My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [37]
Today one of the regulars, a grumpy old Italian wearing a porkpie hat and Ray Charles sunglasses, tells me how glad he is that we’re keeping the lottery machine, and I don’t have the heart to tell him its days are numbered.
“The customer he don’ wanna walk all de way down to de Bergen,” he says. (Bergen Street is where the next-closest deli with a lottery machine is located.) “My office is right here.”
“Oh really?” I remark, trying again to be friendly. Though I’ve seen him around a couple of times, I didn’t realize the old man still worked. “So what do you do?”
“I’m a plumber,” he says proudly.
“Oh?” I haven’t noticed any PLUMBER signs nearby. “Where’s your office?”
“Right there.” He points at the corner of Hoyt and Atlantic, where nothing larger than the telephone booth stands. Then he walks outside and sits on our newspaper box. So I ask Dwayne what this could possibly mean—was the old man pulling my leg?
“Alonzo’s a street plumber,” Dwayne says. “That’s his corner. He just stands there all day waitin for somebody to ask him to unblock a toilet. He don’t harm nobody.”
“Where are his tools?” I ask.
“He used to keep them at home, but that was when he lived in the neighborhood. Now he lives in the projects in Flatbush, so he keeps them in a basement down the block. One of the antique store owners gives him a little space.”
“When did he move to Flatbush?”
“I dunno. Ten, twenty-five years ago.”
“Ten or twenty-five years ago? That’s how long he’s been standing on that corner?”
“Like I said, he don’t harm no one.”
“I didn’t say he did, Dwayne. I just wanted to know what he does for a living. Is he there every day?”
“Every day, all the time.” This bothers me. If the corner is Alonzo’s office, how come I never see him there? Sure enough, when I look outside again he’s gone.
After that I begin reconsidering the lottery machine. For every Screamer or Mumbles, there’s someone like Alonzo, who’s hardly what you would call a lottery fiend. Of course, as soon as I begin having second thoughts, the lottery machine, being the evil, all-knowing creature that it is, seems pleased and emits one of its random robotic belches. (I swear, every time I look at that thing, it smiles at me and whispers, You know you want to play. Try it!) Being connected by wire to some central location from which it receives updates throughout the day—numbers, numbers, numbers pouring into its cold blue shell—it will also occasionally hiccup and go off on feverish fugues that I imagine to be telepathic summons to members of the lottery community. That’s undoubtedly the worst part of the lottery machine: you often feel like you’re hosting an Amway representative or the latest diet guru, a charlatan preying on the feebleminded. The lottery messes with people’s heads. It turns them into twitchy, dart-eyed, pattern-obsessed arithmomaniacs—people crazed by numbers. For instance, on January 2, 2003, we had people with dark circles under their eyes and chewed-down nails spilling out the door, desperate to play variations on 1-2-3 before it reached its quota.
“No, you little brats,” a lottery customer with a Russian accent shouted at her wailing children, before dropping on the counter what appeared to be change she’d scraped up from inside the couch. “There’s no money for breakfast.”
But if preying on people’s vices is to be avoided, we’d have to shut down the store. Our shelves would be barren. Our cash register would be empty. The regulars would launch an insurrection. Therefore, when Glenda comes back, I tell her we’ve decided to keep the lottery machine a little longer.
ANOTHER REASON I dislike the lottery machine is that I can never seem to operate it without exposing my incompetence. Anyone can butter a bagel or pour a cup of coffee, but with the lottery there’s a whole specialized vocabulary—the daily double, the day-night combo, the fifty-fifty split, box, straight—that tends to out the unversed. Every