My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [56]
“I should have waited until the state did its assessment,” she says, although if she had, we never would have been able to open by Christmas. “I can’t believe how stupid I am.”
“Well, we’ll just have to track Salim down and straighten this out,” I exclaim defiantly. Gab looks inconsolable, however, in part because Salim has already proven rather elusive. Since moving to New Mexico or Arizona or someplace out in the desert, he’s changed his number (as the alarm company found out) and failed to send us a forwarding address. We’re in contact with one of his relatives, a man in Queens who takes payment on what we still owe from the sale, but who is little help in locating Salim and who becomes impossible to contact after employees of a notoriously aggressive city marshal start leaving threatening messages on our answering machine.
The marshal—in New York, city marshals are a despised class of Old West–style bounty hunters who, despite not being public officials, somehow get to carry badges and guns as they pursue parking cheats and other scofflaws—is named Martin Bienstock, and his quarry are the KustomKools, those sexily purring refrigerators that came with the store. As it turns out, Salim bought the KustomKools last year with a deposit, then struggled to make his monthly installments, causing him to be threatened by the seller with legal action (which we never found out about). As with the tax arrears, this would seem to be a problem for him, not us. However, Bienstock only cares about the KustomKools, which he’s been threatening to come over and seize. As a result, since the refrigerators are basically the only valuable thing in the deli, pretty soon all we’ll have left is a cave filled with junk food to go with that eighty-eight-thousand-dollar debt to the government. (Maybe we can turn the store into some kind of avant-garde performance space and host readings!) Gab has bluffed Bienstock as well as she can, using her best bite-your-head-off lawyer routine, but Bienstock’s lackeys countered by threatening to come over and break down the wall with a wrecking ball. Thus we’ve been forced to look out the window all day, scanning the block for heavy machinery and ninjas and whatever else Bienstock’s posse includes.
Even if Bienstock doesn’t knock them down, it feels as if the walls are caving in. What happened to us? I feel like asking. Where did so much evil luck come from? None of our hard work or responsible decision making seems to be paying off. Has it always been this hard to start a modest business like a deli? What law of the universe did we violate, which god did we anger? One day I walk into the store and have this feeling that it is turning into someplace else, a place I visited recently but can’t remember. Then it comes to me: with its empty shelves, dirty floors and damp, desolate chill, our store has become the North Korean deli. It has the same atmosphere of decay and despair, the same sadness.
The hardest question is how it happened so quickly. Salim’s business may not have been run the way they teach at Harvard Business School, and it may not have been terribly profitable, but at least it had customers—loyal customers—and a purpose. The community depended on it. People cared about it. Somehow, despite selling nothing that was good for you, it had the air of a decent place. And it was not in danger of failing before we took over.
We’d risked more than we intended, I realize. It wasn’t just the money we’d borrowed or our careers; it was the store, with its years of goodwill and place in the community. It was Gab’s family; it was Edward’s health; it was Kay’s house, which we haven’t made a mortgage payment on now for two months. And it was becoming my marriage with Gab.
OVER THE LAST few weeks, the Review has proven something of a refuge from the