Once we decided to turn the Schwa Effect into a money- making proposition, it wasn't hard to get the ball rolling. When we had presented our series of Schwa experiments to the class, most everyone laughed, figuring it was a joke—but enough of our classmates had been part of the experiments to suspect there was something more to it. You know, it's like that TV show where the psychic dude talked to your dead relatives—all of whom seem to be just hanging around, watching everything you do ... which is really disturbing when you stop to think about it. You don't really believe it, but there's enough borderline credibility to make you wonder.
That's how it was with the Schwa. It was too much for most kids to really believe the Schwa Effect, but people were curious—and curiosity was a key element of Stealth Economics. Mary Ellen MacCaw was the first to offer hard cash.
"I wanna see the Schwa do something," she said to me in the hall after school. Most everyone else had left, so we were pretty much alone.
"Do what?" I asked.
"I don't know. Something."
"The Schwa doesn't do things for free."
Mary Ellen reached into her pocket, jangled around in there for a while, and came up with four quarters. She handed them to me.
"For a dollar, the Schwa will appear out of thin air."
"Where?" said Mary Ellen. "When?"
"Here and now," said the Schwa.
And she jumped. I've never seen anyone jump like that except while watching a horror movie—because the Schwa had been standing right next to her all along.
She bumped into a locker and the sound echoed down the hallway. "How do you do that?I" she asked the Schwa.
"Guess you could call it a 'hidden' talent."
As Mary Ellen's mouth was almost as big as her nose, by the next day people were waiting in line to pay the price and share in the Schwa Experience.
My dad says that at Pisher Plastics they believe anything can be marketed and sold. "They'd put a price tag on a dead rat if they thought it would sell," he once told me. "Then they'd hire an advertising firm to show beautiful women wearing them on their shoulders. It's all part of a free-market economy."
I can't vouch for the dead-rat theory, but I do know that in our local free-market economy, the Schwa was a high-ticket item—and as his manager, lining up his jobs, I got a decent percentage of the money he made. I gotta admit, though, the money was just gravy. It was great for once to be the center of attention—or at least positioned next to the center of attention. Funny how the Schwa could be right in the middle and still go unseen.
"It's a waste of time," Ira said, when I asked him if he and Howie wanted in on our business venture.
"Yeah," said Howie. "I can think of a hundred better ways to make money."
They were still pretty annoyed about the grade we had gotten on our Schwa experiments. "F for eFFort," Mr. Werthog had said. He thought the whole thing was a scam when, for once, it wasn't. After that, Ira and Howie wanted nothing to do with Stealth Economics.
"Why don't you forget this Schwa thing and help with my next movie," Ira said. "Gerritsen Beach Beauties."
"I'm casting director," says Howie, beaming with pride that may have just been hormones.
I told them no, because I couldn't just bail on the Schwa.
"Suit yourself," Ira said. "But when we're surrounded by babes begging for a part in the film, don't come crying to us."
In the end no girls were stupid enough to audition for them, so they had to settle for Claymation. Stealth Economics, on the other hand, turned out to be a much better business decision than anyone thought.
Once Mary Ellen MacCaw spread the word, people began to devise more and more uses for the Schwa's unique talent. A bunch of jocks paid the Schwa ten bucks to eavesdrop on a gaggle of cheerleaders and find out which guys they were talking about. I negotiated an eighteen-dollar deal for the Schwa to slip a kid's late book report into a teacher's briefcase, right beneath the teacher's nose.
"We want to put the Schwa on retainer," our eighth-grade student officers told us barely a week into our little business. In other words, they wanted to pay him a lot of money ahead of time so they could ask him to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it.
"Cool," the Schwa said.
"How much?" I asked.
I negotiated them up to ten bucks a week for service-on-demand. The Schwa cost more than cable!
They used him a lot in the first few weeks he was on retainer. Mostly they asked him to go into the teachers' lounge, hang out in a corner, and report back to the student government on all gossip. He always slipped in right behind one of the fatter teachers, and never got caught. The student officers also had him hang out in the cafeteria kitchen to see who was mooching all those missing snack cakes, because the principal was blaming it on students. It turned out to be Mr. Spanks, the school security guard.
"We'd like to sign him up as an investigative reporter," the journalism class said, after they heard how old Spanky got busted. But the class officers made a big stink since they already had him on retainer, claiming we couldn't work for both government and the press, so we had to tell them no.
The jobs made us decent money for doing nothing more than not getting noticed—but it was dares that payed the most, depending on how many kids paid into it. Since I acted as the bank, paying out of my own pocket when we lost, the Schwa and I shared our dare winnings fifty-fifty
"I dare the Schwa to walk into the principal's office, thumb his nose at Principal Assinette, then leave, without being seen."
Piece of cake. Total take: $32.
"I dare the Schwa to cut in front of Guido Buccafeo in the lunch line without being noticed, then dip his finger in Guido's mashed potatoes, and not get beaten up."
No problem. Total take: $26.
"I dare the Schwa to spend an entire day at school wearing nothing but a Speedo and not be noticed by his teachers."
We lost twenty-two bucks on that one, but he made it all the way to third periodl
I told the Schwa he was like Millard Fillmore—the president famous for going unnoticed—and as his manager, I found my middle-finger syndrome fading away. I was suddenly being treated with respect.
"It's all gonna crash and burn," Ira kept telling me after Ralphy Sherman started spreading the rumor that the Schwa could teleport. No one believed it, but it still damaged our credibility. "It's like Las Vegas," Ira said. "No matter how much you think you're winning, the odds are stacked against you."
I reminded him we had already scientifically proven that the odds were on our side. "We can still cut you in on the action," I offered him—and then I had to add, "You can take your money and buy more clay." Ira was not amused.
Still, no matter how much he and Howie frowned on our scheme, it didn't faze the Schwa, so I tried not to let it faze me.
"You oughta go into business school, Antsy," the Schwa told me as we scarfed down fries at Fuggettaburger. "You've got a real knack for it."
"Naah," I said. "I'm just leeching off of you." But still, what he said struck a chord in me—and no minor chord either. It was the first time anyone ever accused me of having any real talent. I mean, my mother sometimes says I should go into astrophysics, but that's just because I'm good at taking up time and space.
I don't know what came over me then. Maybe I felt I knew the Schwa well enough—or maybe I was just talented at screwing up a good situation. Whatever the reason, I turned to him and asked: "So, Schwa—what really happened to your mother?"
I felt him go stiff. I mean I really felt it, like we were connected in some freaky way. He finished his fries, I finished mine. We left. Then, just as we hit the street, he said, "She disappeared when I was five." And then he added, "Don't ask me again, okay?"
As for what happened next, call it fate, call it luck, call it whatever you want, but the next dare was the one that changed our lives. It could be that both of our lives were leading up to this moment. But I always wonder what would have happened if we didn't take Wendell Tiggor's dare.
I already told you about Old Man Crawley—the hermit who lived on the second floor of his massive restaurant that took up a whole block on the bay. I think every neighborhood in the world's got a shut-in. There's all these reasons for it, y'know, like outdooraphobia, or whatever they call it. They love to make movies about shut-ins, and it always turns out that it's some lonely dude who's just misunderstood. But that wasn't the case with Charles J. Crawley. Nothing to misunderstand about him. He was old, he was rich, he was cranky, and although no one ever saw or actually spoke to him, he made it very clear he was not to be messed with.
There was this one Halloween, for instance, some of the neighborhood kids, including my brother, went on an egg patrol—and there are lots of windows to egg on that second floor of Crawley's restaurant. We never did see Crawley himself looking out of the windows, but there were always Afghans poking their noses out. So, anyway, my brother and some of his friends, they go out on Halloween a few years back, toss a few eggs at Crawley's upstairs windows, and run off. We heard nothing about it, except for one thing . . . from November 1 until New Year's Day, not a single market in the neighborhood had eggs— not even the big supermarket chains. "It's a local shortage," people were told—but everyone knew that it was Old Man Crawley He had pulled some strings and shut down the egg supply to the whole neighborhood. No one ever egged his windows again.
Which brings me to the biggest and potentially most profitable dare that our little invisibility enterprise with the Schwa took on. Like I said, it was Wendell Tiggor's dare. It was a pretty clever one, which makes me think he didn't actually come up with it, because Wendell Tiggor had about the intelligence of my mother's meat loaf if you took out the onions. It was at the bus stop after school that Tiggor came up to me.
"So, I've been hearing about this Schwa kid." (Tiggor begins every sentence with the word "so.")
"Yeah?"
"So, I hear he goes invisible or something."
"Why don't you ask him yourself?" I say. "He's standing right here."
"Where?"
"Right in front of your face."
"Hi," said Schwa, who happened to be next to me and, I might add, directly in Tiggor's line of sight.
"Oh." Tiggor squinted his beady eyes and looked him over. "So, he doesn't look invisible to me."
"Then why didn't you see him when you were staring straight at him?" Tiggor has to think about that one. You can almost hear rusty gears turning in his head, like one of those farm combines that sat out in the rain too long. I figured if I let those gears turn anymore, one might come flying out of his ear and kill some innocent bystander. "Never mind," I say. "What can we do for you?" By now a few other kids have started to take notice of our conversation.
"So, I hear you do stuff," he says to the Schwa.
"Talk to my manager," says the Schwa. Tiggor's lip curls in confusion.
"He means me. Is it a service you wish my client to provide? Because if it's a service, you'll have to clear it with the student officers, who have him on retainer. Government regulations. You know how it is. Of course if it's a dare instead of a service, we can do that, no problem." At the word "dare," even more kids moved into listening range. Six or seven were clustered around us, and as everyone knows, when there's a few kids in a group it draws more and more, like curiosity has its own gravity.
"It's a dare," says Tiggor.
"Dares come with a price, too; what do you want the Schwa to do?"
"You say he can do things and not be seen," Tigger says. "So let's see if he can go into Old Man Crawley's and bring something back." A bus came and went, but none of the kids got on. The public buses run every ten minutes, and this was worth ten minutes of everyone's time.
"Let me consult with my client."
I pull the Schwa aside, and he whispers, "I don't know, Antsy."
Tiggor laughs. "See, I told you," he says to the other kids. "He's a fake. Ain't no such thing as an invisible boy."
"Well, he did walk through the girls' locker room without getting seen," one kid says.
"So," says Tiggor, "does he have the pictures to prove it?"
"Yeah," I tell Tiggor, "you wish you had pictures."
Tiggor looks at me and hooks his thumbs in his pockets like he's a gunslinger ready to draw. "Twenty bucks says he can't do it."
"You're on," I said without a second thought—such is my faith in the Schwa. But the Schwa tugs my sleeve.
"Antsy..."
"What do you want him to bring back?"
"So, how about a dog bowl," Tiggor says. Everybody agrees that's the perfect item. There's about twenty kids around us now.
"Anybody else care to take the wager?" I ask.
The kids who had seen the Schwa in action all looked down and shook their heads. Only those who were not yet believers would bet against the Schwa.
"I'm in for five bucks," says one kid.
"Two bucks over here," says another. And by the time the betting frenzy's over, fifty-four bucks are on the line.
We caught the next bus, and all the way home the Schwa was bouncing his knees up and down like he's gotta go pee, but I know it's because he's all nervous,
"Come on, Schwa, take it easy. There are so many dogs in there, you'll probably trip on a bowl on the way in." "And if I get caught?"
"If you get caught, I pay everyone fifty-four bucks out of my own pocket—no loss to you, except maybe loss of life—but that's a real long shot." I was only kidding but he took it seriously. I began to feel a bit lousy for rushing into the dare without checking out his feelings first.
"We can always back out," I told him.
He didn't like the sound of that either—it would make him look chicken. "It's just that everyone's heard how creepy Old Man Crawley is. There are all these rumors about him."
"So? There are rumors about you, too."
"Yeah," said the Schwa. "And some of them are true."
He had me there, although I didn't have the nerve to ask which ones. "Listen; if you actually go in there, you'll be going in as just some guy—but you'll be coming out as a legend: the one kid ever to penetrate Brooklyn's last great mystery."
That hooked him. "People remember legends, don't they?"
"Always."
The Schwa nodded. "Okay, then. I'm gonna nab myself a dog bowl."