The Bialy Pimps (11 page)

“Roger, where are you going so fast?” Tracy said.

Roger gave no sign of acknowledgment and vanished like a specter into the night.

Philip walked to the front and locked the door, sealing Roger outside and his shame inside for another day. At the same time, the Anarchist came in from the rear, bitching as usual. Philip wasn’t sure what he was bitching about, but overheard enough to assume it was about some asswipe customer. He was already telling Rich about the Face-Kicking Machine. Rich was giggling at the idea.

“Okay kids, I guess we can get started,” Philip announced, lighting a cigarette. “Who’s not here yet?”

“The delivery kid... and Smooth B,” Darcy counted, craning her neck.

“And Trip,” added the Anarchist, pulling up a barstool and seating himself awkwardly behind a towering Beckie.

 
“Trip hasn’t worked here in two years,” Tracy said.

“And I’m right fucking here,” said Smooth B, affronted.

Brian “Smooth B” Kerns looked, dressed, and sometimes talked like a 1950s street punk. He wore immaculate black dress slacks and shiny black lace-ups to work under solid, primary-colored dress shirts. Today, Smooth’s shirt was a loud red and was opened at the top three buttons to reveal a bright white undershirt. As was usually the case, he was wearing a silver-studded leather belt around his slight waist. As he settled back, his posture said,
My balls have their own balls, bitch.

“Shit,” he said, leaning back into repose. He tucked a loose hair into the shellacked black 1950s be-bop hairdo springing ominously from the front of his head and returned his attention to the book he’d been reading while Philip was talking. It was a paperback whose cover showed grainy stills from disturbing-looking reality horror films. It was entitled
Are You Snuff Enough?

“So,” said Philip, pulling up his own chair and sitting on it backward. “Meeting stuff.”

Rich hooted.
 

“Let’s lead with the good. We’re about to start our busy season.”
 

“That’s not good,” said the Anarchist.

“It is if you like having a job,” said Philip. “We’re on really thin ice. Restaurants are just about the hardest kind of businesses to keep afloat because the profit margins are so small and labor turns over so often. I mean, think about it. How many of you were here a year ago?”

The Anarchist, Beckie, and Rich raised their hands. Philip raised his own.

“Four of us. And of the rest of you, a handful have only been here through the summer. Summer is party time. Fall is work. This is a different place when the students are around. Fortunately, we’re also a different place on paper when fall rolls around, but in the meantime, in the summer, when it’s slow, we’ve got a bit of a problem: apparently Bingham is thinking of closing the place down.”
 

Rich shrieked, causing his cabbie hat to fly off and hit the floor. Again.

“I’m not particularly worried about profits, myself,” Philip continued. “Give us an OSU fall with all the students buying books and running back and forth around the Oval and suddenly we don’t look quite as bad when we’ve got a line out the door for two hours every day. But that’s still six weeks or so away, and I have two full monthly profit and loss reports to file before we get to a good one in September. So while I’m not particularly worried about making money in the fall and therefore for 1998 as a whole, I
am
worried about
making
it to the fall.”
 

The Anarchist said, “Doesn’t Bingham get that the school year is the busy time?”

“No, honestly. I loved William, but he was shit as a manager from a business perspective. We bled like a pig over the past two falls and the past two springs. Too much food purchased, too many bagels going hard and stale, bad cleanup leading to rat incursions, too many people working at once. He let us all eat for free – and, this’ll be fun for you noobs to hear – he even let us eat free when we weren’t working. Dungeonmaster Eric used to come in on his day off, make a dozen sandwiches for him and his roommates and guests, and walk out with a giant paper shopping bag full of food. William always had two or even three extra people working than were needed, because he liked the company and didn’t understand numbers. He bought supplies from the most expensive vendors, spent extravagantly to decorate, and was dumb about energy. This building leaks like a sieve, but William just turned up the heat in the winter to compensate. Twenty bucks for weatherstripping and a few tubes of caulk combined with a non-tropical thermostat setting could have saved this place thousands.”
 

Rich giggled. “Tubes of cock.”
 

“So... no faith from management. From where Bingham is standing, things aren’t going to get any better. But as far as I’m concerned, things are
only
going to get better.
Much
better. I’ve got William’s old problems mostly handled, so give me a few hundred customers a day and this place becomes a decent investment.

“Now,” he said, “that’s all just background. I want you guys to know that as far as Bingham is concerned, we’re a big old expense item, so it’s our job – all of our jobs – to show him that we’re not. And because we still have six weeks before we can show him that we can be profitable, we need to show him that we can be minimally
un
profitable. If we can keep the bleeding to a minimum, I can hopefully convince Wally to convince Bingham to at least let us have a go at the fall.”
 

The Anarchist, usually sarcastic and annoyed, was uncharacteristically serious. Beneath his caustic exterior, Bingham’s meant a lot to him. Not as a business (he could give a shit about the deli’s profitability or anything that Bingham himself might have cared about), but as a community. The crew was his extended family. And as much as he hated the deli’s customers, Bingham’s was the best and most fun job and work environment he could possibly imagine.
 

“Is it really that bad?” he asked Philip.

“Pretty bad. Bingham’s like a recluse or something, so I can’t really know what he’s thinking, but Wally talks like it’s an any-moment thing.”
 

The room was quiet except for Smooth B, who flipped a page in his book and said enigmatically, “Women love men who kill.”
 

Philip shifted in his chair and fumbled his cigarettes out of his pocket. He lit one, dragged on it briefly, and then set it in the crook of an ashtray at the table beside him.

“So. Number one is that there are going to be some cost-cutting measures. Employee meals are now a twenty percent discount. For those of you in the room who are math majors, you’ve currently been paying half price, which is fifty percent off. Meals are also now full price if you come in when you’re not working. No discount. And don’t give me that look, Beckie. I eat here too. This sucks for all of us. Also, we’re going to start weighing our meat.”

Rich snorted.

“I hate this one, personally, because I think that the fact that we stack ‘em tall is why people like our sandwiches, but all of these orders are coming from Wally. Two ounces per sandwich. There’s a little digital scale by the make table now. Use it. Two slices of cheese, except for the sharp cheddar with those fucked-up tiny slices. Four of those. And one more thing: no more overtime. You’re scheduled to leave at two, the clock’s going to punch you out at two, all automatic-like.”

“Do we still have to punch
in?”
said Beckie.

“Yes.”
 

“So basically, they want to stop us from getting an extra few minutes on the end, but if we’re two minutes late, they want to make sure we don’t ‘steal’ those few cents.”

“Coming from Wally. Don’t blame the messenger.”
 

“This is bullshit,” said Beckie. She crossed her arms, crossed her legs, and sat back, looking toward the door.
 

Philip continued. “Number two is....”

“Number two,” Rich giggled.

“.... is to enjoy the last weeks of summer. Once the fall rush hits, things need to move faster around here.” He looked at Slate. Slate was six-two, two-fifty, and played bass in a punk rock band. He hated the customers more than even the Anarchist and was in love with the slicer. “That means no playing Scrabble behind the counter,” Philip told him.
 

“When it’s slow?” said Slate.

“Maybe. Let’s see what happens.”
 

Slate sighed.

“Last order of business. We’ve got a rat problem.”
 

The Anarchist barked laughter.
 

“Yeah, I know,” said Philip. “But let’s pretend that this is a rational situation. Let’s pretend that there’s a hope of stopping him.”

Mike, who had only worked at Bingham’s for a few months, said, “Him?”

“The Rat,” said Tracy.

“We have a rat?”

“Yes. And no matter how many times we kill him, he comes back,” said Tracy.

“So there’s more than one rat.”
 

“No. Just the one.”
 

“But you’ve killed it.”
 

“Brutally. Repeatedly.”
 

“And there’s still a rat problem.”

“Correct.”

“So there’s more than one rat.” He looked at Nick, who, as always, looked as if he were on barbiturates. “Am I not saying it right?”

Tracy sighed and shook his head.

“Regardless,” said Philip, “closing crews, sweep everywhere. Every corner. Check under the make table; shit falls there all day long and then festers. Put the chips into that big Tupperware thingy under the counter; if you leave them out, The Rat will rip them open. Bagels all go back into the walk-in. Use the Purple Stuff liberally. Just make sure you only do that after the food has been hermetically sealed for the night. Otherwise we’ll start causing genetic mutations and birth defects and shit.”
 

Philip stopped, took a final drag on his cigarette, and snuffed it.
 

“That it?” said the Anarchist.

“I guess,” said Philip.
 

“Sucks,” said Beckie.

“Really just the meals,” said the Anarchist. “The clock thing won’t really matter day to day.” And listening to this, Philip thought,
Him of all people being the voice of optimism and rationality. He who wanted to slam people in the face with the lids of the steamers. He must get how serious this is.

Beckie scoffed, not wanting to hear it.
 

The meeting wrapped up with an anticlimactic sense of resentment. Slate went back upstairs, Philip went into the office to answer some emails and do some bookkeeping, and the rest of the employees grabbed drinks without paying for them (the new policy couldn’t possibly extend to drinks, right?), and walked out through the back door which let out into the 2-car parking alcove off of the alley where Nick had begun his grand red-and-black mural over a year ago.
 

Just a few blocks away, planning had begun to help Bingham’s maximize its financial difficulties.

Big Bagel Bills – or “3B,” as it was known by its owner, its employees, and the two dozen people who had located and patronized it in its four months of existence – wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for spite.

The new deli, located on the corner of Chittenden and Pearl just one block east of High Street, was opened shortly after Bingham’s stopped carrying iced tea. The timing wasn’t a coincidence. Dicky Kulane, 3B’s owner and chief perpetrator, had worked for the Green Leaf Tea Company as a roving salesman prior to opening his own deli, and Bingham’s had been one of his clients.
 

Bingham’s was the client Dicky hated – and this was saying a lot because Dicky was a star to most of his clients, who always did exactly what he told them to do.
 

Dicky was good at sales because he was intimidating, and this was a lucky break because Dicky wasn’t violent or even overtly threatening. Not yet, anyway. He was just odd, as is any kid who is voted “Most likely to climb a bell tower with a rifle” in high school.

Bingham’s was the reason Dicky no longer worked for Green Leaf, and it was the reason 3B had opened its doors. It was the reason 3B steamed its bagels instead of toasting them or serving them cold. It was the reason Dicky Kulane had an ulcer.
 

3B, in turn, was the reason that, in a few short months, Bingham’s would cease to exist.

Here’s how it started.

Dicky, like Captain Dipshit, had been raised with the knowledge that he was very, very intelligent. Unlike Captain Dipshit, however, Dicky’s intelligence was verified by legitimate tests that he took himself. He was particularly adept at math and science, and routinely won various science fairs and invention conventions growing up, until he reached high school and his projects began to take on an evil feel. Once he crossed from science into evil science, the boards of the various science fairs and invention conventions became wary and began to give him “good effort” ribbons instead of first place trophies. Such token ribbons seemed to strike the necessary balance between awarding him high marks (which were inappropriate, given the evil) and disqualifying him (which seemed somewhat dangerous, given his temperament).
 

Dicky was intelligent, but he ended up selling tea because he was socially retarded. He didn’t understand how normal people interacted, and he didn’t know what he should say (and not say) at what time, in which situation. He didn’t have friends because he was too strange, and he couldn’t date because he was both aggressive and awkward. Despite his aptitude, he nearly failed all of his classes in high school because he crossed out errors with the zeal of a CIA censor (a process which took several minutes per word but resulted in a completely indecipherable black bar of solid pencil graphite) and because he couldn’t speak the language of any test that wasn’t conducted on a bubble sheet. In physics, for instance, he could calculate how high a rocket would go given X amount of solid fuel burned with 100% efficiency, but he used up all of his test time attempting to explain how the flight would be affected by any payload you added (nitroglycerine in the cone would require counterweights at the base, for instance) and would depend on the angle of flight (toward the school or toward the house of the girl who laughed at his haircut).