The Bialy Pimps (53 page)

Philip stared at them, trying to shoot lasers from his eyes and make them go away. They had been around for a good portion of the last evening and had debated the pros and cons of a
faux-
New Orleans decor versus something emphasizing fewer columns and more “artistic messiness.” Philip had scoffed at the discussion (much to their haughty disgust) and had tried to picture it: the height of fashion with a dash of
nouveau-
asshole.
Oh yes, Bernard, that arrangement looks perfect with the color scheme but I’m afraid it just will
not
go with the huge phallus at the front of the room. And can we get some better lighting on the gigantic ass? Puh-
lease!

It was not censorship that bothered Philip as he sat in the deli at 6am cursing the year that would end tonight. Censorship was irrelevant, really, since the media was (and had been) showing an enormous amount of latitude. You want crass? You got it, and then some. This is America, baby.
 

What bothered Philip – and this was a common opinion – was that it was all becoming just a tad too...

Contrived
.
 

Yes, it was just a little too planned for his champagne tastes.

Rich had nailed it earlier, just before voicing his own leanings toward “telling them all to jam it” and wondering aloud if he should just go to the arcade for the night. He had looked over Angela’s shoulder and spied the planned set. Then he had told Philip the truth.

“They’re ruining us,” he said with a lock-jawed nod and his beefy biceps folded across his chest. His eyes were uncharacteristically grim under his Buddy Holly frames. To Philip, he looked like a man who was voicing not just his opinion, but rather the unvarnished truth.

“They want me to wear
pants!”
Darcy complained.

“As opposed to a dress?”

“A dress?” said Darcy.

Frustrations had raged for hours. Eventually, unable to make a dent in Angela’s steamrolling plans, the entire group retired to the neighboring bar and continued their heated protestation there, where they could get drunk. As time passed, the problems seemed to resolve themselves.

“Have you ever noticed,” Philip asked after a few rounds of beers, “that your balls hang lower when you’re depressed?”

Darcy nodded. “Yeah.”

The Anarchist, who wasn’t drinking, refused to come down from his indignant high.
 

“The place is turning into a carnival!” he said. “Why do we have to change everything for the cameras? Weren’t people originally attracted by our ‘unique style?’ Why do we need to show them something that’s not really ours, that’s totally contrived? Do we really want to become cookie-cutter caricatures? If they want Bingham’s at its crazy and offensive best for this stupid gala, why are they doing this flash remodeling job?”

Tracy turned to him, eyes red but serious. “We have to...
conform.”

Slate, who was the punkest motherfucker the Anarchist ever did see (“Hell, he’s even more punk than me,” he said) slammed a fist on the table, making the glasses jump and clang together. “Conformity!” he shouted.

“Shhh!” hissed a woman at the next table.

Slate farted his protest.

“Conform,” said the Anarchist, who still considered himself punk as hell even if Slate was punker. “Screw that. I’ll be damned if I’m going to become their... their
boy.”

“Who is this
They?”
Philip slurred. He then clamped his hand over his mouth, strained as a gagging reflex puffed his cheeks, and sprinted toward the bathroom. He upended a stool in the process.

“Shut up,
boy,”
said Rich in his a slave-driver voice. Then, penitent: “Yes
massuh
. Yes
suh
.”

Then, all at once, the Anarchist realized what had happened, what was happening right now. He was still following in line. He was still being led. He was still being a mindless sheep. They all were. And what’s more, every move they made was creating more and more sheep. They were collecting followers – yes-men and yes-women who would do whatever they said, no matter how stupid their requests. The kind of people who walked behind and would continue to do so even if the leader walked right off a cliff.

But who
was
in the lead? That was the question.
 

The Bingham’s crew led followers, sure. But the crew was, in turn, being led by market pressures that came from the collective will of those followers. Philip, the Anarchist, and the others did exactly the disobedient things their bosses requested of them. They were different, just like everybody else. The whole endeavor was a self-contained system that existed to feed itself, like a snake that was eating its own tail.

It was as if they had forged a path, but then someone else had come along and widened it, cleaned it up, and paved it. They made it so the busses and heavy equipment could get down the Road Less Traveled, to the secret garden that rewarded those who reached its end.
 

Then they built a Starbucks, and started advertising.
 

At 6am, barely awake, Philip drank his coffee and watched as crepe streamers came down and silk hangings went up. He still had a bad hangover, had gotten four uneasy hours of sleep, and hated – fucking
hated
– 1998.

The Anarchist sat beside him. He looked at Philip, saw the tight veins in his forehead, and grimaced in sympathy.
 

“I
do
kind of like the huge paper mache ass,” he said, “but they’ve got your proportions all wrong. It’s totally unlike your ass.”

“My ass has been besmirched,” Philip agreed, nodding.

“Did they say what was wrong with all of the old asses?”

“Renee says that our asses were not realistic enough for the cameras.”

“I see. They need realistic asses for television?”

“Yes. And they took down all of our vibrators, because they said they were ‘out of tune.’ They also said that they would be building a huge vibrator which will hang from the ceiling over... there.”

“Realistic vibratory action?”

“Nothing but the best.”

The Anarchist nodded, feigning acceptance because the situation was essentially unchangeable. It still felt like conformity, but there was nothing to be done. He had made up his mind to get out of the business after this whole fiasco was over. He had a sneaking suspicion that many – perhaps the majority – of his co-workers felt the same way. The old Road Less Traveled was getting a mite crowded. Maybe it was time to seek a new one. A more subtle one.

A massive Philip head was being erected in the corner. It was wearing rhinestone-studded pimp sunglasses and was supposed to represent the Philip from the Bialy Pimps’ first music video, for the smash hit “Here Comes the Manager.” The workers (or the Powers That Be) seemed to have decided that the nose would be elongated and would be able to spin like a propeller. Probably with smoke and sound effects, too. This would be quite a party.
 

After a pause, Philip said, “I’m getting out, you know.”

The Anarchist nodded. He knew what Philip meant.

“It’s too much. This is out of control, and I’m tired of being a stooge. It stopped being fun right around the time it got to be expected, when these new chic customers started to come in.”

“When the customers turned into tourists,” the Anarchist said, still nodding.

“When people stopped being offended. When they started to ask for punishment. When suddenly the people who we are and the place that we created – the personalities and place that everyone liked so much in the first place – had to be turned into... into
this.”

“People are stupid.”

“Amen to that.”

The Anarchist inhaled, held it, and exhaled noisily, helpless. “So... after tonight?”

“First thing tomorrow. New year, new life.”

“Worried?”

“The thing that bothers me is that Bingham’s will go on without us. All the trademark shit plus the fact that they can still squeeze money out of this thing pretty much guarantees it. I want out, but I don’t want anyone else to have Bingham’s. Not
our
Bingham’s. It belongs to us. It’s...”

“Sacred?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, who knows where this will go. Let’s just do this thing tonight as best as we can. One last dance, our way, for old times’ sake?”
 

Philip nodded. “Their show, their decor, their sensationalism. But our dance, our way, right? This one last hurrah?”

“Brother,” the Anarchist said with a smile, “I’m going to miss you.”

The crew’s presence wasn’t necessary for most of the day. They hung back, letting Renee the Decorator and Angela the Agent handle everything as the final day of the year dragged into the afternoon.

By three o’ clock, the store had been transformed into nothing short of a Hollywood movie set, complete with camera dollies, extensive accessory lighting, and boom microphones. In the midst of all of the changes, Beckie was most concerned about the sloth.

“The sloth,” she said curtly, “is drunk.”

Tracy thought he might have misheard her. He said, “Pardon?”

Beckie sighed impatiently, the mannerism of an overworked new mother. “It was the monkeys’ fault, of course. Have you ever heard of an alcoholic sloth? I think not. They don’t drink in the wild, because they don’t have these pressures and these bad role models. But ours does, and now, we have a sloth who is passed out in the back and I’m telling you, it’s the fault of those damn monkeys.”

Tracy shook his head. “Pardon?”

“Philip took the monkeys out on the town last night after the rest of us turned in. He said that they’ve been working hard and that they deserve it. Now Philip and a bunch of chimps have hangovers, and we have a sloth in the back room – a sloth who
clearly
cannot hold his liquor – unconscious on the floor.”

Tracy did not know how to comment on the matter. “Sloths eat leaves,” he said.

Beckie ignored him. She planted her hands on her hips and began to tap her foot. “It was inevitable, you know,” she said. “Sloths are supposed to hang from the rafters and swing in the crawlspace. They were never meant to...”

“Sloths are supposed to hang from
trees,”
Tracy said.

“...to sit around and languish. Ever since those... those
fools
put in this new,
mod
ceiling, he hasn’t been able to play or get any exercise. He’s starved for love and attention.”

“You’re saying that the sloth has been ruined by success? Like Elvis getting loaded on pills and booze?”

“Well, you just go back there and look at him if you don’t believe me!” she said. “Drunken sloth, drunken monkeys, and two employees who are constantly buzzing on Cherry Alka-Seltzer. I’m telling you, we’re living life in the fast lane.”

Tracy thought of the sloth, wondering if he had
ever
seen it move more than two feet, drunk or not.

“We’re on a runaway freight train to oblivion,” she continued. “Bricker shot his television last night. He said he’s ‘fucking tired of
Meet the Press
reruns’ and thinks that
Beverly Hills, 90210
is getting ‘too preachy.’ And he’s getting fat, letting himself go.”

“He was always fat.”

“Philip is emaciated. The store is a madhouse. Yesterday, I even saw Smooth B and Jenny fighting over differences in their ‘artistic styles’ for the new album. We’re going down the tubes, here.”

“It’s your imagination,” Tracy told her. “All but the store and the sloth.”

“And Ted,” she added. “We’ve lost Ted.”

Yes, that seemed true.

“Ted,” Tracy said nostalgically. “Yes, Ted. But we didn’t kill Ted. A bus killed Ted.”

“It was our fault,” she said. “If this place hadn’t gone into overdrive, then Ted wouldn’t have had to upset his schedule. He might not have come at that exact time, and that bus might have missed him.” She was tearing up again, and Tracy wanted to put an arm around her, to tell her that it would be all right.

What she was saying wasn’t true, of course. Ted might have gotten struck by a bus at any time. He jaywalked every day on his way over, and the recent Bingham’s hysterics had not changed that in any way. The changes made Ted come neither more frequently nor more urgently. It had just been sheer dumb luck.

Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if it had been an assassination, if Ted’s transatlantic enemies in the business of espionage had hijacked a Number Two Central Ohio Transit Authority bus in order to run him down.
 

He shook his head and, in spite of the subject, couldn’t suppress a smile. Old habits died hard when it came to Ted.

He told Beckie that it had been a coincidence. It could have happened any time. They could not have prevented it. They had not caused it.

There was a silence between them. Neither knew what to say. There was nothing to be said. Workers hammered in the background. Two men in suits were deep in discussion in Roger’s (and Ted’s) usual seat. Beckie felt sure that if she were to listen in on the conversation they were having, she’d find that they were working out her own actions for later in the day. Decisions were being made for her. Everything was alien.
 

“I haven’t been home in six months,” she said slowly, as if it was just occurring to her. It was true. There had been no time.

Tracy threw her a serious nod, heavy with unspoken words.

“I think I might go home tomorrow,” she said. “We have the day off. It’s not far. It’ll be strange, going home a celebrity. My mom has already told me that the neighbors want autographs.”
 

“That’s messed up,” said Tracy.
 

“And my cousins want action figures. I think I’ll take them some. Nick told me he could rig a few that won’t electrocute you when you hold them.”

“See? There are upsides.” But even saying it felt strange. How could there be anything other than upsides? The thought was an ungrateful one.