The Bialy Pimps (15 page)

Moments later, Dicky, who had been waiting around the corner in Pearl Alley, barreled down the connector in a beaten-up red truck with the words
Ain’t no Benz or broke-down Jeep
stenciled on the doors in white paint. As he approached, Captain Dipshit noticed a window decal on the rear windshield that read
I know it’s cute but don’t call me daddy
.

The window rolled down and Dicky stuck his head out.
 

“Not a word. This is one of my employees’ trucks. He calls it the Get Laid Mobile, but I’m pretty sure the only people getting laid in it are the drunk kids who use the open bed to screw in after the bars kick them out.”

 
“This truck is releasing an unhealthy amount of pollutants,” said Captain Dipshit. “I’m quite uncomfortable standing beside it.” Now that he was taking action that stood to hurt Bingham’s, he was regaining some of his old, comfortable habits. His foot was tapping and he was looking side to side impatiently.
 

Dicky cocked his thumb over his shoulder. “Put those drinks in the bed of the truck. I just saved a shitload on my drink order.” Then he paused, thinking. “All but one case,” he added. “Go throw one case into their air conditioner.”

“Done and done,” Captain Dipshit sang, and ran back to the alcove behind the deli.
 

That was the first day.

The second day, he’d intercepted the meat order.
 

The third day, today, he’d arrived early and had intercepted the bagels themselves. How could a deli function without bagels? They’d have to run out and buy bagels, and they’d do so from the UDF down the street at greatly inflated prices.
 

Captain Dipshit cackled, imagining himself like the Grinch who stole Christmas.

But now it was afternoon, and the giant football player was inside again, and, when he dared to look in, he could see all of them through the window, laughing and carrying on. It was as if they hadn’t been robbed at all. Just as the Grinch had been unable to best the Whos, it almost seemed as if Bingham’s wasn’t being affected by his little acts of sabotage.

They laugh without meat.

They laugh without bread.

They laugh without Snapple, or soft drinks instead.
 

And what happened next? Well at Bingham’s they say that the Captain’s impatience grew three sizes that day.
 

He sat in the alcove, on top of the dumpster, waiting and tapping his foot and willing the entire endeavor to hurry up, because the job was getting tedious. He had things to do. He had places to go to hurry through tasks. He had classes to ignore because he was busy missing things in order to accomplish various degrees of rushing.
 

He willed himself to calm down. He’d just have to wait. As impatient as he was to get on with it, he’d just have to wait. They couldn’t go on like this forever. So he’d hang out in this alcove, and he’d steal and he’d sabotage until something
did
happen.
 

Then, indeed, something
did
happen, as Johnny Rocker rounded the corner.

Bricker had left an hour ago. Darcy and Beckie’s shifts had ended at around the same time. Philip, who worked more hours than anyone else because he had to pretend he was in charge and knew what he was doing, was back in the office, on the phone. Slate was still working, and after two hours, was still doing the slicing. As if to prove that his love for the slicer was unique and special like a flower, the odd man out had been removed. Inexplicably, the Box Next to the Slicer had vanished.

Mike, the Anarchist, and Smooth B had relieved the lunch shift workers. The Anarchist was restocking the Snapple re-delivery that Philip had called for late yesterday when the normal order had failed to arrive. The re-delivery had shown up a few hours later in the day, the delivery guy telling some bullshit excuse story that just made him look incompetent at his job. Then the tower of drinks had stood behind the counter until just now, which made the Bingham’s workers look incompetent at
their
jobs. Or possibly lazy.

Smooth B was reading another glossy paperback. This one was called
Plastic Surgery Disasters
. Smooth was spending most of his time on the breasts section, because, as he said, “No matter how much tits are a disaster, they’re still tits.”

Mike was pretending to clean the lobby tables, but he was actually only out there because the Hot Diet Coke Girl, who had tits that were not a disaster, was sitting near the front window.
 

“Hey, look at this,” said Mike in his usual bored voice. He was holding up a copy of the
Columbus Dispatch
which had been abandoned in one of the corner booths.

“‘Quayle announces bid for 2000 presidency,’” the Anarchist read. “Oh good
God
!”

“No,” Mike replied, walking up to the counter. He tapped the space above the
Dispatch
masthead. “This.”

Across the lightly-perforated top in measured capital letters was the handwritten imperative:
Make more white babies
.
 

The Anarchist took the newspaper. “Another one. Did you see who was sitting there?”

“No. It was in that booth we can’t see from behind the counter.”

“Damn. There’s a movement afoot.” And there was, too. Philip and the Anarchist had been finding White Babies missives recently, all deliberately and carefully penciled out at the top of the
Dispatch
. The paper was always left where someone would find it, and turned so that whoever found it would see the message. Sometimes it was simple, like the one Mike had found, but sometimes statistics and other factoids were added. The most recent had been,
Heads of household: Black - 44%, White - 56%
. Today’s discerning racist demanded facts. Empty bigotry was so 1995.

Philip emerged from the back and walked up to the Anarchist, who said, “Make more white babies.”
 

Philip was carrying his backpack. “Maybe when I get back. I need to run to the bagel place. And then to the meat place.”
 

“They won’t re-deliver?”
 

“No. They’re like, ‘It’s not our fault your delivery was misplaced.’ And I was like, ‘Bitch, we never got it, so
you
misplaced it.’ And they’re all like, ‘We’ve got your signature right here,’ and I’m like, ‘Bitch, where did your driver supposedly leave this phantom delivery to go with this phantom signature? Did he give it to us where he was supposed to, the same place as usual?’”

“Did you really say ‘bitch’?”

“No. But it was in my tone. They knew I was calling them bitch.”

The Anarchist nodded.

“Anyway, they both said the same as 7-Up said yesterday. The driver left it with someone at the back door. I asked them to describe the person, and they said it was this ratty blonde woman who smelled like B.O. I asked if this mystery person – probably some innovative bum – came out through the back door to meet them, or if they’d rung the bell to summon her. I asked if the woman then took the order inside. They didn’t have an answer for that. Then I asked them if they thought it was weird that some smelly woman was just hanging out, waiting for them in the alley, took the order in an unusual place, and then just continued to stand there with it until they drove away. They got all quiet. And I was like, so bring me another, and bring it inside this time like you’re supposed to, bitch.”

“But they still won’t redeliver.”
 

“They will at our normal time. So for meats, that’s Thursday, and for bagels, that’s tomorrow morning. As you can see...” He gestured at the bagel shelves, which held a few bags of stragglers from the previous day. “... we probably shouldn’t wait. So I’m taking a field trip.” He hiked his backpack further up on his shoulder.
 

“Annoying.”
 

“Not really,” he said. “You guys don’t need me. This gives me an excuse to leave in the middle of the day and go pick up that new paintball gun they’re holding for me all the way up near the bagel supplier. I was wondering when I’d find the time to go get it. Some homeless woman has forty pounds of processed meat and two hundred bagels, and I get to leave. That’s win-freakin-win, baby.”
 

After Philip left, the deli churned through the slow afternoon. The Hot Diet Coke Girl left, which made Mike sad enough to actually clean the tables as he’d been pretending to do. Smooth finished his “bloody tits book” and left it in the store’s library next to the coloring book that Beckie and Tracy had made obscene. A few customers came in who were only mildly annoying. One asked to have her sandwich cut in half, but none vultured. Even the Anarchist, who was a very unforgiving audience, considered it an acceptable level of annoyance.

“Man,” said Smooth B after the lobby was again mostly empty, “That one girl came in with all the Tommy Hilfiger shit on, I was about to smack her upside her head. ‘Bout the only thing stoppin me was the fact that she had a great rack.”

The Anarchist, who hadn’t yet finished stocking the Snapple, pushed the unopened skids of bottles under the steamer table for someone else to deal with.
 

“You only think about two things, don’t you?” he said to Smooth B. “Sex and death. And really, the way you do it, it’s kind of just one combined, super-gross thing.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Smooth clarified, “I’m not sayin I’d wanna fuck her up the ass. I’m just sayin she’d like it.”

Outside, the afternoon was winding down into early evening, but the air was still hot and shimmering. It wouldn’t be this way for much longer, thought the Anarchist. Soon it would be the autumn that Philip was so eager for, and the leaves would be turning and the place would look properly collegiate. The students who came in would wear long sleeves and long pants and then jackets, and they’d be in by the hundreds during the lunch rush. The place would be busy, all right. Philip couldn’t wait. The Anarchist, who would be graduating in the spring and then moving on, wasn’t as sure. Anything that was a “last” was uncool.

The strutting, air-drumming figure of Johnny Rocker danced past the front of the store, singing at the top of his lungs as usual. Then two passersby stopped where the menu was posted on the window and all four of the workers whispered at them to go away. They did.

Despite the music coming from the speakers, the place seemed unnaturally quiet.

“I think the air conditioner’s broke,” said Smooth B. “I’m hot as fuck.”

Captain Dipshit was standing in the alley, minding his own business, when he was assaulted again.

Just before it happened, he was thinking about how he couldn’t keep stealing deliveries forever. How much was he
really
hurting the place? And how long would they be fooled? Did he expect that they would just
not track down
the source of the delivery problem? They were evil assholes, but they weren’t stupid. This was an annoyance – a temporary inconvenience – and nothing more.
 

At that moment, without warning, Johnny Rocker rounded the corner.
 

Johnny Rocker was a man in his late 40s who loved classic rock music. He loved it so much, in fact, that he seemed to spend his entire day doing nothing other than power-strutting around Columbus singing it at the top of his voice. He wore jeans, T-shirts, work boots, and huge black stereophonic headphones. The headphones were plugged into a CD player that, being an early Sony Discman, had to be held level to keep from skipping. Both of Johnny Rocker’s hands wore black leather gloves, and he kept the left hand, holding the Discman, steady at waist-level. The other hand was as free as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s free bird. That wild child played air guitar, air drums, or air harmonica, fist-pumped, and made devil’s horns.
 

You could walk right past Johnny and he’d never see you. His eyes were on the road, on his goal, and on 1978. He looked fierce, and pissed. He was a man on a mission, jamming in a private world that pedestrians assumed existed beneath his headphones. You could never hear Johnny’s music. All you could hear – from several blocks away – was him bellowing along.

When Johnny Rocker rounded the corner from High into the short connector, Captain Dipshit jumped in surprise, then was immediately alarmed. This man wasn’t strolling. His eyes were steely, fixed on Captain Dipshit. He was coming fast, and he was yelling.

“Hey, how are you?” Captain Dipshit said, pitching his voice so that the man, who was still at the other end of the alley, could hear.

No response.
 

“I’m just having a smoke,” Captain Dipshit said. “Good place for it! Private back here.”
 

But the man was hearing none of it. He was shouting something Captain Dipshit couldn’t make out – something about how bad he had been. His legs and arms were pumping. He was holding something in his left hand. Was it a weapon? The Captain was toward the rear of the connector alley and Johnny was still near the front. It was too far to see.
 

“Did you need something from me?” he said, now starting to get nervous.

“I SEE – A BA-AD MOON A-RISIN’!” Johnny Rocker bellowed. “I SEE – TROUBLE ON THE WAY!”

“I don’t want trouble,” said Captain Dipshit, beginning to take a few steps backward. He didn’t want to run. He hoped to slip around the corner onto Pearl with dignity, and
then
run once he was out of sight. But the man was closing fast and Pearl was a good fifty feet away. Dignity might be secondary to saving his skin.

“I SEE – EER-RTHQUAKES and LIGHTNIN’!” he shrieked, brandishing a fist. “I SEE – BA-AD TIMES TODAY!”

“There’s no need for that...”
 

“DON’T GO ROUND TONIGHT!”

“I’ll... I’ll just go,” he said. The man’s arm was up, now flexing, now hitting his chest. A fire blazed in his eyes.
 

“IT’S BOUND TO TAKE YOUR LI-FE! THEEEERE’S A BAD MOON ON THE RISE!”