The Bialy Pimps (13 page)

The real insult was that the company had sided with Bingham’s. The company had, in fact, fired him based on no more than Philip’s phone call.
 

Really? After all the work he’d put in?

After all the early mornings and late nights, out pounding the pavement for those damn hippies? After his best-in-territory sales awards? After his nearly total and complete record of customer satisfaction? It was a fine how-do-you-do.

They had fired him, supposedly, because the customer relationship was sacred. Because the customer was always right.

Ha!

It was ironic that the customer Green Leaf had fired him over didn’t seem to believe that at all. Bingham’s was a den of disrespect. A group who treated their customers like hell, and who believed that
they
were always right.
 

If Dicky owned a restaurant, he’d do things differently. He’d treat his customers with respect.

And that made a twisted kind of sense, the notion of Dicky opening a restaurant. So, unemployed, a brand new venture seemed to make as much sense as anything else. Rather than getting another sales job, he’d open a restaurant – and not just any restaurant, but a bagel deli. Why not? He had some capital saved up and had good enough credit to get a loan. He already knew the lay of the land. He already knew the suppliers, and by stunning example, he knew exactly what
not
to do.

What Bingham’s did wrong, he’d do right. He’d treat his customers like family. He’d advertise and seed word of mouth and would offer specials designed to lure them in early. He could even budget for it, and plan to lose thousands of dollars during the first months so that he could hook people and get them used to his restaurant over Bingham’s. He’d offer free food. Free drinks. Free kids’ meals. Free coupons. He’d offer bonuses if customers brought him the “B” restaurants page out of the phone book. That idea was especially tricky. When customers brought him the “B” page, they’d essentially be removing Bingham’s from the book for him.
 

So Big Bagel Bills was formed. And Bingham’s decline thus became only a matter of time.
 

Unfortunately, starting a restaurant didn’t go as well as Dicky had planned. For one, the building he rented used to be a dry cleaner, so people kept bringing in clothes. When the first few people came in with bags of shirts and pants, he simply told them that the dry cleaner was gone. As time wore on, he became less patient and tended to snap at them. Hadn’t they figured it out yet? Sometimes, he wouldn’t catch a dry cleaning customer in time, and they’d leave their laundry at the front, on his counter, with a note. So he’d call them and tell them to come back and get their clothes, and instead of thanking him, they’d usually get angry. They’d be annoyed that the dry cleaner was gone. They’d be annoyed that Dicky and 3B had moved in. They’d be annoyed that they’d lost time. They’d be irritated that their shirts weren’t done and that they now had to find a new cleaner. And Dicky would say, when they’d come in, “Hey, want a free bagel?” And more often than not they’d be too annoyed to take him up on it, and when they did, they did so grudgingly, as if they were doing Dicky a favor, and they never returned.
 

The other problem was employees. After spending time at Bingham’s, he knew exactly the type of people he didn’t want to hire. He didn’t want lazy, do-nothing, unmotivated, crass, disrespectful people working in his deli. So, with these standards in place, he opened the door to applicants and found nothing but lazy, do-nothing, unmotivated, crass, disrespectful people. There seemed to be nothing else. Apparently this was what college bred today – at least when hiring at five dollars an hour.
 

So he settled. To be cautious at the startup, he only hired two employees. They weren’t any better than those at Bingham’s, but Bingham’s didn’t have Dicky to oversee the operation.

The two kids he hired weren’t in college (and hence could treat the job like a nine-to-five), so Dicky give them a full load and staggered their shifts so that just the two of them could cover the entire day. Paul, who was fat, annoying, and deluded about his prowess with women, worked from 6am until 2pm. Plato, whose real name was Michael but who refused to be called “Michael” because it was a base name that didn’t do justice to the superior philosophical intellect he seemed to think he had, worked from noon until 3B closed at eight. Dicky, who had turned a small back room with a locking door into his apartment (really just a bed, a TV, a computer, and some random furniture), worked the entire day. On Saturdays, Paul worked from noon to three and Dicky covered the rest by himself. On Sundays, the same deal went with Plato.
 

The arrangement made sense because it skirted overtime (Paul and Plato were required to clock out for an hour lunch during slow times on weekdays) and because his presence in the deli for almost 100 hours per week meant that laziness and disrespect from his employees could be kept to a minimum. Plus, it ensured that there were three workers on during the busiest times, which would be enough until the crowds became overwhelming.

The arrangement did not make sense for only one conflicting reason, and it was that nobody ever came in to eat.

In retrospect (retrospect meaning “too late to get out of the lease”) the building was probably to blame. It was a block off of the main stretch on High, but this shouldn’t have been a death blow because it was visible from High. What was more problematic about the building was that it placed 3B mostly below the street, in a sort of split-level layout. There was a coffee shop called Java Jive above Dicky’s restaurant, and Java Jive was big and loud. It was so big and loud, in fact, that its presence spilled out onto the street in an untidy sprawl of sidewalk tables and chairs that were occupied in all seasons, despite the chilliest and blusteriest of Ohio winters. From this sprawl, customers climbed a giant central staircase of eight steps to enter Java Jive. To get to 3B, they had to know about the two smaller side staircases that went down eight steps, and the one on the right was mostly obscured by Java Jive’s handicap ramp.
 

To compensate for his lack of visibility, Dicky had a gigantic sign constructed that said “3B” in flashing orange lights, and had it installed near the sidewalk.

Immediately, the eye-catching sign worked wonders. Business at Java Jive nearly doubled. Customers sometimes asked why the sign said “3B” instead of “2J,” but the Java Jive employees never seemed to know. “It’s a marketing thing,” they usually said.
 

Dicky, who had no experience with marketing and who hadn’t thought to add a few words of explanation to his sign (“downstairs” or even “fresh bagel sandwiches”), couldn’t figure out why nothing was working. And nobody came in who could explain it to him, except for his dry cleaning customers.

“Can I have heavy starch on these shirts?” such a customer might say.

Honestly, 3B’s location problem didn’t seem to Dicky to be a huge deal even before he bought the sign. Sure, Java Jive dominated the entrance, but that was simply an annoyance – another example of a business run by inconsiderate, disrespectful assholes. 3B’s service was orders of magnitude better than anywhere else on campus – unfathomably better than Bingham’s in particular. Their food was better, too. Their atmosphere was better. They had advertising in the local rag papers. It should have been a slaughter, and death to Bingham’s – obvious visibility or not.

But it wasn’t a slaughter. It wasn’t even close. 3B was circling the drain, and Bingham’s continued to thrive. Why?
 

Maybe people like being abused,
he thought.

No, that couldn’t be it.

Or maybe they’re just incredibly, incredibly stupid.

And oddly, as inconceivable as it was, some combination of the two just might be true. The public didn’t want quality. They wanted bad treatment. They wanted disrespect. They wanted mediocrity. And (or?) they didn’t know any better. They’d stick their faces into a running fan, and say thank you. Tell a person there’s a fly on their nose and give them a flyswatter, and they’d hit themselves in the face every time.
 

Was that it? It seemed so bleak and so nihilistic, so pessimistic about humankind and whatever future it might have. But based on his experience in life so far, it just might be true. He was always smart, and just about everyone else he ran across was unfailingly stupid.
 

Stupid masochists. They were choosing Bingham’s over 3B over and over and over, with no end in sight. He hated that it made sense. He hated that it might have been his own underestimation of mankind’s stupidity that was doing him in.

It had been four months, and 3B was out tens of thousands of dollars – much of it right out of Dicky’s pockets. The loan payments and labor costs and utility bills were becoming harder and harder to handle. Dicky had known it would be a rough start, but he’d known (known!) that it would pick up, and then he’d start
at least
breaking even. He hadn’t anticipated this total and complete absence of customers. He hadn’t anticipated this kind of bleeding.

Idiots. The world was full of idiots.
 

And then he thought of how it was in high school, with those idiots. With his plans and schemes and with the vague fear everyone seemed to feel around him.

Drastic action might just be required. Maybe a bit of sabotage.

That would be cheating, sure, but it was just righting a wrong. It was leveling the playing field, allowing the two rivals to compete on even ground. He’d hoped to compete on the basis of the free market, but the public apparently didn’t know what was good for it. Give people a choice between crap and goodness, and they chose crap if it was more conveniently located. Just look at McDonald’s. There McDonald’s was, on every street corner. Disaster food, and not even good food. But it was right there, and so it prospered.
 

Forget marketing, positioning, service, food, and environment. The problem, Dicky realized, was simply that Bingham’s
existed
.
 

And then he thought, just for fun, just to indulge in fantasy a bit:
What if it didn’t exist?

If Bingham’s went out of business, the dislocated customers would need to find a new place go to. And what was a cleaner, fancier, nicer, more friendly Bingham’s? Why, that would be 3B. Dicky even steamed his bagels, just like Bingham’s did.

If – and this was purely hypothetical, of course –
if
Bingham’s went out of business, it only made sense that their customer base would head the few blocks down to the only other bagel deli on campus. He could probably even put a sign right on the front of Bingham’s soaped-over windows to make sure they knew where to go, and what the replacement deli offered. And if – just if – that happened, Dicky would easily recoup his labor and loan and utility costs. It would only be a matter of time before he began to come out on top, actually making a profit.
 

If only Bingham’s wasn’t there. Its presence was a public distraction that he would never be able to overcome, because people were lazy and incredibly stupid masochists.

Too bad the place existed.

For now, anyway.

On the other hand, Tom “Bricker” Brickhouse was glad that Bingham’s existed. He’d been coming in for months now, and things just kept getting better.

Bricker, according to Philip, was at least eight feet tall and weighed five hundred pounds of pure muscle. In reality this was probably an exaggeration. Bricker played football for Ohio State. He had, in all likelihood, had no choice in the matter. When he was born, he probably weighed thirty pounds and had to be cut from his decimated mother and excavated using a crane. When the doctor put him in the bedside bassinette in the delivery room, Bricker had probably flattened it, at which point scouts from various colleges likely pushed their way through the door, slapped helmets and pads on the gigantic child, and carted him off to training camp.
 

The first time the Bingham’s crew had seen Bricker, he’d come in with a motley assortment of other gigantic football players. The group of five men had been so massive, in fact, that Philip had expressed serious doubts that the ghetto floor in front of the ghetto register would be able to hold their massiveness and keep them from plunging into the ghetto basement, where their lower halves would be investigated by rats while their upper halves would no doubt continue ordering food, the tops of their heads now even with the heads of the rest of the customers.
 

Philip had called this group “The Meathead Pageant.”
 

The Pageant hadn’t returned, but Bricker had. Philip, never willing to abandon a prejudice before its time, remembered Bricker when he returned and continued to mock him privately. Once, attempting to give exact change, Bricker had paid $3.75 for his sandwich instead of $3.85. This naturally proved that jocks were stupid.
 

Bricker began to win Philip over once he started talking about how funny it was when people hurt themselves.
 

“That kid,” Bricker told Darcy, Beckie, and Philip one time, gesturing to a departing Captain Dipshit, “I saw him flatten some old lady down the street the other day. He speared her in the gut with his head.”

Darcy, who had recently had her hair dyed jet black and cut into a bob with dramatic Bettie Page bangs, giggled ferociously. “What, on purpose?”

Bricker had sat down in Army Ted’s usual chair opposite the counter and, Philip felt sure, was making it scream in pain. He took a bite of his bagel and half of it disappeared. “No, he didn’t see her. He was sprinting full-out, like the devil was chasing him.”
 

“Maybe the devil
was
chasing him,” yelled Slate, who was out of site around the corner. He was slicing, massaging his lover the slicer with a greasy wad of corned beef.
 

“Anyway, he just barreled into her. Knocked her onto this tray
full
of drinks she’d just bought. The drinks sprayed over the entire corner. The kid and the old lady kind of made this ball of humans and crashed to the ground, and then she got up and started yelling at him. Then she kicked him and pepper sprayed him.”