The Bialy Pimps is the story of a college bagel deli whose employees have had enough. The customers are rude and arrogant, the store is falling into shambles, and management wants more profits at any price. The crew is tightly wound and belligerent. The bloodthirsty blade of the meat slicer is claiming victim after victim and The Rat, a singular entity who refuses to die despite traps, poison, and being crushed with heavy metal cylinders, is beginning to show his face with increasing, ominous frequency. A sinister sabotage plot is afoot, masterminded by rival deli manager Dicky Kulane and his oblivious lackey, Captain Dipshit. The deli's owner is threatening to close the store for good and this time, he promises, it's for real. But when the fed-up employees decide to make their dreams into reality -- to go down in a blaze of glory if they are to go down at all -- a surprising thing happens. They become famous.

A testament to two of life's more interesting axioms (that people will accept what the media tells them and that humiliating people is tirelessly entertaining), The Bialy Pimps tells a tale of fame and of friendship, of hilarity and of sobriety, of the best times of our lives and of the fight to keep them from ending. The employees of Bingham's Bagel Deli are completing a phase of their lives, enjoying their days but realizing all the same that the time to move on is rapidly approaching. Will they still be able to act like fools in their new lives? Or will they have to (perish the thought!) grow up? The protagonist (nicknamed "The Dark Lord,"), only months away from beginning graduate school in a new city, has been itching for months to leave the insanity of undergraduate life. Now, he wonders if he will miss it, if his future colleagues will laugh at his stupid quips or simply regard him with confusion. A monumental decision seems to be at hand. And time marches on.

Blending outrageous, irreverent humor with the sobering pain of leaving friends and carefree times in order to "become a proper adult", The Bialy Pimps is at times laugh-out-loud funny and at other times dead serious. College is a time of great growth and excitement. It is also a time of great change, and how we deal with change determines the direction of our lives. Will the Dark Lord fight the change? Or will he relinquish control to fate? Times are good, but you can't work in a deli forever...

Bingham's Bagel Deli is loosely based upon a deli at which I worked during college. The crew is modeled after people who are for the most part completely real, though they are fictionalized and exaggerated. They are, most properly, caricatures of the people who lend them their names. The customers, both our beloved regulars and the loathed college-age hordes, are character sketches. Some are amalgamations of people we served; some are symbolic individuals representing an entire class of morons. Some are almost entirely real, with only the names changed. There was one employee character who I reluctantly had to cut completely from the manuscript because his best stories, even when fictionalized, might have gotten several people in a lot of trouble. I'm not going to tell you who is who. Only the people who are in the book -- specifically my underpaid food-service comrades -- will know for sure.

Though the main plot itself is fictional, almost all of the more trivial events along its fringes are entirely true. One of the reasons I wrote this book in the first place was to preserve the plethora of absolutely ridiculous events which made (and still make) me laugh my head off. I have simply changed the context of these stories and squeezed them into the story. Most of the people who read this book will not fully appreciate the stories, but it will be worth it when (for example) Ryan sees how I turned the time he puked spontaneously into a street-side trashcan during the morning bank run into a crucial plot point. But have no fear, common reader -- a guy heaving in a trashcan surrounded by pedestrians is funny whether you were there or not.