The Bialy Pimps (22 page)

He followed the folds of forgotten space, wondering for the hundredth time what the space was designed for. A basement with so many chambers? Why? It recalled the horror movie mainstay of the abandoned mental hospital in which unthinkable things had been done.
 

He passed rat nests and rat pellets that hadn’t been there when A-1 Exterminators had paid their fruitless visit. He heard unsettling scratching and dripping sounds. In some spots, standing water covered the ground.
 

Forget embarrassing hats,
he thought with a shiver.
If Wally and Bingham had really wanted to torture us, he would have told us to move down here.

Almost at his destination, he shied to the side of the corridor as he passed the Lair of the Air Conditioner Queen. It was a dark place, cramped and ruled by a foreboding blue metal hulk and meshed with crisscrossing serpentine vents. The vents weaved and bobbed among one another (weaved way more than was necessary or efficient, in his opinion) before entering the walls and ceiling. Woe be to the person who had to change the Queen’s air filter every few months, as there was barely room to move below her entangled arms.
 

As the Anarchist passed, the round logo on the Queen’s front gazed through the door at him like a single unblinking eye.

The Steamer Graveyard itself, located at the end of the basement’s main room (and very near the basement’s other entrance, he remembered with irritation) was a monument to the shitiness of American workmanship. Bingham’s had been in existence at the time for four years, but more than fifteen steamers, all broken beyond repair, stood three high in a wall of spent merchandise. They sat one on top of another like fallen bodies in a mass burial pit, facing the Anarchist with their black handles pointing at him like diseased tongues. A naked bulb cast a cone of light on the dead.

The Anarchist did not waste any time. He pried one of the steamers open, removed a length of wire, and retreated up the front stairwell.

He crossed to Philip, who was still examining the phone’s shattered innards, and announced that he had found some wire.

“Give it a shot,” Philip told him.

The Anarchist held the massive, heavy-gauge steamer wire next to the delicate wires in the phone. “I may have miscalculated,” he said. He tried to twist them together and discovered that he couldn’t bend the steamer wire at all.

“I’ll get the pliers,” Philip said.

The pliers were moot. Philip made a U-bend in the end of the thick, six-inch steamer wire, but could not twist it. So instead, he wrapped the tiny wire from the phone around it several times, then duct-taped it in place to keep it from moving around. The end result looked like a flower vine trying to climb a sequoia tree. He repeated the process on the other end of the steamer wire, effectively but almost certainly ineffectively re-attaching the mouthpiece unit to the rest of the phone.
 

When he was finished, he set the phone down on the counter to admire it. The green rubber-coated steamer wire bulged from the delicate circuitry of the handset. The Anarchist and Philip stared at it as if they expected it to do a trick.

“That phone is ghetto as fuck,” Philip said.

“That is the most ghetto phone that I have ever had the pleasure to see,” said the Anarchist.

“Think it’ll work?”

“There’s only one way to find out.” He tried to re-mate the broken halves of the handset. The green wire protested.

“Fucking wire.”

“Fucking ghetto wire.”

“Try pushing... yeah, like that.”

“Here?”

“Wait, no. There. Right.”

“Oh to hell with it. Let’s just use it like it is, without the casing on it. We can wrap it in duct tape or something.”

“Whew,” Philip whistled. “
Hard core
ghetto.”

“Let’s just see if it works first. Is it plugged into the wall?”

“Now it is. Here.” He jiggled the off-hook button. “Anything?”

“Not yet. Wait. Dammit! Wires came apart.”

“Here. You hold it up and jiggle the button, and I’ll hold the wires together.”

“Won’t you get shocked?”

“From a phone? No.”

Jenny was staring at the tangle of arms and bodies. She elbowed Smooth B and pointed to it. Smooth B squinted, then shrugged.

The Anarchist pulled the handset away from his ear. He looked at Philip. Then, with a flash of mutual comprehension, they both looked at the ailing phone.

“Should we smash it?” Philip asked.

“I don’t think we have any choice,” the Anarchist replied.

After the phone had been smashed into many humiliated pieces in the back alley and the handset with its shattered hangers-on had been heaved into the overhead electrical wires, Philip came back into his office, sat down in his chair, rolled into the ghetto office pothole, and picked up the phone.
 

There was no dial tone.

He jiggled the off-hook button, already suspecting that he may have been guilty of executing an innocent piece of telecommunications equipment. Still nothing.
 

That was it on Bingham’s phones. There was (
was
) the Ghetto Phone near the slicer, and the office phone. There were no others to try, but it didn’t matter. If the office phone was out, phone service in general was out. The office phone had never been a problem.
 

Philip didn’t own a cell phone. He didn’t think anyone at Bingham’s owned a cell phone. The odd miscreant who actually had a
regular
phone was something of a catch for the deli. Fully half of the employees on the phone list were listed as NO PHONE, though Philip suggested this was because they didn’t want anyone calling them from the official phone list, asking them to pick up shifts.

Meh.
 

He could call Wally when he got home, as long as he remembered to write down Wally’s number before he left for the day. Or he could just say fuck it and not call Wally. His moment of wanting to yell at the boss had passed in the excitement surrounding the attempted rescue and subsequent mercy killing of the Ghetto Phone. Wally’s loyalties and/or his insanity were pretty clear. It would be satisfying to have his say, but...

Meh.
 

... but he didn’t really care anymore. No matter how many hoops he jumped through, Bingham’s was going to close its doors. No matter how much he complied, nobody here would have a job much longer. And what was worse? They wouldn’t have this
place
anymore. Screw the
job
.
Bingham’s
– as a friendly, family, slacker way of life – was what mattered. And that was gone very soon. He could wrangle all the business and wear all the stupid hats Wally wanted and nothing would change. He was tired of doing things that made him feel like a stooge and a sell-out.
 

So Wally was telling him to save money by slicing up roadkill. Sure, it was bizarre beyond belief. Sure, it was infuriating. But it was also moot. It didn’t matter what ridiculous thing Wally told him to do now. Bingham’s wanted to die and was apparently determined to do so with or without Philip embarrassing himself or his co-workers. So, he’d let it die.

Thanks to the cable modem connection (another William early-adopter triumph), the lack of phone service wouldn’t stop him from going online and sending email. He opened a new window and composed a message:

Wally,

I tried to call but our phones are out. If I think of it, I may try to call you when I get home. Or you can call me. Whatever.

But I’m done doing the stupid shit you and Bingham keep dreaming up for us. You can fire me or you can leave me here. I’ll stay until I hear different.
 

If Bingham wants to close the place, let him, but you can stop sending demands. I’m done.

Philip

It didn’t take long for a reply to come. When it did, it said that things were more dire than ever, and the deli would certainly be closing within two weeks if certain measures weren’t taken. Then it listed the measures, and suggested that Philip reconsider.
 

Philip closed the message and turned off the computer. He took off his mushroom hat and walked back out into the lobby, to make bagel sandwiches for what seemed likely to be one of the last few times.

Philip didn’t tell anyone about Wally’s final demand, his own email back to Wally, or Wally’s reply with its dire two-week prediction. He simply announced that there would be a party on Friday night, didn’t give a reason, and invited everyone to come.
 

There was something about the tone of Philip’s announcement, though, that must have suggested that something untoward was going on. Normally, the Bingham’s parties were drunken, stoned affairs. The night usually reveled on with increasing debauchery until only the most hard-core participants remained, usually having breakfast at a Bob Evans before finally going to sleep. Normally, somebody baked pot brownies or packed a bowl before the night was over. One time, an ex-employee known simply as “The Doctor” had even whipped up what he called his “Green Dragon Brew” – a concoction made by shaking a bottle of whiskey over a moss-like wad of marijuana for hours on end.
 

The party that Philip held following Wally’s latest message was, by contrast, far more subdued. Everyone seemed to sense the spirit of what was coming, what was being celebrated, or perhaps what was being mourned. Fewer people came. Intoxicants were less pervasive. Beckie, in a fit of inspiration, even thought to bring the Bingham’s Sexual Harassment Log.

The Sexual Harassment Log was an exceedingly immature, politically-incorrect record of every out-of-context remark ever uttered within Bingham’s’ walls. Beckie’s favorite page, however, had nothing to do with Bingham’s or with double entendre. The page had once been part of
The Big Book of Pictures to Color
but now, transplanted, resided inside of the Log. The picture was of a cartoon sheep (little more than a simplified, cottony cloud) and a mottled Holstein cow. The two were standing end-to-end in a sunny meadow, the cow’s head at the sheep’s hindquarters and vice-versa. The animals were licking each other’s coats with their oval-ended cartoon tongues in what seemed to be a subtle piece of sexual innuendo. Beckie had colored it and had transferred it to the Log, declaring that if a children’s coloring book picture of barnyard animals engaged in a thinly-veiled sixty-nine was not sexual harassment, then nothing was.

Once the party (which despite everyone’s best efforts felt more like a vigil) was well underway on the deck of Philip’s apartment building, Beckie handed out Xeroxes of the sheep and cow picture. “So that you never forget me,” she explained. The gesture, which was supposed to be funny, had a feeling of sending off and of departure, but nobody bothered to point it out. There was an unspoken truth being honored. Everyone seemed to understand.

After some sedate discussion in which business at the deli wasn’t so much as mentioned, Mike grabbed the Log and declared in his stoic, uninterested voice that he was going to kick things up a notch by reading a few verses.

He read, “Beckie: ‘Hey Philip, there’s something between your legs.’

“Beckie: ‘Now I’ve got white goo all over my hands!’

“Beckie: ‘Oh great. I’ve only been here five minutes and I’ve already been logged twice.’”

He stopped. He scanned the page, then flipped to the next page.
 

“Okay, pretty much all of the entries in here are Beckie,” he said. “I’m bored.”
 

Darcy took the Log and began to leaf through it. “Why are Philip’s entries so blatant?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Most of the quotes in here are things that were taken out of context, but listen to Philip’s: ‘I have big balls.’ ‘My dick itches.’ ‘This is like that time I shit my pants.’”

Tracy set his beer on the deck and eyed Philip. “You shit your pants?”

“Not since I’ve been running the place, I’m happy to say.”

Tracy continued to look at him expectantly.

Philip took a sip from the longneck bottle he was holding. “It was back when William was the manager. I had been sick for a week. I was hung over, too, and then all of a sudden...” He paused to let this sink in. “Anyway, I told William that I needed to borrow his car to go home and change. He laughed at me and said, ‘No way, Toby! You’re not getting shit in my car!”

Darcy cocked her head. “Toby?”

“William called me ‘Toby’ because he decided that it was the ultimate fat kid name.”

“Ah.”

“Anyway, he eventually let me go but made me sit on a collapsed cardboard box.”

The next five minutes passed in a serene, reflective calm, as always tends to happen at parties after someone tells a diarrhea story. The night was warm, the air clean and surprisingly quiet for a Friday on campus.
 

It was nice, thought the Anarchist. All of them together, hanging out as friends. There was no stupid deli business. No demands from Wally. No asshole customers. This was like Bingham’s at its very best. The good of Bingham’s without the bad. Bingham’s when it was slow, when High Street was mostly abandoned and the crew lounged inside, wasting the owner’s money by sitting on the counters and reading, playing Scrabble, or just bullshitting.
 

“Wouldn’t it be great if this was what work was like?” he said. “If we could just go in and hang out together but not have to serve anyone?”

Jenny, who had been mostly quiet in the corner, shrugged. “Yeah, sure. You may be overlooking the idea of how a ‘job’ works, but sure.”
 

“The other day,” said the Anarchist, “this guy asked me to add sprouts to his bagel as I was making it. Which is annoying. So I told him that sprouts cost fifteen cents extra, and he huffed and nodded, and so I added them. Then, as he’s reaching into his pocket for change, he suddenly stops and looks at me and says, ‘You shouldn’t charge extra for sprouts, man. They come from the earth.’ I shrugged and told him that cows also come from the earth and that he was welcome to raise either rather than paying us fascists for them. But he looked all grumpy and there was a line at the register, so I just wrapped up his bagel and gave it to him without waiting for the change that I figured wasn’t coming anyway.”