My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [97]
Instead, though, we decide to stop selling cigarettes altogether, voluntarily surrendering a hundred dollars a day in earnings, or about one-third of our daily profits. Maybe it’s the small business person’s pigheadedness that motivates this decision, the feeling that “I’d rather put myself out of business than let someone else do it.” Or maybe it’s forward thinking. After all, if we get caught again, which seems inevitable, given the tenacity with which the city is stalking us and its penchant for ruthlessness, we’ll eventually lose the tobacco license anyway and have to make the same adjustment. This way we’ll at least get to keep the lottery machine! (What a statement—being desperate to hold on to a device that drives everyone crazy and earns only three dollars an hour.)
Either way, suddenly everything is jeopardized. The summer is over. For the last few months, I realize, I’ve been looking forward to each day rather than counting off the hours. Every morning, the first thing I did was check the logbook in the kitchen where the profits from the previous day are written down. Tomorrow was our friend—not that the numbers were so stupendous; it wasn’t like watching a portfolio of Google stock. It was just a sense that we as a family were doing our jobs and making good choices, and the future would turn out okay—all backed up by the apparent reality of numbers. Now it’s over. We’re headed back into survival mode, and I’m the reason we’re there.
A RARE CAT
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE FALL GEORGE STORMS INTO THE office, directly after returning from a month-long vacation in the Hamptons, and with his suitcases still in the hallway and sand still stuck to his shoes, he summons the staff for an emergency meeting right there next to the luggage—no cocktails, no sandwiches, no merry round of storytelling to get things started.
“I’ve just finished reading the material you all gave me to consider for the next issue,” he says, waving a pile of manuscripts, “and it is dreadful. In fact, it’s the worst pile of submissions I have ever seen.” Then he looks directly at me. “Ben, would you care to defend this?” He starts reading from one of the stories I gave him, a very solid piece from a reputable literary agent. The young female author had written a sort of McEwanesque horror story about a young woman being absorbed—consumed, really—by pregnancy and marriage into a libidinous and depraved upper-class family. George, reading it in the most lugubrious voice imaginable, gives it the sort of treatment no story could survive.
“You call that writing?” he sneers after a few paragraphs. “Tell me why. I want to know.”
I falter, unable to respond, in part because I know that despite what he says, George does not really want to know. He’s not interested in a debate. He wants to make a point, and he knows that if he fights dirty, none of us will do so back.
He continues reading, making more and more of a mockery of my selection.
“How could you call yourself an editor and fall for that?” he taunts. “Really, it’s shameful.”
Then, seemingly becoming aware of how vicious he’s being, he steps back. “I don’t mean to put you on the spot this way, but I just have this feeling that … things are not right here. We’ve gone astray, and we have to get back on track. Everything is on the line! We must do something. I want to shock you all into action.”
Then he goes upstairs, and the staff confers.
What to do? To some of us, this isn’t about the magazine per se or even just the fiction; it’s about George showing us who’s boss after being away for a while. Or it’s his way of coping with the distress that his memoir is causing him, a display of bravado intended for himself as much as anyone. He just needed an audience.
That night I stay up late writing a defense of the story George rejected, a passionate