My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [38]
Not that I’ve misrepresented myself. I certainly haven’t told anybody things that aren’t true. But then again I haven’t had to, since no one at the store talks about their personal lives except Dwayne. (Dwayne’s personal life is the store.) In fact, it amazes me that some of the regulars spend as much time as they do with us and I have no idea whether they’re married, single, wanted for murder or Nobel laureates. (Maybe they went to boarding school too: Mumbles of Groton; Toilet Paper, St. Paul’s ‘74.)
But it doesn’t matter. There are things you know, things you pick up. The details always tell.
Tonight a young man with one of those unsettling neck tattoos comes into the store. The regulars give him a wide berth, as if he’s displaying gang colors I can’t see or the telltale bulge of a weapon under his hooded sweatshirt, and suddenly everyone in the store becomes very quiet, except Dwayne, who’s having a telephone conversation in the stockroom. Rubbing his hands, the young man announces that he has just gotten out of jail and would like to see someone named Lucy.
“Lucy?” I look at the regulars, but their faces are even blanker than usual. Dammit, it’s the moment I feared: my unmasking! I rake my memory for the name Lucy and come up empty-handed. Was she a clerk who used to work for Salim?—a thought that for some reason triggers the mental image of a dimpled Rosie Perez look-alike with a glorious derriere. Or might Lucy be the exotic dancer with a receding hairline who lives around the corner and glares at me every time she comes in?
Maybe if I drag this out, Dwayne will sense trouble and get off the phone in time to come to my rescue. “Lucy” sounds like code for something illicit. I’ve heard about delis with side businesses in things like illegal numbers. Maybe massages? Knockoff handbags? Drugs?! I almost blurt out, “Of course we don’t have that here! Are you crazy?” But then I tell myself, Play it cool. Lucy’s not here, man. She’s gone. No more Lucy. Which, of course, relies on the assumption that we don’t have Lucy. However, what if we’re a Lucy emporium and I’m the last to know? Now half of me wants to say, “sure,” just to find out what Lucy is, and the other half is afraid that upon my saying so, a troupe of dancing hookers will appear from nowhere with rubbing oil and hooded towels and then I’ll really be in trouble.
In the end, however, I just don’t want to reveal my ignorance. “Sorry to disappoint you,” I say, “but Lucy’s not here. She”—I have to stop myself from winking—“doesn’t work here anymore.”
The young man stares at me as if I’m insane, then exits the store shaking his head. At which point Leslie, one of the regulars, comes up to me and, laying his hand on my shoulder, says gravely, “Ben, who’s Lucy? ‘Cause I really want to meet her.” The whole group then bursts out laughing, especially the regular named Floyd, who keeps saying, “Is she loosie? Is she loosie?”
“What’s going on?” Dwayne asks, coming out of the stockroom. Leslie explains, and Dwayne starts heaving with laughter too.
“Lucy ain’t a person,” he says. “It’s a ‘loose cigarette.’ “ He takes a Newport out of his own box and waves it at me. “That guy was asking if he could buy one of these.”
“Oh.”
“Lucy, Lucy, show us your—” chants Floyd.
“Don’t worry,” says Leslie. “If you’re not a smoker, you wouldn’t know.”
But I did use to be a smoker. In fact, I lived in New York and smoked a pack and a half of cigarettes every day for almost ten years. How could I not know what a loosie is?
THE NEXT EVENING I decide that it’s time to make myself more comfortable in the store. On most days the radio plays during the morning and afternoon, and the television comes on at night. I’ve been working to the sound track of murder, mayhem and steel-cage matches, or music that somebody else chose, but tonight and from now on we’re going to listen to what I want to hear, which will involve