My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [18]
“Tell me, if you lived in Fort Greene,” he demands, “then you must know the store over by the park—the one on the corner. Yes?”
“Oh, sure, I know that place.”
“That’s my cousin’s store—Ibrahim’s!” Salim cries joyfully. “Do you know Ibrahim?”
“I, uh, sure. Doesn’t everyone?”
Salim starts looking for the phone and threatening to call Ibrahim right away. “Where’s that damn phone?” he mutters, while tearing through piles of newspapers, receipts and other garbage around the register.
“Salim, you don’t have to do that, really. I don’t think Ibrahim will remember me …”
Salim has now located the cordless phone, but no matter how hard he jabs it, he can’t get it to dial, perhaps because it’s encrusted with enough mustard to dress a hot dog. “I swear, this place is becoming a pigsty,” he says, as if it weren’t his own store. But then he forgets the whole business and turns his attention to the lottery machine, where a customer is waving a piece of paper at him, which Salim absentmindedly scans.
“No money this time, my friend. Better luck tomorrow.” The customer walks out without a trace of a reaction. Salim turns back to the checkout counter.
“Now, where were we? Oh yes, you were thinking about buying my store. You want to see the books? Meet the landlord? Have a look at the basement? How soon can you buy?”
“We’re not there yet,” I say. “I just wanted to come by and introduce myself. We like the store a lot.”
Salim looks unimpressed.
“That’s good,” he says, “but if you make me an offer, don’t insult me. This store may not look like much, but I promise you it is worth more than you think. I am not the first owner. There are people in this neighborhood older than both of us who have been coming here their whole lives. They have spent more money in this place than they have on their own apartments, their own savings. I will not sell to just anyone.” He folds his arms across his chest.
“Well, that’s good to know.” Is this some kind of bargaining strategy?
“Make me a good offer,” Salim continues, “and on your way out of the store, take anything you like.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
So I ask for a pack of Parliament Lights, Gab’s brand of cigarettes.
“That’s too much money,” Salim says. “Pick something else.”
Why do I have the feeling that doing business with Salim won’t be easy?
BACK OUTSIDE IT is a warm December night, so I start walking toward Smith Street. Boerum Hill still has blocks that are visibly poor, and it is more industrial, with housing projects that seem a lot bigger and more intimidating than those in Fort Greene, where Gab and I used to live. At the same time, Boerum Hill has Smith Street, maybe the trendiest place to open a restaurant or boutique in the whole city. Smith Street is a good place to live even if your idea of paradise isn’t a neighborhood packed with stores selling hand-printed baby kimonos and touchless cat massages. You can almost forget that the housing projects, the Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses, which have so many buildings they essentially form a neighborhood unto themselves, are only a block away. Ditto the Brooklyn House of Detention and the general seediness around State Street, with its hot-sheet motels, job centers and stores like 99¢ City. They are there if you want them to be.
Like all the surrounding neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn, Boerum Hill started out as a middle-class community, and despite its disrepair, you can see that background in a building like Salim’s. Probably just a single family had lived in that entire four-story building once. The second floor held a dining room with a parquet floor, a chandelier and special side rooms for entertaining. The backyard contained a patio or a garden, and the garage was where a horse-drawn carriage was once parked. Or so I imagined.
At some point, though, Boerum Hill fell on its luck. Maybe it was the Gowanus Canal, a festering, reportedly body-filled outlet for factories and junkyards, that set off the decline. Or maybe it was after the city decided to plant a pile of public housing and social services in the neighborhood.