The Bialy Pimps (25 page)

The man’s face was red. He looked ready to explode. The situation had spiraled out of his control, and he didn’t like it.
 

“Who are you to talk to me like that?” he said. “I’m an office manager downtown. I do
real things
. I don’t just sit around and do nothing all day, drinking and partying, being lazy and pretending to ‘go to college.’ What exactly are
you
training for, for the rest of
your
life? Will you even graduate? Will it matter? Or is
this
your future, working in a deli forever? Don’t talk to
me
about being out of control. I must make ten times what you make. I’m the reason you’re able to stay open, you insolent little shit. If it weren’t for me and my money...”

“You haven’t paid us any money,” Philip reminded him. “You and your wife have both weaseled out of paying before, too. You’ve gone through three of our sandwiches, and that’s just your portion of the meal. You’re not the reason we make money. You’re the reason we’re going under.”

The man’s eyes burned. “What kind of people do you have running this place? I have never seen such insolent, disrespectful, unaccommodating...”

He stopped speaking when Philip tensed up, reared back, and smacked him across the face with the back of a metal spatula.

The fat man stared at Philip, slowly bringing three fingers to his cheek to touch a reddening spot. His wife’s eyes bugged out in shock. The anorexic daughter looked like she was going to faint.

“Wh...? Ah...?” the fat man mumbled.
 

There was a moment of tense silence. The Anarchist looked at Philip, who was still steely, still stoic. He hadn’t hit the man hard, and he hadn’t hit him in anger. He’d hit him to see what would happen.
 

Was this serious? Was this dire? It seemed very, very wrong, but still the Anarchist couldn’t decide.
 

Slate, on the other hand, had decided. Following Philip’s lead, he reached into a bin in the back of the make table and pulled out a hard-boiled egg, leaned forward, and smacked it against the fat man’s forehead. Most of the egg dropped to the floor immediately, but some of the yolk stuck in a yellow circle, like a Hindu dot.
 

The fat man gaped at him – not with anger, but with incredulity. His jaw was hanging open. He was outnumbered. Not in a fighting sense, but in a sanity sense. He didn’t need to be saved, but he could use a bit of confirmation from those in charge that this wasn’t, in fact, the way things were supposed to work, but no such confirmation came.

Sometimes, you’ve just gotta say, “What the fuck?”

The Anarchist grabbed half of a cucumber and shoved it into the man’s open mouth.

“Oogh,” the man said around the cucumber.
 

Then, unable to comprehend this startling turn of events, he slowly turned around and plodded out the door. His wife and daughter followed him, leaving the store eerily silent.

Philip felt a sudden chill run through him. He’d known what he was doing. It had been done in cold blood, if there could be such a thing when no actual blood was involved. He’d been provoked, but he’d been provoked many, many times before. Something – common sense, human decency, his paycheck – had always stopped him. There was a social contract in place, and he’d just violated it. And sure, some people didn’t understand the social contract. Some people robbed and raped and killed... and assaulted with spatulas... and there was even a word for those people. They were called sociopaths.

So this is what the fantasy feels like when it becomes reality,
he thought.
Is it sweet?

Not really. He’d probably be sued. Maybe arrested. Funny how that never happened when you were bullshitting through wouldn’t-it-be-great-if scenarios over a few beers at 1am.
 

He’d hit a man with a spatula. The others had smashed him with eggs, stuffed a cucumber in his mouth.

And the store was
filled
with witnesses.

He tried to think quickly, already regretting what had just happened. How could he salvage the situation? He opened his mouth, not knowing how to begin, but wanting to explain it away somehow, anyhow. He had to try.
 

“I...” he began, to the staring crowd.

The rest of what he said was lost in a tumult of sound. The customers – some standing, some sitting, some climbing onto the tables – were all applauding and whistling.

Tracy walked through the front door in the mid-afternoon, still smarting from the way Army Ted had eluded him earlier. Tracy had noticed Ted across campus in the morning and had decided on impulse to trail him. He had lost him immediately, as if Ted had known that he was being followed.

That Ted knew or cared that he was being followed was, of course, ridiculous.

Nonetheless, Ted seemed to shake everyone who tried to track him. Years ago, Carla had attempted to suss him out at the undergraduate library, where he seemed to spend the better part of most days, but each time she tried, he vanished into the stacks. Beckie had spotted him at the theater, but had lost him when he entered the men’s room and never reemerged. Philip had seen him jogging, but Ted vanished into thin air after rounding a corner. The corner offered no doorways through which Ted might have scrambled and had no windows through which Ted might have climbed. All that confronted Philip as he screeched to a halt were a full dozen of the mocking math tutor fliers, staring blandly at him from behind a sealed and immovable ventilation grate. Philip wondered where Ted had gone. He also wondered just how the hell the new math tutor fliers had gotten behind the ancient grate.
 

As Tracy entered Bingham’s, he saw Philip and Philip alone. There were many other people in the store, but Philip stood out because he was entirely immobile. He was standing behind the counter, very much in the way of the others, staring not so much at the front of the store as
through
it.

Philip was immobile because he was in another place. Specifically, he was seeing himself in jail. A few minutes ago, he had watched himself be sued and broken down to living out of dumpsters to survive. He had seen the fat man and a sleazy lawyer come into the deli, hand him a summons (he supposed that was the way it worked), and say smugly, “You have been served.” Then he had watched his arrest. It was conducted not by policemen but by Nazi Gestapo officers who goosestepped into the store wearing broad-hipped black pants and grabbed him by both arms. And now, he was seeing himself in jail. Philip Martin, assault. Philip Martin, guilty as charged by the Thought Police of believing that The Customer Was Not Always Right.

Tracy poked him. “Hey. What’s up?”

Philip blinked.

“Hey,” Tracy said again. He continued to poke.

“What?” Philip asked.

“What me? What
you?
You look like you’re going to pass out. Rough night last night? Not quite sober yet?”

“What?” he asked Tracy again.

“Are you all right?” He turned to Slate. “Is he all right?”

“I think he’s having trouble making the leap from fantasy to reality,” Slate decided after a contemplative moment. He set down the knife he had been holding and snapped his gloves with satisfaction. The rest of the crew had stopped wearing the gloves almost immediately following the fall party at Beckie’s, but Slate refused to give them up.

“What does that mean?” he said.
 

Philip had shaken some of the cobwebs from his head and had slumped against the back countertop. He sipped on a mammoth cup of Mountain Dew.

“We just enforced the new policy,” said Slate in a matter-of-fact tone.

“You don’t mean the
new
new policy, do you?” said Tracy. But of course, he knew it couldn’t be. That had just been drunk talk. That was just venting between friends. That wasn’t serious, and everyone knew it.

“As new as they come,” said Philip. He sounded remorseful, almost sad. Tracy didn’t like the tone at all.

“You mean you...”

“I hit a customer with a spatula,” he said. “Then, these two guys decorated him.”

Tracy was afraid to ask what “decorated” meant, but in spite of Philip’s dire state, he couldn’t suppress a bark of laughter.
 

But of course, he knew that it was no laughing matter. It was one thing to talk about turning dreams into reality, but it was entirely another thing to actually do it.
 

Tracy could manage only a whistle. He
couldn’t
believe it, but he believed it all right. Slate and the Anarchist looked amused, clearly unconcerned with what “decorating with malice” might mean. And why should they? If trouble came, it’d be a slap on the wrist for them. It’d be different for Philip. Philip was the manager. On top of the fact that he’d actually hit someone (which had to be worse than “decorating”) he would also, in a way, be responsible for the actions of the others. It was his deli. It was on his shoulders.

“Why don’t you come to the bar with me?” said Tracy, indicating the back door and the sleazy bar beyond it down the alley. “You could probably use a drink.” He looked around. “And I don’t think you’re helping much here, anyway,” he added.

Philip agreed, and they walked to the bar in silence. After five or ten quiet, meditative minutes, Tracy said, “Tell me what happened.”

Philip did.

Philip was the closest thing Bingham’s had to a principal, or a mom, or a boss, or any other form of killjoy authority figure. But given that Philip never showed up on time, sometimes showed up high and/or drunk, and abandoned the customers every Friday for a weekly deep-fry hedonismfest in the back room that he called “FryDay,” he wasn’t
much
of a killjoy. He was “responsible” at best... and really, that was a matter of semantics.
 

And so, with the sole bastion of restraint at Bingham’s barely coherent at the bar down the alley, the other employees began to test their limits. And why shouldn’t they? They had implied permission. Philip had done what he shouldn’t have done, so “shouldn’t do” became fair game for everyone else.
 

Get in while the getting’s good. Life’s too short, and they were invincible.
 

Carpe diem,
and all that.
 

Ray Sapperstein, known to Philip and a few of the others as Super Ass, alpha male of the Law School Posse, was flying solo today. This was unusual. Much like an individual member of the Borg collective, Ray was uncomfortable being cut off from other minds that he could direct and take credit for. Often, when he was on his own without his faithful crew by his side, he would make a witty remark and nobody would laugh. He’d make a comment about someone who was a big faggy poseur and nobody would murmur in agreement. It was like traveling through open space without a spacesuit. Without your protective bubble of controlled environment, you were totally exposed. It could suck from a validation standpoint.

Earlier, at the book store, Ray had told a clerk that that he didn’t want the second edition of a certain law ethics book because one of the authors had joined up with the firm of Rowen & McCoy. And yet they’d credited him with a book co-authorship! Could the clerk believe it? The clerk didn’t laugh as expected, and didn’t seem opposed to believing it.
 

Walking down High afterward, he’d overheard a car stereo with an improperly balanced equalizer and saw that it was one of those overcustomized jobs with the stupid nonfunctional spoiler. He’d been in a crowd waiting to cross 12
th
and had remarked about the substandard custom jobs being done these days in aftermarket shops for low-end cars. Yet nobody even turned to look at him, let alone express murmurs of agreement.
 

The day was annoying. His errands were boring. He’d just grab lunch and go home. Or better yet, he’d grab lunch and head back to the law library. Mark would probably be there, studying. Ray hadn’t used his quip about the ethics book author at Rowen & McCoy on anyone other than the bookstore clerk yet, and it was far too insightful to go wasted.
 

So he walked down to Bingham’s.
 

As he opened the door and began walking toward the counter, he noticed that the old tasteless, classless music had returned. He sighed.

Bingham’s had good food, but Ray knew better than to try to be witty and charming with the people there. It was a base restaurant. Ray had high-society tastes but a student’s budget, so he often had to settle. It wasn’t
too
bad. The employees were slow and talked like they were total idiots, but it was cheap and he was always able to get what he...

A clerk in a red shirt came running toward him holding what looked like a wet, brown wasps’ nest.
 

“Incoming!” the clerk yelled. The giant object was suddenly airborne. It landed at his feet with a
Thock!
and a spray of what looked like brownish blood.

The clerk in the red shirt dropped his head in disappointment and said, seemingly to Ray, “C’mon, Doris! Catch it!”

“Little help?” said a voice behind him. It was another employee that he hadn’t noticed. The one with the baseball cap. So this was the Doris who had missed the catch by at least a full yard.

Ray looked at the object at his feet. Whatever it was, it was oozing, and it had spattered his khakis. He looked up, totally baffled.

“Little help?” Baseball Cap repeated. He pointed down, indicating the thing on the black and white tiles, as if he thought Ray might not have noticed it. “With the roast beef? Little help?”

“Oh my God!” Ray exclaimed, melting into schoolgirl revulsion. “There’s a beef on the floor!”

“Little help?” the kid with the red shirt was now saying.

“There’s a
beef
...!” Ray spat. “On the
floor
!”

“I know,” said Baseball Cap in an expressionless voice. “I’m embarrassed. But who knows how far an uncut roast beef will fly? Who has a frame of reference for such things?”