The Bialy Pimps (34 page)

But before rage could choke him, Wally noticed something else – something which seemed as incompatible with the insulting decor as oil was with water.
 

All of the tables were full. All of the chairs were occupied.
Every one.

Wally had never seen that before. Even during the biggest of rushes, the numbers in the customer parties never perfectly matched the number of chairs around each table, so there were always empties. People were always leaving as new customers arrived. Food was a transaction: in, eat, and out. But the way the lobby was filled, it looked like what you’d expect at a show. People were coming, eating, and
staying
. Spare chairs had been co-opted by other tables. Some people, able to snag a chair but unable to find a table, were sitting in the open. Others around the room were standing, waiting for a chair to open up.
 

The entire room was abuzz, alive with activity. Conversations mixed with the hiss of steam from the steamers. Knives and spatulas clanged. Steamer lids banged. There was an insectile buzzing from the vibrators mounted on the counter, and from time to time, a startled shout would leap above the background murmur as someone backed absently into one of them. The music, which today was Rage Against the Machine, was screaming one unpunctuated sentence – “FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!” – over and over again, an adamant refusal that echoed Wally’s refusal to believe what he was seeing.

In the middle of all of it was the TV crew, and under its hot lights was a figure Wally knew on sight but could not name. Then it came to him:
Slate
. Slate was talking into a bouquet of microphones. The onlooking reporters smiled and nodded, soaking up his every word. Wally had seen this behavior before, on his wife’s gossip TV shows. The reporters were not here to do a smear piece on the monstrosity that Bingham’s had become. They were here to dish about celebrities.
 

Wally’s mind was reeling with irreconcilable emotions: anger, fear, confusion, panic. He didn’t have the slightest idea what to do. And Philip had called him into this mess? Why? Had he thought it would be fun, that Wally would be pleased? Wally was not pleased. Wally felt like he was having a heart attack, but before he did, he had to find Philip, and kill him.

But there was more, as little as he wanted to admit it. There was another emotion fighting to be heard as well. It was excitement.
 

What he was seeing was intolerable, but what he was seeing had, according to this past week’s bank deposit, nearly tripled their profits.

His business mind couldn’t help but be intrigued – enough to blunt the sharpest edges of his anger. What had Philip done to pull this off? And how, pray tell, had he done it? Philip’s education was fluff: psychology and sociology. He wasn’t in business. Yet, what Wally saw was a stroke of business genius.
 

Unauthorized, yes. Disgusting and obscene, yes. He needed only to look around to see sex, nudity, profanity, and obscenity.
 

But genius nonetheless.
 

He walked forward, and found himself standing on something soft and yielding. He looked down. It was a gym mat.

Then, as the crowd ahead of him parted, he saw Rich’s small body gripping a kid twice his size in a figure-four leg lock. The captive was sweating and struggling, but Rich held firm, flexing a twitching, tattooed arm as he gripped the edge of the mat to keep the tension on. He was yelling at the other kid to tell him that he was the master, that he was the best of all time.
Oooh-yeah.

Then Philip’s decidedly less agile form flew across his visual field, flying like Superman as he leapt from the countertop. Philip tackled a large woman and as he did, there was a
pff! pff!
as Mike fired two paintballs in rapid succession, then switched to singles, aiming for the backs of the people toward the front. Some of the balls that missed their targets exploded against the windows in pasty red starbursts. The people who Mike hit screamed; there was cussing and shouts of
You can’t do that
and
You’d better hire a lawyer
and then red, disheveled customers scrambled through the door past a courteously-drawn crushed velvet rope. Once some went out, the doorman allowed others in to take their place.
 

The mundane business of the store seemed a blasphemous contrast to the violence and chaos and tasteless décor. Wally could hear the
fuh-whump, shhhk!
of the register opening and being slapped shut, and he could see four workers making sandwiches. They’d even had to open the never-used second make table on the register’s other side. That’s how dedicated the ever-responsible crew was to getting food out fast to the hungry customers while shooting them, tackling them, and bombarding them with dildoes.

Wally had never been so torn. This was a travesty. It was legally actionable. It was morally wrong. And, at the same time, it was apparently an incredibly brilliant strategy.
 

Just as his simultaneous anger and amazement reached its peak, a balloon filled with mayonnaise hit him in the neck. He turned, and saw that something large was coming at him.

It was Philip. And when Philip saw who it was that he had hit with the balloon, he stopped in his tracks and the evil smile fell from his lips. He lowered his raised arms and froze in place. Rich saw it, and released the customer he’d been wrestling with. The customer ran out the door. Slate saw Rich, and the reporters saw Slate. Behind the counter, Beckie saw Philip and was one of the few who recognized who Philip had just seen. She froze, the others froze, and Darcy reached up and snapped off the stereo. All eyes turned to the two people face-to-face on the wrestling mats, suddenly deathly quiet.
 

“Wally?” said Philip with disbelief. He had to spit the word out to make it pass his lips. It felt like it didn’t want to go, like it weighed a ton.

“Philip,” Wally said coldly.

“Shhlucck?” said a third voice from above.
 

Wally could hear something over his head – a light crunching sound, like someone eating a salad. There was a snap, like that of a breaking twig. Something fell on his shoulder. It was a leaf.

Wally looked up and met the bulging eyes above him, the long, hairy arm clinging with its three splayed toes to the overhead scaffolding. The other hand held a leafy branch. The thing chewed a few more times and then, seeming to capture the store’s suddenly negative vibe, stopped chewing, and just stared.

“Philip?” said Wally. This time, it was a question.

“Sssshhhlpp?” the sloth replied.

The world became suddenly swimmy, and Wally went gratefully into unconsciousness as he fell to the floor in a jumble of lifeless arms and legs.

When Wally came to, he awoke dazed, as if from a dream. And he
had
been having a dream, he remembered. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He was... somewhere. Somewhere loud and crazy, like a concert. And Philip was there.
 

Only as the world cleared, he realized he wasn’t in his bed. There were people above him and he was... on the floor? But it was too soft to be a floor. It was squishy, like a stack of blankets. Or a mat.

He took inventory of his surroundings: High tables. High chairs. The smell of cooking food. Philip.

Philip.

So that hadn’t been part of the dream.

Reality fell into place piece by piece. The last thing that clicked was that he had been angry. He was at Bingham’s, and he was supposed to be angry.

“Wally? You okay?” said Philip.
 

Wally sat up. Philip was kneeling beside him. Customers and a few members of the crew stood in a ring around them. Everybody had stopped what they were doing and were watching the couple on the floor, sensing that this particular casualty was different from the others. Something was wrong.

“
I’m
okay,” said Wally, shaking off the last of the cobwebs and standing, “but
you’re
clearly out of your mind. What the hell have you done to my restaurant, Philip?”

“Um...” Philip stammered. Then he realized that there was no eluding the truth. Wally had seen it all. And also, he thought, fuck Wally. Wally had driven them to this. “Well, it’s the new plan,” he said.

Wally glared lasers at Philip. “The
new plan?”

“Yes. We didn’t like your way of doing things, so we decided to do them our own.”

“You didn’t like my way of doing things? And so you did
this?
Have you had an embolism, Philip? Did you catch crazy from the homeless people who come in here? Oh, you’re gone. You’re
so
gone. All of you. This is... criminal, what you’ve done here. What you’re
doing
here,” he corrected. He looked at the dildoes, Rich in his wrestling singlet, the snipers with the paintball guns. “If this leads to any legal action or charges, you can bet we’ll be contacting you again,” he said.

“Wally,” said Philip .

“Look at this place!” he said, throwing his arms up in exasperation. “You’ve destroyed and defaced property, harassed customers,
assaulted
customers, skimmed funds, no doubt...”

“Wally, listen,” said Philip.

“How long has this been going on? Two weeks? A month? No wonder your emails have been so strange. You’ve lost your damn mind!”

“
My
emails?”

Wally shook his head, unable to process the situation. Ten minutes ago he’d been worried that something dire had happened at Bingham’s, but it turned out that... well, it turned out like this.

“Why would you do this, Philip?” he said, just as confused as he was angry. “You were on the upswing. I had Bingham all turned around. I’d gotten you the time you needed. You’d kept the store from closing, which always seemed like a really important thing to you. How could you turn around and piss it all away? And how could you do this to
me
, Philip? I’ve been your only ally at corporate, and now how am I going to look? Is this how you treat your allies? Don’t you see what kind of a position this puts me in?”

But the new Philip didn’t take well to tongue lashings. He remembered the fire he’d felt on the night of the party and on the morning he’d slapped the fat man with the spatula. He’d been mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore then, and he’d be damned if he was going to let Wally absolve himself of his part in this now.

“It’s your own damn fault, Wally!” Philip snapped. “If you were so fucking worried about what was going to happen to
you
and
your
deli, why did you start making such idiotic, impossible demands? What was I supposed to do, if I wanted to keep my job? Was I just supposed to sit there and let you continue to make us to wear makeup and embarrass ourselves? When I finally got the uniforms and discovered that they were
fucking dresses
, was I just supposed to put one on without asking questions?”

Now it was Wally’s turn to be on the ropes. “Wait... what?
”

“And really... was I just supposed to slice up possum instead of turkey to save Bingham a buck just because your high and mightiness said so? Before you get too loud about what
I
did, ask yourself what the health department might have had to say to
you
if I’d told them about that little brilliant business move.”

“Wait...
possum?
I never...”

“I tried to work with you, Wally. I sent you email after email after email to try and reason with you, seeing as you’d clearly lost it. I...“

“Philip, What the hell are you talking about? I never...”

“... tried to work this out. I tried to play by the rules for as long as I could, but you just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and I know that all of
this
...” He swept his arms around the store. “... is a bit of an... an
overreaction
, but we’re
human beings
, and we got
pissed off
, and
you
did that to us, so don’t you fucking
dare
act...”

“Philip.”

“...like you’re totally and completely innocent, when, if
anything
...”

“Philip.”
 

“...
you
were the one who shot first, and we weren’t about to just sit here and...”

“Philip!”
 

Philip stopped mid sentence, his face red and his breathing heavy. His mouth hung open. He let it close.

“I never told you to do any of those things,” Wally said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Part of Philip, watching Wally during his tirade, had already figured that out, but the rest of him wasn’t ready to relinquish his anger just yet. He wasn’t ready to let Wally off the hook. He wanted to be furious with him, to yell at him, to finally
have
someone to yell at. He wanted to keep his enemy concrete, and real, and present, right here, right now, in front of him, because this was a catharsis that needed to be released before Philip exploded or broke apart.

“Of course you did,” said Philip. “You told us those things, and a lot more.”

“When? How?”

“Email. For... months now.”

“Show me,” said Wally.

Both Wally’s and Philip’s anger collapsed as they sat in the office, Philip in the chair and Wally hovering over his shoulder, Hotmail open on the screen. Wally denied sending the messages in the Bingham’s inbox, and Philip believed him. Part of him had known all along that something was very wrong. Wally had always been cool, and the emails of the past two months had been very uncool. And in a way, it was nice. Sure the situation had gotten out of hand, but Wally had never been the dick Philip had thought he’d been. Wally had always been on his side. It was maddening to be played, but it was far better to be played by a stranger than by a friend.

 
From his end, Wally explained that for the past two months, the “Philip” emails he’d been getting had been increasingly snide, increasingly incompetent, increasingly negative, and increasingly self-deprecating. In one email, “Philip” had said that he knew he was too fat, and so if Wally wanted to fire him, he’d understand. In another, “Philip” had admitted to having had intercourse with bagels in the past, and then had made a joke about how small your manhood had to be to manage such a feat.