The Bialy Pimps (60 page)

“And Captain
Dipshit,” said Tracy, now beginning to stream tears of laughter, “at one point he was spinning around in super-fast circles. Did you see that? He was using the laws of physics to fling the rats off. Like he was Mr. Wizard or something.”

Philip slapped him on the back. “Hey. I wonder if he found this experience healthiest.”

Tracy sprayed him with saliva, but Philip wiped it off without a care.
 

Ted thought of how he had tried to save the deli, and how the rats had won the day anyway, proving that there were some things that even the Shadow didn’t know. He’d thought the crew would be disappointed and sad, not laughing and having the time of their lives.

“Aren’t you guys bummed out?” he asked.

The Anarchist composed himself. “Ted,” he said, laying a hand on the thin man’s shoulder, “Bingham’s’ time was past. We were tired of being celebrities, and this place stopped being Bingham’s a long time ago.”

Ted shrugged. “You could have returned it to normal. Gone back to how things used to be.”

“No,” said the Anarchist. “If we had done that – if we
could
have done that – Bingham’s would always be ‘that place that used to be famous.’ Or, ‘the home of the Bialy Pimps, remember them?’ It was dying no matter what, and I’m kind of happy that it didn’t have to die a slow death.”

“But you guys love this place. It could have gone on without you. It could be run by new employees.”

Philip shook his head slowly side to side. “We don’t want it to go on without us. If we can’t have her...” He reached out and touched the stone wall under the half-mural. “... then we don’t want anyone to.”

Bingham’s was frozen in time now. It’s sensational death had made it immortal. What it had been, it would always be. Bingham’s was gone. But in its passing, it would be able to live forever.

The other employees, who had begun trading their own favorite moments of the night, were laughing now. Philip and the Anarchist nodded to Ted and then turned to join them.
 

They stood there for a while, in the cold beside the high stone wall, and traded tales, slapped backs, and let themselves be human. There would be time for mourning later. For now, in the shadow of death, they found life, and the moment seemed to last – and laugh – forever.

Philip looked to the Anarchist, then to Slate, then to Tracy. Tracy looked to Darcy, Mike, Rich, and Beckie. The glances passed from one to the other, among all of them.

Then, without warning, Roger fired out of the Bingham’s bathroom, did a half-wave to the rats, and speedwalked out the front door and past the mouth of the alley in a blur.

Someone wished him a Happy New Year, and then the laughter began anew.

EPILOGUE:

Irish Eyes Are Smiling

“I fell in love with my enemy.

I let go of everything I had left at home.”

– Jawbreaker

“We’re the ones – the only ones, strong ones, proud ones – we’re living for today.”

– Pennywise

Bingham’s Bagel Deli was closed on January 1
st
for the New Year’s Day holiday. January 2
nd
was a Saturday, but the Columbus Health Department showed up nonetheless first thing in the morning to close the doors for good. Nobody was surprised. The deli had been all but abandoned anyway, after several employees had braved the stares of the new rodent inhabitants to remove some mementos from the back room. The closing was an uneventful one. Notice was posted on the door, and Bingham and his executives received some paperwork in the mail. And that was the end of it.

The fame and phenomenon of the Bialy Pimps persisted for a few months, but without the deli, the Pimps seemed hollow and meaningless. The wheel of fame turned elsewhere. Britney Spears had just begun to surface, and the Pokémon and Teletubbies crazes were both beginning to gain momentum in the U.S. Pre-fab bands composed of five boys whose songs were filled with a lot of noises like “oooo-ooh” and “oh-wo-wo” were slowly gathering steam. Bialy Pimps CDs began to accumulate and then stagnate in used music shops, the fad tired and the fans fickle. It suited the Pimps just fine.

Most of the people involved in the Bialy Pimps saga found themselves in search of new jobs. The higher-ups on the entertainment end had been humiliated by the live broadcast of an event gone horribly, horribly wrong, and set out looking for scapegoats to fire. Angela the Agent, however, found a new gig almost immediately. She moved on to manage one of the aforementioned boy-bands, with limited success.

Dicky Kulane was neither identified nor captured, though he received tetanus and rabies shots and was applying various ointments to thousands of rat bites and scratches until mid-February. Nobody bothered to investigate the botched bombing fully. The events of New Year’s Eve 1998 had been tumultuous at Bingham’s Bagel Deli, and Dicky’s failed attempt, seeing as it had failed, was really the most inconsequential among them. With all the attention focused on sensationalism instead of on attempted crime, the would-be bomber was allowed to slip through the cracks in the system.
 

Dicky considered the Bingham’s situation to have been a success. Although his own plans had backfired (and he never did learn why), the fact was that Bingham’s had closed. That had been his objective from the beginning, and all was well that ended well. The ends justified the means. He and 3B were free to rule the campus bagel scene as they saw fit.

From time to time in the months that followed, Dicky would walk by the hull of his vanquished foe. The furniture and the personal items had been removed, and all that was left was a cavernous lobby, seeming somehow larger now that it was empty. He smiled when he looked at it, cringing at the memory of the rats but simultaneously laughing at his victory. He had shown them all. The deli had never been anything but a dirty rat-hole from the beginning, and should anyone doubt it, they needed only to walk by at night. The rats were always present in small numbers, but at night they ruled the place. They ruled even the surrounding streets. Homeless people refused to sleep anywhere nearby, for fear of pestilence.
 

For their own part, the rats made plans to conquer to world. Regrettably, these plans came to an abrupt end when the Rat Nation lost its brave leader. Squeaky III made the unfortunate decision to conquer the entire building as the first step to conquering the world, and so peeked upstairs to feel the situation out. Slate saw him, and eventually bludgeoned him to death with a cinder block that he had been using as a doorstop. A respectful period of mourning followed, and then the others ate his corpse.

Mere weeks after Slate moved out of his apartment upstairs, an urban renewal organization decided after repeated analysis (and revulsion) of the New Year’s tapes that public health would best be served by completely demolishing the building and starting fresh, sanitizing the site from the ground up. Dicky watched the demolition with great relish, sitting across the street for hours at a time as cranes and other machinery poked at the building with their digging scoops until the walls fell in. By mid-March, a Steak ‘n Shake had been erected on the old site.
 

Unsure what else to do and relieved that
something
was open for business in the area, Roger began to frequent the new Steak ‘n Shake and order medium Diet Cokes. The girls were not as reliably wonderful and the staff was not as amiable as they had been at his old haunt, but Roger was a man of simple tastes. In time, he and the Steak ‘n Shake became used to each other, and he once again became someone’s wacky old black man who whistled and laughed and coughed. Regrettably, the walls of the new store did not have mirrors on them in which he could admire his reflection. It did, however, have a splendid bathroom.

With Big Bagel Bill’s foe vanquished, the deli enjoyed a brief period of prosperity despite the fact that most of its foot traffic still expected it to be a dry cleaner’s. Then, after the Steak ‘n Shake construction drove the remaining rats (a few thousand) out of the husk of the old Bingham’s building, they moved into Dicky’s basement and business dropped to nothing. Emboldened by their success at Bingham’s, it did not take the rats long to move upstairs. They made nests in the lobby. They began to dine at the tables like paying customers, making themselves at home. It was a wonderful transition for the rats, as they lived for a while in the lap of luxury, breeding topside like first-class citizens.
 

One day, as Dicky took in the bizarre spectacle of his rodent regulars at their usual tables, what remained of his fragile sanity finally broke. He clamped his hands over his ears, yelled, “I can’t take it anymore!” and sprinted out the door. Then, after the deli sat abandoned for a few months, the rats knew that it was time to move on. They needed food, and the absence of humans meant that they would need to go out and forage. So, after Dicky left – moving eventually to the far east to pull rickshaws – the rats slowly meandered back to the river and to other basements. And by the river, in the sewers, they rediscovered their wild rat nature, and were happy.

Captain Dipshit, who had never been terribly balanced, was half insane following the New Year’s Eve events. He tried halfheartedly to pursue his class-action lawsuit against the defunct Bialy Pimps and was only mildly surprised when he was told that there was no credible corroborating evidence to back up his story.

The Bingham’s staff went their separate ways, most of them carrying hefty bank accounts and piles of worthless merchandise with all of their faces and names on it. Philip, Slate, Nick, and a handful of others remained in Columbus, while Darcy moved home to the Cleveland suburbs. The Anarchist moved in with his fiancée just south of her, and Beckie moved back to her home town of Cincinnati. From time to time one would call another to chat or get together, but they all drifted apart over the year that followed.

In short, they moved on with their lives.

The Anarchist sat in his home office, besieged by hundreds of multicolored Post-It Notes. Many of them carried shorthand reminders of things to do before his upcoming wedding. He still had to get three of his groomsmen fitted for their tuxedos, check back with the DJ, and attend to a handful of other minor chores. The biggest problem, though, was gathering addresses for the wedding invitations.

Especially for those Bingham’s people.

The crew had always been difficult to find, even when they lived in town and all worked together. So far, the Anarchist had tracked down Beckie, Darcy, and Tracy. He had email addresses for Slate and Rich somewhere, but he was not sure where. He had an email address for Philip, but Philip seemed not to be checking it.
 

When he finally got Philip on the phone, it was like stepping back in time.

“Philip?” said the Anarchist.

“Hey! How are things?”

“Oh, great. I’m working on a bunch of projects right now, and I’m trying to get all of this wedding shit settled. I...”

“Is
that
coming up already?” Philip asked, surprised.

“A few months. In June.”

“Wow.”

“Time flies,” said the Anarchist. “But yeah, I need your address so that I can send you an invitation.”

Philip gave it to him, and they chatted for a while. It was all coming back to him. Moving away had been a tough adjustment, but it had been time. And after nearly a year away, things were, indeed, falling into place nicely. He was writing ad copy and doing other odd writing jobs in order to glean a small but respectable income to accent his hefty Bialy Pimps nest egg. He had all of the freedom in the world, but he missed the old life. He missed High Street and its activity. He missed the bums. He even missed Bingham’s idiot customers. He missed his old roommates, even the one who used to throw fruit at him. But most of all, he missed the crew. It was all for the best, but it was hard to feel that way sometimes.

“Hey, question” the Anarchist said bluntly, “how is your money holding out?”

Philip paused, a little surprised by the question. Then: “I’m rich. We’re all pretty rich, I think.”

“So you didn’t spend it all on booze? You didn’t gamble it away?”

“Fuck you.”

“Just saying.”
 

“I’m not even the only fuckup who’s managed to keep it together,” he said. “I talked to Nick the other day. I see Tracy and Rich sometimes, too. As hard as it is to believe, I think we all still have our money. Most of it, anyway. Why? Need a loan?”

“Now, fuck
you.”

He paused, suddenly hesitant to tell Philip about his idea for fear that he might not want to participate. He already had Beckie and Darcy on board, but Philip was the key.

“I had an idea,” he said slowly. “For a business venture.”

“What kind of venture?”

“Nothing huge. A few thousand here, a few thousand there.”

“But I mean, what do you have in mind?”

The Anarchist found himself playing with a ballpoint pen. “Darcy and I were down there last weekend. “We tried to get a hold of you but surprise, surprise, we couldn’t.”

“I wake up at four in the afternoon,” Philip explained.

“We got together with Tracy. Then we walked down to the comic shop and talked to Rich. We have an idea for you. For
us.”

Philip sniffed. When he spoke, he sounded intrigued. “What idea?”

“Do you remember Big Bagel Bill’s?”

“No.”

“They called themselves ‘3B’. They were right down the street, under Java Jive. I don’t think the old manager liked you.”

“I haven’t the slightest recollection of a 3B.”

“Anyway,” the Anarchist continued, “they’re closed now. I hear the guy ran off into the mountains or something. The landlord says he went nuts. And Java Jive, upstairs, went out of business not long after we left. The point is, the whole building is empty, and Tracy and Darcy and Rich and I were just talking, joking around at first but then thinking seriously about...”