For the first time in his life, Joey the Deli Man is starting to dream big dreams. They may not seem big to some people, but for Joey they’re huge.

A high school dropout who’s worked in the same Brooklyn store for nearly 20 years, the Deli Man, also known as Joey Mancuso, is ready to trade in his old life for a new one.

Now 35, he’s reading voraciously for the first time and is taking his General Equivalency Diploma test this week – after nine hours a week of pre-GED and GED classes for nine months. Then he plans to take a test for a city job, with either sanitation or the Transit Authority.

“I don’t want to work in the deli no more,” Mr. Mancuso says, his voice full of the streets of what used to be called South Brooklyn.” I want more out of life.”

Mr. Mancuso’s story is not just of someone striving for a better life. It’s also a story of missed opportunities – some his fault and some not – and it’s an indictment of a public school system that pushed kids along even though they cut classes and or did poorly.

“I hardly went to a math class in eighth grade and they passed me. Seventh grade, too,” says Mr. Mancuso, short and muscular and dressed in a white T-shirt to show off his biceps. A blue baseball cap covers his close-cropped hair; a silver-and-gold earring is perched on his left ear lobe, and his hands constantly reaching for a cigarette.

Mr. Mancuso grew up on Van Brunt Street in Red Hook and went to school in what’s now called Carroll Gardens. “I went to fifty-eights and one-forty-two’s,” he says, using the plural form of the school names, P.S. 58 and the old I.S. 142, as do all the old-timers. “By the time I got to junior high, I wasn’t going to school much.”

His father left when he was 5, so it was just he, his 7-year-old sister, and their mother. As he approached his teens, he fell in with “the wrong crowd” and began skipping school to hang out in the park or along the pre-yuppified Smith Street – before the trendy restaurants and boutiques replaced the junkies, hookers, and social clubs.

“If I showed up, I showed up,” he says. “If I didn’t, I didn’t.” He says he did fairly well in class when he bothered to go – reading at a basic level, but not with a lot of comprehension. The schools just kept promoting him.

“I didn’t really have anybody to push me along to do better,” he says. What about his teachers, the principal, or truant officers, he was asked. “They didn’t seem to care,” he says.

Still, he got through 10th grade at John Jay High School, showing up occasionally and starting to work in the deli in the afternoons or after school. Then, at 17, his mother died. “There was just me and my sister,” who had recently graduated high school, he says. “I had to work full-time, so I dropped out of school.”

That began a life of stocking shelves, cleaning up, and doing pretty much everything else in the deli six days a week, 10 hours a day. Most of his friends also dropped out, drifting into low-paying jobs or, in one case, jail.

“I figured this was my life; the deli,” he says. He married at 21 and had two sons. He and wife split up a couple of years ago and she took the family upstate, a five-hour drive from Brooklyn. He sees the boys,10 and 8,whenever he can make the trip. Every time he sees them these days, he tells them, “Don’t be like daddy. Go to school. Stay in school. Enjoy it.”

Soon after the breakup, he began to dream. “I realized I just couldn’t deal with this life anymore,” he says. He decided he wanted more out of life; maybe a city job. To do that, he needed his high school diploma, so in February he enrolled in GED classes in Sunset Park. He needed work in reading comprehension and was encouraged to read something meatier than newspapers and magazines.

“I had never read a novel in my life,” he says. “Never opened a book after I quit school.” The first thing he read was a thriller called “And Then You Die.” It ran more than 300 pages and took him nearly a month to read, but he was hooked. “I loved it,” he says. Other thrillers quickly followed, including James Patterson’s “The Four Blind Mice,” a suspense novel so full of twists and turns it’s almost impossible for even a sophisticated reader to keep up.

“I’ve read 14 novels since February,” he says proudly. “It’s a way to get myself ready to take the GED and get out of the deli. I’m hungry and I’m determined. I want a job with a future and with benefits. I’m not going to stop until I get there.”