My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [121]
In general he sounded okay. However, Dwayne always sounded okay if you let him get going. My worries about him continued. At the store, Dwayne had worked a staggering number of hours, often more than sixty a week, and now to make the same amount of money he was working part-time jobs all over the place: Coney Island, east midtown, the West Village, even Hempstead, Long Island. The traveling was brutal; at least when he’d worked at the store, his apartment had been three blocks away. Now he spent all his time sleeping and eating on trains, which for someone whose lifestyle habits were already lethal (two six-packs of Heineken a day, one pack of Newports, extreme quantities of fast food that probably made him weigh eighty pounds more than he should) was painful to consider. And there was the work itself. Since leaving the deli world, Dwayne had become something of a professional inflictor of violence. His day job was in security at department stores in midtown, where he scowled at and occasionally tackled robbers the same way he’d done at the deli. At night came the dirtier work as a bouncer at a string of nightclubs in Brooklyn and Queens. One night I visited him at a bar under the BQE, near Jetro, where he was manning the door and where the clientele consisted mainly of falling-down-drunk Central American migrants. Here Dwayne wasn’t so much a deterrent as an in-house brawler taking on all comers. The fighting was guaranteed, and after one of the drunks came at him with a broken bottle, Dwayne would sit on the poor fellow until his friends came and peeled him off the sidewalk. It was bloody, sordid work, and for all the risks involved it didn’t pay particularly well. But the dirtiest job of all, according to Dwayne, was what he did on weekends, working as an umpire for Little League baseball in Park Slope.
“The parents are some crazy fuckers,” he said, shaking his head. It was so bad that he’d bought himself a pit bull and started taking it with him to games.
But were three jobs enough?
“I ain’t never leaving Brooklyn!” he continued to shout at me every time I managed to track him down, even after he’d broken up with the librarian and was calling me from Kingsbridge, up in the Bronx, where he’d “temporarily relocated.”
“I ain’t never leaving Brooklyn!”
That was what he shouted at me, again, the last time I talked to him. He wasn’t sure exactly where he was that time—he’d started out on a train bound for Hempstead and slept past the stop; now he couldn’t tell which town he was in.
“I’ll call you back,” he said wearily.
He never did. We went through our worst period of not communicating after that, a good six months where he didn’t call. Finally, Gab went to one of the department stores where he worked and asked a cashier what Dwayne’s hours were, so she could come back and find him. The woman covered her mouth and ran away, and Gab knew. When the cashier’s supervisor came back holding Dwayne’s funeral program, she was already crying.
Dwayne had had an aneurysm just two weeks before. He’d been pingponging around the city more than usual, bouncing from his kids to his jobs to his girlfriend (he was trying to get back together with the librarian), and one night something inside him just gave. He was up in the Bronx when it happened, and a friend who was with him called an ambulance right away, but like everything with Dwayne, the rupture was so massive that he never had a chance.
Everyone said the same thing about his funeral: it was the most varied group of people they’d ever seen—blacks, whites, Asians, Mexicans, old people, young people. Everyone. And nine months later I find myself still thinking that one of these days he’s going to call.
THE SAME MONTH as Dwayne’s death, Gab and I finally moved out of Kay’s basement. Like everyone who moves back into a parental household,