The Bialy Pimps (40 page)

Beckie wondered if Ted had gotten the “tango” idea from the movie
True Lies.
She mentioned this strange coincidence to him.

Ted told her that Hey! That movie was based on him! Hee-hee! The story had been leaked to the press and nobody bought it, but some Hollywood guys had decided that it would be a good idea for a movie. Yes, he recalled with a fond glint in his eye, he had certainly killed those terrorists good. But, he explained, they got it wrong. Remember that scene where the terrorist jumps from one building to the next on a motorcycle? And Arnold Schwarzenegger, in pursuit on horseback, can’t get his horse to make the jump? Well, Ted said slyly, he had made that horse jump. He and the horse had landed in the rooftop pool and Ted had caught the terrorist. He had been forced to kill him with a plastic fork and knife. Hee-hee!

Beckie couldn’t take it anymore. She had palavered with the Anarchist and the pair had decided that although Ted’s stories had always been outrageous, they had definitely taken a turn for the worse. Just who did Ted think he was? And did he think that
they
were as stupid as their customers? Beckie, ever sensitive to such an accusation, was indignant. Still, Ted told his stories with such conviction and filled them with so much mundane trivia that she couldn’t help but wonder. Certainly a back-from-the-dead centenarian ex-FBI director was not in cahoots with Ted to save their deli, and certainly Ted had not shared a set of bedsheets with supermodels and actresses. But, some of it might be true. Beckie’s dormant quest, which had taken a back seat to the recent uproarious developments, reasserted itself with a toothy insistency. She had gone at it with gusto.

Her initial investigations had been unsuccessful, owing perhaps to Ted’s uncanny wiliness or perhaps to her own espionage inexperience. She had lost him over a dozen times just as had others (such as Tracy) who had tried to tail him. He seemed to disappear around corners and enter rooms from which he never emerged. He seemed to slip through cracks and fly into the open sky. He definitely
moved
like a secret agent, Beckie thought.

There I go again,
she thought to herself. Ted didn’t move like a secret agent. He moved like a normal guy. Ted was working on her now, without even being present.
 

What
was
it about Ted? Why did they even give him credit enough to pursue him? They had dismissed other whackos for less. Why was Ted so compelling?

She let the question drop. It didn’t matter. Ted
was
compelling, regardless of how or why. He was like a parasite in the mind, working himself through her cerebrum. So she had persisted and finally, after so many failures and disappointments, she had struck the jackpot.

Ted had left the theater with a woman who was not skinny and did not have a French accent. He did call her “Yvette,” though. So this was the French divorce lawyer wife? After watching them interact, Beckie doubted if Yvette knew what the Bill of Rights was, let alone the Ohio divorce statutes.
 

The pair had walked out of the theater and had climbed into a maroon station wagon which was well past its prime. They had driven to the unassuming white house at which Beckie was now on stakeout. Was this the big house in German Village? Was the car that they came in one of Ted’s many sportscars? Was the yacht parked out back?

As Beckie looked on, Ted and his wife watched television and ate a late dinner. When they were done, they went upstairs to bed. At least one thing was true, she realized as the couple walked up the stairs. There was, on the wall, a large U.S. Army flag.
 

Beckie was disappointed. Ted’s life was so pathetic that it made her sad. She wished she had never investigated, or at least that she had never succeeded. Of course Ted was lying, but seeing proof was unsettling and melancholy. She felt sorry for him, and at the same time felt pity – the kind of pity that made her feel above him in a way she did not wish to be.
 

She had blown it. Liar or not, Ted was a friend. Beckie had unleveled the playing field, and now she would never be able to look at him in the same way again. He was just a man. He was living the unspectacular life.
 

She had kind of hoped that Ted would win, that he would elude her forever or that some of what he said would turn out to be true. She wanted to keep the mystery alive. She wanted to admire him in the I-can’t-believe-what-this-lying-dirty-old-man-is-saying way in which she was accustomed. She would no longer be able to respect him. Neither would Tracy or the Anarchist, once she told them. Maybe she
shouldn’t
tell them.
 

Of course she should, she decided. They had a right to know the truth, no matter how ugly it was.

She turned around and weaved her way out of the bushes. On her way back to her car, she glanced at the name on the mailbox: HANDY. The Anarchist had been close then, when he had taken his glimpse of Ted’s license.

Beckie walked slowly away from the home of Ted and Yvette Handy, her head down and heavy. It was no fun unmasking the Lone Ranger after all.

The day that the agent came to visit was a busy one. The demands of fame were insistent. Besides, a bevy of minor tortures were being tried out, a handful of deliveries were coming in, and in the eyes of the Anarchist and Beckie, Slate’s head was growing.

“It’s too big for his fucking hat,” Beckie said disdainfully of the gargantuan head.

Slate had been given his promotion not two weeks ago, and already he was hiding in Philip’s office all of the time and counting the money. The money did not need to be counted. Philip had counted it the night before, and even if he hadn’t, he would count it when he came in today. Philip was getting much better with punctuality, in fact, and people were saying that he had even started eating better. Was Fat Lazy Philip – was William’s “Toby” – a thing of the past? Certainly not, hoped the Anarchist.

Beckie was fuming. The line was out the door as always, and Slate was not helping. The fact that she had no real obligation to work either at this point was lost on her. She had been at Bingham’s longer than Slate. So had the Anarchist. Who was Slate to tell them what to do?

“The slicing thing has gotten worse, too,” commented the Anarchist.

Beckie sneered. Slate had some sort of sick love affair going on with the slicer, and had been romancing it since day one. Even before the uprising, Slate had carried on with his whirring steel confidant.

Even now, the Anarchist could see the slicer winking at him. It had a razor sharp cutting blade and a thirst for human blood just like the industrial laundry machine in the Stephen King story “The Mangler.” At least three or four times a year, it would claim an unsuspecting victim who would bleed profusely. All attempts to close the wound were inevitably futile for at least twenty minutes or more. All you could do was to contain the blood in a bucket and hope to clot before going unconscious. The thing seemed to be diamond edged, and coated with a powerful anti-coagulant.

The Anarchist shuddered. It was looking at him, all right. Perhaps Slate was in league with it, spending the long, languishing mornings caressing it with meat and cheese and plotting his takeover. Maybe he whispered to it, stroking its duller surfaces sexually and whispering seductively into its churning mechanical ear. Had it ever cut Slate? The Anarchist thought not. It had cut him, and it had cut Beckie, and it had cut scores of others. But it had never cut Slate.

Beckie motioned to Bricker to kick all of the customers out of the store. She was in no mood to work.
 

“This is bullshit,” she said to the Anarchist. “
I
can get the slicing done by ten. Slate
used
to take until noon, like he was stretching it out on purpose so that he didn’t have to work. Now he’s stretching it out until one or two in the afternoon.” She looked at the slicer hatefully, then warily.
 

The Anarchist nodded. Yes, Slate had really become Mr. Assistant Fucking Manager. From time to time, during a rush, he would peek out from the back and the workers would relax, seeing that Slate had finished whatever useless and redundant duty was upon him in the office and that he was coming out to help make food. Then he would disappear from whence he came without a word.

Beckie was still looking at the slicer.
 

The Anarchist nodded to the computer-generated flier above the slicer which showed a badly-drawn caricature holding up a hand with missing fingers. It read:
Cleaning the slicer? Use the glove!

“I wonder what happened to the glove,” he said. He had his suspicions, of course. The glove, a heavy silver mesh of chain mail that looked like an accessory to a suit of armor, protected the hand that cleaned the slicer from its bloodthirsty blade. Slate had obviously hidden it to protect his metal lover.

“Dunno,” was Beckie’s response.

The Anarchist headed off to class. Just over an hour later he came back, swearing about the class’s asshole TA who had graded his essay inappropriately. He’d gotten high marks for content, but she’d made style comments about his writing, declaring certain sentences to be run-ons and others to be “wordy.” In the opinion of the Anarchist, who was the best writer he knew, the TA should keep her fucking writing style advice to her fucking self.
 

Never one to miss a chance to prod the Anarchist when he was angry, Philip asked how the grad school applications were coming along. The Anarchist said that he hadn’t gotten around to them. He had, however, written several more brilliant pieces of creative writing that he’d like to shove down the whore TA’s throat.

The Anarchist was still stewing when the agent came in. As a result, he was short with her.

“I’m Angela Finney,” she said with a smile and an offered hand. “I represent...”

“Hey!” he shouted, squirting her in the face with spicy mustard.

The agent smiled, nonplused. “Ha ha ha. That’s your act, isn’t it? Very funny. Anyway, our firm would like to represent you for...”

“Woo!” the Anarchist hooted. He pulled a fire extinguisher off of the back counter and sprayed her with it.
 

She hopped around in the freezing spray and made involuntary sounds of discomfort. When she recovered, she straightened the lapels of her neat red and black suitcoat and smiled again through a light frosting of icy white condensation. “Ha ha,” she said, chucking the Anarchist lightly on the shoulder. “You kids are all right.”

His efforts frustrated, the Anarchist turned the agent over to Philip.
 

Angela Finney was a talent agent, and had seen the
60 Minutes
interview. She said that she believed they had MTV-style appeal. The youth of America, she said, was dying for such rebellious idols. She asked them if they had any talents among them, no matter how trivial, that they thought could be sold to pop culture. It would be worth a lot of money if they had.

After Tracy made a suggestion (one which took him all of three seconds to offer), the agent shrieked with glee and began to ramble on about what a perfect idea it was. It had more than MTV appeal, she said. It had Weird Al Yankovic appeal.

The following week was a blur. Angela The Agent, as she came to be known, worked at lightning speed. Speed was essential. America has a very short attention span, she said, and if they didn’t capitalize on the Bingham’s craze now, the country might lose interest. They had to strike while the iron was hot. At a fifteen percent cut of any profits, Angela had a large incentive urging her on.

She was one hundred percent correct about one thing: fame was rolling along like a freight train. After the
60 Minutes
piece, reporters from classic news organizations and pop media alike were breaking down the door. People recognized all of the crew members on the street and asked for autographs, which they were all too flattered to give. Philip was approached to do a guest spot on
Step By Step
which he declined on principle, and then to do a spot on
The X-Files,
which he accepted with gusto. He was to play an alien who comes to Earth and gets a job in a deli, where he begins late at night to zap customers with a ray gun and eat their spleens. Nick, with his trademark lounge-singer-meets-beatnik charm, smelled merchandising opportunities and began to craft a series of “Bingham’s Action Figures.” Each had spatulas in hand that moved in a realistic backhand-slapping action. In addition, each figure had its own individual superpower. The Nick figure, for instance, carried a lounge-singer’s microphone and could lure his enemies into a coma with his deep, seductive, silver-tongued voice. The Darcy figure had “Boobs of Vengeance” which could fire paralyzing streams of milk across huge distances with hair’s-breadth precision.
 

Rich was perhaps the proudest of all. He was asked to host a major pro wrestling event and would get to break a chair over the back of The Rock, who would then call him a “roody-poo jabroni.”

During the time in which Angela was hunting around, having power lunches with MTV executives, and signing contracts, Bingham’s and its workers became overnight sensations. The timing was perfect. At the end of the tumultuous first week, she stepped into the lobby and announced that everything was set to go, as ridiculous and filled with shameless bandwagon propagandizing as it was.

The Bialy Pimps’ CD single and music video for their song parody “Here Comes the Manager” were released within two weeks.

“This had better be good, or I’m going to stick an icepick into your brain,” Dicky Kulane told Captain Dipshit.
 

“It’s not good,” said Captain Dipshit. “But it’s important.”

It was eleven at night. The air was cold and Dicky was tired, so with an annoyed sigh, he let his unwelcome guest inside so that they could get whatever-it-was over with as fast as possible.
 

“I get up very early,” said Dicky. “I was in bed when you called. I’m not a very fun person when I’m tired, just so you understand.”