The Bialy Pimps (26 page)

“It most certainly should
not
be there,” said Red Shirt, nodding at Ray. “But now it is. You see it yourself. What a sad state of affairs.”

“Pick it up!” Ray said. And all of a sudden, he realized that it
was
blood that had spattered his slacks, and felt nauseated.

“I’m afraid it’s out of my hands,” said Red Shirt. “In fact, it was supposed to end up in
his
hands...” He indicated Baseball Cap. “...but I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
 

“I have dreamed a dream,” said Baseball Cap, “but now that dream is gone for me.”
 

Ray was about to say something (not sure what, though) when a voice to his left said, “The avocado on this sandwich is brown and disgusting.”

The employees looked toward the supplicant. It was, of course, Frat Douche, who
always
complained about the avocados. Slate, above all others, hated Frat Douche. One day last month, Frat Douche walked in, in the afternoon, to complain about the avocado that had been on his sandwich that morning.
It was like a mushroom,
he had said.
Do you dislike mushrooms?
Slate had asked.
It was tough and completely inedible,
Frat Douche had said.
Did you eat it?
Slate had asked.
Yes
, Frat Douche had said, then had stomped his foot for no reason at all.
 

Do you want another sandwich?

No.
 

Do you want a refund?

No.
 

So what do you want?

I want to let you know how bad it was.

Every time after that, the staff showed him the avocados before he ordered, and every time, he complained afterward anyway.
 

It was like tire rubber. It was brown and squishy. It had spots in it.

Why did you get it if you thought it was going to be bad?

I didn’t know it was going to be bad.
 

But he should have known, because every time, his criticism was about visible attributes. Things you could see.
 

No matter how fresh the avocados were, he complained. He was like an avocado savant. A connoisseur. He could probably tell you about vintage. Age. Area of origin.
 

He never wanted a refund.

So what
do
you want?

I want to let you know how bad it was.

Slate, never one to miss an aggravating encounter with Frat Douche, had appeared behind the Anarchist and the felled roast beef.
 

“I’ll give you two choices,” Slate told him. “Either you can take the sandwich as it is and leave now, or I can give you a wedgie.”

Frat Douche looked up at Slate, thoroughly confused. Slate outweighed him by seventy pounds and could definitely enforce a wedgie, but that wasn’t the point. Why was “wedgie” entering the conversation in the first place? It didn’t make sense. More: it wasn’t
in the realm
of sense. Slate might as well have said, “You’re in a room, but
lorem ipsum
wrench and a waffle.”

“No,” he said, deciding to hit the reset button, “I’m saying that the
avocado
...
”

“I must warn you,” Slate told him, now looking down at his watch, “you have only ten seconds to decide. The default answer is the second one. Because you have had nothing but contempt for our precious avocados in the past, you should consider yourself fortunate that I am giving you the option.” Then, to the Anarchist, who, sporting an evil grin, had stationed himself behind the customer: “Maestro, ready yourself, if you please.”
 

The Anarchist hunkered down.

Frat Douche shook his head, helpless.

Slate was still looking at the watch on his cocked forearm. “You now have six seconds. Five. Four.”

“But... the avocado...”

“Three.”

“Surely you can’t...”

“Don’t call me Shirley,” said the Anarchist from behind him.

“One,” said Slate.
 

“... avocado...”

“Sorry. Time’s up.” Slate flipped a finger at the Anarchist, who thrust his hands into Frat Douche’s pants and pulled. After a satisfying five inches, there was a thick stop as the undergarment wedged itself firmly in the cleft of Frat Douche’s buttocks.
 

He let out a yelp.
 

He turned to the Anarchist, who shrugged.

Then, just as the fat man had done earlier, Frat Douche turned, winced, and ambled out the front door.

Ray Sapperstein, A.K.A. Super Ass, looked at the employees. He felt as if he were the one who had gotten an out-of-the-blue wedgie.
 

“Can we help you?” said Mike.
 

Ray instinctively pivoted and stuck his hands on his rear. No crotch-digging for him, thank you very much. Then he looked down at the sagging hunk of bleeding meat at his feet, which he had forgotten about.
 

Oh, right. That didn’t make a lot of sense either.

“Why don’t you clean off those tables over there?” the Anarchist suggested, handing him a rag and a bottle of purple solution.
 

Ah. Something that didn’t make sense. That was unusual.
 

Ray looked at the Anarchist, helpless. The Anarchist was smiling mildly.
 

“I’ll have ham and cheese on wheat,” said Ray. He was nowhere near the register and nobody was asking for his order, but it was all he could think of.

“I figure you owe us,” said the Anarchist, ignoring him. “You guys always pay for your food, but you don’t pay us to clean up your mess, and you always leave a huge one. Maybe if you tipped us, it might be different, but of course that doesn’t happen. So it’s only fair that you clean off all of the tables in the place, right? Yeah, you see what I mean.”

Mike reached behind the counter and grabbed a putty knife. He handed it to Ray. “Don’t forget the boogers underneath,” he said.
 

“And another thing you could do? See where the tables are all pushed together, like
all
of the tables in that whole area in one big blob? Of course you do; you and your buddies did that yesterday. Maybe you could put that all back.”

“While singing,” said Slate.

“In a falsetto,” said Mike. “And the song should be, ‘I feel pretty.’”
 

Ray was dumbfounded. Less than five minutes ago he’d been ready to grab lunch and run to the library for some witty put-downs, but now he stood in the middle of the tiled floor among maniacs, holding a dirty rag and a spray bottle, having witnessed a wedgie. He shifted his feet and felt himself kick the oozing beef on the floor. It was decidedly squishy.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Slate. “I’ll give you two choices. Either you can clean up a bit, or we can douse you with condiments. You have ten seconds to decide. And I feel obligated to warn you, the default choice is the condiment bath.” He bent his arm and looked at his watch.

“I have to go,” said Ray.

“Eight seconds.”

“I’ll... I’ll just...”

“Six seconds. Five.”

“I have to go,” he repeated. “I have a... a briefing.” He winced. It was the best he could manage under the strange circumstances.

“Two seconds. One.”

Fifteen minutes later, Ray was on the sidewalk outside Bingham’s. His sweater vest was speckled with roast beef drippings. His hands were filthy from cleaning, his fingernails tinged a strange purple. And his pride was bruised. From feeling pretty.

He decided to forget the library, and to forget Mark, and to forget making the most of the witty remark about the ethics book’s co-author.
 

Maybe he should call it a day and just head home. Yeah. That made the most sense.
 

What a strange day this was turning out to be.

After spending nearly two hours at the bar with Tracy, Philip went home. He ate a snack, had a fitful and unsettling nap, took a cold shower, and finally decided to return to Bingham’s to catch the evening shift and to face the music, if there was music to be faced.

When he walked in, he could tell that something was different. The deli appeared normal, but it smelled like rebellion. There was a smirk on every face, a glint in every eye.

“What?” he said, looking from one face to the other.

It was the Anarchist who answered. “That fat guy came back. He just left ten minutes ago.”
 

Philip cringed. “To take legal action? To file a police report?” he said.

The Anarchist shook his head side to side, still smiling.
 

“No,” he said. “To eat dinner.”

That night, the Anarchist had another dream.
 

He was on a sailboat in a blustery wind. It was a long boat with tall sails and with the spinnaker foolishly raised despite the blackening skies and the fierce and growing gale, in the middle of an endless ocean. Huge waves struck the sides of the boat and crashed over the rails. It was hard to see, hard to keep his balance.
 

The ship’s captain and the only other person aboard was Joe Pantaliano, dressed in the dark, slick, and somewhat shimmery suit he’d worn as Guido the Pimp in
Risky Business,
black dress shoes on his feet, a silver gun tucked into his belt. He was soaked, battered, beaten around by the waves. He couldn’t keep his footing either. A wave would strike the side and toss the boat and Joey Pants would go with it, falling to the deck and crashing into the rails, almost rolling over the side and into the surf but then recovering, standing back up, taking the wheel. He wasn’t wearing a life jacket. And he was howling with laughter.
 

To port, only a few miles distant, the clouds broke and there was sun on the water. To starboard was the blackest storm imaginable. The wind poured out of the storm like water from a waterfall, and Joey Pants laughed and laughed as he kept trying to steer into it.
 

Time of your motherfucking life, huh kid?
he kept shouting
 

As he yelled, over and over, the Anarchist could barely hear him over the noise of the waves and the howl of the wind. Joey Pants kept trying to fight to steer close to the wind, into the storm. As he did, crosswinds kept making the ship heel, hard, the rails in the water on the leeward side, the sails kissing the waves, the mast jerking up and down like the beat of a metronome.
 

The Anarchist yelled at the captain to steer downwind, to ride with the flow, to let the boat go where it wanted to go, to where things were safe and not so unpredictable. And the captain just kept laughing, kept yelling, kept turning into the roiling storm. Again and again both of them fell, neither of them wearing harnesses or life vests, fighting into the wind, fighting to stay upright, fighting to be heard.

The Anarchist kept shouting that if they went downwind, they’d be safe.
 

And Joey Pants kept saying that he knew, he knew, and that he totally agreed, and that he was doing his best to avoid that bullshit, and then he wrenched the wheel, trimmed the sails, and tried, yet again, to steer as close to upwind as the sails would let him, directly into the maw of the storm.
 

The Anarchist awoke with the sun in his eyes. The apartment was quiet. His heart was pounding, but not from fear. From exhilaration.
 

After the tympani in his chest had settled, he looked across the room with foot-dragging irritation. Somewhere, in the mountain of papers on his desk, there were several grad school applications that had been mocking him for weeks. He’d sworn that today – which he had completely off from both school and work – was the day he’d finally fill them out. Finally look through his options for next year. Finally take some proactive action. Finally pretend to be an adult.

Next year was still a question mark. He wasn’t sure what the next step would be, after he graduated and the free rides ended. But you didn’t find these things out by sitting on your hands. There were people in the world who got up, did only what was in front of them, and then went home and went to sleep so that they could repeat it the next day. You’d get trapped if you lived that way. You’d get trapped into a no man’s land of living by default if you... if you ignored your grad school applications until it was too late.
 

He willed himself to get up, to walk over and start filling the damn things out before he got distracted by something else.
 

Ugh. Fucking boring.

But what was he going to do, work in a deli forever? He sat up and steeled himself as if he were going to jump into a pool of ice water.
 

Let’s do this thing,
he told himself.

He’d spent too much time over the past few weeks hanging out and goofing off. Too much time pursuing hobbies. Too much time talking to people on the internet, and too damn much time writing short stories that never got published. Too much time at Bingham’s. Sure, Bingham’s paid the bills, but only insofar as a college student with parental support can be said to
need
to pay the bills. It wasn’t important. It was a distraction.

He tried to psych himself up.
 

C’mon. Grad school apps. Today! Hoo-rah!

Sufficiently psyched, he got up, walked past his desk, and gave the stack of paperwork the finger. Then he got dressed and climbed into his car to drive to Bingham’s.

Screw responsibility. The applications could wait another few days.
 

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

There’d be time for regrets later.

“People are stupid.”

“Fucking-A right. Amen.”

The Anarchist waved a dismissing hand. “No, no,” he told Philip shortly. “I know what you’re thinking, but that’s not it at all. I don’t mean, ‘There are a lot of people in the world, and they are unintelligent.’ I mean it as a philosophy. A way of existing. Plan your life around this: People are stupid. People are cows.”