My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [28]
“THE SQUARE ROOT OF A DOUGHNUT”
THE HOLIDAY SEASON COMES AND GOES, WITHOUT QUITE THE oomph in beer and lottery sales Kay had been expecting. Part of this, I hypothesize, is that Boerum Hill, being popular with young, single New Yorkers who tend to come from other parts of the country, sees its population drop over the holidays, as people go home to visit their parents. Kay has a different explanation: it’s freezing outside, and after Christmas we had a blizzard. “People not want to go out even for beer,” she rationalizes. Although it’s frigid in the store as well (there’s only one radiator, whose functionality I have yet to determine; I have a feeling we’re being kept warm by the carafes of stale coffee on Salim’s coffeemaker), I notice that Kay is wearing only an orange T-shirt with cut-off sleeves. Maybe she keeps warm thinking of what the shirt says: COSTA RICA! (A place she’s never been to, incidentally.)
After a week at the register, I’m making fewer mistakes but hardly at ease. The store has a regular crowd of customers, people who come in and hang out and sometimes watch an old color TV propped above the cold-cut display. It’s never the same crowd, or at least it hasn’t been since I started trying to remember faces. Some people have gone out of their way to be welcoming, which is weird, I guess, because they’re welcoming us to our own store; others, more disconcertingly, act as if we’re not even here. Tonight, after a long day at the Review, I come in and find one of the largest crowds I’ve seen yet, watching a movie. I’m not in a very crowd-friendly mood. I had a pile of unread mail and manuscripts on my desk at the Review, only a fraction of which I was able to dispose of, and some of which I’ve brought with me to the deli.
“What’s on TV?” I ask, trying to be upbeat. A cheerful deli owner.
No one answers, so I take off my backpack and drop it heavily next to the coffee machine. The people watching TV are blocking the aisles and creating a gauntlet of cigarette smoke and malt liquor breath for the enjoyment of customers who come in to actually buy things. Meanwhile, on the TV voices are screaming, blood is splattering and some sort of electric knife or chain saw is droning painfully. It’s not exactly a scene that puts you in the mood for a sandwich.
“Scarface again?” I sigh, not really to anyone in particular.
“Chucky Two,” a voice from the crowd shoots back.
“Oh. Thanks.” I look around the store. In the beer aisle a man in a wheelchair has fallen asleep with a smile on his face and is snoring blissfully, emitting soft liquid sounds. Next to him is a woman in a subway booth operator’s uniform, who had evidently grown tired of watching the movie on her feet and made herself a pillow out of hot dog rolls, is laughing hysterically.
“Man, I’m glad I don’t have to live with Chucky,” she says. “He’s so bad.”
Maybe I can hide in the stockroom and read, I think wishfully. But as I venture back I hear voices there too and smell something pungent and sickly sweet, like an air freshener—except it smells as if it’s on fire.
“What’s going on back here?” I demand, sweeping aside the stockroom curtain.
The stockroom is not a real room but an alcove walled off from the main part of the store by the refrigerator. It is inadequately lit and filled with stacks of cardboard boxes and bags of leaking garbage. I try to spend as little time in there as possible, because the floor feels about as sturdy as wet tissue paper and the shelves are lined with thousands of pounds of beer and other liquids.
No one answers, so I squint, and in the smoky haze I begin to discern bodies: three, maybe four, seated on milk crates.
“Can I help you guys?” my mouth says, not because I want it to but because sometimes