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“I don’t know,” someone finally says. “That’s not the question.”

“What’s the question?” I ask the figure, who appears to be made out of smoke.

“The question is, Can we help you?”

The voice has an undeniable element of nastiness, and now one of the other bodies is standing up. Clearly, I interrupted something—a card game? some sort of business transaction?—and my entrance wasn’t very diplomatic. Who am I anyway? To someone who’s never seen me before, I probably look like just another customer—only demanding information I’m not entitled to.

Suddenly a door in the back of the stockroom creaks loudly and opens halfway. The bathroom. A vigorous rush of liquid. Then a voice, unmistakably African-American and young.

“Ben, that you?”

“Yes, hello, Dwayne?” I cry. Dwayne is one of Salim’s old employees, the only one we have kept on. It must be him back there in the bathroom, I reason, but whoever it is doesn’t reply. Or, rather, he lets his vigorous dialogue with the toilet bowl reply for him, while the rest of us wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, a human Brinks truck waddles out into the stockroom. He is dressed like a farmergangster (Oshkosh B’gosh overalls, oversized New York Rangers shirt, red bandanna) and walks a bit stiffly, like a rusty robot samurai, but with instantly recognizable authority.

“Yo, Marvin, sit the fuck down,” Dwayne says. “That’s Ben, the new owner.”

Marvin sits down, fast and hard. But another man even bigger than Dwayne stands up.

“You mean the new owner of this store?” he grunts.

Everyone looks at me as I nod dumbly, feeling as if I’ve just been identified as the perpetrator of an unspeakable crime. My center of gravity has suddenly dissolved. The floors are tipping from side to side. I want to spread my feet wider or put my arm against the wall, but there is nothing for me to hold on to except smoke.

The man takes a menacing step forward, halving the distance between us, and not even Dwayne moves to stop him. Then he lunges, wrapping me in his arms like a terrible bird, and as I surrender the battle to maintain my balance, my face collapses into the base of the giant’s neck, where at last I identify that odd scent I had first detected outside the stockroom: a French Vanilla–flavored cigar, undoubtedly one of the Dutch Masters we sell ourselves.

I met Dwayne once before. He is thirty-four and has worked at the store since he was eighteen. Half of what he says I can’t understand, either because he says it too fast or because what he says turns my brain inside out. Two hours after I met him, though, I knew his life story: where he grew up (three blocks from the deli, in the Gowanus Houses), where he was shot (around the corner) and what he’d ordered in the mail the previous week from the ninja supply company (eight throwing stars, five knives, a pair of nunchakus, some kind of truncheon and a pair of slingshots with ball-bearing ammo—one for him and one for his sixteen-year-old daughter, Keisha).

The first thing Dwayne said to invert my cerebral cortex was that he has a cousin with some gifted children.

“They’re so smart they can tell you the square root of a doughnut.”

“What?” A second earlier we seemed to be having a discussion about hubcaps. The segue to the cousin’s kids eluded me.

“They’re so smart they can tell you how fast it takes spit to fall off a roof.”

Huh? I looked around—was the cousin or one of his kids nearby? Is he a hubcap designer? I would soon learn that this is quintessential Dwayne, though. As he would say, my brain moves “slower than water going uphill,” while his brain moves like Renee, the drunk down the block who drinks Colt 45 “like a snowball going down a snowhill.” After touching on the cousin’s kids and hubcaps it was on to why you can’t eat Chinese food after drinking beer (“You’ll mess up the alignment of your stomach”) and how to escape from a police choke hold. Only a genius (like Dwayne) can see the connections.

As for the interaction in the stockroom, it’s easy to see why Marvin