The Bialy Pimps (49 page)

“It’s my fault that Ted is dead!”

The Anarchist was still thinking. Then he said, “I’m beginning to agree with you. Maybe it
was
your fault.”

Jenny gasped.

“Right
there,”
Mike was telling the behemoth in front of him, pointing. “Above your ear.”

Philip looked to Mike, then to Jenny, to Beckie, Darcy, the Anarchist. He was strangely unaffected by the whole situation. It felt like a dream, like when he’d chased the bum down High Street with a pipe all those years ago. He had heard William’s voice as he’d stood over the bum with the pipe raised as he heard Beckie’s and Darcy’s lamentations now, through a haze and muted:
Don’t do it, Toby.
He felt lightheaded, just as he’d felt then. It was all too bizarre. Ted had seemed immortal in a way, an unshakable obelisk of persistence amidst a sea of changes. Ted had been a focus. He’d been an anchor.

“I know it’s there,” the customer told Mike.

Beckie was cradling the plastic lawn swan like a child. “Ted!” she sobbed.

A week after Army Ted’s funeral, two weeks before the planned Rat Uprising, and just around the time that OSU’s final exams were getting into full swing, the weather turned bitterly cold and Philip admitted the truth.

“Ted is not the tutor,” he said heavily.

“Was
not,” clarified the Anarchist.

“Ted was not our savior.”

“At least not in the way we thought,” the Anarchist amended.

“We still haven’t been sued.”

“Not once.”

“And the tutor fliers continue to refresh and multiply following Ted’s death.”

“Fruitfully,” agreed the Anarchist.

Philip sighed, wiped his brow, and squinted at the front windows. He hardly noticed the wall of customers and screaming fans and gesturing reporters there anymore. He saw the back of Bricker through the glass as a protective mass, keeping all troubles at bay. Beyond the screaming people, the snow was fresh and clean, unsullied for the time being by the tramping of eager feet.

The Anarchist followed his gaze. “Should we open the moat?” he asked.

“I believe so,” Philip answered, reaching back and pressing a button on the wall. In front of the store, the sidewalk slowly opened into a long, gaping hole. The hole was filled with a red liquid.

“Hot sauce?” the Anarchist asked.

“Hot sauce.”

Bricker was protected on his small island in front of the door, but the throngs of customers and others had fallen into the spicy bath. It had been Beckie’s idea, and when the moat was open, Bingham’s had no sidewalk at all. Only the moat, and the small army of midgets that Philip had hired to poke the people in the moat with long sticks.

“Look at those midgets,” Philip said fondly.

“Midgets are funny,” agreed the Anarchist.

If Ted had not been a mystical presence, then there was no magic in the situation at all. There was no real pressure anymore. People were apparently just too stupid to sue them, and Bingham’s was charmed. Hell, nothing made any real sense anymore, so why not? It was as good an explanation as any.

Everyone wondered if the chaotic Bingham’s rollercoaster ride had reached its apex. The sensation was a runaway success, and there was seemingly no limit to what people would accept in the way of merchandising. Nick had embarked on a series of experiments intended to test the limits of consumerism, but everyone thought he was insane. Certainly, they said, nobody would buy a Bingham’s shower curtain.

But they had. The first small run had sold out within a few days, and everyone was impressed. They were skeptical, however, when Nick began to produce a Bingham’s cereal.

“Bingham-O’s?” Rich asked skeptically.

“Yup. Shit’s gooood.”

“It’s Cap’n Crunch,” Rich told the spidery Nick as he worked on the paperwork for an order.

“It’s Bingham-erific.”

“But,” Rich said carefully, “it’s Cap’n Crunch.”

Nick puffed his cigarette. “Man,” he drawled in his syrupy voice, “it stops being Cap’n Crunch when I pour it out of the Cap’n Crunch box and into this one.” He brandished the box at Rich like a weapon. On the front was a picture of Philip, in flowing robes, wearing a turban. Across the top, in block letters: BINGHAM-O’S. Below it, in cheerful italics:
Eat it, fuckface!

“Hmmm,” Rich assessed.

The cereal sold out right away, and Nick was fired up. He immediately embarked on a new venture, to keep revenue up.

“Bingham’s metal screws?” Artie asked, bouncing a few of the shiny pointed screws on his palm. “Are you sure?”

“Was I sure about the Bingham’s hairpiece?” Nick said.

Artie nodded solemnly. “Touché.”

Later, Tracy said, “Bingham’s vertical blinds?”
 

Darcy asked, “Bingham’s sexual lubricant?” and

Slate said, “Bingham’s suppositories?”

All were great successes. All it took was the Bingham’s name, and the product in question immediately became sales dynamite. The action figures were in their tenth edition, and the original figures were already considered collector’s items worth hundreds of dollars despite the fact that all ten editions were exactly the same. Most of the employees had been guests on MTV by now, and for some reason Smooth B kept getting phone calls from horny supermodels. He felt that he was too good for all of them.

Philip had become a teen idol. Among his photo credits, he counted such prepubescent girlie special edition magazines as
Philip is Hot!
and
Philip Martin, Super Hunk!
On the cover of both of these, Philip was lying on his stomach in bed, chatting on the phone, his legs curled up behind him and the phone cord twirled around one busy finger. One entrepreneur even contacted him about starting a teen chat line which would charge five dollars a minute for girls to listen to recordings of his voice. He agreed, on the condition that he would simply read the ingredients of Spam over and over.

All in all, things were grand. Still, something troubling was in the air.

“Something troubling is in the air,” the Anarchist told Rich.

“I just farted,” Rich explained.

Beckie was the first one to begin to show signs of strain. Perhaps worn down emotionally by the tragic death of Army Ted, she slipped into a shallow but troubling depression, spending most of her days feeding Swannie with breadcrumbs from the palm of her hand. She was tired of fame, she said. The others tried to explain her attitude by using logic.

“PMS,” Bricker declared.

“Pregnant,” Tracy hypothesized.

“I’m the best writer I know!” chimed the Anarchist for a reason that nobody could fathom.

Still, explanations aside, the stresses of fame and being in the public eye were indeed taking their toll. The Anarchist and Philip had nearly doubled their intake of cherry Alka-Seltzer. Slate began to sequester himself with the slicer, hunching over the machine in the corner like a leprechaun making gold.
 

Philip began to hate the customers.

“You’ve never
not
hated the customers,” the Anarchist clarified.

“I hate them in a different way now. I used to hate that they came in here and bugged me. Now, it’s a base-level contempt for humanity as a whole. The human race needs to be extinct.”

“I’m not hoping for that, personally.”

Philip shrugged. It was a helpless gesture. “I know we never intended for this to have any grand moral ramifications, but said grand moral ramifications appeared nonetheless once the whole mess got rolling. I can’t help but feel that we could have made a difference. We have not.”

“Explain.”

“You know. ‘People are sheep.’ ‘People are stupid.’”

“Right...”

“But have we changed anything? We should have woken people up. We should have shaken them into sensibility. I can’t help but think that all we did was change the focus of their idiocy.”

The Anarchist shook his head. “I don’t know if it was possible to begin with. You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”

Philip sighed.

“How do you see all of this ending?” the Anarchist asked after a pause. The question was hardly surprising, given the Anarchist’s preoccupation with what came next in recent weeks. But Philip was in a philosophical frame of mind, and heard the question anew.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re the Spice Girls. We’re the Backstreet Boys. We’re
flashes in the pan.
Someday – someday soon – people are going to stop caring about Bingham’s Bagel Deli.”

“I suppose so.”

The Anarchist hopped up onto the counter. In contrast to the usual tenor of these conversations, he seemed curious instead of concerned. He said, “Not that it bothers me. We’ll still have money if we save up what we’re getting now. And really, all of this attention
is
getting kind of tiring. But what will happen to the deli?”

“Become just a deli again, I suppose.”

“And we’ll all stay on?”

“Not you. You’ll be mutating genes.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve decided not to go to grad school.”

Philip was surprised. “Really? Why?”

The Anarchist waved his hand, dismissing the subject. “It’s not important.”

“So... what? You’re going to work here for a while longer?”

“Maybe. But this place won’t be the same when all of this” – he swept his arm across the store, indicating its banners, crass decorations, and machines of customer humiliation – “is over. I can feel it.”

“Maybe it’ll go back to the way it was before.”

“No, it won’t. Bingham’s will be meaningless after this high we’re on now. Besides, Beckie will be leaving soon, and Darcy is talking about moving back home. Give us until the summer and other people will start to graduate and move away. Hell, if your plan to start that hydroponics farm out in Colorado pans out, then you’ll be gone, too.”

“A few people will stay.”

The Anarchist was staring at his shoes. He thought of the people who had already left – Carla, William, Trip – and those who soon would. “Hell,” he said, “I don’t want to work in a deli forever. Neither do you. We’re
all
going to have to move on eventually. Maybe when this ends, it
should
end.”

Philip nodded.

The Anarchist continued, “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. See, I’ve always hated change. I’ve always hated when time marched on and wished that sometimes it would just stand still for a while. But time can never stand still, because if I stay in this moment forever, I miss all of the things that I could have seen and done because I am a finite, flawed creature, blinded by the moment so much that I can’t entertain the possibility that the future will be better. But it’s
always
better, whether we see it or not. It’s better because it’s progression. It’s growth. You have to appreciate things when you have them, and then let them go. I love this moment. But now...” – he paused, looking at his watch – “...it’s gone. Just like that.”

Philip was staring at him. “I don’t know whether to be depressed or inspired.”

“Don’t be anything. It’s just the way things are.”

Philip said nothing.

“So I’m wondering what happens next. This will end, and then Bingham’s as we know it will vanish. It gets a new manager and a new crew. The walls get a fresh coat of paint. Maybe the hole in the office floor gets fixed and the picture of Jason in the flaking plaster outside of your door gets spackled over. The new kids will probably enjoy the new Bingham’s, but it will never be as fun as our time. Never.”

Philip smiled. It was true, and it was bittersweet.

“You know,” said the Anarchist. “You were right about me. I was following someone else’s plan, too.
I
was stupid.
I
was a sheep. I decided once upon a time what I wanted to do with my life, and I never went back to re-evaluate it. But now I have, and I realized that I didn’t like where I was going, and I’ve made a change. Now, I don’t know where I’m going. That scares me, but I’ll get over it. Life is too short to spend doing things that suck. Ted’s death is an all-too-clear reminder of that. Any one of us could get hit by a COTA bus tomorrow, and if that were to happen to me, I want to have enjoyed the time I had.”

“Maybe this whole thing has made a difference after all,” said Philip. “We thought we could wake up the world, but we ended up finding out that we were asleep, too. We didn’t wake up others. But at least we woke up ourselves.”

“So what happens next?” said the Anarchist.

Philip shrugged. “Time will tell.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said Tony. “The camera is
gone
. You’ve got no footage. No proof. There is nothing at all for you to use against them.”
 

Dicky nodded. “I heard you the first time,” he said. “And I understand you just fine.”
 

It wasn’t surprising in the least that Tony’s camera was gone. Dicky had come to expect as much from Bingham’s. Bingham’s wasn’t a normal place. It had a spell over it – a dark and protective enchantment bestowed by some hideous power. And what was so ridiculously, hilariously, stab-yourself-in-the-eye-with-a-fork-and-then-burn-down-an-orphanage funny about the whole thing was that this was
exactly
what his idiot protégée had been saying all along.
 

“I
told
you the place was owned by a smelly drunk homeless megalomaniac dwarf who is actually Satan,” said Captain Dipshit, who was sitting at Dicky’s side.

“I know, I know,” said Dicky.
 

Something had changed in their relationship. It used to be that Dicky was the boss and Captain Dipshit was the stooge. Dicky was still the boss, but ever since the day Dicky had seen the rats in Bingham’s lobby, Captain Dipshit’s role had become closer to that of an advisor. And it was about damn time.
 

“Seven hundred dollars in equipment,” said Tony, pacing and getting red in the face. “And they just
took
it. Those... those
God damn kids
. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
Nothing.
What am I supposed to do? Tell the cops? ‘Oh, hey, these people stole a camera I was using to spy on them.’ Dammit. They wouldn’t even own up to it. Just had me clean up the mess and order another
air freshener
for them, of all things.”