The Bialy Pimps (38 page)

The only real problem with the new wave was that customers were beginning to look for the violence, and to greet it smilingly. This was a catch-22 in the eyes of the Anarchist. They had started this as a civil uprising of sorts, with the crew in control for a change and the idiot masses finally forced to be the supplicants. But as the store became more popular, the crew’s antics stopped being acts of control and started being entertainment. They’d started out as clerks, had become revolutionaries, and were becoming clerks again.
 

One day, a young man about the age and build of Frat Douche vultured over the counter and said to the Anarchist, “Ha-ha, now you’re going to have to push me back with that bar under the counter. Do it!”

This wasn’t shattering the status quo; it was only changing its shape. The intention had been to shake people out of their complacency, but all it was doing was giving them a new kind of complacency. Instead of whiling away their lives by getting up and going to work in the morning, driving the same stretch of road, getting a cup of coffee, and eating the BHT drying agent in their stereo cartons, people would while away their lives by getting up in the morning, getting a cup of coffee, and expecting to be slapped with a spatula.
 

So he asked Bricker to knock the man unconscious, strip him nude, wrap him in wax paper, and hang him upside-down like a cocoon from a tree in the Oval. Bricker reported later that the kid was very angry and agitated when he woke up, and that two separate dogs had humped his head while he hung there. This was a good thing to hear. If they could keep changing, keep dreaming up new ways to humiliate people, they wouldn’t have time to adapt. Satisfaction was killing these idiots, said the Anarchist at his elitist best, so as long as people were getting uncomfortable or angry, that meant the crew was doing its job.
 

After a few weeks, Bingham’s popularity had increased so much that the store was always filled to capacity, with very few slow periods. Slate found it intolerable, as he was constantly working and was never able to play Scrabble. Flexing his new assistant-managerial muscle, he took decisive action.

“Whenever I’m working,” he declared, “I want no customers in the store. Bricker, get some of your cronies to take food orders from people out front. You can take some of the registers out there if you want. Collect money from people and give them correct change, and then run the orders inside, to us. Put them in here.”

Bricker watched Slate. “Orders in the trashcan,” he confirmed.

“Right. Then go back out and take more orders. After a few hours, when people start to ask where their food is, tell them that it will be out shortly. Tell them that we’re usually more motivated if people tip. Then keep ringing up more bagels, take their money, and when the registers fill up, bring the drawers back here and dump them in
that
trashcan over there.”

“The one that you wrote ‘Tips’ on the front of?” Bricker asked Slate.

Slate nodded. “Right. Then, if after a few more hours people start to complain again, tell them to shut their pie holes. Literally. Say: ‘Shut your pie hole.’ Don’t tell them anything else. When they start getting really nuts, start punching people.”

Bricker nodded attentively.

“At five or six o’clock, tell them that you’re going to start letting people in the store. Come inside, and lock the door behind you. Have your men part a little and let people past the velvet rope. Let them all press up against the door. Then reach around the corner there... see it? The two buttons? Press the bottom one to lower the gate. I’d guess that you’ll capture around twenty or so people between the front of the store and the gate. I would also guess that a few people will get pinned under the gate. They’ll be fine; just let them struggle there for a while. Then, Rich, Darcy, Beckie, and I will run up the back steps and onto the roof, and we’re going to pour a bunch of barrels of spoiled mayonnaise down on them. Let them swim for a while, and then raise the gate and let them out.”

“Then what?”

“Then go back out and tell them that there has been a horrible mistake and that none of that was supposed to happen. Apologize and tell people that the doors will be opening soon. Then trap a new group with the gate and repeat the whole thing. Got it?”

Bricker nodded expressionlessly. “Got it.”

The plan was a brilliant success, since Slate’s take-their-money-and-don’t-deliver scheme demonstrated that there was no real need to expend effort in order to make income. Tracy said that it would never last, that people would eventually catch on and stop paying for food that was never going to come. He was wrong, though – every time, people paid and were surprised when they did not get their food. Every time, people pressed forward and were trapped between the gate and the door to be doused with condiments, like raiders of a castle being scalded with boiling oil. Every time, they were surprised.

After a few days, the routine became boring. Besides, the stock drums of mayo that Slate had ordered from the Army eventually ran dry, and so did similar vats of barbecue sauce and honey mustard. The Anarchist decided that although Slate’s plan was brilliant, it was wearing thin. To truly be a world-class asshole, he decided, one had to be face-to-face with one’s adversaries. He missed the personal contact.

Still, the most attractive feature of Slate’s plan was that it freed the employees from work and allowed them the carefree laziness of days gone by. The Anarchist decided that he would be damned if he was going to let customers deny him this, so he bumped Bricker’s salary up as security supervisor and asked him to follow a new tactic.

“Bricker,” he said, “I want you to start letting people back into the store. We’re going to sit behind the counter and watch TV on that big fifty-inch LCD screen that I had installed under the grill hood. We’ll also be playing Atari on the old TV, and Slate really wants to get back into Scrabble. We’ll be doing everything but waiting on the customers. You can just sort of hang back or glue people to the walls or hit them with bats if you want. We’ll handle everything initially, by which I mean that we are going to ignore everybody. They’ll probably get plenty mad. You can suggest to them that we might get back to work if they tip us.

“Let them clamber around for a while and then at the top of the hour, I want you and your meatheads to line up here, along the back wall, and plow everybody out the front door. Do it football style – pretend that they’re an offensive line trying to sack us, your quarterbacks. Then stand back and let them try to get back in and we’ll handle it from there, but here’s what else you can do to help us...”

The next day, hordes of customers swarmed the front counter and yelled and swore, shouting for the crew to get to work and make their food. Bricker told them that tipping might help, and immediately wallets opened and the tip jars filled to overflowing. While this was happening, most of the crew huddled around the grill hood, intently watching reruns of
Mork and Mindy
on the new TV. Slate and a few others stood over the Scrabble board, and the Anarchist and Nick played Ms. Pac-Man on Dungeonmaster Eric’s old Atari system.
 

When the top of the hour came, Bricker and his goons drove the customers through the door with the vigor and strength of a freight train. The eyes of the assaulted widened in surprise. Grunts issued from every person in the mass. Faces grew indignant.

When the huge bouncers stood aside, the horde rushed back in – not aggressively or at a run, but with the determination of shoppers at a clearance sale. The employees were ready, and jumped up with their weapons drawn. Most held riot guns loaded with knee-knockers. Some held paint guns, and some held pressure hoses. Rich, Smooth B, and Tracy wielded the gigantic slingshot-style “fruit cannon” that the Anarchist’s roommate had made out of elastic surgical tubing. Tracy and Smooth held the ends of the cannon while Rich cradled an orange in the stretched-back sling and then let go. There was an orange blur, and then a fine spray of juice and pulp as the fruit disintegrated on impact. He fired again and again, chuckling evilly.

It was a slaughter. People retreated through the narrow doorway and took up watchful stations outside, panting and breathless. Every once in a while a brave soul would try to reenter and would be pelted with a barrage of paint and water and fruit and rubber projectiles, doubling him up and sending him out crawling. Rather than leaving, he would compose himself and resume watch. Bricker would then walk around and tell people that tips might grease the wheels a bit, and they would contribute. After a brief but tense standoff, the employees would fall back into their earlier states of leisure and the cycle would repeat.
 

Belligerence increased with every cycle of influx and forced efflux and by the end of the week, people were being thrown through windows. Employees glowed and customers swore. Displaced customers always vowed retribution and revenge, but they always came back.

Business increased, notoriety surged, and day by day, the money continued to roll in. Even Wally was smiling. Thanks to consumer idiocy, the sky was the limit.

Trip would have been so proud.

The Anarchist pressed his lips together at the thought, repressing a nostalgic frown. Trip, with his ratty blonde ponytail and his Doc Martens boots. Trip, who had executed Squeaky and displayed his corpse in William’s office. Trip, who had carved a ten-pound chunk off of the huge, erroneously delivered cheese brick, then had eaten it in one sitting because he couldn’t fit it in his fridge.

Standing before the completed Face-Kicking Machine, the Anarchist missed Trip more than ever. This was a dream that had been so very long in coming. The progress so far at Bingham’s had been amazing, but this was a triumph of idiotic proportions. The Face-Kicking Machine had been so abstract, so far-fetched, so unbelievably stupid, a long-lost fantasy so odd that a thinking person could rest assured that it would never – nay,
should
never – see the light of day.
 

The Face-Kicking Machine!
he thought, still incredulous.
Here! Made real!
He could hardly believe it. He wished that Trip could be here to share this moment with him.

Now, the time had come for its debut.

“You’re the first customer of the day,” the Anarchist told a stocky boy with his baseball cap on backward. “Our policy is that the first customer of the day has to submit to the Face-Kicking Machine.”
 

“Huh?” said the customer.

The Anarchist gestured to the tangled mass of metal pipes and smiled.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
 

“First customer must submit to the Face-Kicking Machine. That’s the rule.”

Face-Kicking Machine lore was absolutely full of pointless, ritualistic rules. The first customer has to submit to the Face-Kicking Machine. Any customer wearing red has to submit to the Face-Kicking Machine. Anyone who uses the word “moist” or “panties” has to submit to the Face-Kicking Machine. Why? Because it was the rule. There was no other reason besides the rule. The Face-Kicking Machine would have been right at home working a government job.

The Anarchist once asked Trip what would happen if someone refused to submit. Trip had an answer right away: If you refused to submit to the Face-Kicking Machine, you’d have to submit to the Face-Kicking machine. And if you refused
that
, you’d be required to submit to the Face-Kicking Machine. Nobody would want that kind of escalation, so compliance would be nearly 100%. But this was all theoretical. It hadn’t been tried until now.
 

The First Customer of the Day looked at the machine and then back at the Anarchist. He shook his head in confusion.

“Go on,” the Anarchist told him. “Just follow the instructions on the machine. It’s self-explanatory, really.”

The First Customer of the Day stalked over to the machine. It was in the corner where the front counter met the wall, near Swannie’s nest. He looked at the placard above the metal mass, which read
Face-Kicking Machine.
He looked down at the instruction card and began reading.

“What is this thing supposed to do?” he asked.

“What would you expect a ‘Shoe-Polishing Machine’ to do?”
 

“Polish my shoes?”

The Anarchist nodded. “You see what I’m saying.”

The customer had finished scanning the instruction card and was looking the machine over, searching for the lever. You had to understand the machine before using it, so that you’d be able to use it properly. The machine had no operator. It was always operated by the person who would receive its boot. The point of the Face-Kicking Machine was not to kick someone in the face. The point was to allow a person to kick
himself
in the face. It made possible that which was physically awkward at best.

Neither the Anarchist nor Trip could have explained how the idea for the Face-Kicking Machine came about. In all likelihood, the contraption had probably been Trip’s idea first. Of the two sadistic, idiotic young men, Trip had been the more sadistic and idiotic.
 

The idea was simple: A frame. A boot on a spring-loaded arm. A manual lever as the trigger. You operated the thing like you operated a slot machine, except that the only jackpot you were likely to get out of a round with the Face-Kicking Machine was a bloody nose. And by the way, one was never
subjected to
the face-kicking machine. One was forced to
subject
oneself
to it. It had the understated brilliance of medieval torture.
 

“Shit!” the First Customer of the Day shouted after trying the contraption. He was clutching his nose in agony, treadmarks from the boot’s sole crisscrossed across his cheeks and forehead. Trickles of blood leaked through his fingers and pattered onto the floor.