The Bialy Pimps (2 page)

Many corporate types had their eccentricities, and Wally’s was hatred of the phone. Normally, correspondence between Bingham’s and Wally, the owner’s go-between, was conducted by email. Wally only picked up the phone when he absolutely had to. Usually you heard from Wally when the shit had hit – or was flying rapidly toward – the fan.
 

“Yeah,” Philip said, “I’d forgotten what you sounded like. And so calling today... that has to mean bad news?”

“Not great,” said Wally, “but let’s not get all negative. You’ve only been manager for a month or so. Bingham gets that. So yeah, I’m calling mainly because, as you already know, the deli is bleeding pretty bad. But you get a pass for a little while, to see what magic you can do to fix it. Lucky you.”

“Bingham is just going to prop us up while we lose his money? Because I come so highly recommended and can make him rich if he just hangs in there?”

“Because you’re not William,” said Wally.
 

Philip frowned. Wally had finally said it.
 

“Don’t get me wrong,” Wally continued. “I liked William, but William didn’t understand money. He ordered too much food and let it go bad. He kept it as hot as a sauna in there... except in the summer, when he kept it like a meat locker. He spent thousands of dollars redesigning the place after it had already been redesigned. He even hired that guy who works there ... what’s his name? ... to paint that mural on the side wall of the building, facing the alley off of High Street...”

“Nick.”
 

“Yeah, Nick. And is that mural even finished?”

Philip thought of the red side wall of the building with the single black slash through it. It’d been that way for a year now.

“No.”
 

“William seemed to think that because none of the checks he wrote bounced, that he could just keep on writing them for whatever he wanted.”

“He wouldn’t pay for the Face-Kicking Machine,” said Philip.

“The what?”

Philip sniggered. Even if he explained the Face-Kicking Machine to Wally, he doubted Wally would find it funny. “Never mind,” he said.

In the intervening silence, it occurred to Philip that the deli was too damn quiet. Something ugly must be brewing. That’s how it worked around here.

“How are the employees treating you?” asked Wally.

“Fine, for the most part. Most of them have been here less than a year, some two years, so I’ve always been a senior employee to them. The problem is with people like Beckie, who have been here as long as I have.”

“Is she the tall, blonde, really tan girl?”

“Yeah. We all went out once when you came in to meet with William. Remember?”

“Maybe. Did she want William’s job?”

“No, she has ambitions beyond managing a deli, unlike me. She won’t be in college much longer, and then she’ll probably move. The job would tie her down. It’s just that she just doesn’t listen all the time.”

“Like how?”

“It’s not important. Beckie’s not a problem. I love Beckie.”

“Give it time. Give it all time.”

Philip nodded – as if Wally could see it.

“And now the bad news.”

“This has been good news so far?” said Philip.

“Okay, then the annoying part of the bad news,” said Wally. “Employee meals are going up in price again.”

Philip moaned. Meals were free across the board not too long ago, and the initial change that required meals to be rung up had caused a stir. There had been an increase three months ago, and that change had damn near dissolved into mutiny. This newest price hike would be extremely unpopular among the college students the deli employed, most of whom had signed on factoring free meals into their pay.

“They’ll be pissed. And they’ll blame me,” Philip said, sighing.

“I know. But do it anyway.”

“I hate you, Wally.”
 

Wally laughed. “This is why we pay you the big bucks now, to sometimes be the bad guy. Just keep up the good work... and make those changes, all right?”

“Sure, Wally.”

“Take care.”

“Bye, Wally.”

He hung up and put his forehead in his hands. He was beginning to get a headache.

A few minutes later, the Morrissey Anarchist appeared at the office door.

“Philip.”

Philip looked up at the figure leaning against the door frame. The Anarchist was dressed modestly today, his brown hair disheveled and hanging over his forehead. He wasn’t always so sedated. There was a time when he had dyed his hair blonde and spritzed it into sharp quills.
 

Philip appraised him for a second before responding. The Anarchist was smiling but seemed somehow troubled. It meant that something was simultaneously amusing him and bothering him. This was normal. For the Anarchist, life’s shittiest moments always came with a hilarious silver lining.

“What?”

“Situation in the dining room.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “Probably best you see it for yourself.”

Philip rose from the chair, which remained imprisoned in the office pothole. The Anarchist led him out of the office and around the corner, past the old Chester’s grill hood and the table that was home to the meat slicer and, of course, the aptly labeled Box Next To The Slicer.

As they approached the work area behind the counter, a single word came from the front room:

“Balls!”

Philip’s eyebrows rose.

The speaker was a disheveled old man wearing a threadbare coat with a yellow shirt underneath that read
I got leid in Hawaii.
He was sitting in one of the tall red chairs arranged around one of the tall circular tables in the dining room, one leg hanging straight down and tapping against the floor. His other leg was up, long across the adjacent chair – a posture that put his crotch on display, maybe and maybe not on purpose. He was unshaven, with a mess of graying hair. The Anarchist fancied he could see green stink lines radiating from the man even now, but allowed that it might be his imagination. Might.

“Where the FUCK are all the bitches at?” the man bellowed.

Philip turned to the Anarchist. “I don’t suppose this fine gentleman has purchased a sandwich?”

The Anarchist shook his head.

“I’d FUCK a sandwich!” said the man.

The Columbus area – and especially the OSU campus – was filled with homeless people who were, in Philip’s words, “shit out of their motherfucking minds.” Most were harmless, but their lack of normal behavior could shock an entire room into paralysis. If you didn’t watch out, any of High Street’s crazies could take the restaurant hostage simply by sitting down and talking loudly to themselves. Nobody would act. The interloper would simply talk and talk and talk for hours, disrupting the whole day’s business.

There’s a psychological name for this phenomenon of inaction:
Diffusion of Responsibility
. But locally, at Bingham’s, it was known by another name:
Someone Else’s Problem.
 

The man in the lobby had been in before. In fact, he’d been in last Tuesday. He’d come through the door and had made the rounds of the tables, hitting each group of dining students up for spare change, and then had stood in front of one of the full-length mirrors in the dining room, making faces at himself and becoming increasingly offended at his reflection. He’d started yelling at himself, then at the employees. Slowly the dining room had emptied. Soon there was only the bum and the employees, all of whom were reading magazines and hoping the problem would resolve itself.
 

The siege of bum-on-deli had lasted for three hours. Every time someone new walked through the door, the man would offer to take their hat whether they were wearing one or not and then would follow the new customers around, swearing and stabbing them in the back with an invisible sword. Eventually the newcomers would leave, and the man would resume his station at the door, waiting to offer to take the next person’s hat.

It all ended when someone finally gave the man a hat. He had run off with said hat, hooting with victory.

Now, Philip was shaking his head at the Anarchist. This was bad for business. Why did he always have to be the bad guy?

Philip walked up to the man.
 

“You’re going to have to leave, sir,” he said.

The man eyed him. “Are you the president?”

“I’m black and I’m proud,” said Philip, who was Irish.

“Okay,” the bum replied.

As the man walked out, Philip turned to the Anarchist.

“You have to toss those fuckers out,” he said. “Don’t just let them sit here when I’m not around. They smell up the place.”

“You’re just being prejudiced,” said the Anarchist. “You’re a total dick.”

“Two weeks ago, dude shit his pants and hung around here all day because Darcy and Beckie were too timid to throw him out. Then Rich showed up and didn’t throw him out. All day long, more workers came in who didn’t throw him out. Next day there’s a funk in the air and three people tell us that our meat smells like shit. Kid throws up in the bathroom, misses the bowl. Guess who cleans it up?” Philip thrust a thumb into his chest. “And then, after I did it, the air smelled like barf and shit for days.”

“Coincidence,” said the Anarchist.

“Just kick them out. And if they don’t leave, you can hit them with your purse.”

Philip had no tolerance for such crazies. He always threw them out without hesitation. He could throw them out better than anyone else, and there was no nutcase – no matter how nutty – that he
couldn’t
throw out. Philip had thrown out Cochese. He’d thrown out the Private Dancer. He usually gave Little Johnny Redbeard a pass, but that was an exception. Once, back when Carla worked at Bingham’s, Pissy Pete had thrown a cup of coffee at Carla, and Philip had chased Pete down High with a pipe. That had almost ended badly.

When the bum had gone, Philip hopped up on the stainless steel countertop under the gigantic, chalk-drawn menu board.
 

“Did you know that we don’t have rats?” he told the Anarchist.

“Really.”

“So says Dan.”

And for the rest of the day, amazingly, Bingham’s
didn’t
have rats. The gray-haired bum didn’t return, but Little Johnny Redbeard – who had an intolerable odor but also an epic dwarf beard – did. The spreadsheet with the red numbers on it was washed away by the office computer’s screensaver and Philip forgot, again, to require employees to pay more for their food. Tracy came in for his shift, Captain Dipshit stayed away, and the House of Pain and Vanilla Ice CDs were played loudly. Store regular Tom “Bricker” Brickhouse, one of OSU’s linemen, came in, let himself behind the counter, and made himself two free sandwiches. He chatted intelligently with the staff for a few minutes and tried his best not to look as if he were just a meathead jock, which of course he was.
 

Bagels were thrown. Cheese was burnt. And in spite of Beckie melting crayons in the conveyor toaster, nothing caught on fire.

So all in all, it was a good day.

That night, The Rat returned.

He trotted into the area behind the counter, his hairless tail whisking up dust bunnies behind him. He moved carefully – hiding, surveying, and sniffing before venturing out into the open. His rat instincts urged caution. Something had changed. There were strange orange boxes in the basement now, and strangeness suggested peril. He should watch himself.
 

Death in itself was no concern, of course, but traps were. Even when you were immortal, having your back broken by a spring-loaded metal arm or going into a poison coma sucked. Countless martyrs had learned that lesson throughout history.

He counted his blessings, insofar as a rat can be said to count anything. Bingham’s was a place of untold pleasures. Meat? Yes. Cheese? Yes. Cheetos? Yes. And the basement. The glorious, endless, disgusting and feculent basement, wherein The Rat and his kind could share their spoils and copulate in vast heaps of fur and droppings. The drippings of the soda syrup boxes. The ancient bags of potatoes that the current building’s occupants didn’t know were stashed in a concealed closet. And the crumbs. The vast, vast wealth of disgusting, delicious crumbs. The deli was Shangri-La. It was a Heaven from whose pearly gates St. Peter would not chase him with a broom.

The Rat had one hell of a life.

In fact, he had had many lives. He had been killed many times, and would surely die many more times in the years to come, but none of that mattered. The Rat was immortal and (much like the Dalai Lama) would continue to be reincarnated over and over again but (in contrast to the Dalai Lama) would do so in vast litters of squealing pinkish blobs amidst his mother’s feces.
 

But dying was still unpleasant. Reaching the base of the soda machine, he reminded himself to tread cautiously.

An image came to mind of one particular death, at the hands (or the feet) of the one known as Trip. The incident had ended with a boot to the head as one thought

(Must eat and reproduce!)

had screamed through his consciousness.
 

Dead with a Doc Martens logo embossed on his skull. Unpleasant indeed.

The Rat proceeded to systematically work his way up to counter-level, past a small piece of white paper bearing an advertisement (
Math Tutor – #050 to 895 – 292-5040
) which had been taped to the wall behind the bagel shelves. He found a speck of provolone cheese. He ate it, then moved along the steel surface to the chip rack, which had foolishly been left unguarded. He used his claws and teeth to tear into a bag and spilled its contents onto the floor.
 

He sat up on his hind legs and looked around, whiskers twitching, in a gesture that might have been called “cute” in just about any other animal. Rats weren’t “cute,” though. Cuteness was beneath them. Rats were devious. And rats were stealthy.
 

Now you’d see him; now you wouldn’t.

The Rat was a corner-of-the-eye phenomenon. He was a specter, a ghost. He was seen from time to time in blurry, fleeting visions as phantasmal as Loch Ness monster and UFO sightings... and then, suddenly, he’d appear – real and in the flesh, as if
made
real by the accumulation of human fear.