Have we talked about how much I love stunt memoirs? Books like The Year of Biblical Womanhood and I Was (Blind) Dating but Now I See and even The Reading Promise, which, although it described some stunts, might not technically have qualified, since the writer didn't do them just for the purpose of getting material, will always leap off the shelves and into my hands. Near the end of Ben Ryder Howe's My Korean Deli, someone asks him, "You bought the deli so you could write a book, didn't you? Admit it." If so, I hope he got his money's worth-- it's a charming book and deserves a wide readership.
I don't live in New York, but I go there quite regularly. I have been in my share of corner stores, always with the same sense of trepidation I feel when walking into a small diner on a blue road in the midwest, a trepidation that is caused by not the worry but the certainty that "they" will know I don't belong and will a) shoot me dead on sight b) pretend I don't exist or c) charge me double what the regulars pay. Turns out it's not me, it's them: "At a deli you don't really try to sell people things," Howe confesses, "instead, you act as if you want to kill them, throw their s*(& in a bag, and glare at them until they leave the store."
Howe is a funny guy and excruciatingly self-aware, but his descriptive powers also gave me nightmares. Literal nightmares. Salim's deli "appears to be rapidly falling apart, as if a passing truck could make the whole thing crumble. There's even-- and now of course I know why the lease is so cheap-- a hole in the ceiling the size of a volleyball, as if an elephant's leg had come through, and that hole is currently dripping little bits of plaster. Other parts of the ceiling appear to have caved as well... but these have been covered with sheets of aluminum, then painted, and now support little stalactites of dust that wave back and forth in unison..." That's some scary stuff, there. Especially when you realize not for nothing are these joints called delis. They actually will make you a sandwich right there that you are supposed to put in your body. Lord, have mercy.
Howe's experience was a fascinating glimpse of life behind the counter in the city that never sleeps. Recommended!
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