The Bialy Pimps (12 page)

All through school, his teachers didn’t know what to do with him, so they passed him based on his test scores and based on the fact that they were mildly afraid of what might happen if they didn’t pass him. Scuttlebut in the teachers’ lounge was always the same: “Richard Kulane is smart... but there’s something wrong with that kid.”
 

So Dicky floated on through, making his own somehow evil projects (“Genetic mutation in practice” and “What will shrapnel do?” were 1980 and 1981’s disturbing non-winners), and coming up with various schemes.
 

His junior year, he changed large amounts of money into Canadian quarters as a moneymaking venture. At the time, he could get eleven Canadian quarters for two US dollars, so he got vast rolls of Canadian quarters at the bank and began attempting to pay for everything with them. The whole effort fell apart if he attempted to buy anything over a dollar, so the process was incredibly slow. He’d pay for school lunch with one US dollar and a Canadian quarter. He’d trick his acquaintances (“friends” was too strong a word) into giving him a dollar for four quarters here and there until they caught on. But by and large he had to parcel them out, and he abandoned the venture when, after two months, he’d realized a profit of $2.14.

His senior year, he decided to see how low ultralight planes flew and how far in the air buckshot would fly. He did these investigations in tandem by standing in his backyard with his father (who always had wires coming out of his head; an oddity that was never explained even to Dicky) and firing shotguns at the planes. There was no harm in this, really, because the law said that private property was three dimensional and therefore extended
up
from a taxpayer’s yard. So if Dicky and his dad could hit the planes, then the planes were in their airspace anyway.
 

After graduation from high school, Dicky applied for a CalTech postdoctoral position. Because Dicky had neither a doctorate nor an undergraduate degree, he was not accepted. Defeated, Dicky mailed off several vaguely threatening letters to CalTech’s postdoctoral committee, handwritten in his clumsy, careful lettering and censored with those heavy, inscrutable boxes when he made mistakes. The letters never made it to their addressees because the secretary who opened them sent them to the FBI. Something about the handwriting and the censor blocks convinced her that they were written by a serial killer.
 

Since a postdoc at CalTech was out of the question, college was out of the question. So Dicky got a job in a restaurant, because a girl whose window he’d been peeping through (nothing sexual. That would be creepy. He just watched her read in her bedroom for a few hours each day) worked there. He was eventually let go because several customers complained that their waiter seemed unbalanced. It was nothing they could put a finger on, but they’d ask for bread and Dicky would give them a look, or they’d send a steak back and Dicky would stare at the bread knife for a few tense seconds before taking it. He’d introduce himself and gaze for too long at the table’s woman, or he’d lean too close and invade personal space. He’d breathe heavy. He’d give them their change entirely in Canadian coins.

After a few starts and stops, Dicky ended up in sales, where invasion of personal space and a vaguely (but non-definite) threatening manner was an asset. Dicky did well in sales. His customers always bought and bought quickly just to get rid of him, and he never had any complaints because they somehow felt that he might set their building on fire if they expressed doubts. And so, through this delicate balance of service and fear, Dicky entered his brief golden age.

Normally, Dicky’s client interactions went like this: He’d come in. The employees would run to the back to get the manager. Dicky would ask the manager if he needed more tea. The manager would say, “Yes, yes, whatever, just don’t hurt us,” and Dicky would walk out with another sale. It was easy. He was a rockstar.

Bingham’s, however, wasn’t easy. There, he wasn’t a rockstar. Bingham’s, in fact, didn’t seem to notice his sales prowess or even like his company’s product. Every time Dicky went in to get Bingham’s biweekly tea order, he’d discover that tea hadn’t even been brewed for sale.
 

“You aren’t brewing the tea?” Dicky would ask Philip.
 

“Nah,” was a typical Philip response. “Nobody buys it.”
 

“How can they buy it if you don’t brew it?” Dicky would counter.

“Why should we brew it if people won’t buy it?” Philip would reply.

“How much tea would you like to reorder?” Dicky would ask.

“Ask me in two weeks,” Philip would say.

Every time, it was the same. Only once in a blue moon would Bingham’s place an order, yet every two weeks, Dicky was expected to return. Every time he showed up, he’d find that no tea was ever made. The translucent white plastic tea reservoir (on the front:
Green Leaf is Your Health Oasis
, and below that, a small flier had been adhered that read MATH TUTOR – #050 TO 895 – 292-5040) was always in the back, on the wire shelves above the triple sink, upside down and bone dry. The stock of giant tea bags was never depleted.

“So do you
ever
make tea?” Dicky asked once.

“Pretty much never,” said Philip.

“But two months ago, you placed an order. So sometimes you make it. Did it sell two months ago?”

Philip looked at the Anarchist. “Did you make tea?” he asked.

“No,” said the Anarchist.

Philip pitched his voice to Tracy, who was using the slicer to trim the extra length off of a leather belt. Because the slicer only had so much depth, the process was moving along slowly. He was chopping off quarter-inch segments one at a time and was tossing this confetti into The Box Next to the Slicer.

“Tracy! Have you ever made tea?”

“Sure.”
 

“Here?”

“Sure.”
 

“Iced tea?”

“Oh. No. Only individual cups of hot tea. You told me never to make the iced tea because the tea guy was a prick.”

Philip flinched.
 

“I never said that,” Philip told Tracy, jerking his head toward Dicky so that Tracy could see.

“Oh, right,” said Tracy. “That was Danny who said that. Danny who we fired for stealing steamers.” He paused to think. “I never make the tea here because... because one time I made it and a lot of people got sick.” It was true, too. Slate, who loved the slicer but hated the feel of the food, had become particularly disgusted with the roast beef one day while slicing and had thrown the entire uncut beef into the tea reservoir.
Nobody drinks that shit anyway
, Slate had said. But they had, and the result hadn’t been pretty.

“The tea is making people sick?”

“Only when we brew it,” said Philip with a shrug.

“So why did you order the last time? Why don’t you cancel with the company?”

“Sometimes, employees need to ship things through customs that are best packed in the distracting scent of tea leaves,” said Philip.

“Are you kidding?”

Now it was Tracy’s turn to signal Philip to be quiet.

“Of course I am,” he said, chuckling.

So each visit, it was the same drill. Into the deli. To the counter. There’d be at least two lazy employees reclining in the back, just out of sight from the front door, sitting where the overstock Styrofoam cups were stored. They were always reading or, increasingly of late, playing Scrabble. They did this while they were on the clock instead of prepping, or cleaning, or... or making tea. Meanwhile Dicky, who (let’s face it) was smarter and better than them, was working hard just trying to keep food on his table, pounding the pavement on useless errands like this. And none of them cared. None of them realized that they were lazy and inferior wastes of space, and none of them seemed remotely bothered by the fact that their behavior, as lazy and inferior wastes of space, was crapping on him, his job, and his company.

“I don’t suppose you need any tea,” he’d ask the employees.

“No,” one of them would say, without looking up from their book.

“Why don’t you brew some right now, and see if anyone buys it?” Dicky would say.

“That would require getting up,” they’d reply. “So you see the difficulty of the situation.”

This made Dicky fume. He worked on commission. And even accepting that, accepting that Bingham’s would never order, the bigger insult was that his repeated useless trips meant that he was simply wasting his time. If Bingham’s wanted to stop carrying tea altogether, fine. If they wanted to start selling tea, then all the better. But they would commit to neither. They existed in limbo, refusing to cancel their reorder check-in but refusing to make (and hence buy) any Green Leaf product. And the company, in its hippie wisdom, didn’t believe in minimum reorders. “Let it be what it’ll be,” one of the executives was reported to have actually said in a board meeting.

So every two weeks for over a year, Dicky went into Bingham’s. And got madder and madder each time.

The situation – and the place itself – was beyond understanding. Bingham’s was staffed by layabouts. Slugs. Wastes. Human trash. Dicky most respected intelligence and innovation, but given that he was currently in foodservice sales, he’d settle for seeing a solid work ethic.
He
got up each day at 5am, hit the gym, walked the dog, and began his route. He doubted that these... these
people
... would ever know the value of hard work. And if he..
. he!.
.. had to work this hard, than these idiots should have to, too.

Dicky complained to his manager about Bingham’s, asking if he could stop checking in, or at least check in less frequently. His manager told him to try harder. The customer was always right, he said.
 

Not at Bingham’s, though. Dicky had been in often enough to know that the whole organization scoffed at both ends of the food chain. They treated their suppliers (like Dicky), like total garbage, and they treated their customers like total garbage. Dicky had once seen a woman complain about the music, and had watched Philip tell her that she could go elsewhere if she didn’t like it (and it was, Dicky remembered, a particularly offensive verse, repeating FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME over and over). During that same trip, while Dicky had been working in vain to sell tea, he’d watched a call ring in to the back phone, and watched Philip take it. It was clearly the same woman. He knew because he’d heard Philip tell her, “If you want to speak to the manager about the music, that’s me. Yes, I’m the guy who told you he didn’t care what you thought when you were in here.” At which point she must have hung up because he stood there for a while, asking the dead phone, “Hello?”

The problem with Bingham’s was that the whole place, both collectively and as individuals, had no basic human decency. But he was told that the customer was always right, and so he tried anew.

“How about I make the tea for you?” he asked Philip during his next check-in. “I’ll get the reservoir for you and brew it. No problem.”
 

“No thanks.”
 

“People might like it,” he said. He turned to the line of customers and asked, “Would any of you like iced tea?”
 

A few people nodded and said they would. So, with an air of resignation, Philip had gone to fetch the reservoir from the back. Dicky felt as if maybe this would be the moment he turned the corner, that he solved the persnickety Bingham’s dilemma.
 

Two weeks later, he returned to find the tea unmade, the reservoir in the back, on the wire shelves, bone dry. And now those little white “math tutor” fliers were on the sides, back, and bottom as well as the front.
 

So Dicky repeated his offer to Philip, and again made his plea to the customers in line. Again customers said they wanted tea. But this time, Philip said they were too busy because the lunch rush was on. And besides, the tea reservoir was, indeed, just a reservoir. You had to brew the tea using the coffee machine, and it was currently brewing coffee. Decaf was set to brew next.

“You can make it when all of the coffee is done,” Dicky said.
 

“We’re too busy,” Philip repeated. “No order today. Check back in two weeks.”

Two weeks later, Dicky came back and found the tea reservoir still stowed and the stash still untouched. So he let himself behind the counter and began to brew the tea himself.

“What are you doing?” asked Philip.

“I’m making tea,” said Dicky in a defiant, pouty voice.

“You can’t do that,” said Philip. “That’s our tea.”
 

“Not if you don’t brew it,” said Dicky.

“Perhaps you don’t understand how ownership works,” said Philip.

“If you don’t brew it, it just sits back there and rots,” he said. “This is good tea. You don’t give it a chance.”
 

“Who are you, the tea rights committee?”
 

“I’m brewing it,” said Dicky, his face set.
 

“You owe me a teabag,” said Philip.
 

“I don’t owe you anything. You never brew it. I’m just doing what you should have been doing all along, every day.”
 

Philip grabbed Dicky’s arm and tried to pull it away from the coffee machine, where he was devoutly brewing.

“Give me those tea bags.”

“No.”
 

“Give them to me,” said Philip.

“No.”
 

And in the end, because the customer was always right, Bingham’s hadn’t sold even the tea that was already brewed, had gotten a case of free tea bags, and had gotten Dicky fired.
 

The Green Leaf executive hippies told Philip how sorry they were about the incident.

Philip graciously accepted their apology.

And Dicky was suddenly unemployed, baffled, and angry.

He had done nothing wrong.
They
were the ones who had broken the social contract.
They
were the ones who kept wasting his time, kept disrespecting his effort and his hard work.
They
were the ones who never sold anything – not because the tea wasn’t good, but because they were too lazy to brew it.
They
were the ones who laid around the entire day, letting the deli become filthy instead of doing their jobs, playing their offensive music (“Treat ya like a gas can – take your ass and fill it”) and disrespecting both the customers (who gave them the patronage they needed to stay in business) and the vendors (who sold them what they needed to stay in business.)
They
had done wrong here, not him. Yet who was out on the street?