My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe

us?” George will then cry. “Who will perform the readings? Who will provide the publicity? Who will find us a venue?”
    “Yankee Stadium!” someone on the staff will shout. “Someone call Steinbrenner.”
    “No, we’ll have a party inside the Brooklyn Bridge!”
    “No, we’ll do it at LaGuardia, and have readings on the tarmac and shoot fireworks at the planes!”
    “Call the Port Authority!”
    “Call Norman Mailer!”
    “Call Swifty Lazar!”
    “No, call Bobby Zarem! Swifty’s dead!”
    George loves this. No matter how incoherent it is, seeing the staff brainstorming makes him feel like we’re getting things done
and
having fun at the same time. So thoroughly unproductive are most
Paris Review
meetings, so exhaustingly frivolous, that people tend to wander back to their desks afterward in a daze of guilt and have deeply
productive
afternoons—unless, of course,they’ve had too many of George’s beers, in which case they pass out in one of the slush-reading chairs.
    Today’s meeting is different, however. As I’m waiting for it to start, someone asks me if I’ve noticed how changed George seems since his accident. “Accident?” I say. It turns out that the other night George fell at one of his private clubs and smashed his head. He spent the night in the hospital, and since then he’s been, well, with head injuries it’s hard to tell. He’s up and about, but definitely not himself.
    When he walks into the meeting, he seems considerably frailer than the last time I saw him.
    “As you may or may not have heard,” he begins by saying, while staring at the floor with uncharacteristic vagueness, “I’ve had a bit of a mishap. That blasted floor at the Colony Club is harder than it looks. I mean the Century Club—or was it the Brook? Anyway, that floor was marble, pure marble, I can tell you, and now I’m a bit of a mess, as you may or may not be able to tell.”
    George is too modest to realize that right now he looks like a man who got yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, thrown in a van and dropped by the side of the road out in the country, but we won’t point it out for him.
    “Are you feeling any better?” one of the editors asks.
    Rotating his eyes but not his head (too painful, apparently), he says to her, “I can’t read or write. I can barely talk on the phone. I can’t even make sense of what I’m watching on TV. All I want to do is sleep and drink ginger ale.” He holds up one of those little green bottles of Schweppes.
    The staff looks stricken, and George obviously notices. None of us have ever seen him in such awful condition.
    “I’m sorry for being like this. It’s damn embarrassing.” At that point I wonder if the meeting will end right there. But Georgeroused himself from bed for a reason—he wants to say something—and seems to find a reserve of strength.
    “Listen all,” he says, perking up. “Being like this has gotten me to do a bit of thinking I wanted to share with you.”
    The living room is silent.
    “I will recover from this mishap,” he continues, “eventually. But who knows what could happen after that? I could have a stroke while playing tennis, or I could be run over by a bus while crossing York Avenue. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
    The staff nods. We’ve heard this speech before. After the bus-on–York Avenue scenario—in case that wasn’t vivid enough—he’d come up with a half-dozen more. (“I could be crushed by a falling bridge. I could fall into the polar bear den at the Central Park Zoo. I could be mortally wounded in a freak trampoline accident.”) Talking this way revealed that even George worried about death and, in particular, the future, which is only natural in a seventy-five-year-old. It wasn’t quite as morbid as it sounds, however: part of him, the bon vivant, the seeker of fun, clearly looked forward to adding death to his repertoire of experiences and the stories he would be able to tell about it