The Bialy Pimps (30 page)

What was happening at Bingham’s was a game. Everyone understood that. And every game had to have rules. The rules said that the crew could do pretty much whatever it wanted, but no matter
what
they did, the game was still played in a deli, meaning that there were workers and there were customers. Food was served. Money was paid. Those were the rules of the game, just as gravity was a rule of life. You can choose your career in life, and it can be whatever you want, but you can’t choose to float. Similarly, in the Bingham’s Rebellion game, if customers came in, the crew would need to deal with them. And that would suck, because right now it was so quiet. So peaceful.

“I’m going to sneak over and lock the door,” said Tracy.
 

And this was borderline as far as the rules were concerned, but it would also be pretty funny. Normally the Anarchist would allow it, but right now it was too risky. Tracy would never make the front door before they came in, and once they came in, they’d be customers. Game over.

There was a Pavlovian squeak of the door (Pavlovian because the noise itself triggered an automatic annoyance response in all Bingham’s workers), and the two customers began walking the twenty feet between the door and the counter. Stupid smiles on their stupid faces. Walking along stupidly. Surely thinking stupid thoughts, on their way back from somewhere stupid. Maybe going to watch some stupid TV shows later at their stupid house in Stupidtown. Unaware that their stupidity had just ruined a perfect, peaceful moment. It was as if they thought the place was a fucking restaurant, and the people who worked in it were there to serve them.

That was when the Anarchist turned the hose on them.

He did it so quickly and so smoothly that Tracy never saw it coming. All of a sudden he was leaning back, the canvas hose cradled in both arms, bracing himself against the pressure. His face was wild, mouth wide and lips pulled back to reveal flashing teeth. He looked at the ceiling, shook his head back and forth, and brayed laughter.

“YA-YAAA!” he yelled.

The hose gushed an incredible amount of water. The pressure wasn’t as high as it could have been, but it was high enough to arc the thirty feet to the customers. What was it hooked up to? Tracy followed it with his eyes and saw that he could only tell that it ran to the back, into mystery.

The two writhing would-be customers were holding their hands in front of their faces, yawing with surprised mouths, still advancing.

The Anarchist hooted with abandon, splaying his feet wide and shaking his hips like Elvis. He redoubled his effort to focus the spray, to drive them back.

“AWWW-AWWWW!” he shouted, Sam-Kinison-like.

They turned. Slipped. Fell. Rolled all the way to the door, against the door. Got to their feet, and reached for the door handle. Missed it, fell again. One tried to help the other up, but the floor was a high-pressure river, a giant Slip-and-Slide. Eventually the sheer weight of the water (and also their bodies) against the door forced it open, and they rolled out onto the sidewalk.
 

Once outside, the couple stood up, shook themselves off, and walked south down High Street as if nothing had happened.

The Anarchist cranked the hose off.
 

Tracy and the Anarchist surveyed the store. Tables were toppled. Water was absolutely everywhere.

Tracy said, “I’m not cleaning that up.”

Then Philip decided the cleanup issue for them (decision: nobody would clean it up; the floors were fake wood that wouldn’t warp and most of the water was running either outside or into the basement) by bringing them the news from the bathroom.

Across the street, perched on the stone wall in front of the undergraduate library where Little Johnny Redbeard had made many a reluctant friend, sat a man named Chuck Fink.

Chuck was the author of a small but fanatically read column in the
Dispatch
called “Fink’s Fluff.” “Fink’s Fluff” was just what its name implied: a weekly “fluff” journalism feature that Chuck’s more scholarly colleagues detested. Chuck didn’t cover car crashes and terrorism and corruption. He covered pet adoption fairs. Hookers with hearts of gold. He wrote about philosophical bag ladies, nostalgic businesses, and particularly artistic graffiti.
 

Chuck’s colleagues detested Chuck’s column because its readership was extremely large, fiercely loyal, and very vocal despite the general shittiness of Chuck’s journalism. Once, during a contract dispute, the
Dispatch
had rejected Chuck’s salary proposal and the paper had announced that the column would regrettably no longer be running in the
Dispatch
. Chuck himself wrote a letter to the editor on the matter (which, to its credit, the
Dispatch
ran without bias), complaining about the paper’s unfairness. In response, the “Fluffers” (Chuck thought that was hilarious) organized a protest and made the paper’s existence hell until it caved to Chuck’s demand and brought the column back on board. None of this surprised Chuck. You don’t fuck with the Fluffers.

Chuck found his stories by keeping his ear to the ground. When someone mentioned something trivial but vaguely interesting, Chuck checked up on it. One quick phone call or trip and an hour of writing later, he was done and his work was submitted – a work-to-completion ration that was fine by Chuck who, much like the Bingham’s crew, wasn’t big on effort.
 

He’d heard about Bingham’s a lot lately. It was a campus fixture, really no more remarkable than Grinders or BW3 or any of the other local restaurants. That is, until recently. The things he heard about it now were piecemeal, like rumors. He didn’t know anyone who had eaten there, but he knew a lot of people who knew people who had eaten there, or knew people who knew people who had eaten there. And the tales he’d heard about Bingham’s, they were like fish stories, surely exaggerated.
 

Aggressive, in-your-face service. Over-the-top rudeness. Borderline assault. Hell, actual, literal assault.
 

And the people who walked by the place reported that it was always packed at lunchtime and dinner. They always said something like,
I keep meaning to try it, but haven’t had the guts.
 

It didn’t sound like a place you ate food. It sounded like a trial you endured, to see if you could take it. The way people talked about Bingham’s, it was like they were talking about one of those masochistic obstacle courses like a Spartan race, where people dove into pools of ice water and weaved through vines of live electric wires.
 

And now, he’d met the manager. The manager had essentially confirmed what Chuck had heard.

I wouldn’t go there now if I were you. It’s quiet and empty right now, and they always hate the first customer after a lull. Who knows what they’ll do to that first customer?

And then the manager had vomited into a curbside trashcan, wiped his mouth, and walked on as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

The manager’s warning hadn’t deterred Chuck from Bingham’s. Quite the contrary. He was more interested in the place than ever, but he decided to heed the warning and let someone else break Bingham’s afternoon quiet spell.

So he’d walked down and sat across the street, waiting. In his bag, he had a camera with a telephoto lens. He got it out, snapped a few shots, and watched for the opportunity for more.

Just a few minutes after he’d set up shop on the stone wall, two people stopped in front of the store, considered briefly, and then went inside.
 

Then something interesting had happened. He couldn’t be sure exactly what it was from his position across the street, but it looked as if the two people were writhing in agony. They were shielding their faces, sliding all over the place as if on

(a wet spot.)

Right. That was it. That was kind of what it looked like, like they had slipped and fallen. But they were also holding their hands in front of their faces and jerking around kind of like if

(they were being sprayed with a hose.)

But that didn’t make a lick of sense. And yet, that was what it looked like, at least from where he was sitting. And then sure enough, the sidewalk in front of the door began to grow dark, and he could see a river of water spilling through the cracks around the door, across the sidewalk, and into the gutter along the street.
 

He took some photos.

The door banged open and two doused and dripping people tumbled out onto the sidewalk amidst a great torrent of water. With the door open, Chuck could see the offending hose in action, and then it was shut off, its job done.

The people shook themselves off and walked away.
 

More curious than ever, Chuck, who was wearing belted khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and a hat, shouldered his camera bag and began to jaywalk across High toward Bingham’s, just as a mysterious Army guy with a similar appearance often did.

The Anarchist felt a pang of regret that Philip hadn’t been around for the hose-soaking and made a mental note to repeat it for him. Then he sighed as he glanced up to see Army Ted walking over from the undergraduate library. It’d have be later. He couldn’t spray Ted. You didn’t spray a spy with legal connections out the front door. It was bad for business.

Just then, Philip burst from the back room, brandishing the broken-off handle of the toilet plunger like a sheared Olympic torch, hooting with what could only be described as victory.

Just as Chuck Fink walked through the door, Philip thrust his chest out and wagged the plunger handle at Tracy and the Anarchist. “Fucking-A right! Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy, bitch?”
 

“All right, all right,” the Anarchist said to him. “We’ll figure out who your daddy is. Just what are you talking about?”

“Oh, man,” said Philip, breathing hard. “Come with me. You won’t believe this.”

Philip led them through the back room, past the triple sink, and through the door that opened into the other end of the bathroom hallway. Tracy remembered the urgency with which Philip had entered the bathroom earlier and had a moment of terror. How had that plunger broken? What had he been trying to force down the drain with it?

From the lobby, now in front of the counter, Chuck watched the three employees enter the bathroom. He looked behind the counter and saw the hose. It wasn’t a garden hose as he’d imagined. It was a giant fire hose, the valve closed but still full and fat. He turned around to survey the damage. It looked like a hurricane had hit the front room. Chairs and tables were overturned, debris was all over the place, and everything was soaked.
 

Chuck pulled his camera from its bag and began taking pictures. The lobby. The hose. The insulting decor that had appeared of late, all of which had been placed at Darcy’s rather perverted suggestion and supervised by her personally: a blown-up, larger-than-life photo of Philip’s naked ass dominated the coffee cream-and-sugar station. Black rubber dildoes hung from the ceiling like cocoons and sagged from the walls like inverted coathooks. There was music on the overhead speakers – some rap album that, as he listened, finished “Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny” and transitioned into “Lift Your Head Up High and Blow Your Brains Out.”

As he took it all in, already beginning to write a column in his head, he could hear wild commotion coming from the bathroom. What exactly was going on here?

When Tracy and the Anarchist entered the disgusting and confining men’s room, they immediately noticed two things. The first was that there were strips of toilet paper carefully laid on both forward-jutting prongs of the U-shaped toilet seat, as if the thing that had happened had occurred just as Philip was dropping trou and preparing to place his ass, duly protected, on the seat. And second, there was something large and brown in the middle of the floor next to the other half of the plunger.
 

“Is that...” And Tracy was about to conclude with something gross when noticed the tail, and realized what he was actually seeing.
 

It was The Rat. Dead. Again. Bludgeoned, by the appearance of things, as there was no blood. The two newcomers surveyed the room like a crime scene.
 

See the bottom half of a plunger near the body, Watson? That must have been the murder weapon.

But surely no man could fell a great rodent with a plunger, Holmes.

Once all other possibilities have been eliminated, whatever explanation remains – however improbable – must be true, Watson. And so we must conclude that this was done by an extremely talented assailant, unusually adept at plunger marksmanship.
 

And likely with his ass out, Holmes. Look at how the toilet was prepped.
 

And so it was, as Philip told the tale. He had indeed dropped trou and was in a semi-squat, halfway down, when he’d heard rustling behind the trashcan. Then he’d seen The Rat emerge from behind it, fully sixteen inches with the tail, and had grabbed the only weapon he saw and began to do battle, his pants and belt still jingling about his feet as the two scrambled around in the cramped, tiny room. It had taken Philip several hits before his foe was destroyed, as he was beating him with a weapon that had all the rigidity of Silly Putty, but each hit stunned The Rat for a second (“like playing freeze tag,” Philip explained) and eventually he’d hit him with enough force to overcome the less-than-suitable bludgeoning surface of the plunger and had sheared the thick handle in two with a decisive, end-of-
Street-Fighter
FINISH HIM! blow.
 

Philip added that this incarnation of The Rat had been a worthy foe and that, in homage to the large amount of squeaking that had transpired during both chase and battle, he was posthumously naming this one “Squeaky II” after the most notorious Rat incarnation in Bingham’s history.

Philip, Tracy, and the Anarchist emerged from the bathroom and, having failed to prop open the door to the back, had to return to their posts by walking through the lobby, past Roger and Ted’s usual seats.