The Bialy Pimps (31 page)

And speaking of Ted, where was Ted? The Anarchist had seen him crossing the street just before heading to the murder scene.

Then he noticed that there was some imposter in Ted’s place. Trying to look like Ted, in belted khaki shorts and a hat, with a bag slung over his shoulder. Another mortal foe of the deli and its beloved regulars, perhaps.
 

“You’re not Army Ted,” said the Anarchist.

“This is the guy who watched me barf,” said Philip, still without shame.

“I’m Chuck Fink,” said the newcomer. “I’ve been wanting to see this place and talk to you guys.”

They were the only four people in the lobby. Between the barfing and the hose-soaking and the Rat-shitter incident, none of the three employees had any animosity or energy left to hate Chuck, who shared some sort of kinship with them simply by being present during Philip’s moment of triumph. All three were all on highs, and when you’re on a high, anyone nearby who isn’t a major douchebag is cool. And besides, Chuck didn’t seem like a customer. Customers didn’t introduce themselves and offer to shake hands.

Oh, right.

The Anarchist shook the hand that Chuck had been holding out, waiting. Tracy followed suit. Philip indicated Squeaky II, whose corpse he held up by the paper-towel-wrapped tail, as a reason for not shaking. Ordinarily, a bathroom-related rodent kill was something Philip would try to hide, but this was the new Bingham’s. All bets were off, and it didn’t seem to make a damn bit of difference as far as business was concerned.
 

“I was wondering if I could talk to you guys about your... your unique way of doing things,” Chuck said. “For the newspaper.”

Philip thought for a moment and shrugged. They all would (should, anyway) be fired or arrested soon for assault, extortion, sexual harassment, health code violations, insubordination, and not following the golden rule of The Customer is Always Right. What further harm could negative publicity possibly do? It might be fun to have five minutes of fame. Ten seconds of fame, whatever.
 

Sometimes, as it was said in high society, you just had to express your predilection for not giving a fuck. It would be something to stick on his wall and discuss with his mother when he was doing time, wedded to a cellmate named Rocco.

“All right,” said Philip. “What do you want to know?”

“Is it: asking to have a bagel cut in half?” Darcy was asking the Anarchist.

“No, but I really, really hate that. Especially when people do the karate chop along with it – the universal ‘cut in half’ gesture.”

“Is it playing with the rubber dinosaur puppet that sits on top of the little tip jar?”

“No.”

Darcy frowned and rubbed her chin, allowing her index finger to linger over the healed piercing in her lower lip. She was discovering, much to her dismay, that she was not very good at “Name That Peeve.”

“Is it asking where the straws are while standing right in front of them?” she asked.

“Nope,” replied the Anarchist with a smile.

She shrugged. “Okay, I give up.”

“My selected favorite pet peeve of the day is...” he said, drumrolling his fingers on the counter, “... asking what a bialy bagel is!”

“That’s not fair! That’s a legitimate question!” Darcy pouted, stomping her foot. She was disappointed. The Anarchist had told her that he would choose a pet peeve that he found especially irritating, and if she could guess it, he would cover her Saturday shift so that she could go home and have angry sex with Lint.

“It’s a
peeve
,” he told her. “It’s not supposed to make sense. I also get really agitated when people don’t order right away, and go sit with their friends first.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because as soon as I’m done making their food, I can forget about them. But if they hang out in the corner before ordering, then I can’t rest because I have unfinished business. I know they’ll come up eventually; I just want to get it out of the way ASAP.”

But Darcy didn’t really care. This situation was maddening. So much for her trip. So much for her few hours of loveless passion with ex-boyfriend Lint. And it was a bullshit peeve, anyway.
 

“How could you possibly be annoyed by someone asking what a bialy bagel is?” she said.

“It’s an unnecessary question.”

“How is it unnecessary?”

“Everybody knows what a bialy bagel is.”

“What about the people who don’t know what a bialy bagel is?”

The Anarchist opened his mouth and then allowed it to close. “I hadn’t thought of them,” he said.

It was at that exact moment that the girl at the front table – the one who had come in earlier and not ordered right away – walked up to the counter. After perusing the menu, she asked, “What’s a bialy bagel?”

Darcy glanced at the Anarchist, but he was holding it in, trying to behave.

“It’s a flat bagel that’s baked instead of boiled,” she told the girl. She picked up one of the browned discs and held it high, waving her hand across it like Vanna White. “It doesn’t have a hole. It has onions, poppy seeds, and all sorts of other toppings on it.”

 
“And cornmeal on the bottom,” the Anarchist added.

“And cornmeal on the bottom,” Darcy repeated. She patted the Anarchist.

“What is this?” the customer asked, picking up and playing with the dinosaur puppet. Then, before Darcy or the Anarchist could respond, she craned her neck up over the attractive bouquet of drinking straws (on the box:
Unwrapped drinking straws – for pure pleasure)
and continued, “And my friend wanted me to get her a straw. Where are they?”

The Anarchist could take it no more. He nodded to Bricker at the front door who, at the signal, sneaked up behind the girl. Within seconds, he had glued her to the empty filing cabinet that he had pushed up near the counter for just such an opportunity.
 

“Wha?” said the girl.

“Come with me, ma’am,” answered Bricker, slipping an industrial dolly under the cabinet and canting it back so that the girl became slung across it like a burlap sack.

“Was that really necessary?” Darcy asked Bricker as he returned to the counter.

“Was what necessary?” asked Kato, who was standing behind Bricker.

Bricker, who had not noticed Kato, spun around with his glue tube cocked and ready. Then he saw who it was and relaxed. Kato, like Roger, Ted, and a few others among the old regulars, was on the store’s Do Not Fuck With list.

Kato hadn’t been coming to Bingham’s as long as Roger or Ted, but he’d been coming in for long enough to have become one of Tracy’s favorites. Tracy had to argue hard for Kato’s inclusion on the DNFW list because Philip hated him. Kato always got a plain bagel with cream cheese. A
lot
of cream cheese. Kato would vulture intensely as his bagel was made and would coach the maker through the process, simultaneously encouraging their efforts and asking for more. “A little more,” he’d say. “Can you put a little more on there? Maybe a little more than that? And just a tad more on that side? Yeah. Thanks. Good job.” And normally this kind of behavior would irritate anyone enough to shit literal bricks, but somehow it didn’t burn coming from Kato, even for the Anarchist.
 

Both Tracy and the Anarchist went out of their way to indulge Kato’s cheese lust, testing to see how far it went. Both had taken to cleaving an inch-thick section off of the huge rectangular block to start, and still Kato asked for more. So they’d gone to an inch and a half, then two inches, and still he asked for more. One day Tracy had cleaved a full third off of the giant loaf of cream cheese and had pinched it between the two halves of a bagel. The creation stood over six inches high. Kato was delighted when he saw it, but then, upon further consideration, said, “You know what? Can you spread just a little more on that one side? Great job. Thanks.”

Tracy wasn’t sure why he liked Kato. Perhaps it was his long, wild, fried mane of hair. Perhaps it was the nervous and jittery way he shot past the front windows at all hours in tiny 1980s shorts, speedwalking somewhere urgently. Perhaps it was the way he always, always,
always
smelled like sunscreen. But probably, it was the way he nodded vigorously while simultaneously advancing his head forward every single time he said thanks.
 

“Nothing. It was nothing,” said the Anarchist, in answer to Kato’s question about what Bricker had felt was necessary. Kato had seen the entire thing. He’d been directly behind the girl as she’d peeved the Anarchist into ordering her gluing. He’d watched her rolled out on a filing cabinet. But nothing fazed the old regulars anymore. For one, Bingham’s had always been weird, and this was just another level of weird. But more importantly, they were all weird themselves.

Kato ordered his usual bagel. The Anarchist pulled out an unopened brick of cream cheese, removed the wrapper, smashed half of a bagel onto each end of it, and wrapped the entire thing in three sheets of foil. He handed the 18-ounce package to Kato.

“Thanks,” said Kato, nodding vigorously while advancing his head past the plane of the register.

“I called the TV station,” he said, tucking the massive cheese log under his arm. “You know, to complain about the advertisements they keep putting at the bottom of the screen?”
 

That had been a Tracy thing. Kato was good-naturedly indignant about the ads at the bottom of his TV screen, so Tracy had suggested he call the station. Just for the hell of it, to see if Kato would do it. Kato was like a pet to Tracy. Like most of the best regulars, he was a bit off, and you could sometimes convince him to do dumb things. Kato always wore a sweatband on his head, so one time Tracy had convinced him to wear a fedora during his daily walks instead because he said he’d heard they absorbed sweat even better than a headband. Kato had done it.

The Anarchist exchanged a few token words with Kato about the TV station, but inside he was feeling nostalgic. Kato had been here before the craziness and the added stupidity, and Kato would be here after the craziness, if there was an after. And what was more, Kato’s aroma of sunscreen was making him think wistfully of the beach, in the waning warmth of summer. He closed his eyes and imagined that he could hear the ocean waters crashing against the shore in rolling waves of foam. He could almost feel the water splashing his ankles.

“You’re standing in the pool,” Darcy informed him. He looked down and saw that he was knee deep in the “therapeutic spa” that Philip had brought in. It used to be a mammoth cow trough, but Philip had been using it recently to bathe behind the counter.

The Anarchist shook his leg off and pretended that he hadn’t noticed. He eyed Kato, wondering if he was somehow responsible for the pool snafu. But really, ending up in a cow trough for no reason was par for the course nowadays.

Nothing in the Anarchist’s world made sense anymore. None of it. The Anarchist had imagined that the initial skirmishes of the Bingham’s Uprising would clarify life for him by proving that there was, in fact, a limit to people’s stupidity and blind conformity. He’d imagined that testing those limits might – in a perverse and backward sort of way – help restore his faith in humanity. But instead, things had just gotten more and more bizarre.

And amidst the bizarre? Business was up. Way up. With OSU back in session and the fall season in bloom, the store was doing close to twice the business it had been doing last fall. People were not being driven away. They were being drawn in.

And that didn’t make a lick of sense. You could only throw up your hands and default to the unsatisfying conclusion that people were stupid.

Management, on the other hand, wasn’t stupid.

Philip had received an envelope from Wally the previous day which enclosed two slips of paper: a bonus check and a letter. The letter explained that because the deli had been doing so well, the staff had earned a reward for their hard work. It was to be spent however Philip and the rest of the employees desired. Philip himself was being given a raise.
 

Philip had stared at the letter long and hard, trying to glean just what was on Wally’s mind. In the letter, Wally had not mentioned rescinding the closure of the store. Why would he go from “imminent closure and you’d better comply or else” to “cheery good wishes and here’s a bonus”? The switch was downright bipolar. The letter was one Philip might have expected had none of the events of the past month ever occurred... and yet, they
had
occurred, hadn’t they? Reality was so hard to get a handle on these days.
 

Really, the letter sounded like the old Wally. The good Wally. And it was nice to hear from the good Wally, because the Wally of late had been an unreasonable prick. Philip had always liked Wally, and he hadn’t enjoyed loathing him over the past few months.
 

But so much about the letter didn’t make sense, just as Bingham’s success recently didn’t make sense. Where was Wally’s apology for all the stupid things he’d made them do, and all the jerky, unreasonable things he’d said in demanding that they do them? Where was his anger at Philip for ignoring his instructions, and then for ignoring Wally entirely?
 

It was a bit schizo, but really, the situation was probably difficult for Wally. Wally had only been the messenger. His demands to Philip and the crew had come from Bingham, and so Wally had ended up between a rock and a hard place. He probably didn’t
want
to be a dick to Philip, but his job was probably on the line, too.
 

Bingham had commanded Wally. Wally had commanded Philip. Philip had ignored Wally, and business had doubled. So were Wally and Bingham happy about the doubling, or mad about the insubordination? Was this a victory or a defeat?

The note and the check suggested that things had settled on a net positive, he decided. The deli was profitable, so the past was forgotten.

But then, Wally didn’t know
why
business had doubled, did he? He probably thought that it was due to an especially good football season, or to one of the competitors closing down. Anything but the real reason.