My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [119]
One thing I haven’t forgotten, though, is the pleasure of the job itself. Sure, nine-hour shifts are physically and psychically demanding, and doing it every day is arduous, and knowing that you’ll likely be doing it forever is as demoralizing as the gulag, but according to at least one prominent definition of a satisfying job—the one laid out by Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which I must have written at least five papers on in college—running a convenience store isn’t half bad for the soul. Marx said that under capitalism workers were not “self-actualized” because they merely worked as the equivalent of bolt tighteners or zipper checkers on an assembly line and never saw the fruits of their labor consumed by a living, breathing community. Even in a neighborhood like Boerum Hill, though, where the old community, the one with roots, was feeling more and more embattled, and the new one was composed mainly of young transients, there was no lack of face-to-face connection, especially on those nights when you felt like you were conducting an informal survey of all the different flavors of halitosis. Yes, we were cogs in a way, not having harvested our own shade-grown coffee or baked our own homemade Twinkies, but never did I feel like a mere soda machine waiting to have someone insert a dollar bill in my mouth. The work was varied and challenging, and it took a certain expertise to get each facet of it right. The challenges evolved. There was never a moment in which I didn’t feel mentally stimulated by the tasks at hand. The labor itself even had, dare I say, a transcendent moment or two.
Paradoxically, it was this pleasant and even exciting feeling that ultimately convinced me that I was not cut out for the deli business. While I have certainly become less fearful of the marketplace since we bought the store, Kay was essentially right about me at the beginning: I do not love money. Not enough, anyway. And I probably never will, alas. And while I liked the feistiness that shopkeeping brought to life, I was concerned that it was boosting an already healthy sense of paranoia. At some point “Think for yourself” turns into “Trust no one,” and this paranoia goes against the communal part of shopkeeping that I enjoyed.
AT THE Paris Review there was no future for the editors who stayed on after George’s death. A few eventually quit, disillusioned by changes that were either happening or not happening, and the rest, including me, were let go. The board brought in a new team, most of whom were old enough to have had significant experience elsewhere in the media. The office was moved from its cozy little bubble on East Seventy-second Street to a commercial building downtown, and things like marketing and business (hopefully contracts, too) were handed off to specialists in those fields, I’m sure for the better. I have no idea whether the magazine itself is doing well or not, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read it. I get jealous when I think about the excitement that the new editors, whoever they are, must be experiencing whenever they have that moment and a manuscript comes out of the slush with an unlikely return address—Zook, Kansas; Auburn Correctional Facility; Staten Island—and the person holding it feels the rush of The Discovery: first their heart quickens, then they start clenching the pages, then they can’t do anything in the world except read (a firework could explode right next to them and they wouldn’t turn their head), and then all of a sudden they have to get up and find someone, interrupt them, take the phone out of their hands and hang up, whatever, and say, “Read this.” The slush is an affirmation that great literature isn’t about anything—not what writing program you attended, not how blessed you are in the cheekbone department, not who your friends are—but words themselves. Strange to say, but somehow I ended up missing the part of the Review I dreaded most.
THE ONE FRIEND I made at the store was Dwayne, although as I discovered after we no longer worked together,