My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [59]
“George, I—”
A glare and I know better than to even apologize. He’s actually trembling and, judging by the snarl in his lip, thinking something unpleasant, possibly murderous.
And then, just like that, he storms out of the library, hails a taxi and disappears into the Manhattan night, leaving me to wonder what sort of punishment he will devise. It will have to be pretty imaginative to make me feel worse than I’m already feeling, and I have no doubt it will be.
MONDAY IS ALWAYS the worst day at the store. No one buys anything. They stay at home eating leftovers, I guess, or maybe they dine out, or maybe they just starve themselves. It’s one of the mysteries of the convenience store business, like the phenomenon of customer waves, whereby the store goes completely dead for a few minutes—you can hear the cockroaches scurrying—and then all of a sudden twenty customers walk in at the same time, as if they’d been conspiring outside on the sidewalk, huddling in the manner of a football team, with formations and schemes and plans of attack to make sure that not one night will ever go by when I do not commit a huge, pressure-induced mistake.
Today during the day shift we make six hundred dollars, which comes out to sixty-six dollars an hour—in revenue, not profit. Take away overhead and inventory costs and you’ve got less than what a babysitter makes on the Upper East Side, or a dog walker, or a low-level drug dealer. And a babysitter is a damned solo practitioner—our lousy twelve dollars an hour results from the labor of an entire family.
Vultures are circling. Wolves are hovering in the distance. Someone who identified himself as in the market for distressed property stopped by our store the other day and said he’d heard that our store was for sale (which it is not). A few days later a documentary filmmaker dropped in and asked Kay if he could interview her for a film he’s making on gentrification.
“As a longtime resident of the neighborhood who’s been left behind by privatized hypercapitalist development, your perspective is important,” he said. “Huh?” Kay replied. “We only been here two month.”
This afternoon, when I trudge up Hoyt Street to start my shift, I see one of our lottery customers, a friend of Chucho’s, sitting on one of our milk crates next to some bric-a-brac he’s laid on the sidewalk, apparently with Chucho’s blessing.
“CDs, VCR tapes, stereo equipment,” he says to the crowds passing by. “Women’s clothing.” When he sees me, he smiles—an expression so foreign and welcome to me right now that it literally stops me in my tracks. Then he asks if I can go inside and fetch him a beer.
“I’m working,” he explains. And indeed he is: his crowds—for used shoes, a pair of salad tongs and one yellowing copy of The Death of James Dean—are larger than ours. So I go inside and get him a beer.
It is now seven-thirty P.M., and the store has been comatose since the night shift started. This isn’t right. It’s not natural. Even on Mondays the store has commuters coming in at this time of the evening. Thus I start doing what no store owner should ever do: I stand at the window, anxiously watching people walk by. No one will even make eye contact with me. They know. They can see that the store is empty, because one of my recent “moves” was to declutter the store’s facade, thinking that rather than malt liquor ads featuring half-naked nymphets wearing boa constrictors, the public would like to see what kind of store they are walking into before they come through the door. And I think they do appreciate the move. They’re saying, “Thanks for letting us see that your store has no customers. I think I’ll walk an extra block and go to the deli that doesn’t make my skin crawl.”
I should at least try to look busy, so I go