The Bialy Pimps (23 page)

“You gave him sprouts for free?” said Philip. “You owe me fifteen cents.” Then the smile that was on his lips soured at the edges and he added, “Well, you owe Bingham.”
 

“But he wasn’t done. Dude’s like five-four, hair up in what looked like one giant knot that was probably supposed to be dreadlocks. Smells like total shit. Like literal shit. I’ve got maybe four bagels going and I just wanted the counter space free. But I’m working on the other bagels and he’s still there. He’s watching me and he goes, ‘Is that the knife you used to cut my bagel?’ and I say yeah, it is, and he says, ‘You just used it to cut that sandwich with meat.’”

“Uh-oh,” said Beckie.
 

“I told him, ‘We wipe the knives after using them to cut anything other than plain bagels, so rest assured no meat or meat juices got into your bagel.’ And it was true. I was wiping. Diligently. But the guy’s like all angry, and he demands to see the manager.”

Philip laughed. He tended to do what Wally told him, but he wasn’t any more sympathetic to customers than anyone else. He’d fix what was wrong, but wasn’t a fan of self-important, indignant blustering, which is what almost all demands to see the manager amounted to. The customer might as well have asked to see the Tooth Fairy for all the good it would do him.

“I told him you weren’t in. You
were
in, but... you know.” Philip nodded his thanks. “So then he gets all mad and red-faced and asks for the management phone number. There’s like three people behind him waiting at this point, and I’m losing track of the sandwiches I’m making. So I finish one of the sandwiches up and look at the name on the ticket, and before I reply to this asshole, I yell over his shoulder, like ‘AL!’ or whatever the name was, so that we could keep things moving, and the guy flips out.”
 

“Why?” asked Tracy.

“He thought he was being yelled at,” said Beckie, who had been there when it happened.

“So at this point, the guy starts yelling, saying that he wants to fight me,” said the Anarchist. “He’s yanking at the knob on the door in the counter, but it’s all ghetto and you can’t open it unless you lift straight up while pulling, and so all he’s doing is shouting at me and shaking the whole counter, and one of the bags in front of him falls off and splits open on the ground. Al’s bagel, I think. So Al comes over and asks where his bagel is, and I tell him that I have to make another because this dude knocked it onto the floor. While this is going on, some fat lady sidles over next to the yelling kid and plants her foot on what used to be Al’s bagel and the next second, she’s fallen on her ass, and starts yelling at me too, like the bagel on the ground is my fault.”

Darcy lit a cigarette. “I think the people coming in are getting dumber,” she said. “Or at least more annoying and less logical.”

A few quiet seconds passed. The Anarchist’s story was apparently over, and nobody cared enough to ask how it resolved. Probably the three customers fought each other.

“I may be done,” said Mike.
 

“You’re going home?” said Beckie, protest in her voice.

“No, I mean that I may be done at Bingham’s. Talk about ‘less logical.’ Look at us, staying here with all of this crap. I mean, I like you guys, but... hairnets and stupid hats? Tasteless uniforms? Fucking
The Music Man
on the stereo? It’s not exactly the job I thought it would be.”

“I may be done too,” said Beckie. This was no surprise. She’d balked at the perfectly rational increase in employee meal costs way back at the meeting and had been a ticking bomb ever since.
 

The Anarchist was shocked. He was determined to go down with the ship.
 

“Beckie!” he blurted. “What about Roger? He’ll die without you. Like, literally die. We’ll come in one day and he’ll be on our floor, dead. You want that on your hands?”

“I’ve got one year of college left. I’ll get an ulcer if I have to spend it like this,” she said. “Work used to be fun-annoying. Like, the customers mostly sucked, but it was a job, and was as good as a job could be. We could play whatever we wanted on the stereo. We could throw the rotten avocadoes into the wall of the bookstore across the alley. Cool people worked there. Now the people are all that’s left, and they’re barely cool because all of them are wearing dresses and mushroom hats with bagels on springs bouncing around on the top.”

“Then what about Ted?” said the Anarchist. “We’ll never uncover his secrets. He’ll win!”

Beckie shrugged.
 

Jenny laughed. “Army Ted. I’m getting to like that guy. You know how he jaywalks over from the undergraduate library all the time? Just saunters right across High, barely even looking around? It’d be hilarious if one day he was halfway across the street and then he just got hit by a COTA bus.”

The Anarchist and Beckie both stared at her, mouths open.
 

Jenny waved them off. “I like him, okay? But just picture it: He’s jaywalking, that man purse thing over his shoulder, his skinny legs, his flat baseball cap, and then, all of a sudden,
WHAM!”
She chuckled.
 

It looked like nobody was going to respond, but then Tracy said, “Oh, I get it” in an attempt to end the awkward silence.

Philip leaned toward Darcy and, without asking, took a cigarette out of her pack, put it between his lips, and lit it. “Wally wants us to serve roadkill,” he said.
 

Nobody reacted. Nothing was a surprise anymore.

“I told him no. I also told him that I’m telling him no from here on out. You all can do what you want, but my days of sucking his cock are over.”
 

“So, you’re quitting too?” said Beckie.

“No. I’m just not listening anymore.”

“You’re going to go to work and not listen? To... what? Change things back to how they were a few weeks ago?”

Philip leaned back, put his feet up. “I was thinking of going a bit further in the other direction.”
 

Beckie made go-ahead hand motions. “Like...?”

“Well, let me put it this way. Have you ever seen that episode of
The Simpsons
where Homer quits his job, and on his last day, he goes through the factory playing Mr. Burns’s head like a bongo drum?”

Tracy, who was a huge
Simpsons
nerd, said “Bees are on the what now?”

And the Anarchist, who always played this game with Tracy, countered with, “Trouble a-brewin.”
 

“You want to play Wally’s head like a bongo?” said Mike.

“Everyone has a last-day fantasy. They want to quit and go out in a blaze of glory. They want to do something ridiculous to get themselves fired. They figure they’re out anyway, so why not do what they’ve always wanted to do? Think about it. What have
you
always wanted to do?”

The Anarchist immediately thought of the Face-Kicking Machine, but restrained himself.

“Someone yells at you for charging for sprouts. What would you really like to tell them? Someone leans over the counter. That bothers some of you for some reason I never really understood, so what would you like to do to them? Someone eats three-quarters of a bagel before declaring it inedible and asking for a refund. Someone’s just plain annoying, because you’re the clerk and they’re the customer, and the customer is always right. Wouldn’t you like to... you know, metaphorically play their head like a bongo?”

Philip was feeling reckless. It was his job to be the level-headed one, and here he was proposing mutiny. It’d been months since he’d been just another carefree employee, expected to mock customers and to hate them for the smallest imaginary offenses. Nowadays, the Anarchist was the impatient one. Slate was the hater. Mike was the asshole. Beckie and Darcy were the secretly sly and devious ones. Rich was the irreverent one. But Philip was none of these. Philip was Mr. Responsibility. It was his job to contain all of the animosity that came with serving people who often took the concept of “serve” too literally.
 

But in spite of that, he was still Philip. He was still the same person he’d been those few months ago. Boss or not, he didn’t enjoy being mocked or played with. He didn’t like it when people treated him like a jerk or a fool. He didn’t like being a pawn in someone else’s stupid game.
 

But there was more to his current anger, and what it was had only dawned on him a few hours earlier, as he’d been preparing for the party.
 

Philip had been asked to do stupid things just like everyone else, sure. But he had also been told to require the
others
to do stupid things. He had gotten it from both ends, taking orders from Commandant Wally and passing those orders on to the hapless underlings. He had been both a fool and a stooge. And as much as Philip hated mindless conformity, he hated being an agent and an enforcer of mindless conformity even more.
 

“I think you’re proposing things that you’ve told me in the past not to do,” said the Anarchist. “Things that, I’ll add, I’d only been joking about.”
 

“I’m just feeding you back what you said to me the other day,” Philip said. “You wondered what these people would put up with. What I’m suggesting is really just an experiment to find out.”
 

Darcy smoked. Philip sipped his beer. The Anarchist, who was almost a teetotaler, sipped on a Diet Coke.
 

“I do like the idea of being able to play House of Pain again,” said Tracy. “‘Boom Shalock Lock Boom
.
’”

The Anarchist turned to Tracy. “‘Excuse me, senora. Are you a whore-uh, are you a lady? Is it Erica Boyer or Marsha Brady?’”

“And M.C. Hammer,” said Tracy. “I miss Hammer. ‘Please Hammer, don’t hurt ‘em.’ Which I’ll admit I never understood. Isn’t Hammer benevolent? It should be like, ‘Hey Hammer, thanks for helpin’ ‘em.’”

“And Vanilla Ice,” said the Anarchist.
 

Darcy shook her head, then interrupted Tracy and the Anarchist’s reverie. “Why are you two obsessing on the music?” she said.

“I’ve had enough of the
Lieutenant of Inishmore
and I now know in excruciating detail what I’d do If I Were a Rich Man,” he said. “You don’t understand complex souls like Tracy and me. Our rockstar lives have been atrophying and becoming significantly less awesome during the months we’ve been unable to rock out to the dope rhymes of Everlast.”
 

Darcy turned to look at Tracy.

Tracy nodded, then rapped, “I’m Irish but I’m not a leprechaun. If you want to fight then step up, and we’ll get it on.”

Beckie turned to Philip. “If we all stay, and none of us quit, and all of us refuse to do that stupid Wally stuff, it’ll be like an inverse strike. But just like a strike, we’d have to all do it.”
 

“No problem here,” said Mike.
 

Everyone looked around the rough circle at everyone else. One at a time, they all nodded.
 

“And the head-bongos?” Beckie added.

Philip lit a new cigarette. He pinched it between his thump and forefinger and held it from underneath, like a Nazi in a movie.
 

“There’s something you all should probably know,” he said. “The store’s closure is imminent. Like, imminent. The last email from Wally essentially said so. Well, technically it said that
if
we didn’t do a bunch of stupid shit, the place would close. But – and you can call me a skeptic – somehow I don’t think doing this latest round of stupid shit would make a difference. None of this adds up. We’ve almost tripled prices over the past few weeks, and we’re getting just about the same number of daily customers. So profits are up from where I’m standing, yet every time I report better profits, Wally tells me about something big on his end that offsets it. No matter how well we do, no matter how well this stupid, improbable shit actually works, it’s like paddling upstream three feet from Niagara Falls. I’d have to be stupid at this point to not see what’s actually happening.”

The Anarchist shrugged and shook his head.
 

“Bingham
wants
the place closed. He’s wanted it closed for months. At first, he wanted it closed because it was losing money, but Wally held him off. He must have finally decided that it’s time, though, and he’s probably committed. Maybe he has his eye on a nice little commercial rental he’ll buy once he liquidates Bingham’s. Maybe he’s even put down a deposit on it, and can’t back out now. So the place
has
to close, and all of this is just... just for show. It’s like some kind of idiotic game, with us in the middle. It’s not about profit and loss. It can’t be. The losses are too coincidental, and too big.”
 

“How long before it closes?” said Darcy.

“Wally is always vague. Maybe two weeks? The game has to be getting old for him. Eventually he’ll just drop the axe and end it.”
 

Beckie took a deep, slow breath. “I don’t want the place to close,” she said.

“I don’t think it can be prevented,” said Philip.
 

“Just to play the devil’s advocate,” said Mike, “is there
any
chance that we could stop the place from closing by continuing to listen to Wally, but that we’ll screw it up by going back to how things used to be?”

“... and beyond,” said Darcy.

“Yes, and beyond.”

The Anarchist set his Diet Coke down and looked Mike in the eye. “Are you seriously asking if we might be able to save the old homestead by slicing up and serving roadkill?”

Mike shrugged and adjusted his baseball cap. “Had to ask.”

Tracy scooted into an upright position and waited until he had everyone’s attention.
 

“So let me just get the tally,” he said. “We have a restaurant that’s going to close no matter what. We’re tired of being screwed with. We miss our terrible rap albums. We’d rather be fired than quit, but we can’t
all
be fired if we’re all doing the same things wrong. They’d just have to go ahead and close it, but that’s inevitable anyway. Is that about right?”