The Bialy Pimps (9 page)

Devious, this Bingham,
thought Captain Dipshit. What was he up to?

An hour or so later, Bingham had emerged from the leaves, dusted himself off, and taken off screaming. There was no apparent reason for this. One moment there was an arm and a leg in a pile of leaves in an alley, and the next there was a small man blazing north on High, running after something or someone, or running from something or someone. Or perhaps on a bank run. The manager, Philip, usually did the bank runs, but it made sense for the owner to do it if he damn well pleased, and this was how Captain Dipshit imagined said owner would do it. And woe to the bank teller who had to wait on him.
 

Once the dwarf was gone, Captain Dipshit decided it was safe to cross the street and go inside, as long as he did it quietly and without attracting attention. He’d need to be quick, though. Bingham could return at any time.
 

Once inside, a quick scan of the lobby revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The afternoon rush was over, and only a few tables were occupied. There was no red-bearded man, no Private Dancer, no obvious nutcases of any kind. The employees were, blessedly, working. It looked like a deli, in other words. No evil here. So he exhaled and stood up.
 

Rich, who was operating the register and saw Captain Dipshit appear as if from nowhere, shrieked. His hat flew off and he bent to recover it.
 

Captain Dipshit approached the counter, unsure how to proceed. He knew in general what he wanted, but had no idea how he’d get it. He needed something damning. If he brought something damning to Dicky Kulane, he felt sure Dicky would know what to do with it. In fact, he was beginning to think that Dicky’s intellect rivaled his own, hard as that was to believe. All he needed to do was to get something for Dicky to work with. The rest would follow from there.

What, though?

Maybe he’d discover something disgusting that he could take video of and send to
Nightline
. Really,
Nightline
would be the best solution. Anything worthy of
Nightline
, in fact, would flat-out get Bingham’s closed down, because
Nightline
was always exposing things that were illegal and/or gross and generally fucking shit up. If he could provide
Nightline
with something sufficiently disgusting, it would be a slam dunk. Possibly an employee would lose a finger and serve it to a customer in a sandwich. Or maybe there’d turn out to be a child’s potty in use by employees behind the counter. Pooping behind the counter of a restaurant would definitely be good
Nightline
fodder. It seemed like even odds that this would be the case, so Captain Dipshit had his fingers crossed.
 

As he inched toward the counter, he suddenly heard a loud, high-pitched voice come from behind him, asking some young woman how she was doing.

He turned. There was a table of jocks sitting around one of the high-tops and an older black man sitting by himself, smoking. The man took a puff. The jocks seemed to be talking to each other about football. Nobody seemed to own the girlish voice he’d just heard.
 

He turned back to the counter. He thought,
Fish
. If the deli were serving blowfish, they might serve the poisonous gland by mistake and kill someone.
Nightline
would like that. He doubted that blowfish was on the menu, but there was a lot up on the giant, chalk-drawn menu board that he had been too busy to peruse, so it seemed possible.
 

“Do you have classes today, Miss?” said the girlish voice from behind him.

He turned again. The jocks were still discussing football, but now the black man was smiling. The over-white grin seemed to float disembodiedly among a cloud of blue cigarette smoke, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.
 

Turning again, Captain Dipshit thought,
Vomit
. If any of the employees were vomiting in or around the food,
Nightline
would certainly want to know. Or if they were serving roadkill. Any of these would do. Captain Dipshit began to get excited. If only...

“I like to watch
Wheel of Fortune
,” said the voice. “Do you?”

The black man was still sitting in the high chair, one leg crossed over the other, one elbow propped up on the tabletop. Still smiling. He continued. “Do you have a boyfriend? I’ll bet you have a bunch of them, a nice young lady like you!”
 

Captain Dipshit looked around at the people in front of him and the people behind him. Nobody was looking at the black man. And what’s more, all of them were men.
 

“Are you talking to me?” he asked.

The black man took a puff on his cigarette. Nice and slow.
 

“Because, you know... I’m a man.”

“Now what kind of thing is that to say about yourself?” said the black man.
 

Captain Dipshit had reached the counter. Rich had recovered his hat and was again manning the register, and the Anarchist was making bagel sandwiches to his right. As the Captain watched, the Anarchist slipped a bagel with meat and cheese into a steamer just like 3B’s and closed the lid, then gave the handle three sharp pumps. Steam rose in a cloud.
 

“What can I get you?” Rich asked Captain Dipshit.

“Do you have blowfish?” said Captain Dipshit.

“Do
you
?” returned Rich.

A puff of blue smoke issued from over Captain Dipshit’s shoulder. “Let me tell you about when I was in the Korean war, young lady,” said the high-pitched voice. “I’ll buy you a medium Diet Coke!”
 

“We have tuna fish,” said Rich from the register. “Whether you chose to blow it or not is up to you.”
 

“It was in 1961...” said the voice behind him.

“I don’t think we were in Korea in 1961,” said Captain Dipshit without turning.
 

The voice was nonplussed. “Well,
somebody
was.”
 

“No,” said Captain Dipshit to Rich. “I don’t want tuna. Blowfish.”
 

Now Rich looked defensive. “I don’t take requests.”
 

Captain Dipshit could feel his heart starting to pound harder, faster. It was happening again. The odd things. The nutcases. And they were all laughing at him, because they were so dumb and he was so smart. Dumb people couldn’t tolerate being one-upped. They had to blow up the things they don’t understand. Someone wise said that once.
 

Captain Dipshit willed himself to be cool.
 

“All I’m asking,” said Captain Dipshit after a deep sigh, “is whether or not you guys are pooping in a jar behind the counter. It’s a simple question. And you,” he turned around. “I’m a man.”
 

The black man’s eyes became momentarily wide, then settled into drugged stoicism. He sat back down at his chair, recrossed his legs, and resettled his cigarette-arm elbow on the table. Within seconds he’d vanished almost totally behind a cloud of blue smoke, like a magician’s exit.
 

Rich said nothing. He smiled politely, as if this were all perfectly normal.

“So, no blowfish?” said Captain Dipshit.

“No blow fish,” said Rich. “Blow goats?”

“I’ll just have a bagel with all of the vegetables on it,” said the Captain. Then inspiration struck him and he added, “And if you’re going to wipe your nose on it, I’d like to videotape it.”
 

At this, the Anarchist looked up. Then he shook his head, pinched the bridge of his nose, and sighed with something like sadness.
 

“What kind of bagel?” asked Rich.

“Whatever’s...”

“Jalapeno,” said the Anarchist.
 

Rich turned his head, quizzical. “We don’t have jalapeno bagels.”
 

The Anarchist was already using his fingers to press peppers into an egg bagel. “Sorry, what?” he said.
 

All of this had sailed past Captain Dipshit, whose heart was beginning to triphammer in his chest. He could feel his foot wanting to tap, so he let it. He could feel his fingers wanting to jitter, so he let them. He was more impatient than he’d ever been. It had been stupid to come back in here without a sword or a shield or a cross or something.

And now the black man was whistling. Really, really loud.

Captain Dipshit turned and saw that the jocks had left, and that on the old man’s other side were two girls who were chatting to each other. The man had somehow inched closer and closer to them without them noticing. He still sat, he still smoked, but now his shoulder was almost touching that of a girl in a tank top. And he was whistling. Loud. The girl in the tank top turned to look at him, but he was oblivious.
 

The whistling was entirely tuneless. It warbled through the restaurant like a physical thing, and one by one the diners turned to look, saw the man’s apathy (or unknowingness; it seemed entirely possible that he didn’t realize that he was whistling), and eventually turned back.

Loud whistle. Puff.

“Whatcha whistling, Roger?” asked Rich.

 
His response, so classically Roger in the artistic omission of the article, was simply, “Song.”

Loud whistle. Puff.
 

Loud whistle. Puff.
 

Then came a cough – the kind that recalls the expression “cough up a lung” because it seems quite literal and quite likely. The cough came from deep down, deep in the man’s chest. If the whistle had permeated the deli’s lobby, the cough actually filled it, spreading through every square inch of airspace and pushing against every inhabitant, suffocating them all with raspy, phlegmy noise.
 

HUUGH-HA! HHHRGH! HHKKAW!

The cough troubled Captain Dipshit. Any moment now, the man’s lungs would leap from his mouth and fall onto the black and white tiles. Would he be expected to retrieve them, to shove them back in? No, he didn’t like this at all.
 

Then, as abruptly as it had started, the man’s cough stopped and he started whistling again. Whistling and puffing.
 

The Anarchist, still working on Captain Dipshit’s lunch, said to himself, “Is banana peel a vegetable?”

Captain Dipshit had a rare clear and cogent thought:
Maybe none of this is happening.

The idea had a different flavor than his thoughts usually had. It was almost as forceful as the voice of God had been the other day. It was particularly colorful, particularly glossy around the edges. It seemed somehow more important and more true.
 

So he pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit it.

Just as he took his first drag, the Law School Posse walked through the front door.
 

The lunch rush was dwindling into quiescence, and the loud lobby had settled as the largest groups had filtered out, returning to class or work or to pressing matters of alcohol and orgies. A few more borderline groups had left during Roger’s inappropriately loud whistling and coughing fits. So the appearance of the gaggle of immaculately combed, buffed, and polished whiter-than-white kids was a shock because as always, they were loud.

“I can’t believe Yale accepted Richard,” said one of them. “And Brown took Nick. HAHAHAHA!”
 

The reason that Brown’s acceptance of Nick was hilarious was immediately recognized and declared worthy by the rest of the collective mind. The entire gaggle erupted into haughty chortles.
 

Rich heard the chortles and, in his mind’s eye, immediately saw all of them wearing monocles and sipping brandy from froofy decanters.
 

Captain Dipshit, dragging again on his joint, had a more troubling thought.
Now these people are laughing at me, too.

He began to regret getting a sandwich. He should have just asked some questions, sniffed around the edges for obvious sabotage fodder. He should have put a concealed camera in a hat like the
Nightline
guys did. That way, he could have gotten some damning evidence and could have come back, confronted Philip, and said,
Why don’t you just have a seat over there?
Then he could have laid out his evidence and nailed him to the wall with it.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

But no. Now he was in the place’s vortex again, and things were going bad fast.

He’d already paid for the sandwich. He’d have to wait; he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of running off without it. As soon as it was ready, though, he would go. This time, Bingham’s had won. Bingham’s was going to be a tough nut to crack. Bingham’s, it seemed, was not going to be poop-jar easy. Few things were poop-jar easy anymore in this increasingly unstable world.
 

He took another puff on his joint.

One of the Law School Posse jarred Captain Dipshit’s right shoulder in the middle of a diatribe about a professor who was surely a huge faggotty faggot who was involved in all sorts of faggotry. (The notion that this last was a low-brow, low-breeding form of faggotry was, of course, implied and understood by the hive mind.)

Captain Dipshit’s joint fell to the floor, and the apparent alpha of the Posse (a plump, cocky young man that Philip simply referred to as “Super Ass”) stooped to pick it up. Then he smiled at the Captain.
 

“Why hello there, young lady,” he said. “Can I have a puff off of your... cigarette?”
 

Captain Dipshit snatched it back.
 

“No need to get testy,” he said, his mouth pursing.

Captain Dipshit started to reply, but Roger chose that moment to begin laughing for no reason whatsoever.

 
The Anarchist slid a paper bag onto the counter and said, “Here’s your bagel. I didn’t wipe my nose on it. I can, though, if you’d like.”

“Did you cut it in half?” said Captain Dipshit.
 

The Anarchist felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. This was among the most offensive of the Anarchist’s many unfair and unfounded pet peeves. Other peeves were: not picking up your bagel when you were called, commenting on sandwiches that weren’t yours, commenting on your own sandwich, making special requests, leaning over the counter to watch a bagel being made (known as “vulturing” – the most egregious among the peeves), asking questions about the food, changing a bagel or cheese choice spontaneously (which usually required vulturing), commenting on how busy the restaurant was, commenting on the music, singing along with the music, making music requests, drumming on the counter, placing money on the counter instead of handing it to the cashier, not tipping, tipping the one-cent change from a 99-cent item, opening a sandwich at the counter, bringing a sandwich back to the counter with a comment, bringing a sandwich back to request an additional free item like lettuce, bringing a sandwich back to request a paid topping like sprouts, asking what made sprouts so fucking special over lettuce that the former cost money and the latter did not, making jokes about having “a lettuce on lettuce with lettuce” sandwich to save money, announcing that charging for sprouts was criminal (“they come from the earth, man”), smelling like patchouli, smelling like B.O., being a hippie, commenting on the color of the avocado, asking what was on an everything bagel, asking what the workers’ favorite sandwich was, taking too long to order, ordering a DIY bagel and not starting by announcing which kind of bagel it would be on, breathing too hard, and existing.