My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [6]
“Bet that keeps you up at night,” I say to the male owner.
“Bet what does?” he replies.
We go back upstairs and take another look. The store is a full-blown disaster—during the twenty minutes we’ve been visiting, not one customer has come in—but with work it can be turned around, and outside waits a fancy neighborhood filled with big spenders. The owners want seventy-five thousand dollars, which we offer them; then we wait for their response. Nothing happens for several days. We have now been looking for a store for three months, and patience in the Pak family has truly all but run out.
“How hard can it be?” Gab exclaims. “Is New York City not filled with delis? We aren’t looking to open a whole supermarket. All we want is our own little space.”
“Maybe it’s a message,” Kay says. “Buying store is mistake.”
But we’ve already considered the alternatives, such as a Subway or a twenty-four-hour photo shop or a fishmonger’s, and ruled out each one, because the Pak family’s expertise lies in convenience stores.
Then the owners of the Brooklyn store call. They tell Gab they’ve decided not to sell after all and, in keeping with their mysterious ways, offer us no explanation. Perfectly polite and friendly, but perfectly strange at the same time. In a month or so we will drive by their business, just to see if they were telling us the truth, and we will confirm that indeed it has not been sold, but neither is it open. The place is dark and shuttered. A little after that Kay will hear through the Korean grapevine that the old man had suffered a heart attack and the family had moved to parts unknown.
“Now what we do?” Kay says in disgust. “I’m not be having energy anymore. This drive me to be the crazy person.”
We all look to Gab, who is slumped on the living room couch and seems in fact to be sinking into it, sucked down by some depressive force emanating from below the house. She says nothing for a while, but then:
“I can look at one more store,” she says. “Just one. After that I’m finished.”
Kay gets the Korean newspaper, and there in the classifieds it is: “Busy street, bright store, new refrigerators—Brooklyn. $170K.”
That was how we found out about Salim’s store.
SLUSH PILE
AS I PREPARE TO BECOME NEW YORK’S NEWEST DELI OWNER, I take comfort in still having my job at the Paris Review, where I’ve worked for five years. Being an editor at America’s premier literary journal is like an anchor, holding me fast no matter how far I drift. Yet I’ve been free in how I talk about the deli—too free. I’ve told too many people, when the truth is that you never know how people are going to respond. In professional baseball they say that when a player gets sent to the minors, an invisible wall forms around him in the locker room; one second he’s a teammate and then poof! Suddenly he’s a ghost, a leper, a virus. I’m afraid that when people hear about the deli, they’ll say the right things (“That’s wonderful! I’ll be sure to stop by when you’re working!”) but be afraid to go near me for fear of catching the curse and ending up the manager of an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt at the mall.
I didn’t tell everyone, just some friends and people in the office. But maybe that’s too many, for the one person I haven’t told—my boss, the famed writer, editor and bon vivant George Plimpton—is the one person whose reaction I fear most. George isn’t an ogre or anything. Far from it. Basically he’s a kindly, lovable old man who likes to walk around the office in his boxer shorts and rarely fires anyone. He’s certainly not one of those pathological magazine editors who overworks their staff until they slump over their desk dead of a heart attack at age thirty-six. If you’re going to slump over your desk at the Paris Review, it had better be dead drunk, not dead dead. But there is one issue that would cause George to fire his own family, and that’s loyalty. When