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By Root 1207 0

of making me feel like we were also capable of influencing bigger things, like our fate as a family or my marriage. However, it was even worse than I feared—in addition to all the things about a streetside business that are fundamentally chaotic, there was Dwayne, and there was the built-in instability of our neighborhood, and there was all the arguing at home, which made decision making of any kind all but impossible. Gradually, I began to surrender some of my own ability to control—a decision here and a decision there. Nothing since then has happened that I can directly attribute to my new, Zen frame of mind, and yet I’m almost sure that it has helped. For one thing, the inventory (which is essentially the store itself) has attained a kind of equilibrium: we’re no longer the junk food bazaar we were when we took over, but we never got more than halfway to being the gourmet market I wanted to be, either. The store is a mutant, a hybrid. It isn’t coherent in the slightest—the first time people come in, they often get that “Huh?” look on their faces as they struggle to process the mixed signals sent by a lottery machine and tofu jerky, or by Olde English malt liquor and Belgian Trappist beer. But I learned to accept this and so did most of the customers, maybe because our lives weren’t coherent. New York wasn’t coherent. Why force it to be?

The reward has been that after being a spaz my whole life—I’m a socially nervous person and always will be—I have an almost greater comfort with strangers than I do with people I know well. Standing there all day not knowing who’s going to come in next or what they’re going to say, you have almost no choice except to become a bit more easygoing, and to trust more. It’s a good thing. Everyone should work at a checkout counter for some part of their lives.

PROBLEM EMPLOYEE

AFTER SIX MONTHS OF WORKING WITH DWAYNE, I STILL CAN’T decide if he’s the store’s biggest asset or worst liability. On the positive side, you have an employee who shows up for work on time six days a week and frequently comes in on his off day as well. You have an employee who when he’s at work rarely stops working, whether he’s washing refrigerator doors or assembling Sunday newspapers. You have an employee who’s essentially a foolproof government sting detector, a discouragement to would-be troublemakers and the convenience store equivalent of Daniel Boulud or some celebrity chef, all rolled up into one.

On the other hand, you have an employee who is a constant headache, whether he’s openly disobeying instructions, second-guessing his bosses in front of customers, barking at the customers themselves or merely dropping jaws with outrageous behavior and lewd commentary. You have an employee whose friends and family come into the store and do everything possible to distract him. You have an employee who’s almost as much of a magnet for trouble as he is a deterrent.

And you have the gun.

I have long worried, without telling anyone, that Dwayne brings a gun to work. One day, early on, Dwayne was carrying on with his usual stories of wildings and carjackings (he had just finished telling me about the time he stabbed a man in the cheek with a fork) when he asked me:

“So what do you carry?”

“Carry?”

“To protect yourself.”

I was taken off guard (not to mention still getting over that image of the fork in the face). We had been in the store only a week or so, and self-protection was—somewhat bizarrely, in retrospect—way down my list of priorities. I had bigger things to worry about at the time, like remembering the price of Coors Light tallboys and finding the stamina to stay awake. But I didn’t want Dwayne to think that I was so naïve as to have not given the issue thought. So I muttered something I hoped would be indecipherable, somewhere between “I forget” and “a salad fork,” which Dwayne rightly interpreted as “nothing.”

He was apoplectic, of course. The way he made it sound, brownstone Brooklyn was still an urban combat zone, despite the peaceful changes gentrification had wrought. The store would be robbed