The hit man is standing in a Los Angeles office building. His hands are shaking. "This is the last one," he croaks. "I'm so nervous I can't stand it." His accomplice, trimly dressed and wearing horn-rimmed glasses, is chewing his lower lip. "You'd think it would get easier with each delivery," he mutters. "But it doesn't."
A Mafioso massacre? A bank heist? A CIA caper? In fact, the I hired agents are armed with a cream pie. Their mission: to smash the pie into the face of a local office employee who is celebrating his 26th birthday. The two agents, hired by the celebrator's merry-minded boss for $35 (pie included), are operatives of Pie Face International, one of a growing number of organizations across the country dedicated to the silliest U.S. fad since streaking: smashing pies into the faces of selected victims—for a price.
In the past few months Pie Face International has made some 60 successful deliveries in the Los Angeles area, hitting such celebrities as the Rev. Ike, Country Singer Diana Trask and Psychic Peter Hurkos. In Minneapolis, for the same amount of dough, Pie Kill, Ltd., has left more than a dozen victims pie-eyed. In St. Petersburg, Fla., Pies Unlimited has claimed 78 victims, among them the assistant metropolitan editor of the St. Petersburg Times, billing clients from $50 to as high as $300 per job. San Diego's whipped cream mafia, which charges only $20, has scored 20 times, including a celebrated hit of a cable-television executive at a city council meeting.
Lighthearted Havoc. Many of the pientrepreneurs were inspired, and some actually franchised, by Manhattan-based Pie-Kill Unlimited, which has twelve operatives, has been in business for a year, and claims a face count of 178. Pie-Kill's manifesto, composed by Founder Rex Weiner, a pastry-faced 24-year-old, reads as if it had been collectively written by P.O. Wodehouse, James Bond and the Three Stooges. "Our high duty," it announces, "is to 1) stamp out pomposity; 2) uphold the virtues of surprise, randomness and chaos; 3) wreak lighthearted havoc whenever and wherever possible; and 4) get away with it."
For $40 the Pie-Kill client can take his choice of lemon cream, chocolate cream, banana cream and lemon meringue (the hardest to remove) pies, all of which emanate from a Manhattan bakery that, says Weiner, produces edible missiles of "just the right consistency—heavy and thick. Aerodynamically they are perfect."
Pie-Kill does not stop at artificial boundary lines. It has just made its first international hit. As Canadian Newscaster Keith Morrison was reading the headlines one morning last month in Montreal on a Today-style TV program carried live across Canada, Weiner splatted a whipped-cream pie across his face. Morrison was stunned, but quickly recovered and wiped the debris from his face; the creaming was rebroadcast on another nationally televised program a few days later.