Authors: Johnny B. Truant
When Philip returned from a short phone conversation, he looked at the Anarchist with malevolence. “Do you know who that was?”
The Anarchist looked innocent. “Who?”
“
60 Minutes.
They’re on their way here. They’re coming in the morning.”
“Is that so?”
“What did you tell them?”
“Me?”
“They said that they talked to you this morning.”
The Anarchist smacked his hand on the table. “Is
that
who that was! Yes, I guess I did talk to them. It seems that since the deli doesn’t have a phone, and since yours is always disconnected, they somehow hunted down my phone number. They wanted to know if we would be willing to be interviewed for a segment on one of their upcoming shows. I told them yes.”
Philip didn’t know if he should be happy or angry. He settled for exasperated. The Anarchist’s little phone chat had been this morning,
after
Wally’s intervention at Bingham’s,
after
Wally’s decree that it had to end immediately,
after
Philip had told the Anarchist about Wally’s unsurprising final decision.
“Why? Why would you do that?”
“Tell them not to come, if you’re against it.”
Philip shook his head. “I tried. They said that it’s too late. They said the crew has spent all day readying for the segment and that they’re done with their prep. They said that at this point, they’re invested and are not about to come up with a new story, especially given that we’d already signed off on it. (Oh, and that’s another thing. You signed something that they faxed over? Thanks for that.) They said that the piece is going to be done on Bingham’s with or without our help. If we cooperate, they want to portray us as a quirky social experiment. If we don’t, they’ll come in here with cameras and annoy us and make it a ‘shocking exposé.’”
The Anarchist smiled in a way that severely irritated Philip. “I figured they might say that.”
“You’re ruining this,” said Philip.
“Oh, come on. If I had said no this morning, then they’d still do the exposé thing. It was just good timing, and I think we can spin this right.”
Philip sat back down and wiped his forehead with his arm. “This thing is beyond our control now, you realize that. It’s snowballing and snowballing...”
“It was never really in our control, I think.”
“What do we do?” asked Philip. And he was literally asking. It was obvious to everyone that he truly had no idea.
“Business as usual,” said the Anarchist. “We open tomorrow just as we did yesterday, and we pull out all the stops.”
“But Wally...”
“If we take it all down, then it’s going to look like we’re hiding something. There’re hundreds of eyewitnesses and newsreels on us and what we do. If we crawl back into our hole and play dumb,
60 Minutes
is going to ask questions of our customers and dig up the footage from the local newspapers and TV stations. They’re going to make it look bad – very bad –”
“Which it is.”
“– and it’ll prompt a huge lawsuit, I can practically guarantee it. We’ll be shark food. You’ll be lucky to escape with your shirt.”
Philip tapped his fingers on the tabletop.
“The only alternative is to go out gangbusters,” the Anarchist told him.
Philip sighed. “If we go out gangbusters, Wally will have my head.”
“If we hide,” said the Anarchist, “the media will eat you whole.”
There was a period of heavy silence. The Anarchist seemed to be the only one with any idea of what to do. Most of the crew didn’t care. If anything, they were rooting for the Anarchist’s plan. Sure, they’d probably end up fired, but did it matter? They’d anticipated losing their jobs weeks ago. At this point, it didn’t matter that going back to normal would mean continued employment. It would mean an unacceptable level of subservience, too.
But Philip? For Philip, this was more dire, and also personal. For months, he’d thought that Wally had turned on him. And yesterday, Wally had thought that Philip had turned on
him
. Yesterday, they’d finally straightened out the misunderstanding and mended the broken bridge. Was Philip now willing to burn it entirely, to willfully and deliberately turn on Wally for real? Wally had asked,
Is this how you treat your allies?
Wally was willing to take a share of the Bingham’s heat. He was willing to go to bat for Philip with Bingham. Despite a major fuckup, Wally was still willing to be Philip’s ally. With the dice about to be cast, how was Philip going to treat him?
“I don’t know,” said Philip.
The Anarchist reached forward, touched his shoulder.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you ever see
Wag the Dog?”
Philip shook his head.
“It’s about the press and the presidency. There’s a sex scandal, so the spin doctors fabricate a war to distract the nation. And the idea is, the dog is supposed to wag its tail, but what actually happens is the other way around. The media doesn’t
cover
reality. The media
creates
reality.”
Philip looked up.
“What we’ve found here, with customers, is only the tip of the iceberg. People do what they’re told. What’s going to happen when
60 Minutes
comes in here is that they’re going to tell the nation what to think about us. They’re going to tell people who we are and what we do, and they’re going to tell them whether it’s good or bad. I’ve already told you that
60 Minutes
will cover us in one of two ways, depending on whether we cooperate or not. That’s a big thing. Right here, right now, with a simple decision, we get to determine reality. What we decide determines what they tell the nation. And what they tell the nation becomes the truth.”
“You’re saying that we can avoid the deluge of shit by playing along?”
The Anarchist shrugged. “You can look at it like that, but I prefer to do things for positive reasons rather than out of fear of negative ones. Yes, doing the piece should keep us from being eaten alive... but it might just make our dreams come true, too.”
“And Wally?”
“He’ll thank us when he’s asked to write a Bingham’s management book,” said the Anarchist.
There were a few moments of silence. Philip thought. Then, he looked up and shrugged.
“Shit,” drawled Smooth B, puffing on a cigarette. “Let’s do this motherfucker.”
The next morning, shortly after opening and while the store was still in a relative lull, Tony from UltraClean Hygiene came in to clean the bathrooms as he always did on Fridays. As
he
always did, the Anarchist ran into the back room.
“I can’t
stand
that guy,” he told Smooth B, who was avoiding responsibility by leaning suavely against the doorframe of Philip’s office with a cigarette in his hand and his right foot kicked back up.
“Who?” Smooth said, completely disinterested. He had recently traded his slicked coif for a shaved head, which made him look slightly less smooth and slightly more degenerate.
“The UltraClean guy. The dirty old man.”
“Huh. That guy who’s always hitting on Beckie?”
“One of the many.”
“Uh. Yeah.”
The Anarchist peeked around the corner while Smooth puffed on his cigarette. When he’d shaved his be-bop hairdo, Smooth had also ditched his black slacks, pressed shirts, and shiny black lace-ups. The retro wardrobe seemed to be gone the way of Carla, Trip, and Darcy’s lip stud. Smooth still liked malt liquor, though, and malt liquor still liked him. At least some things never changed.
Wally had left Columbus the evening before last, on the same day he’d arrived. He hadn’t expected a fire as big as the one he’d ended up facing, and he had a flight scheduled in the morning for a family wedding in Hawaii. (“Just long enough to beat the cold spell we’re supposed to get here,” he told Philip.) He’d be off the continent for two weeks, but after hours of discussion, he felt comfortable with how he and Philip had left things. He would have preferred to stay in town just in case he was needed, he said, but given Philip’s new understanding and his own schedule, he knew he could trust Philip to handle the Bingham’s re-normalization on his own.
Before leaving, Wally had promised to tell Bingham nothing. So far, the Bingham’s furor was mostly contained within the city limits, and the absence of any serious publicity or any legal action meant that if they acted swiftly, everything could be swept away without involving (or infuriating) the owner. Wally felt confident that Philip could keep the restaurant profitable even under the normalest of circumstances now that fall had arrived and school was back in session. With any luck, the entire rebellion incident would wash away without a trace, leaving a deli that did exactly what it was supposed to do for as long as its owner would allow it: make food, and make money.
Given what was about to begin in a few hours when
60 Minutes
arrived, Wally’s departure felt like a sign from above. Betraying Wally’s trust caused Philip’s stomach to twist, but there seemed to be no way out. It was either the fat or the fire. And, if nothing else, the path they had chosen was bound to be a lot more fun than the equally vexing alternative.
The morning of the interview passed without incident. It was surprisingly slow, and a cloud of sobriety hung over the crew, all of whom were wary of doing anything that might upset the delicate balance before the bridge could be sufficiently burned. As a result, the morning, a Friday, passed with an air of normalcy. Crew members clocked in and out, meager paychecks were distributed, food was rung up and prepared, and workers who had declared to the world that they would do whatever the fuck they wanted still felt a primitive need to hide out in the back and smoke if they didn’t feel like working. And ever the unpleasant necessity, the toilets got cleaned.
Tony, who had been Bingham’s toilet guy since the restaurant had opened, came in each week to service the facilities. Tony was in his sixties and had bright white hair. He was short, plump, and felt in every way like the friendly old uncle that you should never, ever leave your children with. He glared without shame at all of the female workers (all of whom were attractive, but all of whom were young enough to be his granddaughter), made questionable sexual comments to both genders, and annoyed the piss out of both the Anarchist and Slate.
Slate, for one, was certain that Tony was planting spy cameras in the women’s restroom. Tony seemed too eager, Slate said. Nobody should enjoy cleaning toilets, yet Tony always seemed dying to get his hands dirty. He always did the women’s first, and spent twice as long on it as he did on the men’s.
To test his theory, Slate once tried to dissuade Tony from cleaning the toilets, to see how strongly he’d resist. He told Tony that the restrooms were totally clean, that he’d just emptied the trash cans in both and that they were immaculate. (“I ate my lunch in there,” he added.) But Tony had said that he’d still like to give them a once-over in the name of professionalism. Slate had pushed back, again denying the need and assuring Tony that he’d still be paid. But then Tony had made some aw-shucks, things-ain’t-the-quality-they-used-to-be remark about having pride in the work that the good folks at Bingham’s paid him to do, grabbed the key before Slate could protest, and had gone to work.
A few weeks later, the Anarchist designed an experiment that would test Slate’s findings against a new variable.
“They’re totally clean,” the Anarchist told Tony when he arrived. Then, minding the necessity to keep the baseline experimental conditions as consistent as possible, he told Tony that he’d just emptied both trashcans and that the rooms were immaculate. “I just ate my lunch in there,” he added.
Tony smiled his creepy old man smile. “I’d still like to give them a once-over just the same, to be sure,” he said. He grabbed the bathroom keys, but was back within seconds.
“The ladies’ has a padlock on it,” he said.
“Yes,” said the Anarchist. “We had to close it due to a gas leak.”
“There’s no gas lines in the bathroom,” said Tony.
“Different kind of gas,” said the Anarchist.
Tony had seemed very put out. He tried to get the Anarchist to unlock it anyway, and the Anarchist told him that he didn’t have the key. “It’s very serious,” he said. “Some woman did some unthinkable business in there, and now it’s in the EPA’s hands.”
Tony had said that he hoped it would be cleared up next week and then had left. He didn’t clean the men’s room because the Anarchist had promised him that it was immaculate. The Anarchist had even eaten his lunch in there.
After Tony left, Slate, who knew all about the millions of spycams on the internet, proclaimed this to be irrefutable proof and declared his intention to find Tony’s cameras. He then marched into the women’s room and searched behind the toilet, in the air vent, around the mirror, and anywhere else he could think of. He then tromped upstairs to his apartment and searched online for “restaurant spy cam,” “deli bathroom spycam,” and a few other permutations. But, after an exhaustive search of both the real and virtual worlds, he decreed that there were no cameras after all, and that Tony just must like to sit in there and feel pretty.