The Bialy Pimps (19 page)

The old customers had been an undifferentiated pool of people – students, faculty, parents, Columbus citizens. The only thing all of them had in common was that they were hungry, and that they had walked past a deli. The new prices had applied a filter to this undifferentiated clientele, and now the people who remained (and proliferated; they seemed to tell their friends) had another thing in common: they were all dumb enough to pay two or three times what they had been paying just a month ago.
 

Since the food quality had remained the same at best – and decreased in some cases; Wally insisted that to make the budget stretch farther, they were to purchase day-old bagels from their supplier – this willingness to pay such prices indicated either a wealthier clientele than he’d figured or a quantum leap in stupidity.
 

The Anarchist was on track to graduate
summa cum laude
with distinction (
“Cum,”
said Rich with a snicker) and, in his own opinion, was generally smarter than anyone, anywhere, ever. He had no problem coming up with theories to explain life, but the things he saw weren’t always obvious to his less-gifted co-workers, so he tried his best to explain the theories to them in terms they would understand.
 

“You see,” he said to Philip, “what it is, is that they’re stupid.”
 

“I get it,” said Philip.
 

“Because they’re paying more. For the same or worse food.”
 

“I understand,” said Philip.
 

“And that makes them
stupid
.”

“You think I’m not very smart, don’t you?” said Philip.
 

“They’re... super dumb,” explained the Anarchist.

And they were. Nobody could really deny it. Somehow, the new atmosphere (“musicals, high prices, shit breaking everywhere, and bad service” said Darcy brightly, shaking her ample chest) had given the place a reputation, and a decent one at that. It was as if the place had stumbled on an untapped niche – people who would pay for the honor of putting up with anything. And the sad part was that most of the people who came in were the same people as before – still students, faculty, parents, and Columbus citizens. This meant that the correct explanation involved stupidity rather than wealth.

“That can’t be it,” said Tracy to Mike, who at the time was being particularly stoic under his baseball cap. “Maybe they just really, really like our food. Maybe they just like how this is a cool place where people can come and have fun and be treated with dignity.”
 

A small blonde girl came up to the register behind Mike, holding a bagel open on a sheet of foil.

“This is the worst sandwich I’ve ever tasted,” she said. “This bagel is as hard as a rock.”
 

Mike turned from Tracy to the customer.

“Fuck off,” he said.
 

He turned back to Tracy. “You were saying?”
 

Dicky Kulane had been right about one thing: the changes intended to demoralize and humiliate the crew had soured the mood in Bingham’s. But – and about this, Dicky had been very wrong – the bad vibes hadn’t caused anyone to quit and it hadn’t turned the crew members against each other, against Philip, or even agains Wally, who seemed to just be the messenger. Bingham, who was the source of it all, was so indistinct as to be a figment of someone’s imagination, so there was no point hating him. So the only place for all that negativity to go was toward fatalism, toward a feeling that there was no point in doing anything right.
 

Or to put it another way, all of the bad juju coalesced into what the Anarchist called “a culture of what-the-fuck.”
 

Mop the floor when someone spills a drink? Let it be. What the fuck; we have to wear hairnets.
 

Be nice? Why the fuck should I? We aren’t allowed to accept tips anymore.

Show up on time? What the fuck for? The place is about to self-destruct anyway.

Work well and efficiently? What the fuck are they going to do, fire me?

Strangely, the effect was liberating. With Philip and Wally appearing to be just messengers and Bingham being a mere concept, the only place to direct anger was at the customers – which was something that most crew members had been looking for justification to do anyway.
 

Mere annoyances became screaming headaches. The smallest inconvenient request from a customer became a rage-inducing event. Every peeve felt justified. Asking for extra lettuce? What a load of crap. Changing a bagel in progress? Ugh, infuriating! Not responding when your order was called? Absolutely intolerable.
 

“Bill!” Beckie called one day after completing a sandwich, reading the name off a slip of register tape.
 

Nobody appeared, so she yelled again. “Bill!”

When Bill remained absent, she set Bill’s bagel on the counter, for Bill to claim at Bill’s leisure, and set to work on the next order in line.
 

“Peter!” she yelled after completing the new bagel. Then, noticing the unclaimed, foil-wrapped sandwich still lying on the counter, she added, “and Bill!”

“Mia!” yelled the Anarchist.

“BILL! I have a Tom’s Turkey on onion with provolone for BILL!”

“Mia!” the Anarchist shouted into the face of Mia, who he hadn’t noticed.

“It’s
Maya
,” Maya told him.

“Whatever,” replied the Anarchist.
 

“BILLLLL!” Beckie screamed. She glanced around the lobby. No heads turned.
 

“Screw Bill,” she said as she pulled the bagel down and tossed it onto the back counter.

“It’s been fifteen minutes and I haven’t gotten my bagel yet,” Bill complained a short while later.
 

“Bill?” Beckie inquired.

“Yes?” replied Bill, as if he wasn’t sure.

“I called your name a while ago, six or seven times.”
 

“Well, you must not have said it very loudly,” replied Bill, who then stalked off.

“Ridiculous,” Beckie spat to the Anarchist. “I’ve been saying for years now that we need pagers here like real restaurants have. The kind that buzz and light up when your table is ready. But William wouldn’t buy them despite the fact that he bought everything, and Philip won’t buy them, and now we’ll never get them.”
 

Beckie’s face was creased and ugly as she worked through the rush. Bill had really gotten to her. A lot of things had gotten to her, and to the Anarchist, and to Slate, and to Philip, and Darcy, and Tracy, and Smooth B, and to the rest in the past weeks of unreasonable demands from management. The only person who seemed unperturbed was Rich, who smiled at everyone and giggled at anything even potentially sexual or scatological.
 

“You know what would be better?” said the Anarchist. “Shock collars. Like the ones that keep dogs from leaving their yard.”
 

Beckie was still working, still fuming.
 

“You order your bagel, we give you a collar. And when your order is ready, the collar shocks you. Hard.”
 

This seemed to lift Beckie’s mood, so the Anarchist went on, explaining how the collars would of course lock in place, and couldn’t be removed while they were active. Maybe Bingham’s could install a large
Family Feud–
style ring-in buzzer at the front, and you’d need to tag it to turn off your collar. The mental image was delightful: a lobby filled with customers, convulsing as they were electrocuted, all fighting each other to be the first to reach the big button.
 

In Philip’s opinion, the sadistic atmosphere of late was both over-the-top and dangerous. Tough times or not, difficult higher-ups or not, this was still a business and he was in charge. They’d always been annoyed by customer behavior, but customers were what made the place run. If they’d had more customers to begin with, they’d never be in this mess. Why did the customers never show up back then, which led directly to the staff hating and plotting against customers today? Stupid fucking customers. They should all be beaten with a wet loaf of bread.

“These people should be beaten with a wet loaf of bread,” said Philip, looking out at the surprisingly full lobby.
 

“Man, that’s not fair,” said Smooth B.

“I’m not going to do it,” said Philip. “It was just a joke.”
 

“No, I mean it’s not fair that you’re saying it. Just the other day you yelled at Beckie for saying that some guy should be hit with a wet bagel. That’s essentially the same thing.”
 

“Beckie didn’t
say
a guy should be hit with a wet bagel. Beckie
hit a guy with a wet bagel
. There’s a difference.”
 

Smooth frowned and shrugged at the same time. “Pfft.”
 

Beckie was particularly volatile. Just the other day, she’d thrown a sandwich at some guy because he wasn’t listening for his order. Then, when Philip had told her from across the make area that that was definitely not cool, she’d thrown another at him. He’d threatened to fire her, which of course he’d never do. And she’d said, “You’d better, because I’m not quitting, and who knows what I’ll do next.” There’d been a wild look in her eye, something that said that she didn’t mean it, but kind of also did.
 

Tempers were short. Patience was something that had to be spent wisely.
 

With Beckie moved to slicing duty as a time-out, Slate took over her spot at the make table. Slate hated touching the food, and had been wearing latex gloves when he worked for months now. The rest of the staff didn’t – or, at least, hadn’t until a Wally mandate suddenly required it. Slate began to double-glove, stating that if the glove didn’t fit, he must a-quit. It was supposed to be an OJ Simpson joke, but it was neither clever nor funny.

The only person capable of maintaining any real levity was Mr. Cynical himself, the Anarchist. As it turned out, he really only deserved partial credit for lifting the mood under tense circumstances because he lifted it by proposing bizarre and violent ways that those tense circumstances could be made worse.
 

He proposed:

Electric shock collars that buzzed people’s necks when their orders were ready. Opening the steamers quickly when people vultured over the counter, thus hitting them in the face. Spraying people with the Purple Stuff. Hitting people with spatulas. Constructing a giant bar at waist-level at the make table that, when pushed in by the people making sandwiches, would push out a similar bar on the outside of the counter, to silently nudge customers away.
 

“Think of a pass-through drawer at a locked-down convenience store, or at a prison,” he explained to Philip. “One side pushes in, the other pushes out.”

“Why?” said Philip.

“Or maybe a cow-catcher on the front of a train,” said the Anarchist.
 

A Plexiglas shield separating the workers from the customers. A giant fan that would blow people back and into the walls. Velcro on the floor which matched that on required booties. A sloth.
 

“A sloth?”

“That one was Beckie’s idea,” the Anarchist told Philip. “She wants a sloth. She wants to take all of the tiles out of the suspended ceiling but leave the grid, and then get a three-toed sloth and let it hang out up there.”

“Again I must go back to:
Why?”

“Because sloths are hilarious.”
 

“I don’t think it’s in the budget.”
 

“Well not right now, but look around you,” said the Anarchist. “Bingham-style business works somehow. I’ll be honest; I’d pretty much assumed that Bingham was either senile or just a seriously adept asshole, trying to sink the business in the funniest way possible so that he didn’t have to decide because it would die on its own. But maybe he really does know something.”
 

Philip looked around. The lobby was relatively busy. Busier than a summer day should be. Add in the fact that everything now cost, on average, 250% of what it used to cost, and Bingham’s numbers for August were going to look very good indeed. Then fall classes would start, and it would only get busier.
 

“This begs a question,” said the Anarchist. “What exactly will these people put up with? Let’s pretend that the crisis passes and Bingham stops putting the screws to us a bit. Maybe we get our meals back, maybe we get our tip jar back, maybe we get overtime back. Maybe they let us play House of Pain on the stereo again, or maybe if they don’t allow it, maybe we just do it because we damn well feel like it. Maybe the place is making money, and they let us be a place that just sells bagels again instead of an ant farm. When that happens, what of the customers? They’ve proven they’ll accept rude treatment. They’ve proven they’ll pay more for less. They’ve proven that they’re as dumb as marketing campaigns assume people to be. So I ask... when this financial crunch is over, what of them?”

Philip didn’t have an answer. “What
of
them?”
 

The Anarchist gave Philip a level look. “All I’m saying is, I’m kind of curious just how much they
would
put up with,” he said.

“Oh you goddamn fucking son of a bitch!”

The Anarchist cried these words not in surprise nor agony but with total poseur premeditation as he stumbled out from the back, nearly slipping in the everpresent patch of melted ice at the foot of the ice machine.
 

Darcy turned, gave him a raised eyebrow.
 

“The Rat is back there again,” he said.

“And the hysterics?”
 

“It’s a line from
The Shining
. My favorite book. I saw The Rat when I was washing dishes and was like, ‘Dammit!’ but nobody was around to hear me say it all dramatic and shocked-like, so I was going to come out here and tell you guys, ‘Dammit! The Rat is back there again!’ But then I remembered that I’ve always wanted to use that son-of-a-bitch line, so I decided to lead with it. Was it suitably dramatic?”