My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [91]
“LEAVE!” I shout, grabbing the Thunder Rod from Dwayne. “GET OUT AND NEVER COME BACK, YOU CRAZY BASTARD!” I chase him out of the store and stand there on the sidewalk, trembling, until he’s disappeared.
When I come back, Dwayne is still seething, and for the rest of the night we don’t speak, pretending to ignore each other while I try to forget that image of him standing in the aisle with the Thunder Rod cocked toward my head.
DO WE HAVE to fire Dwayne? It’s a question we’ve been asking since the day we bought the store. Kay and Gab have their own objections to his conduct. Personally, here I am trying in various ways to upgrade the image of the store, and there he is (despite admonitions to behave otherwise) commenting graphically on the appearance of female customers, or yelling at people for calling the store a “bodega” (“This ain’t no Puerto Rican store, amigo. Go down to the projects to get your arroz con perro.”) or screaming at his daughters over the telephone, promising to practically toss them out the window when he comes home. There are the X-rated phone conversations with his numerous girlfriends (“We gonna do it tonight? ‘Cause I ain’t puttin my ass on the train to Far Rockaway if you ain’t puttin’ …”) broadcast to crowds of mortified customers as he casually spreads mayonnaise on a hero.
But we can’t fire him, for a very simple reason: the neighborhood would go nuts, which Dwayne understands as well as anyone. This is why sometimes I wonder if we own the store or the store owns us. After Salim left, the neighborhood saw Dwayne as the one and only legitimate thing about the store, not only because he had stood behind that cold-cut counter for seventeen years, but because he embraced the role of neighborhood advocate, whether it was on behalf of the kids coming out of jail, Alonzo the street plumber, Mr. Chow or the lottery customers. He’s beloved for being an old standby during a time of change, and also because of his own personal story of redemption, which apparently the entire neighborhood knows. Everyone is aware that Dwayne has struggled with addiction and violence, that he had two children at a young age by different women—none of which makes him so out of the ordinary here. What is exceptional is how hard he has fought to crush his demons and buck the stereotype of young urban deadbeat dads. Everyone knows that Dwayne waged a long and ultimately successful battle for full custody over his seventeen-year-old daughter Keisha, whom he’s been raising on his own now for seven years. The store was integral to that turnaround. It is his anchor, and from his pulpit behind the glazed honey ham he preaches the gospel of self-sufficiency, involved parenting and honest work.
As with all preachers, though, you can often see vanity coming into play; Dwayne needs that pulpit. Yet you can also see that he doesn’t rest on whatever laurels he earned as a thug. He doesn’t portray himself as someone who used to be hard. On the contrary, he takes pains (especially for the benefit of the male members of his audience) to establish that he is still whoever he used to be, maybe more so. Thus the cringe-inducing treatment of women, the frightening displays of rage and, well, the gun.
In a store as small as ours, you don’t really have the luxury of keeping someone at arm’s length. Can you share the space and share lives without becoming co-opted one way or the other? And what does Dwayne want from us anyway?
One night Dwayne asks if I can do him a favor: he wants me to drive him somewhere after work. Since Dwayne never asks for favors, not only do I say yes, I don’t even ask where he’s going. The question occurs to me only after we get in the car and start driving.
“Bed-Stuy,” he mumbles, pointing vaguely toward the heart of Brooklyn.
Bedford-Stuyvesant: one of the biggest, poorest and scariest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Kay would not be pleased. We have a rule about coming straight home with the proceeds of a shift,