The Bialy Pimps (3 page)

Every few weeks, someone would look in the wrong place at the wrong time and suddenly there he’d be, big and long and gross. The humans would shriek and he would turn to run, dragging his pink tail behind him. Like a good fish story, reports on him would slowly become more and more exaggerated until his already impressive length evolved from nine inches to a foot, to two feet, to the size of Dr. Stank, Philip’s cocker spaniel. Eventually, the frequency and severity of the sightings would reach a head and decisive action would be taken, but it was no use. They could kill him, but he’d just rise again. The Rat was immortal.

The humans had tried everything: rat traps, mouse traps, glue traps, poison. Exterminators had been called out and paid from Bingham’s’ stingy expense account on two or three separate occasions, and each time, the exterminators somehow came on a day of inactivity, with nests freshly moved and loose snacks undisturbed, with pellets laid out of sight and whole families hiding in cubbies that were all but invisible in the labyrinthine basement. Each new solution to the rat problem invited temporary relief, and each new morning brought disappointment with the discovery of The Rat’s night’s work.
 

The humans tried to be careful and to prevent The Rat from doing his work, but they were no match for his cunning.

The meats, cheeses, and produce were sealed up tightly in the refrigerators at night. The bananas, which had always been left out on the counter, were put away. The bagels were locked in the cooler and the soda machine was cleaned diligently. Every crumb was carefully swept up, and no trash was left in the trash cans. There was supposed to be no food left for The Rat to live on, but somehow something delicious always escaped the humans’ attention.

Tonight, using his immortal existence to the ultimate, The Rat sniffed at various spots and peed on others before discovering a discarded bagel piece that had become lodged in the drain beneath the soda machine.

Amateurs.

But... now there was an odor. Suddenly, he knew there was more. Much more. Somewhere...
 

He sniffed. Listened. Sniffed.
 

Yes. There was a strong scent coming from the back room. It smelled like food – and not some farthing, but a
feast
that would serve him for weeks to come.
 

He trotted to the back room, and onto the stainless steel surface of the triple sink. He raised his nose and sniffed the air.

The smell was coming from the garbage can. And whatever was in there was strong.

After taking another brief moment to enjoy the odor, The Rat dropped two more pellet-like souvenirs and dove the three feet to the bottom of the can, into bliss.

The bounty at the bottom of the can was indeed a feast. There was bread. There was roast beef. There was turkey. There was ham. There was mayo, and it was beginning to go just bad enough to be good.
 

He gorged himself into unconsciousness, and slept in the bottom of the can until morning.

Rich Berman noticed the missing bag in the back trash can immediately.
 

He walked to corner of the room, mildly annoyed that the closing crew hadn’t replaced the bag when they’d taken out the previous day’s trash, and grabbed a new bag out of the box above the sink. Walking back to the trash can, he shook the bag hard to open it. But when he went to replace the bag, he saw that the old bag was indeed there, at the bottom of the can.
 

He shrugged to nobody, looked at the open bag in his hand, and put it in the can anyway, over top of the old liner in the bottom. Let someone else deal with it.
 

Five minutes later, on a trip from the slicer back to the walk-in refrigerator, Rich noticed that the trash bag was again missing. And again, further investigation revealed that the bag was at the bottom of the can.
 

“What the tom fuck is this fuckery?” he asked the can.
 

The can, nonplussed, said nothing.

Rich reached down, snagged the liner with a finger, and pulled it back up. He had one end hooked over the can’s lip when something big shook in the can, and the liner again shot to the bottom.

Rich screamed. It was a very unmanly scream. Yet oddly, it wasn’t out of character for Rich, who was a Navy alum, stood five-foot-three, and had arms the size of pot roasts. He was, as he told his co-workers, “complex.” And this was true. He had the build of a bricklayer, but would occasionally dance gaily for the entertainment of his co-workers and customers. He always wore a hat and thick-lensed, black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses – a look you might call “nerdy” if you wanted your anus pulled up over the top of your head.

Rich looked back into the can, already knowing what he’d see. There was a mass at the bottom, around the size of a big hoagie, working the black liners around the can and scratching against the sides. He could even hear squeaking.
 

A normal person might have dumped the contents of the can into the dumpster, but Rich wasn’t a normal person. Rich was a fan of professional wrestling.

Where others believed in disposal, Rich believed in figure-four leg locks.
 

Where others believed in rat traps, Rich believed in suplexes.
 

Where others believed in hiring exterminators, Rich believed in Duane “The Rock” Johnson.

He puffed his chest out.
 

“You, sir, have dishonored this deli many times in the past,” he told the trash can in The Rock’s hectoring voice, “and this disrespect... cannot stand.”
 

Rich walked to the small cubbyhole containing the syrup boxes that fed the soda machine. It was always sticky over here, something which had not escaped The Rat’s rather limited attention. He brushed aside the clear plastic hoses suckling from the syrup boxes and rolled out one of the untapped, four-foot tanks of carbon dioxide. The effort made his arms strain. The tank weighed seventy pounds.

He hobbled over next to the trash can and, with a grunt, set down the massive tank. He put his hands on his hips.
 

He was in the ring. The lights were bright. He was wearing bikini briefs and was generously oiled. The crowd was cheering, jeering for vengeance. Rich cocked his head, pursed his lips in a defiant pout, and thrust his chin in the air.

“You can gather up all of the trash that you want to eat and all of your little shit pellets...” he said in the same slow, booming voice.
 

“... and you can cram it all together until it’s in a nice, tight little ball...”
 

He grabbed the cold metal cylinder and raised it, muscles twitching with effort, until it was suspended above the mouth of the trash can.

“...then you can TURN THAT SUM BITCH SIDEWAYS...”
 

Then, finishing The Rock’s trademark line, he bellowed, “...AND STICK IT... STRAIGHT UP... YOUR CANDY ASS!”

With this, he thrust the tank into the can. Halfway down, he wondered if the tank was the sort of thing you shouldn’t abuse, if it was the sort of thing that could explode. He had a quarter-second to realize he couldn’t stop it anyway, so he let himself enjoy the moment.
 

There was a satisfying
...kweeek!
as he brought the weight down. It happened at the exact same moment as what sounded like a steak being hit with a tenderizing mallet.
 

Then, after brushing his hands together, Rich bowed forward from the waist and flexed for the invisible masses.

The next day, The Rat returned. Nobody was surprised.

Captain Dipshit was not truly in a hurry, although just about anybody would have assumed from his manner that he was. Across Columbus proper from his usual haunts on campus, he stopped at a McDonald’s and bought a shake. He was not, being the world’s healthiest pot-smoking, glue-sniffing Generation Xer, accustomed to buying shakes, but he had heard in Biology 110 lecture today that shakes contained agarose, which came from seaweed. Seaweed, being a weed, was healthy.

“What kind of shake, sir?” asked the clerk who hated her job.
 

Captain Dipshit, loathe to make this sort of decision on his own, snapped impatiently, “Whatever’s healthiest.”

“What, sir?” asked the clerk, who called everyone, even women, “sir.”

“Whatever’s healthiest,” Captain Dipshit repeated with even more impatience.

The clerk thought of saying, “Shakes aren’t healthy, sir” but decided that the annoying man would leave sooner if she just picked for him. She knew that the chocolate shake mix bag had sprung open onto the floor this morning and that Rudy, the slow fry cook, had admirably but ill-advisedly mopped it up and poured it into the machine to save what he considered to be perfectly good shake mix. She hit the medium chocolate shake button and looked up at the nouveau-hippie with the stringy blonde ponytail. “Anything else, sir?”

Captain Dipshit replied that there would be nothing else – no time to say “thanks” though – and took his soiled shake and left.

Captain Dipshit did not radiate impatience as much as sweated it, breathed it, and in turn farted it. Everything was a rush, and he was always eager to move on to the next place so that he could be impatient there as quickly as possible. He was impatient for everything because he had an unwavering conviction that important people were in a hurry, and that if he was to become important himself, his route to it was through the magic of impatience.
 

Captain Dipshit had an excellent start in the world of impatience, being the son of a woman who was so impatient to have him that she squeezed him rudely into the world a full month early.
 

“There has to be something unhealthy about carrying this much weight around,” his mother said to his father one day twenty years prior to the day Captain Dipshit decided that shakes were probably healthy. His father nodded impatiently in agreement and then turned back to his checkbook and bills where he quickly pasted stamps on the completed pile and pulled a fresh pile toward him.

“Yes, but I don’t have time to talk about that right now. I need to pay these bills,” he explained to her. He reached across the desk for his pen and realized too late that he was already holding it in his hand, and that he had consequently cut a sharp line of ink across the unpaid bills in reaching for it. He reminded himself to slow down, and then reprimanded himself for wasting the valuable seconds that it took to remind himself of it.

Mrs. Dipshit frowned and resolved to get about this pregnancy business, which had already gone on entirely too long.
 

After he was born, Captain Dipshit was reared impatiently by his parents and became brilliant as a result. He was so brilliant, his mother decided, that it was entirely unnecessary to force the young Captain to endure the slow, dumb torture of the state school system. Unfortunately, after a few weeks of truancy, the state sent her a notice requiring either her son’s attendance in school or – and this was flat-out unnecesary – her submission of homeschooling paperwork. But her hand was forced, and so she drudged through the paperwork as the lesser of two evils.

The notion that homeschooling was the lesser of two evils was one that Mrs. Dipshit came to doubt almost as soon as she started into it. Had he attended traditional school, the state school system would indeed have forced the Captain to spend a full year on each of twelve grades (death to a quick mind such as his), but the red tape required for homeschooling was almost distracting enough to make up for its relative rapidity. Living in New York, where homeschooling was closely regulated and overseen, was torture. There were forms to fill out and books to buy. There was bureaucracy upon bureaucracy. Mrs. Dipshit spent a good deal of her time at the startup acquiring the information needed to fill out myriad forms.

“How old are you?” she yelled to the boy, who was rolling on the floor by the TV.

“I am four,” he said, tossing toys aside impatiently. He was actually six.

His mother wrote it down, and then sighed as she came across a stumper which would likely require a trip to her wallet. “Do you know your social security number?” she asked him.

“I poop in the potty,” the boy said. Fortunately, this was finally the case.

Even after filing all of the paperwork with the state of New York, the workload on her shoulders persisted. Oversight and testing was pure drudgery. During the first standardized test (overseen by her personally; she had a diploma certifying her to teach “Whatever” that she had made on her home computer), she gave her son a ballpoint pen and a bubble sheet and was pleasantly surprised at the way the Captain chewed on the pen and then discarded it, ignored the bubble sheet entirely, and moved on to swatting at the family cat. Her heart swelled with pride as she watched her son move impatiently from activity to activity and realized that at just past four/six years old, he was already an important person who could spare no time for such an unnecessary assessment of his abilities.
 

From that point on, the demands on her time only increased. As soon as young Captain Dipshit began taking the tests, the state took notice of his incredible aptitude and began to send him harder and harder tests. This required Mrs. Dipshit to spend more and more time online and at the local university in order to find the correct answers to the increasingly difficult questions. The more success the frazzled Mrs. Dipshit had in her quest for answers, the more notice was taken by the state of her son’s prodigious brilliance. One day a letter arrived in the Dipshits’ mailbox bearing the seal of the office of the governor. It read:

Dear Sir and Madam,

I am writing this letter to congratulate you on the achievements of your young son. I hope you realize what a rare talent he has, and how great an achievement it is for you, as parents, to have raised such a child. You have the right to be very proud of your son, and of yourselves.