My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [8]
Disaster—have I ever faced disaster? No one to catch you if you fall? No safety net? What would that be like?
Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t want to take any foolish risks. Nothing rash, nothing imprudent. And I feel fairly certain that this funk, or whatever it is, will eventually pass. I can’t even conceive of quitting the Review or letting myself get fired by George. Which is why this deli business has me worried.
TODAY IS MY day off, and at the end of the afternoon I get a call at home from Tom, George Plimpton’s assistant.
“George is looking for you,” Tom says.
“Me?” I blurt out. “Why me?”
“I don’t know. But I think you should come to the office as soon as possible.”
I look at the clock, trying to decide how quickly I can make it to the Upper East Side. It’s the end of the afternoon and I am sitting in Kay’s basement in my pajamas. I tell Tom it’ll have to be tomorrow. “By the way, did George say what he wanted?” I ask.
“Nope,” says Tom.
“How did he seem?”
“Agitated.”
“Agitated? Really?” This isn’t good. “Can you describe the agitation?”
Tom sighs. “He came in the office and asked, ‘Where’s Ben?’ three times. Does that seem agitated enough?”
“Okay, okay,” I say. This isn’t good at all, so I make plans to visit the office the next day, screwing up plans I had already made with Gab to see the new store, which agitates her greatly. Lately a tone of desperation has entered Gab’s voice. She’s been taking our inability to find a store awfully hard.
“There are fourteen thousand delis in New York City,” she says, shaking her head. “We can’t even find one to buy, let alone fail at owning. What kind of immigrants are we? Maybe we’ve been in this country too long.”
I have no answers. All I can say is “Let me sort out this business at the Review and find out what’s wrong with George.” We decide that I should drive to the Review in Kay’s Honda (normally I would take the ferry and the subway, a two-hour trip) so that I can return to Staten Island as quickly as possible.
ON MY WAY to the Upper East Side I practice groveling for my job. “Please, George, don’t fire me. I’ll do anything to avoid this right now. You don’t know how low I’m sinking.” Or maybe he does know, and that’s the problem. In any case, whether it’s because someone told him about the deli or because my desk has been unoccupied for too many days, I intend to make it up with a dramatic offer: to read the slush pile again, the monstrous heap of unsolicited, occasionally brilliant but for the most part punishingly unreadable stories that arrive at the Paris Review each day by the duffel bag. That will impress him. Reading the slush is like getting lobotomized with a giant magnet. It’s something only interns can handle.
On my way I duck into a store, a deli, to get change to put in the meter.
“Can I help?” the owner says. It’s a closet deli, one of those stores that make you feel like you’ve accidentally fallen into a coffin. It’s a deli I’ve tended to avoid over the years while working a few blocks away, largely because of the cat hair (one hoped it was cat hair) that the store owner gave as a bonus with every purchase of fresh fruit or a pastry. There was also the owner’s off-putting demeanor, which could best be described as funereal.
“Just a minute,” I say. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, just getting a few quarters and biding my time before the confrontation with George, but the store is empty of customers (as usual) and to just walk out would be rude. The owner goes back to watching a black-and-white television the size of a toaster.
Just pick something and get out of here, I think.
“Here,” I exclaim, grabbing the item nearest to the register, a packet of harmless-looking energy pills.
“And a Red Bull,” I add. The owner retrieves one from a little refrigerator behind the counter.
Energy will be