The Bialy Pimps (28 page)

“Aren’t they?”

They exchanged a glance. They weren’t, were they?

Philip finished his beer and set it down with finality. “Whatever,” he said. “The way I see it, if people are stupid enough to eat BHT and pour hot coffee on themselves and then be surprised that it’s hot, if they’re stupid enough to shove their hands down garbage disposals and spend sweepstakes money before it never arrives because Ed McMahon says that they may have already won, if people are dumbshit enough to lay in the middle of the road because they saw it in a movie, then they’ve got it coming.”

“Just let people try to be sheep around us,” the Anarchist said. “Just let them try it. We’ll ring their bell.”

“Fucking-A.”

“Fucking-A right.” What was wrong with a little humiliation and mocking? Nobody was really getting hurt. This was their blaze of glory. This was the crew delivering some last-minute comeuppance for every dropped drink that someone had left on the floor until it’d attracted ants, every cigarette they’ve found snuffed on a table, every unfounded and indignant complaint they’d endured, every demand they’d been given. What goes around comes around.
 

And sure, it was selfish justification, but what the fuck. This was all about choice. They could choose to be dicks. The customers, for their part, could choose to leave. And of course they would, probably well before Bingham finally dropped the axe and closed the doors for good.

Yes, the Anarchist thought. This was all very fucking-A right indeed.

The reprieve lasted longer than anyone anticipated. Wally had said that the deli’s closure was more imminent than imminent (and had emailed several reminders about this recently, and Philip had replied to each with funny photos of cats), but the imminent closure never came. Every morning, Philip expected to arrive and find the doors locked. Every afternoon, Philip expected Wally to walk in and end it. Every day, Philip expected a certified letter in the mail. But word never came.

And so the experiment continued.

The next few weeks were a blur. The new policy spread like wildfire, ignited cautiously at first, then more aggressively as time wore on. Those who had attended the fateful party on Philip’s apartment deck were the first to institute it. Later, as they warmed up to the idea, the others followed. It was a revolution.

Bricker, for his part, was all too happy to assist. Bricker had never worked at Bingham’s, but, as the Anarchist pointed out, he was a towering son of a bitch. Others agreed, and so Bricker was made the Bingham’s bouncer. If anybody complained about the way they were being treated, it was Bricker’s job to throw them out in the most insulting way possible. Philip had encouraged this. It was, however, Bricker’s own idea to begin gluing things to people.

Ordinarily, the thought of emerging from a place of business –
any
place of business – with a foreign object adhered to one’s self or wardrobe was unanticipated and novel. This was the hook. Bricker, showing his intellectual side in addition to his dumb jock side, adapted with unbridled creativity to the new project. He loved to abuse people, and had found a way to get Ohio State to pay him to do just that. The Bingham’s Revolution (or, as he liked to call it in a fit of scholarly haughtiness, the Bingham’s Civil Uprising) offered him an opportunity to express his assholishness in ways that he had never dreamed of before. He did not get paid for his position as bouncer. He was simply a man who had passion for his work.

As compensation, Philip withdrew petty cash from the register (what the hell, might as well add misappropriation to the list of charges) and authorized the purchase of a uniform for Bricker. The uniform consisted of Bricker’s own black dress pants and the sanctioned top – a black, tight-fitting T-shirt which read in forbidding blocky white type: FUCK WIT ME AND GET YOSEF KILLT. Philip had bought the shirt from an inner-city garage sale. It was two sizes too small.
 

Bricker took his new job very seriously. He would stand stiffly at the left side of the doorframe, his giant arms (made more giant by the too-small sleeves of his uniform shirt) crossed across his barrel chest, feet planted like iron girders and his eyes staring straight ahead. His short hair made him look military. He was a black specter, a towering presence at the entrance that suggested that once inside Bingham’s, you’d best watch that you didn’t GET YOSEF KILLT. Bricker kept his black attire immaculate and free of lint because he felt that he looked more menacing that way, like a mysterious, short-sleeved Man in Black. On the heels of this thought, he requested and received additional register funds to purchase a $95 pair of Ray-Bans. His stony, expressionless eyes concealed behind the opaque lenses, he became even more of an intimidating super-asshole. For Tom Brickhouse, it was the perfect assignment.

Bricker used his shadowy image to the hilt. His presence was never acknowledged by the Bingham’s staff in any way, and customers noticed uneasily that the guard kept odd, irregular hours. They wondered amongst themselves if the giant man was affiliated with the deli at all. If not, if he was not bound by some legal covenant to the establishment, then he might be a lunatic. Columbus had plenty of those.
 

Bricker played on all of this. From time to time, simply because he could do it, he would ask people for money – five dollars, ten dollars, twenty. He never demanded it (that might have been construed as robbery) but instead simply asked, “Can I have some money?” He usually got it, and spent it on small plastic figurines of Smurfs, which he used to decorate his post outside the restaurant.

The gluing had come totally out of the blue. One random Tuesday, Bricker had marched through the door in full intimidator regalia holding a tube of bathroom epoxy and had stated simply: “Today, some bitches are gettin’ glued.”

And glued they got. The first victim was a loud, skinny woman with a buzz cut who was angry because the staff was being insolent. She said, “I want to speak to the manager!” in a gruff voice. It was Bricker who responded. He walked up behind her and in several quick, deft movements, picked up a fistful of stray M&M’s from the candy machine catch trays, dotted each with epoxy, and pushed them firmly into the pinkness of her scalp, visible and leering beneath her crew cut. The woman spun and, not to be intimidated by the bouncer, began to yell about her rights into the space between his nipples. Bricker answered by gluing a disposable aluminum ashtray to her forehead, and then shuttling her out the front door. As they passed the entrance, Bricker silently directed her attention to a small sign that had been tacked to the red door frame:
 

Notice

By entering this establishment, the consumer waives any and all responsibility on the part of the staff or management for inconvenience, incurred expense, or injury caused by thrown food or by various glues.

Thank you for your cooperation

– Mgr

The gluing became more and more creative as the days drew into weeks. Fliers, mints, action figures – all were fair game. Soon, Bricker began bringing objects from home to add variety. He was immensely satisfied in his work, and a genius at it.

Realizing that their time was greater than anticipated, Philip passed around word that this wasn’t a free-for-all. There was to be order here. First and foremost, their jobs as employees of Bingham’s was to insult the customer. Yes, they made food. Yes, they adhered things to people and people to walls. But these people were still customers, dammit, and at Bingham’s, rule number one was “The customer is always mocked.”

Philip’s interpretation of this rule was to cut two large circles in the seat of his jeans and boxers and to display his buttocks proudly. Each day he stood before a mirror with his ample hindquarters facing it, bent back like a pretzel with a lipstick and a grin, and wrote messages on his hair-strewn cheeks. The first day, he had opted for simple: HI on the left cheek and THERE on the right. The next day it was ASS MAN, then GIMMIE KISS, then the long-winded I SCRATCH ‘EM BEFORE I MAKE YOUR FOOD, and then finally PART THE WAVES, which Rich not-so-secretly found more ominous than funny.
 

Philip often wore a T-shirt with the open-cheeked pants that he had bought at the same time as he had purchased Bricker’s uniform. It displayed a mall booth silkscreen photo of an anonymous, toothily-grinning old woman in the center of many cartoon firecrackers. Rockets were splitting open around her in yellow starburst explosions, spilling their confetti guts. Above the woman (who hadn’t bothered to remove either her ostentatious flowered hat or her leopard-print purse before posing for the photo) was the attribution: TOO HOT TO HANDLE.
 

The Anarchist took the new Bingham’s imperative as a license to indulge his love of nonsense. One day, he decided to adopt a different random phrase each hour as the only thing he would say, no matter how agitated customers became with him.

“Have you seen the bugles blow in Tipperary at twilight?” he said for one stretch.
 

Dicky Kulane, who had infiltrated the deli in an identity-concealing wig and glasses in order to determine why Philip was suddenly refusing to send Wally anything other than photos of cats, was particularly confused and annoyed by this phrase. He’d had an embarrassing childhood incident involving the World War I song “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” that he didn’t like to talk about, and suspected that this kid saying it to him now might be a deliberate affront.

“What the hell did you just say to me?” he said, glaring.

“Have you,” the Anarchist repeated patiently, enunciating, “seen the bugles blow in Tipperary at twilight?”

But it made no sense. And looking around his surroundings, he realized that none of what he saw made sense. A few weeks ago, Philip’s angry remonstrations to Wally had ended and he’d gone silent. Then Philip had become flip, and finally he’d begun sending cats. Paul visited Bingham’s for him, but what Paul reported back was nonsense. The place had gone crazy? The employees were somehow assaulting people? But that was ridiculous. The place should be demoralized. Angry. Closing its doors. And Dicky should be gloating. Smiling. Reaping the spoils. None of that was happening, and he didn’t understand why. He had to see it for himself.
 

“I need to see the manager,” he said, groping for a reason. “I want to talk to him about... running some advertisements.”
 

The Anarchist smiled and swung an arm toward Philip as if on a hinge. “Have you seen the bugles blow in Tipperary at twilight?” he said.

When Dicky turned, he found himself face-to-face with his nemesis.
 

Philip should have been broken. Pathetic. Emasculated and beaten. And it was going to be so sweet, Dicky had thought before leaving 3B. He hated Philip. Philip, who personified everything he hated about Bingham’s – the lazy, arrogant, good-for-nothing attitude, the disrespect, the contempt for the needs of others.
 

Today, Philip was wearing Bermuda shorts and a third garage sale shirt which proudly proclaimed: I THE JIGGY MOTHERFUCKER, and the face that greeted Dicky’s stare was not defeated or beaten. It was joyous.
 

Dicky’s disguise was odd but definitely opaque; there was no way Philip knew who he was. Not that he’d care or probably even remember, Dicky thought with irritation.

“Are you the person who runs this... this shithole?” he said.
 

Philip pointed to the legend on his shirt. “I is.”

Before Dicky could say more, there was a loud, staccato racket from the toaster, through which the Anarchist had just run a string of Chinese fireworks. The toaster was consumed in fire. Bursts of flame belched forth from the opening in its front, a spray of fine paper bits on its exhaled breath. Black smoke signaled that the toaster’s innards had taken a serious hit and that it would require medical attention, stat.
 

“Have you seen the bugles blow in Tipperary at twilight?” the Anarchist asked the toaster in a taunting voice. He had always hated the machine, which broke monthly. Now it would never break again.

Dicky’s brief Bingham’s tour concluded with a monstrous man in black gluing an empty pizza box to his back.

After a week and a half of operation under the new policy, Philip was shocked beyond belief that the influx of customers had not decreased. This was especially baffling because most of Bingham’s business came from repeat customers, not from random passersby. He had seen a clear course of events in his head on the evening following his spatula-slap encounter with the fat man. The crew, blaze-of-glorying, would indulge their unrestrained animal natures for a brief period, saying the things that they had always wanted to say and doing the things that they had always wanted to do. Then, within a week, the regulars would stop coming back and would likely begin to call the police and file lawsuits. Upper management or someone (anyone) in a suitable position of authority would come in and shut them down. Then, after having gone out with a bang, the splendid saga of Bingham’s would be over. Most likely, they would hurt legally for it. This last didn’t bother Philip as much as he thought it should have. He was young, and the damage was already done. So in for a penny, in for a pound.

But none of that had happened. Business had been steady. No matter how many people were epoxied to their seats or directed to lick the windows clean, no matter how many were told off, they kept coming back. And sure, some never came back, but those who did come back brought enough friends to make up for it.

One day, at the end of the night, when the register was reset and the daily totals were tallied, Philip found that the last ten days had brought an average of around $200 extra per day. That was not a lot, and was likely due to a burst of unseasonably summery weather – something which tended always to increase business. Still, it was curious...