The Bialy Pimps (62 page)

“I’m almost theee-re,” sang the Anarchist. Ten seconds had elapsed.

“Ooh!” Beckie said, flustered. “Woo! Uh!”

The Anarchist slammed his last bag – the pastrami – home with a flourish. He looked up and smiled. “I win.”

“Shit!”

“And what is
this?”
he asked with a disapproving nod. He tapped the edge of the olives bin, which contained a bag filled with yellow banana peppers.

“Shit!” Beckie spat.

St. Patrick’s Day arrived later in the week. Philip had ordered green bagels, and Tracy had laid in a good supply of Killian’s Irish Red beer. The Anarchist did not drink beer, so Philip had bought him a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream.

The rest of the day proceeded as it had in previous years. Around noon, just as the rush was beginning and the alcohol buzz was setting in, Philip brandished one of the gallon jugs of distilled water used to fill the steamers. He bet the Anarchist and Darcy ten dollars that they couldn’t drink one of them in forty-five minutes. They accepted the challenge and then, after failing, spent the rest of the shift doubled over in bloated pain, trying to battle a line of customers. The Anarchist fought nausea for hours. Darcy ran out back and made herself vomit in the alley. She returned with a pleased look on her face and declared it to be “the easiest puke I’ve ever had.”

Later in the afternoon, Tracy ran down to Spinning Vinyl Music with a bagful of sandwiches and bribed the workers to loan him a few CDs. For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, the air was filled with Irish folk music, the punk-with-flutes ditties of the Pogues, and of course, House of Pain. Everybody had worn green, was increasingly buzzed, and would from time to time break out into a jig. It all felt very Celtic, and Tracy was proud to be Irish.

Beckie danced over to the Anarchist. She said, “Wanna dance?”

“Maybe later.”

Beckie looked at his stern face, his furrowed brow, and frowned. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“You know,” he said, folding his arms, “I’ve been thinking. I’ve spent a lot of time pining for the old days since I moved away last year. But that was unfair. It meant that I was thinking of this year as ‘bad’ and the past years as ‘good’.”

“They
were
good,” she said, looking far away.

“But I’ve realized that now
has
to be good. Because there is only one ‘now,’ and I’d rather be involved with this now than... than not being here at all.”

“Deep.”

“Mmm.”

A pause. Then, she scrunched up her nose. “Why is now so hot again?”

“Because now is now.”

Beckie rolled her eyes. “Duh.”

“You can only live now. You can’t live then.”

“I may be mistaken, but I think I
did
live then.”

He shook his head. “Forget it.”

There was another period of silence. The line of customers was almost gone, and Rich and Tracy were playing a sort of hockey game with a bagel and a broom.
Rich shoots... he scores!

“It was a great time,” said Beckie, “but life goes on.”

“Life goes on. The wheels keep a-turnin’.”

“What about you? How have things been?”

“Great.”

“You’re writing enough?”

He nodded.

She looked around the room. Philip was mooning one of the mirrors. Darcy had just rung up an order and passed the ticket to Tracy. A few seconds later, Philip was yelling at Darcy to get over here and shake those milk sacks for me, baby. Darcy made an obscene gesture in response. Underlying everything, like a photographer’s backdrop, was Everlast from House of Pain on the stereo rapping,
You see I’m Irish, but I’m not a leprechaun. If you want to fight me, step up and we’ll get it on.

Beckie said, “Someone should make a movie about this place. It’s a nuthouse.”

“How about a book?” the Anarchist asked her.

“Eh, I see a movie.”

“How about a book?” he asked again.

“Why?”

The Anarchist chuckled, and said nothing.

The day drew to a reluctant end, shadows climbing the walls of the bars across the street and slinking slowly down High Street like phantoms. The chill deepened and the wind stirred, seeming to beg for attention like a spoiled child. It was supposed to be warm tomorrow, according to the weather forecasters. The days were supposed to become brighter and generally better from here on out. Spring, the time of rebirth, would be arriving. Soon, the young collegiate women would dress to their skimpiest, parading around in little sundresses and lounging on the Oval in dental floss bikinis, ostensibly to “study in the sun.” The flowers in the landscaped areas would bloom, the laughably-named lagoon of Mirror Lake would fog with warm-weather algae, and people would begin to wade in it against regulations. As the Oval filled with bodies languishing in the warm sun, the mowers would hum across it, humans and machines agreeing to disagree, ignoring one another’s presence by unspoken mutual consent. And as they cut, that smell – that sweet, sweet smell of cut grass that signals without a doubt that spring has begun – would permeate the aether.

“I’m going to slice the roast beef for tomorrow morning,” Slate announced. “You know, to get it out of the way.”

The Anarchist smiled at Beckie and Philip. He thought of the roast beef, wondering why Slate would choose to burden himself with it now. Slate hated the thing. He said it looked like a giant turd, floating in blood and feculent juices inside the reinforced plastic bag. Whenever Slate went to slice it, he would first lay it in the vomit sink to clean it off. He had perfected a method of opening the bag using only knives, so that he didn’t have to touch the thing. Then he would run water over it, trying against hope to clean it like a soiled undergarment.

“Hey Philip,” the Anarchist said, watching Slate slice the turd and feeling ill. “I’ve got the perfect tagline for our roast beef sandwiches. We can put it on posters and hang them in the front window.”

“What?”

“‘Deli-fresh roast beef, served festering in its own nauseating filth.’”

Philip shook his head. “Nah.”

“It’s so foul. Our roast beef has always been horribly foul.”

Beckie chimed in. “I know it makes
me
nauseous.”

“Nauseous
means ‘causing a feeling of nausea in others,’” said the Anarchist. “You’re
nauseated
. The
roast beef
is nauseous.”

Tracy had just walked over. “Did you say the roast beef isn’t feeling well?”

Beckie turned to him. “He says the roast beef is nauseous.”

“Has anyone taken its temperature?”

“And he says that I am not nauseous, but that I’m
nauseated.”

“Why does he say that?”

“Excuse me...” said the Anarchist.

“He says that if I was
nauseous,
I’d be making all of you sick.”

The Anarchist was waving a hand at them. “Forget it. Just forget it.”

“You’re not making
me
sick. Philip? What about you? Is Beckie making you sick?”

“Twat,” said Philip.

“You know what?” the Anarchist interjected. “You
are
nauseous, Beckie. My mistake. You’re very, very nauseous.”

Tracy was rambling. “Now, that bum who used to come in all the time,
he
made me sick. The one with the glass eye. The guy who had teeth sticking out of his gums in all directions and looked like a psycho killer. He always smelled like he had just crapped his pants.”

“I had to kick him out when he crapped his pants once,” Philip said.

“He always got a can of RC Cola and he always asked for it so politely, in this tiny little voice. You’d feel ashamed of yourself for thinking badly of him. ‘Can I have a can of RC Cola please?’ Just like that. ‘Thank you.’ Then you’d catch another whiff of him and your guilt about prejudging him would go away. Now
that
guy was nauseated.”

“Nauseous.”

“Yeaugh,” Beckie slurred, recoiling at the memory. “After handling his money, I used to want to bathe in Germa-San.” She sighed. The Germa-San disinfectant gel was gone with Bingham’s. Pimps, Inc. had not bothered to purchase any.

She sighed and sat down. It was closing time, and Philip strolled up to the front and locked the door. Nobody was sure who would close the store tonight, but Tracy and the Anarchist had a sneaking suspicion that they would wind up doing it. They didn’t mind.
 

Philip joined Rich in one of Dicky Kulane’s old booths. Rich had lit a cigarette, and for a minute, Philip wished that he had one as well. He considered bumming one off of Rich, and decided against it. That was the old Philip thinking, the Philip who was out of shape and who deep-fried microwave burritos whole. He was now a new Philip. A modern Philip. A new and improved Philip. A Philip who looked a little like Screech from
Saved by the Bell,
and whose head seemed, to those who had known his fat self, to be too large for his body. He sat back, laying his arm over the back of the chair and letting it hang.
 

Darcy joined Beckie, and then the Anarchist, Slate, and Tracy, compelled by the trend, joined them as well. Some smoked. Others drank sodas. The Anarchist sipped some of the incredibly bad coffee, and Tracy was nursing a concoction called a Brooker Mocha – hot chocolate and coffee – that the Anarchist had made him, for old times’ sake.

It felt like an employee meeting from back in the old days, and the Anarchist half felt like Philip should begin to soliloquize about controlling portion sizes
(this means you, Beckie)
and about making sure to be at work on time to start your shift. He felt like Philip should announce that the store was losing money, that people were (seriously this time) going to have to start paying for their meals.

As the seven of them sat and reminisced, the evening grew long. Still, time seemed to stand still, and it seemed as if the moment could last forever.

And it would, the Anarchist knew. It would live forever in his mind, and in the minds of the six others. The days of Bingham’s were with them too, and with all of the other ex-employees who were nowhere to be found. The past years were every bit as much a part of them as they were a part of him. He found that he missed those times, but that it was all right. All things – even good things – were made to end. It was nature’s way of keeping the world fresh, keeping humanity on its toes. Time crawled along, and circumstances changed.
 

This is the present, he thought with a logical simplicity. It was a tautology, a necessary truth of identity. It meant that no matter what B equaled, A always was exactly identical to A. The present was the present. It was not good, and it was not bad. It just
was
. And in the simplicity, there was power. The past was not good. The future was not bad. Time was not qualifiable, and time was not moralistic. Time
was
. Time
is
.

The atmosphere had wrapped them like a tangible thing, and the Anarchist knew that every one of them was thinking the same thing. The future only
was
. But at the same time, it was good. It was brilliant. It was astonishing.

He looked at his friends and knew that they would miss him when he went home at the end of the week. With a fondness that was not bitter, he knew that he would miss them as well. But he did not feel sorrow; he did not feel regret or loss. He would hold the memory of the years at Bingham’s close, because they were intimately a part of who he was. He knew that as the years marched on, as the thoughts of his college years became more and more like a faded photograph in the back of a cherished photo album, that he would look back on those days and smile.

And I will. In fact, I already do.

THE END

10/15/99 - 1/16/12

and a lot of life lived in between

About the Author

Johnny B. Truant
is the author of the popular blog
JohnnyBTruant.com
, which is probably best characterized as being about
personal development
or
human potential
, but which somehow also manages to be about
entrepreneurship
and
questioning authority
. It’s also a blog that isn’t at all above fart references.
 

Johnny is the director and MC of the
Virtual Ticket program for Blogworld
, the world’s preeminent blogging and new media conference. He’s the creator of
The Badass Project
, a nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating excuses and profiling people with disabilities who make most so-called “able-bodied” people look like total wimps. He’s a regular contributor to premier business blogs
Copyblogger.com
and
Problogger.com
. And lastly, he’s the person typing this right now, pretending that someone else wrote it for him.
 

You can connect with Johnny/me on Twitter at
@JohnnyBTruant
, and you should totally send Johnny/me an
email
if the mood strikes you.
 

There’s more to this story, but let’s move it to the
next page
so that I can talk to you about it in first person.
 

Author’s Note

This book took me twelve and a half years to write.

Or, more accurately, it took me six months to write, then another twelve years to find the courage to “kill my darlings,” as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put it.
 

See, this book isn’t a true story. That would be ridiculous. But it
was
inspired by real people and a real place, and those people and that place were very dear to me. I started writing this novel after I’d left the people and the place behind in college, begun grad school laboratory work, and started having some
really delightful panic attacks
because I had ended up where I wasn’t supposed to be, doing what I wasn’t supposed to do.
 

When this happened back in 1999, it felt as if in a mere six months, my life had gone from being filled with laughter and fun and camaraderie to having very little of any of those. Without the love and support and companionship of my now-wife Robin (to whom this book is dedicated), I think I would have lost my mind. I hated my new job in a way I didn’t think it was possible to hate something, but it wasn’t venomous hate. It was giving-up hate. I felt like I’d discovered that the best years of my life were behind me, and that the future I had to look forward to — at least the part of the future that comprised work, which was a lot of it once you factored in my 2.5-hour round-trip commute — was nothing but bleak.