Jimmy's Store
TUCKER, WILLIAM
Jimmy’s Store by William Tucker Brooklyn THERE’S A LITTLE NEWSPAPER STORE in my neighborhood my family and I have grown very fond of. It’s the kind of place that brings memories of your own...
...The landlord wanted Jim to buy the building...
...This is the trade school, used to film The Blackboard Jungle in the 1950s, which now attracts 3,000 minority kids from all over the city...
...The NIOSH report identified “exchange of money with the public, working alone or in small numbers, working late at night or early morning hours, [and] working in community settings” as risk factors to be minimized...
...Only last May, the Indian newsdealer three blocks away was shot when he hesitated in handing over the day’s receipts to an armed robber...
...Still, nothing excites them as much as a trip to the place they call “Jimmy’s store...
...Then there’s the matter of his building...
...My wife doesn’t know how, nobody knows how...
...And one morning I walked into the Palestinian grocery and found them all sobbing over a brother who had just been killed behind the counter at his own store a few dozen blocks away...
...He hurt his back and couldn’t get out of bed for six weeks...
...He couldn’t speak for a few minutes but finally told me he had been robbed at gunpoint only seconds earlier...
...In other words, every shop owner is a sitting duck...
...The landlord finally told Jim if he didn’t buy it he’d be out on the street...
...One pays $92 a month and has him in court all the time, the other pays $196 a month and sublets his extra bedrooms to homeless people for $50 a week...
...Altogether, Jim and his wife put in fifteen hours a day, 365 days a year, which nets them less than $45,000 per annum...
...Sometimes a little publication will fold, leaving him with the bill...
...I walked in one afternoon and found him pale as a ghost...
...With a subway stop next door, they’re open from 6 a.m...
...He works so hard,” they say...
...He deserves everything good he gets...
...Last fall she performed a concerto with the LaGuardia orchestra...
...Police cars seem to arrive at the school every other day...
...Now that our kids are growing up, they are beginning to appreciate Jim as more than just a generous candy-store owner...
...I rarely have satisfactory answers...
...Last year the elder daughter was first violinist at LaGuardia High School, near Lincoln Center...
...he said...
...Running a candy store in Brooklyn is a daunting task...
...Altogether, Jim and his wife put in fifteen hours a day, 365 days a year, which nets them less than $45,000 per annum...
...No way to make money,” he says...
...It’s happened a few times...
...Still, I hardly ever leave without thinking the next time we visit I could be stuffing flowers into his already rusting security gate...
...Jim brushed us off but his wife seemed interested...
...he once asked me confidentially...
...The paper that gives him the most difficulty is the moralizing New York Times...
...But nothing is easy in New York...
...Jim must pre-pay for hundreds of unwanted publications, then spend hours clipping the mastheads for return credit...
...There are constant hassles...
...he asked...
...Jim finally got a lockbox for the papers but it was broken into as well...
...Jim is my age...
...You think I should buy...
...Like many immigrant wives, she’s a little more at home with English...
...Over a decade we’ve exchanged enough tales about politics, schools, and homework assignments that we’ve become friends...
...Its distributor has a monopoly and until recently owed him five months’ back refunds...
...Within five blocks of my house, two small-business owners have been murdered in the last five years...
...he still asks...
...The next day, along with several dozen other people, I stuffed fresh flowers into his shuttered security gate...
...A few years earlier another young Indian storekeeper was killed in a street robbery...
...Still, these are the good kids, I tell my neighbors, since the bad ones aren’t even going to school at this age...
...Easiest thing to do is be here when the trucks arrive,” he says...
...But for now his wife has prevailed...
...The most common confrontation in my polyglot neighborhood is between the immigrant storeowners and the young black males who are constantly harassing and robbing them...
...He gives our kids so much candy I sometimes hesitate to take them in there...
...Once a singer herself, she has classical music playing whenever she’s behind the counter...
...Frankly, I’m hoping some of his immigrant’s determination will rub off on them...
...The truth is they are forced to buy them by the distributors...
...One of the favorite pastimes of petty thieves in New York is stealing bundles of papers and selling them on the street...
...They didn’t go anywhere on Labor Day...
...Nobody can do this but me...
...How come the New York Times never says anything good about President Reagan...
...A year ago I tried to persuade them to allow me and my wife to run the store for a week while they went on vacation...
...Like many immigrants, he is quietly appalled at America’s social chaos and amazed that the elites seem to take little or no notice...
...The truck drivers care little and refuse to take precautions...
...On an ordinary day, Jim arrives at 5:30 a.m...
...His wife is a bit different...
...His neighborhood is less upscale and much meaner...
...You may wonder why every newspaper dealer carries copies of the Irish Times, the Polish Times, New York Echo, and hundreds of other publications that never seem to move off the shelves...
...With two rent-controlled tenants upstairs he could no longer carry the expenses...
...Both daughters have gone to music camps since childhood, although Jim has always been skeptical...
...Jim’s wife sat in the front row but he didn’t arrive until the concert was half over...
...Jim slept on the floor the rest of the night to ward off looters...
...Retail clerks of all stripes rank behind only cab drivers and police officers as likely victims...
...Now he’s carrying a mortgage plus two rent-controlled tenants...
...The owner is a Korean immigrant named Jim...
...Other news dealers have confirmed to me that the Times is by far the worst paper for gypping its vendors...
...They lounge on everyone’s front stoop, smoking pot and getting a good start on teen pregnancy...
...How come they catch criminals and let them go again...
...I have to be here every day...
...Just a few weeks ago an Israeli shoemaker was hit over the head with a two-by-four by a group of young hoods walking home from John Jay High School...
...Knowing what I do about New York rent control, I told him in no uncertain terms not to take it...
...If I don’t keep track of these returns I lose two thousand dollars in one weekend...
...Jimmy’s store is twelve blocks away, and he doesn’t get the John Jay traffic...
...William Tucker writes frequently from New York for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Somebody had to watch the store...
...And so we go back every chance we get, to stock up on water pistols, baseball cards, and copies of Mad magazine...
...and cleaned out his weekend receipts...
...Study math and science, at least you can be an accountant...
...We finally whittled it down to Labor Day weekend, and with a few days to go I was still pushing...
...from his apartment around the corner to guard his newspapers...
...You see this...
...The worst was when thieves armed with freon gas broke through his security gate at 1 a.m...
...While more casual about the store, she has apparently channeled her drive into their daughters’ education...
...Then one afternoon Jim threw down his books in front of me...
...She’s the one person at LaGuardia you know is headed for something big,” another LaGuardia student told me...
...The family couldn’t afford a funeral and the place still hasn’t reopened...
...Jim rented for fourteen years, but when his lease expired three years ago the landlord said he was packing it in...
...In fact, one main theme of Jim’s business is an ongoing war with his suppliers...
...According to a July report from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, murder is now the principal cause of death on the job for women and third among men, behind auto and machinery accidents...
...It’s the kind of place that brings memories of your own youth—filled from floor to ceiling with comic books, miniature cars, whiffle balls, all the impossibly desirable amulets of childhood...
...I’ve got copies going back to 1995,” he says...
...to 9 p.m., although they do close in the afternoon Sundays and holidays...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 2
