The Bialy Pimps (18 page)

Dicky wasn’t concerned. If things didn’t move in his direction at first, he could always just turn up the heat.

“You guys look like a bunch of fairies,” said Army Ted, sitting in his usual chair with his canvas pack slung over the seat next to him. “Are you going for a kabuki theme in here or something?”
 

“We’re pretty,” said Rich, using his fingers to smooth out his oil-negating T-zone makeup. Rich was about five-three and built like a fireplug. With his nametag, his hairnet, foundation, and lipstick, he was nothing short of surreal. Yet oddly, it didn’t seem to bother him at all.
 

Smooth B, who was working with him, was less forgiving.
 

“Man, this is
bull
shit,” he hissed while adjusting his hairnet on his shellacked ‘do. “I ain’t in fuckin
Mel’s Diner.
”

If Rich was surreal, the customer reaction to the new policies was downright bizarre. The total daily customer count was holding steady – still low because it was summer, but not decreasing despite the higher prices, the looser standards, the idiotic-looking employees, and the joyously enforced “we won’t correct your wrong order” policy. Because of the steady numbers and because of the 30% across-the-board price hike, Bingham’s profits were up over 30%. Philip began to believe that maybe, somehow, Bingham and his idiotic ideas had some sort of a basis in real business... but that didn’t make him like them anymore.
 

“Why are these people paying these prices?” Philip asked the Anarchist. “Why are they tolerating the shitty music, the refusal to fix their orders, and the retarded policies?”

“Because they’re idiots,” said the Anarchist, who was looking in a mirror. He was trying to pull his hair through the hairnet so that it’d vanish onto his scalp.
 

“Did another restaurant close nearby, and we’re getting their refugees? Did some food critic write us up as a ‘must visit’? Is there a weeks-long campus event going on that I don’t know about?”
 

“This fucking hairnet is never going to vanish. It’s just giving me big mall hair,” said the Anarchist.

Beckie, who had taken a few marketing classes, thought that the steadiness of the customers was due to a sort of “Nordstrom effect.” The place had raised prices precipitously – too much to be reasonable. It wasn’t the kind of price hike you made to fight inflation. It was the kind of price hike you made to declare, “We’re now fancy, motherfuckers.” Everyone wanted to be in on something that was fancy, and would pay to do so.

“You know how those high-end stores really do it, don’t you?” asked Army Ted after overhearing this discussion. “It’s economic manipulation by the CIA. With so much work going to China for cheap, the government wanted to give people a reason to keep shopping in the USA, so they started to fix prices and act as anonymous buyers, which leads to a critical mass snowball effect if done in the right areas...”
 

And then for the next ten minutes, while the employees battled a line of customers, Ted droned on from his chair. He knew about the plan because he was involved in structuring the whole thing. Then Libya got involved on China’s side and there was some sort of a covert ops mission required. This was all back when Ted was married to Sandy Duncan, of course, and before his current wife (you know, the model/lawyer), and Sandy got mad when he had to spend so much time overseas, but he pacified her with some of that high-end, pricey merchandise. But of course, the joke was on her because of the price-fixing, and really that four thousand dollar necklace was worth about five bucks, picked up from a homeless street vendor.
 

When the line had died down and Ted had gone, Beckie and the Anarchist palavered in the back over a battered blue notebook. On the cover was a photo of Ted with his arm raised, his pack slung across his chest. Below it was the title, “Official Army Ted Investigation Unit Records.”
 

Beckie was scribbling in the note about Nordstrom’s, the CIA, China, Libya, and, of course, favorite recurring character Sandy Duncan.

“Sandy again,” said the Anarchist. “Makes me wonder what he has going on with her. Who name-drops
Sandy Duncan?”

“Do you think this was before or after he lived next door to Clint Eastwood? Because that was a Sandy thing,” said Beckie.

“I mean, was Sandy Duncan hot once upon a time? If you’re going to invent someone as a recurring character, how about Cindy Crawford or Elle McPherson?”

Really, the T.I.U. investigation record was just mental masturbation, and both of them knew it. Practically every week, Ted dropped a new bomb or at least a nugget or two, and every week, they faithfully recorded it. But the net effect was just a bloated record of everything Ted had said. They weren’t investigating. They were taking dictation.
 

“Why is he doing this?” the Anarchist said. “It’s not only to impress us if you’re going to pull out
Sandy Duncan
over and over. I mean, dude.
Sandy Duncan?”
 

“Maybe she has a lovely personality,” said Beckie.

“What?”

“Well, maybe she’s just so charming that he couldn’t resist. Maybe he’s not as shallow as you think he is.”
 

“Wait... are you giving me logical reasons he’d tell us about Sandy Duncan, or are you instead, in some bizarre world scenario, giving me reasons that he might have married her?”

Beckie shrugged.

“Because let’s be clear. Army Ted wasn’t
actually
married to Sandy Duncan.”
 

Again, Beckie shrugged.
 

“And he didn’t really manage the Sex Pistols. Or orchestrate the demonstration that ended in the destruction of the Berlin Wall. And I’m even going to say that there’s a decent chance that his wife, if she exists, probably doesn’t actually have supermodel friends who visit all the time and then spend most of their time while they’re at Ted’s house in tight tops and short-shorts, doing yardwork.”
 

Beckie looked disappointed. Of course it was all bullshit, but sometimes you just played along for the fun of the game. But lately, the Anarchist had had no patience for games. It was this new, aggressive management that was souring his mood. Hairnets. Washing all dishes twice. Musicals on the stereo. Apparently, uniforms due in the mail any day now. It was enough to make a guy lose his mind.
 

“Let’s do something,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Something to move this... this
investigation
forward, instead of just recording things Ted says. Look some stuff up. Research. Make phone calls. Let’s figure out what’s up with Ted, for real. Is he just deliberately fucking with us, or is he crazy? I want to know if it’s deliberate fabrication or not.”
 

And that was what it was really all about, in the end. He was being screwed with by Wally and Bingham, and he’d always felt screwed with by the customers. If Ted was a whacko, then fine. Bingham’s had many whackos. But he was in no mood to be screwed with, deliberately and maliciously, from another direction right now. So if Ted just thought he was being funny, the Anarchist wanted to know about it. He wanted to know why Ted felt the need to tell his tales.
 

And as long as this mood persisted, he frankly wanted Ted to knock it the fuck off. He’d had enough ill-conceived hilarity in his life of late.
 

“Okay, then what about the license? What did you see?” Beckie asked.

“He took it away before I could really see much. All I could make out was his photo. And Ted. His name really is Ted.”
 

“How could you see ‘Ted’ and not see his last name?”
 

“I knew what I was looking at. I expected to see ‘Ted,’ and the vague letters I could make out seemed to be ‘Ted.’”
 

“You must have gotten am impression of his last name too, then,” she said.

He shrugged, then pointed at the T.I.U. journal. “It’s in there.”
 

Beckie turned a few pages in the notebook, going back to the day Army Ted had put his license on the Bingham’s counter. “‘Lindy? Landry? Gandry?’” She looked up.
 

“All I could tell was that it was maybe five or six letters long and ended in Y. The middle of the word, between the initial capital and the ending Y, was flat and uneventful. No T’s or I’s or Y’s or B’s or G’s, or anything tall or low. Could have been ‘Randy’ for all I could tell.”
 

Beckie pulled a phone book from the shelf. She checked for Lindy, Gandry, and Randy with no luck. There was one Landry, though, first initial T.
 

“T. Landry. East Sycamore Street. Is that German Village?”
 

“Yeah, it is,” said the Anarchist. He picked up the ghetto phone, heard static, and jiggled the off-hook button. He hung the phone up, waited a few seconds, and tried again. Still static.
 

“This phone is ghetto as fuck,” he said. “Do you own a cell?”

“No. You don’t either?”

“I’m thinking of getting one when I go off to grad school in Cleveland next year, but no,” he said. “Does Philip?”
 

“No. I was out with him the other night and we were drunk and in imminent danger of being raped (Philip first) and I asked him if he had one to call a cab.”

“And did Philip get raped?” he asked.

“Only slightly, and I’m pretty sure it was on purpose.”
 

The Anarchist sighed. “This will be so much easier when robots take over the world in 2001. Or when we discover that giant thing out near Jupiter and go through it and meet the Stanley Kubrick space baby.”
 

He picked up the phone a third time. This time he got a dial tone. He dialed the number for T. Landry, talked to someone for a few minutes, and then thanked them and hung up.
 

Beckie said, “Well?”
 

“Tina Landry. Age 97. I know because she told me no less than four times that she was 97 and still lived on her own.”
 

“No sons? No
grand
sons, maybe?”

“One son. Thomas. Coached the Dallas Cowboys for a while. Apparently pretty famous guy. Wore a hat.”
 

Beckie rolled her eyes. “If she claimed to be Tom Landry’s mother, that actually sounds totally like something I’d expect from a member of Ted’s family.”
 

“I don’t know, she knew his stats and would be about the right age,” he said. “Besides, if Ted’s name really was Landry, don’t you think he’d have told us by now that Tom Landry was his brother or dad or uncle or something?”

Beckie shook her head, resigned. Then she said, “What about his wife?”
 

“What about her?”

“She’s supposedly a lawyer. And her name is Yvette. How many lawyers named Yvette do you know?”

“Almost none,” said the Anarchist.

She leafed through the phone book, this time in the Y section.
 

“No ‘Yvette Whatever Law,’” she said. “How about big firms?”

The Anarchist nodded. “He said she works in a firm. Near City Center. Remember when the president was in town last year, and he called Ted and wanted to hang out, so the whole group with the secret service agents and whatnot went to pick up his wife and then went to City Center to hit an Orange Julius?”
 

Beckie stood up straight. “Of course!” She leafed through the phone book, to the yellow pages, to the red-bordered ATTORNEYS section.
 

“There appear to be eight billion attorneys in this city,” she said.
 

“People are idiots, so they need lawyers to validate their idiocy,” said the Anarchist. “Someone eats the BHT drying agent that comes with electronics because it doesn’t say ‘Do not eat this’ on the outside, then sues the manufacturer. Someone spills coffee on themselves and it’s someone else’s fault. I mean, just look at our customers lately. They all need lawyers.”
 

“Did someone spill coffee on themselves?”
 

“No, but it’s only a matter of time.”
 

Beckie closed the phonebook and returned it to the shelf. It appeared as if Ted had outfoxed them yet again.

“Damn,” she said.

Army Ted showed up intermittently over the next few weeks, always flashing a smile at Beckie (“He’s gloating because he bested us,” she said with a sneer) and telling Tracy about the girl who had displayed so much great ass, ordering his Diet Coke and occasionally bitching about the Russians or some other deposed world power.
 

One day, Ted and Roger came in at the same time and warred briefly over seating, as the regular spot of both was the same – the center table, most directly opposite the crew. Eventually, they were both outfoxed by Bricker, who also liked that table and who had no qualms about sniping it while Ted and Roger were facing off.
 

While the three of them sat at their tables – Ted, Bricker, and Roger, from left to right across from the register – the CD changer, on shuffle, began blasting the “When you’re a jet, you’re a jet” number from
West Side Story
and Bricker, who had come around in recent days after initially declaring the musical theme “faggy,” suddenly leapt to his feet and began doing his best Broadway impersonation of a gang member with a switchblade, singing along and springing from one side of the imaginary stage to the other. Roger, whose foot was tapping because he needed to get into the bathroom but couldn’t do so without passing in front of both Bricker and Ted, suddenly clamped his hands over his ears, yelled “I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!” and ran out. Captain Dipshit had been peeking through the front window and saw the whole thing. As Roger streaked past him, he fell over in a dead faint and struck his head on the window molding outside, leaving a welt he would later blame on an unseen assailant.
 

The new customers were even worse than the old customers in the very irritable opinion of the Anarchist. He had a theory about why this was, and had honed his theory in the recent weeks as Wally emailed with another two price increases.