and the whole store hums with energy. During times like those it feels like you’re thinking not with your head and not even with your hands but with someone else’s hands—Gab’s, Kay’s or whoever’s—and you almost get the sensation of being one big organism behind the counter. It’s glorious and mindless and probably weird, but most of all it’s collective and communal.
Unfortunately, our experiment in running a tobaccoless convenience store is not going well. It isn’t just the loss of revenue, devastating as that is, or the defection of customers who used to buy cigarettes and beer, groceries or the newspaper. It’s the message it sends, the tone it sets, the seemingly high-handed attitude it broadcasts. Even some nonsmokers are offended by the idea of a convenience store that doesn’t sell tobacco. And there’s no use explaining when you’ve had, as we have, customers actually throw things at us in anger or drop their groceries and walk out. Smokers and their ilk feel persecuted enough in this city—they’ve had so many changes imposed on them in the last few