The Bialy Pimps (61 page)

“About...?”

“Well, we thought maybe we could buy it. All of us. Together.”

Philip paused. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t want to work in a deli again. Besides, why would any of you guys want to move back and...”

“We wouldn’t work there,” the Anarchist said. “We’d just... own it.”

“Why?”

“Why not? It might be a ... a nice gesture. A link to our past. A legacy.”

“You mean, we wouldn’t run it personally?”

“We’d do whatever we wanted. We would each put in a few grand to get it up and running – to buy the building, buy steamers and toasters and stuff, hire employees – and then we could run it from afar, like Bingham did. I’m not moving back to Columbus, and neither is Darcy, but if you wanted to... I don’t know... manage it or something, you could.”

“No thanks. I’m done managing delis.”

The Anarchist tapped the phone with the pen. “So?” he said. “What do you say?”

“You’re really going to do it?”

“I’ve got the people I mentioned already plus Beckie, and I’m working on others. Of course, I can’t find some of us. But even Bricker might be on board.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“Maybe five grand to start if we get a lot of people and are going to rent instead of buy, or maybe as much as thirty otherwise.”

Philip said nothing. He was thinking. It wasn’t much money, really. Not for the former Bialy Pimps.

“Well...” he said.
 

“We can hire assholes, just like we were.”

“Were?”

“The place will be irreverent and disrespectful. We’ll hire some slacker like you to manage it, assuming none of
us
wants that pleasure.”

“A safe assumption.”

“He’ll come in late every day, bitching about how his eardrum burst. He’ll be the manager you love to hate. We can hire some sluts like the girls. Then we can hire a punk rock timebomb like Slate.”

“And some uppity, arrogant little shit like you.”

The Anarchist laughed. “Something like that.”

A pause. Then the voice on the other end of the line said, “Okay, what the hell.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“And I thought – tell me what you think of this; it was something we were all talking about earlier – that since we would need to paint and clean the place and set everything up, and since we’d have to go down there anyway to do it...”

“You want to work there for a while?”

The Anarchist grinned. “Yeah.”

“Before the employees start? For what... a week?”

“You read my mind.”

“And... what? You want to get the shock collars and the push-back bar and the sloth and all of that? Dildoes on the ceiling, slapping people?”

“No, no. None of that. I...
we
want it back the way it was. You know, the first year you took over? When you were fat? Huh, Toby?”

Now Philip was laughing. “You really want to work in a deli again?”

“Only for a week. Come on, dickface.”

“Won’t that be kind of... retarded?”

“What?”

“A bunch of millionaires, working at a deli for minimum wage.”

“Who the hell is paying
you?”
the Anarchist said. “We’re working for free, bitch.”

“All right, all right. I’m in. When?”

“Tracy had a suggestion.”

The Anarchist wondered if Philip would guess. Every year, the crew, which was lopsidedly Irish, tended to embrace one day at work above all others...

“St. Patrick’s Day?”

“Ironic, isn’t it? Tracy suggesting St. Patrick’s day?”

“He
is
Irish.”

“Word to the Motherland.”

Philip brought it home by deciding to quote House of Pain. “‘I gotta have corned beef and cabbage if I’m gonna manage.’”

The Anarchist replied, “‘I don’t need luck cuz I got a four-leaf clover.’”

There was a beat, and then Philip said, “So then, you’ll handle it?”

“Yeah. I’ll get it together and let you know. But have St. Pat’s week free.”

“As if I work.”

“Word.”

“Word.”

“Take it easy, Philip.”

“See you, buddy.”

The Anarchist hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. It was done. It would be a hassle, but he had the wedding stuff well in hand for now despite what the Post-It Notes seemed to be saying. He had talked to a realtor in Columbus, and the realtor had said that it could all be taken care of in a matter of weeks. The restaurant supply company that Bingham’s had used was still there, right on I-71. Maybe he could get together with Darcy again and go on a little trip.
 

It was going to work. It was going to be a blast.

Maybe Bingham’s – the
real
Bingham’s – didn’t have to die after all.

The mid-March weather was thawing around the time the Pimps, Inc. bagel deli opened to the public. The last blast of snow lingered stubbornly on the hibernating grass, reluctant to give up its post to the warmer weather lest it lose it for good. The air was still chilly (in Ohio, the on-again, off-again of pre-spring persists until May) but the students, ever optimistic, wore shorts and short sleeves anyway. Slate found the attitude illogical.

“Fucking retarded kids,” he was heard to remark.

The paperwork had gone smoothly. In fact, all elements of the ownership swap had proceeded without a hitch. It was almost as if someone or something – some powerful entity – had greased the wheels for them. With a down payment and a few very expensive trips to the restaurant supply store, the new deli was equipped and ready to go. Philip had already begun to screen potential employees and had reported some good finds, and Tracy had already hung a few posters of M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice on the walls. Slate spared the group a sizable investment by procuring a slicer free of charge. Nobody could figure out just where he had gotten it, but it had a similar mechanical hiccup to the old Bingham’s slicer and for some reason had “Toby bites dick” scratched into its dull silver finish.

Darcy was already in love with the place.

What a
shithole!”
she whooped.
 

The rats had left their mark on the walls, floors, and even the ceiling before they ran off, and the intermediary owners (some mysterious firm called “Shadow Investments”) had not bothered to clean up the place. Lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling on red and black wires, and Mike pointed out that you could break the plaster right out of the walls with a light punch. Then he pointed it out again and again, until Rich told him to knock it off.

Philip nodded to Darcy, satisfied. “This place is suitably ghetto.”

The Anarchist, as if on cue, began jumping up and down in the back. “Look at this!” he shouted, holding up one of Dicky Kulane’s old black wall-mounted phones. It was gnawed nearly in half, so that the mouthpiece dangled from the earpiece by a few fragile wires.

“Ghetto Phone,” he said, an evil twitch at the corner of his mouth.

After few days of cleanup and with a small amount of help from professional handymen, the most egregious of the cosmetic and safety offenses had been corrected. The debris was cleaned up and the walls were patched and painted, and the store was generally converted from dangerous to merely condemnable. The make tables (which were the same style as the old Bingham’s tables) and the steamers (which were new but already wheezing) were prepped and ready to go. The lights, poor as they were, were on and sufficient.
 

Beckie hit the play button on the stereo and M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” filled the air like a warm, welcome fog. Philip walked to the front door in what felt like slow motion, threw back the deadbolt, and pushed the horizontal lock-gate aside with a noisy clatter.
 

They were open for business.

Tracy was sitting in class, waiting to join them.

Of the participating ex-Pimps, Tracy was the only one still in college at Ohio State. Beckie, Philip, Slate, Rich, and the Anarchist were in what passed for post-college careers, and Darcy was taking a few classes back home. Mike and Bricker (who had decided to participate in a limited capacity) and Nick and Dungeonmaster Eric (who had pledged moral support) were in town, working. Jenny, Smooth B, and the others had vanished without a trace.
 

Tracy looked at the clock, wondering if class was ever going to end so that he could head over and get to work.

He was more pleased than he would have thought to have people calling him “Tracy” again. He had always been “Tre” to his family and other friends, but when he signed the paperwork entitling him to one-seventh ownership of one “Pimps, Inc.,” he had signed it as “Tracy Constantine.” The Anarchist pointed out that the whim might cause him legal problems down the road, but Tracy told him that if that was the case, the same would go for “Mr. Toby Martin.”
 

The Anarchist saw his point.

It was hard to believe that opening day could really be here, and Tracy found himself wondering how it would go. Would customers come? Would the employees be comfortable in their old roles, or was it all still tainted by fame? Would it be just like the old days? On this last point, he kind of hoped it wouldn’t be. It was time to move on.

He looked up at the clock again, a taunting white circle above the chalkboard on which his Lit teacher was writing key themes of Shakespeare’s later works. There were five more minutes left in the class.

The door to the right of the chalkboard and the clock was opening. Everyone turned to look. It was annoying when people were late to class, because they drew attention to themselves and interrupted the professor. It was as if they felt that the class was beneath them, something that was less interesting than hitting the snooze bar one final time. And by the way, there were only five minutes left. Why bother to come so late? What could they possibly expect to...

Except that it wasn’t a student. It was Army Ted, craning his arm through the door as if trying to squeeze through without opening it all the way. He was slapping the wall above the chalkboard with a handful of papers, and some were sticking. They read:

MATH TUTOR

#050 to 895

294-5040

He did not see Tracy, but noticed the stares of the class and professor. He had expected the room to be empty, but his discovery to the contrary hadn’t stopped him from slapping up some fliers.
 

Ted gave the class an uncomfortable “Oops!” look. Then, just as quickly as he had arrived, he was gone.

Tracy began to snicker, and the laughter built on itself until
he
was the one attracting stares from the others. He laughed until the professor, frustrated and tired, ended for the class, four minutes early.

What a way to start the first day.

Tracy arrived at Pimps, Inc. a half-hour after the store had opened its doors. He was still sputtering laughter, and Beckie asked him what was so funny.

“Ted is the tutor,” he wheezed.

“Yeah, yeah,” came the reply.

All seven of them were working, as they would be for the rest of opening week. In the old days, Philip would have started telling people to go home because the payroll was overkill and he had to make it look as if he cared about the everpresent and incurable budget problem, because Wally was chewing his head off.
 

This week, however, the owners worked for free.

The day progressed without incident, which was exactly what everyone had hoped would happen. The public had a short attention span, and while a few harmless people did stop in and ask for autographs, most of the inaugural customers could have cared less who these kids behind the counter were, or who they had once been.

Slate hated all of the customers. Philip and the Anarchist commiserated, laughing at Slate and his loathing as he hunched over the whirring slicer.
 

Both Philip and the Anarchist, however, found that they were not as annoyed as they used to be. Philip wondered if the college students were a smarter bunch this year. The Anarchist told him that they surely were not, and then made some long-winded analogy about how when you take a very cold shower before entering a less cold pool, that even the cold pool water feels warm. Philip pretended to listen. He could have cared less.

“People are stupid,” said Philip.

“People are stupid,” the Anarchist agreed.

“But for some reason, I don’t hate them anymore.”

The Anarchist nodded his assent. Then he cocked his thumb back at Slate, who was still slicing. “I think
he
still does,” he said.

The Anarchist agreed.

As excited as they all were about working in the new store, only Beckie and the Anarchist were willing to tackle the first night’s closing duties.

Back in the old days, when the two of them made well under six dollars an hour, they used to stretch out closing as long as possible to eke out another half-hour’s worth of pay. They made a ritual of it, bringing dinner or a book and pursuing leisure activities after locking the front door but before beginning to clean. They had always thought themselves to be devilishly clever.
 

The game of milking the clock was pointless now, but they could still crank up the stereo, and they could still play their other closing game.

They had laid it out already, having dumped the contents of the 24 make table bins into 24 clear plastic bags before washing the small, metal bins in the back sink. Now, before the game could start, they had returned the clean, empty bins to the table and had taken twelve bags each. Beckie stood to the left of the Anarchist and snarled at him.

“You’re going down,” she taunted him.

“I think that’s your date’s line,” he returned.

They watched the clock. The second hand hit the twelve position and the two exploded to life, throwing bags into the bins as fast as they could. As usual, Beckie was flustered. The Anarchist worked with stone-faced determination, but Beckie always made nervous little noises.

“Shit!” she said, shooting an arm after a bag that she had thrown in the wrong place. Tomatoes went on the right side, left half, fourth bin,
not
the third bin. What had she been thinking?