My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [88]
I start walking toward the subway, but the trains aren’t running, so I walk across the Queensboro Bridge with a few thousand other jittery (literally—the bridge is wobbling) souls. Once I’ve escaped Manhattan I feel better, but now it’s almost five o’clock and the light is starting to fade. Never has the long summer sunset felt so ominous, like that point in a horror movie when you know that the eyeball-less monsters with blood dripping from their mouths are about to emerge from their lairs. And I have yet to see a single police officer.
In Brooklyn, I come across a pack of anxious, sweaty commuters standing on a corner listening to a battery-powered radio. “It’s a blackout,” someone says, “not a bomb. The mayor just said so.” The crowd issues a collective sigh of relief, but are we really supposed to feel better? Apparently the whole eastern seaboard is without electricity. Nearly one-fourth of the entire country! It’s the biggest blackout in history! Now I’m really starting to worry—how many days can the store’s steel shutters hold up in case people try to break in? Would it be wiser to move all the merchandise to Kay’s house? Does somebody need to stay behind and stand guard? I have images of myself barricaded inside the darkened store, holding off a siege with … stale sandwich rolls? the deli slicer? I wouldn’t even be able to defend myself with hot coffee, since the coffeemaker won’t work. Then again, maybe the store will smell so bad after a few days that the mobs won’t even want to come in.
That’s not likely. As any petty thief worth his salt would know, a convenience store would contain thousands of dollars in phone cards, scratch-off lottery tickets and tobacco. Moreover, after a few hours looters wouldn’t come just for the high-value goods—they’d do it for the thrill, or the beer, and then after the food runs out and New York begins to starve, they’d come for the cat food, which in our dawning Mad Max–style future will be just as valuable as gold.
The more I worry, the more I want to get to the store, but it’s getting harder to keep going in the direction I keep telling my legs to move in—namely, forward—because thanks to the peculiar bend of my journey, from the Upper East Side through Queens and then back toward downtown Brooklyn, I’m now going against the crowd of commuters exiting Manhattan, which is sort of like trying to reenter Yankee Stadium just after the last pitch of the ninth inning. And this isn’t even the thickest or sweatiest part of the horde; it’s the minority that was undaunted by the prospect of walking eight or ten miles in record heat and started as soon as the blackout began, rather than waiting to see if the power came back on. Any second now I’m going to get trampled by a much larger wave of workers exiting the Financial District. And how many would there be? Half a million? A million? In this heat, a million people constitutes a veritable Bataan Death March. There would be people coming over the Brooklyn Bridge who got winded climbing a single flight of stairs, people in suits and high heels, people freaked out if not for themselves then for the family members they’ve been unable to contact, as the city’s cell phone network is currently overloaded. What good is a cell phone if it doesn’t work in an emergency? they’d be wondering, and Why did the city have to get rid of all its pay phones? Next they’d be cursing the city for removing its park benches: Where exactly is a tired person supposed to sit? And what happened to the drinking fountains? And where are all the police officers? And how come downtown Brooklyn doesn’t have street vendors anymore, somewhere to at least buy a soda? They’d be getting angrier, more frustrated and more desperate as they trekked down Boerum Place, a forbidding and seemingly endless street of unapproachable courthouses connecting the Brooklyn Bridge to Atlantic Avenue, and then as they turned east on Atlantic they’d be thinking, Finally! A normal street with stores! But then they’d have to walk two more blocks, past the jail and the parking