My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [93]
“TURN! TURN, I SAID!” he suddenly shouts, as if he’s just woken up.
It’s an awkward spot for a turn. Dwayne wants me to make a left, which would require cutting through three lanes of opposing traffic. What’s more, since we’re going fifty miles per hour, there’s no time to slow down—we’ll just have to go up to the next intersection and make a U-turn.
But Dwayne won’t wait—he reaches across and grabs the steering wheel, guiding us right into the oncoming headlights.
BA-BRUMP!
The car makes a horrible metallic scrape as it rides up over the sidewalk. Whatever Dwayne was heading for, we missed it, and probably flattened one of our tires as a result. But we missed the cars heading toward us and somehow ended up in a parking lot. The question is where.
“Dwayne?”
Dwayne is laughing. “Who taught you to drive like that?”
“Dwayne, where are we?”
Dwayne, however, has already gotten out of the car and started walking away, leaving me to either follow him or hang out alone in a dark parking lot with two thousand dollars in a damp paper bag. I look around. We seem to be sitting directly beneath some kind of pulsing neon light, almost as if we’d arrived at a midnight carnival in the heart of Brooklyn.
Then I get it. He won. By kidnapping me, he’d finally gotten me to go on one of his trips.
“White Castle?!” I yell. “You dragged me all the way out here so you can get some food?”
But Dwayne’s already inside making an order. For both of us.
I LOVE YOU, TOMORROW
THE FIRST TIME I WALKED BEHIND THE CHECKOUT COUNTER I felt a little buzz of excitement, and nine months later it has yet to wear off. Who’d have thought that being a checkout clerk would have such addictive properties? Maybe it’s the Puritan upbringing and the absence since twelfth grade of any real psychotropic agents, other than the occasional Men’s 4-Pac, that makes me susceptible. But that buzz is real, and for that reason most of the mistakes I make occur during shift changes.
Buzz. I just started the evening shift, and Kay and Gab are telling me at the same time what to do and what not to do when vendors stop by to collect bills tonight. Meanwhile, the lottery machine is chattering away and a dozen or so customers are milling about the store, having their own conversations, listening to ours or, in one case, sighing loudly in protest when a customer pays for her groceries with a stocking full of pennies. I can feel my brain being pulled in eight directions at once, its awareness reaching out like octopus tentacles to snatch bits of information from all corners of the store. Some organizational genius, some supreme cognitive database, is taking in all that information, processing it and making appropriate choices about how to respond, and I almost don’t feel like it’s me. After all, if I tried to do eight things at once, I couldn’t. But somehow, since I’m not trying to, I am. I’m in the fabled “zone,” a state of equipoise wherein I become my environment and my environment becomes me: I am a convenience store. I’m even dimly aware that outside the deli, where it’s getting dark, a group of men and women have been loitering on the corner as if waiting for something to happen.
“Did you get all that?” asks Gab, standing there looking doubtful with her hands planted on her hips. “I said there are three envelopes inside the safe, one for the garbage people, one for the bagel man, one for …” I nod at her and smile: Gab knows that I’m just as fast as her at the register now, and no more likely to screw up. If she tells me something, I usually remember to do it. This almost seems to irk her—she’s competitive, after all—and so now she’s trying to throw me off by hitting me with an extra data stream.