The Bialy Pimps (14 page)

“Oh my God! Were they hurt?” said Beckie. She was wearing her apron, as usual, over her extremely short shorts and, as usual, looked naked underneath. Her long legs were so tan that they looked black.

Bricker chewed. “Oh, for sure.”
 

“The old lady too?”

Bricker shook his head. “Only enough to be funny. She ran off, and then he began pouring what was left of her drinks into his eyes to wash out the mace, yelling about Mickey Mouse. I’m not kidding.
Mickey Mouse.
”

Philip found himself becoming interested in his behemoth customer. “Where were
you?
” he said.

“Sitting at Java Jive, like twenty feet away.”
 

“Did you help them?”

“No,” said Bricker. He unslung his backpack and opened it, removing a small envelope baring the logo of a pharmacy photo center. “I did take some pictures, though.”
 

Bricker was a genetics major, like the Anarchist. This bothered the Anarchist because he himself was the smartest person he knew (and was also the best writer he knew), and there was no way that some stupid meathead jock could do what he did. Yet when he mentioned it to Bricker to attempt to discredit his obviously bullshit story, Bricker confirmed his course load, which was essentially the same as the Anarchist’s. Well, it was harder. Bricker was taking an advanced linear algebra class too.

“Just like a jock,” said the Anarchist. “Only here for football. He’d have a hell of a time if he were taking anything difficult.”
 

Beckie opened her mouth to say something, but the Anarchist stopped her.

“Have you ever noticed how he’s... all
dumb
and stuff?” he said.

“No,” she said.

Bricker’s standard order was a Tom’s Turkey and a large Dr. Pepper, but following the discovery of his course load and after some non-subtle quizzing to make sure he understood what he was being taught (a process that was conducted with many behind-the-hand
Durr, I’m big and dumb
comments), the Anarchist reluctantly showed Bricker respect via food by double-stacking the meat on his sandwiches. “You’re a big boy and you need your nutrition,” he told him.

As Bricker expressed more and more behavior that could only be described as “assholishly delightful,” his sandwiches grew until they were triple-stacked. He had to eat them by dissecting them with a fork. Sometimes there were two such sandwiches, like half a cow’s worth of turkey. A customer, watching Bricker, had made this observation once. Bricker just pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head.
 

Eventually, the initial exchange between Bricker and any employee became “How many?” followed by an answering number. Sometimes, when he was particularly famished, Bricker would get as many as four sandwiches. This got expensive for Bricker until a day came that, during the lunch rush, was particularly vulture-heavy. The counter opposite the make table was lined with waiting customers who leaned over it, standing tall and stretching their necks to watch the Anarchist and Darcy work, pointing at this and that, correcting and altering orders, asking for more of item X and less of item Y, and so Bricker, at the register, knowing the crew’s intense and unfair hatred of vulturing, simply sidled his massive girth down the length of the counter, wiping them away from the counter and onto the floor like bugs off a windshield. Bricker acted like he hadn’t noticed the people he’d displaced and began whistling, with an oblivious, dumb look on his face. There were many, many nasty looks thrown at the big man now dominating the vulturing space, but nobody was willing to say anything.
 

Bricker, for his part, soaked it up, loving the hatred bathing him as he stood at the counter. He loved more than anything else to be an asshole.
 

From that day on, no matter how many Tom’s Turkeys Bricker ordered, the Anarchist always gave them to him on the house.

“You keep counteracting customer douchebaggery with your own douchebaggery and we’ll give you a medal,” the Anarchist told him.

Philip didn’t know about Bricker’s free food, but he suspected, and didn’t try very hard to find out if his suspicions were true. Everyone else knew. It made sense. Bricker was performing a service, much like the gross pedophile who cleaned the deli’s bathrooms. He deserved compensation.
 

Darcy proposed making Bricker the official Bingham’s mascot. He could stand at the front of the restaurant in a giant bagel outfit and block the entrance. Bricker was already large; putting him in a round outfit would make him positively impassible. Philip argued that keeping customers out, attractive as it may be, might hinder the deli’s goal of making enough money to remain open until the fall, and Darcy reluctantly agreed.
 

So Darcy proposed an alternative. Bricker could frisk the customers instead of shutting them out, which had its own kind of hilarity. Bricker refused this idea. “It’d mean touching dudes’ junk,” he said. Then Darcy proposed that after frisking the customers, he could frisk her, and jumped up and down to make her massive breasts jiggle and her Bettie Page hairdo bounce. Bricker was picking up the ghetto phone (the one next to the Box Next to the Slicer) and was trying to locate a costume shop that would fabricate a bagel doorman outfit when Philip came back and told him to get his big dumb meathead ass out from behind the counter because he didn’t work there, and told Darcy to get back to work. Bricker sighed. Darcy bounced. Philip went back into the office. The ghetto phone, which had maybe a week left of useful life in it at all times, fell off the hook and onto the counter. A shard of plastic broke off of its casing, giving it a newly and expanded level of ghettoness.
 

Deli life rolled on.

While Bricker sat inside, making the Bingham’s chairs protest under his weight and abusing Bingham’s clientele, Captain Dipshit took up station outside.
 

A week ago, after Captain Dipshit had run back to Dicky Kulane following the Roger incident, screaming again that he was losing his mind or that the place wasn’t right or possibly both, Dicky had had an idea. Captain Dipshit was usually the one who had all the ideas (he was the only person he believed was truly competent, after all), but Dicky was smart, and probably because he was disturbing and seemed both unstable and violent, Captain Dipshit tended to respect and trust him. You had to respect a person who seemed likely to firebomb an orphanage if it looked at him the wrong way. Damn orphanages, thinking they own this town.
 

Besides, Captain Dipshit no longer really trusted his own judgment when it came to Bingham’s. He’d failed to impatient his way through his regular lunch order, time and time and time again. He’d been mocked, time and time and time again. The place confused him and made his head spin. He saw things there – things that couldn’t be real. He had delusions. Just the other day, he’d been convinced that Bingham’s owner was a short, smelly homeless man. (Which, he thought now, wasn’t to say that Bingham, whoever
that
was, was
not
a short, smelly homeless man. It was entirely possible that he was. Likely, in fact.) But Dicky had insisted that that
particular
short smelly homeless man wasn’t the owner, and the Captain had to trust that Dicky knew best. It helped that Dicky had told him, more than once now, “I always know best.” Then he’d told Captain Dipshit about this time in high school when some kid had thought that
he
knew best, and had mocked Dicky, and so Dicky had taken a mace to school in case he needed to correct him.
 

Mace?
Captain Dipshit had said. It seemed an odd choice of weapon for the revengeful school misfit, yet he knew first-hand how crippling mace could be.
 

No
, a
mace,
said Dicky.
Like, from medieval times.
 

Captain Dipshit had looked it up on the internet. A spiked ball at the end of a handle, like a hammer you might use if you really, really hated nails. He wondered where Dicky had gotten a mace, and decided not to ask. The rule was, you don’t ask someone who would think to procure a mace why or where they procured one. Same thing went for an iron maiden or a guillotine. It was best to play it safe with people who owned any of them.
 

Honestly, setting aside the question of
who created the plan,
Captain Dipshit wasn’t entirely sure whether the fact that there even
was
a plan had been his idea or Dicky’s. When, exactly, had they formed a partnership to “get” Bingham’s? It didn’t make sense.
He
hated Bingham’s, but he hated and/or disrespected most things. The list of people he’d need to settle a score with was very long, and he was a very impatient and hence very important person. It was better to run from your conflicts than to settle them.
 

Yet when he’d gone back to 3B again and again, and he’d been losing his mind and out of breath, newly harassed, newly disturbed by something that always,
always
seemed to happen
here
, in this damn restaurant, Dicky had finally said
Okay, this is what we’ll do. This is what we’ll do to fix the situation.

And so Dicky had begun with a question. He said,
How do we get rid of them?

And Captain Dipshit had said:
Nightline. Catch them pooping in jars.

And Dicky had sighed, and rolled his eyes, and left for a while, and finally come back, sighed again, and said,
We get rid of them by putting them out of business.
 

And Dicky had then asked Captain Dipshit, his dim-witted apprentice,
And how might a restaurant go out of business?
 

And Captain Dipshit had said,
They could get infested by thousands of rats which spill up from the basement and take over the lobby. Some madman could plants bombs in the basement.

And Dicky had sighed, had grabbed his coat, had gotten in his car, had driven around with the top down for long enough to clear his head, had taken a walk, had meditated, had prayed, had gone to visit the graves of dead philosophers, had gone to Kinko’s to make some copies, had filed his taxes, and had come back and had said, calmly, repressing his irritation,
That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

And Captain Dipshit, eager to learn, had given the question back to the master:
So how
does
a restaurant go out of business?
 

And Dicky had said,
Simple math.

The restaurant industry had paper-thin profit margins, Dicky explained. You had to be very good to run a successful restaurant. There was an art in labor and marketing and the food itself, of course, but ultimately it all came down to math. A restaurant that could bring in more than it spent would flourish. A restaurant that spent more than it brought in would fail.
 

How do we increase Bingham’s expenses? How do we reduce their profits?
Dicky had said.
Those are the questions we need to ask.

Captain Dipshit asked if it was even feasible to cripple Bingham’s by messing with their profits and expenses. Even if they operated far in the red, the place could limp on forever. It might not be enough. What was the point?

And that dark, orphanage-burning, mace-wielding look had again crossed Dicky’s eyes and he’d said,
Well, even if they stay open and 3B runs out of gas and has to close, it’ll be fun to make them squirm, just for the hell of it. You want to know the truth? I’ll admit I have an axe to grind.

And Captain Dipshit, who thought this axe might be a literal rather than metaphorical axe, took a step back.
 

So Captain Dipshit had taken up station outside of the deli, around the corner, in the small alcove off of the alley between Bingham’s and the book store next to it on High. The pile of leaves that the owner (ahem... the homeless guy who was
not
the owner) had laid in the other day was only twenty yards away, but Captain Dipshit was invisible in the alcove as long as the Bingham’s crew didn’t come out the back door and into the alcove to throw trash into the dumpsters. And the crew was lazy. He’d been in the alcove on and off for three workdays so far, and he’d only ever seen them take the trash out at night. Apparently they piled it inside, near the door.
 

Filthy. Lazy.

Unhealthy.
 

Dicky had said,
We’ll find ways to cost them money. And if we can save 3B money at the same time, all the better.

And so the first day, Captain Dipshit had intercepted the 7-Up delivery man. The 7-Up truck had parked in the alley and the driver had offloaded ten flats of Snapple onto a dolly. The delivery man had begun wheeling the dolly down the alley, toward High, toward the front door, when Captain Dipshit had stopped him and waved him back.

“Hey,” he said. “Back door. All deliveries at the back door from now on.”
 

The delivery man had turned, severely put-out, and had pulled the dolly toward the back door. Then he looked at the back door, which was closed and locked, and then at Captain Dipshit.

“Well?”
 

“Well what?”

“You going to let me in?”

“Why?”

“To... deliver?” he said.
 

“No. Just leave them out here,” said Captain Dipshit.
 

This had seemed odd to the delivery man, but he got paid as long as there was a signature on the delivery slip, and leaving them here was indeed faster. He pulled a clipboard off the back of the dolly, extended it, and said, “Sign here.”
 

So Captain Dipshit had signed, and the driver had offloaded the Snapple, and for the several minutes it took to re-secure the truck’s stock doors and re-stow the dolly, the delivery man had studied Captain Dipshit, still standing by the back door with the flats of Snapple. His gaze encouraged the Captain to open the doors, to do the normal thing and take the delivery inside. But Captain Dipshit just stood there and, when the delivery man looked over, waved. But again, the signature was on the slip. Going in to ask would be slower. So he drove off, shaking his head.