Life is like a bad haircut. At first it looks awful, then you kind of get used to it, and before you know it, it grows out and you gotta get another haircut that maybe won't be so bad, unless of course you keep going to SuperClips, where the hairstylists are so terrible they oughta be using safety scissors, and when they're done you look like your head got caught in a ceiling fan. So life goes on, good haircut, bad haircut, until finally you go bald, and it don't matter no more.
I told this wisdom to my mother, and she said I oughta put it in a book, then burn it. Some people just can't appreciate the profound.
Anyway, the deal with Crawley and his dogs was like a bad haircut I was beginning to get used to. I wasn't expecting to get clipped again by a hit-and-run barber.
"Let Mr. Schwa go ahead. I want to talk to you alone."
Crawley always called us "Mr. Schwa" and "Mr. Bonano." At first it annoyed me on account of my teachers call us "Mr." when they were mad at us. But then, since Crawley was always mad at us, it kind of had some logic to it.
This was the third week of our dog days. Until now, Crawley had little to say to us except to comment on our unacceptable wardrobe, how unpleasant my acne was, and couldn't we find some better deodorant, because according to him, after a day of school we smelled worse than fourteen dogs. It was always an adventure with him, never knowing what he was going to gripe about when we showed up. He was usually much more on my case than the Schwa's. I assumed it was just the Schwa Effect at work. Little did I know he was sizing me up for a higher position in the Crawley Universe.
"Mr. Schwa, I said you could go."
The Schwa looked at me and shrugged. "Fine. I'll notify your next of kin, Antsy."
"Yeah, I appreciate it. If I live, I'll call you."
Once the Schwa was gone, Crawley stared at me from his wheelchair across the room for way too long.
"So what's up, Chuckles?" I had stopped calling him "sir" or Mr. Crawley. The way I figured it, those were terms of respect, and he really hadn't earned mine. Chuckles was my little nickname for him. It started as Chuck, but Chuckles seemed so much more appropriate—especially because of the way he frowned when I said it.
"I am not a clown," he said. "Kindly refrain from calling me that."
I just grinned. He frowned some more. "From now on, Mr. Schwa will walk the dogs alone."
"That's not fair," I told him. "It'll take him till nighttime."
"I will pay him," Crawley said. "Ten cents per dog per day."
"Twenty-five."
"What are you, his attorney?"
"His manager."
"I see. All right. Twenty-five."
"And that's only if he agrees."
Crawley didn't answer that—maybe because it was a fact of life that no one ever disagreed with him. "As for you, I have another task for you."
"Do I get paid, too?"
"Yes," he said without hesitation. This scared me, because Crawley gave money like bulls gave milk: not at all, and you got gored for asking. If he had already decided this was a paying job, it must be horrible beyond words.
"Your salary will depend on how well you perform your duties."
"What's the job?"
Sloth came sniffing at Crawley's pocket for treats, and the old man pushed him away. "My granddaughter will be spending the next few months with me. You will spend time with her. You will entertain her. You will pretend to like her."
I was sensing this haircut was going to be one nasty Mohawk. "What's wrong with her?"
"Why does something have to be wrong with her?" he snapped.
"I don't know," I said. "Something in your tone of voice."
Crawley wheeled himself around, banging his knee on a little end table. I knew it must have hurt, but he refused to give me the satisfaction of a groan. "As it happens, my granddaughter does have a handicap."
"So she's in a wheelchair, too?"
"I didn't say that, did I?"
I waited for more details, but Crawley gave none. So now I was moved from walking dogs to babysitting for some spoiled Veruca Salt—ish little girl.
"You will be here at ten o'clock sharp tomorrow. But first you will introduce yourself to the shower in your house, and you will dress in something presentable. You will also refrain from calling me Chuckles in front of her."
"Tomorrow's Saturday. I've got stuff to do on Saturday."
Which was actually just a whole lot of lying around, and I guess he figured that out, because he said: "Don't force me to make your life more miserable than it already is."
I finally realized who he reminded me of: the Emperor in Star Wars. "Fine. But right now I'm gonna walk dogs so the Schwa doesn't have to do all the work."
"You're such a Boy Scout."
"Heyl" I said. "Enough with the insults!" I hooked Gluttony to a leash, and left.
"Maybe she's like the Elephant Man."
Howie, Ira, and I hung out in my unfinished basement later that night, for the first time in a few weeks. We didn't find much to say to one another, so we resorted to our old standby, playing video games. Our current choice was "Three Fisted Fury," in which steroid-pumped opponents, having been exposed to radiation, have grown more than the usual number of arms and must battle for ultimate dominance of the world. You know—just like the movie.
It was Howie who suggested the Elephant Man theory. We had all been trying to figure out what condition Crawley's granddaughter suffered from that was bad enough for him to pay me to spend time with her.
"I mean, she's got to be ugly in some basic, unnatural way to make it worth money," says Howie.
"Maybe not," said Ira. "Maybe it's Tourette's syndrome."
"What's that?" I asked.
"It's where you have these little seizures and can't stop cursing people out."
"Sounds like most people I know." I swung at his character on the screen with my left and right arms, then caught him off guard with an uppercut from my third arm. He lost ten points of life.
"Hey," says Ira, "what if she's the surviving half of Siamese twins connected at the head, but separated at birth. Only one of them could survive, because there was only one brain between them."
"It sounds logical," says Howie. At this point his screen character sneaks up from behind and nails me with a dropkick from a leg I didn't even know he had.
"Hey, no fair—you took an extra dose of radiation, didn't you?"
I turned from Ira's bruiser, who was still dazed, and began a few roundhouse kicks on Howie's guy. "Maybe it's just something simple," I suggested, "like she's got a peg leg or something."
"Maybe two peg legs," says Howie.
"Or a peg head," says Ira. "I'd pay to see that."
"You're not the one paying—Crawley is." I spun on Ira, gave his character a double-death blow, and he was finished. Ira dropped his controller in frustration. Now it was just Howie and me. I tore into him brutally. It wasn't because I cared about beating him; I just wanted it done. Kind of like the way you finish that last piece of pizza, just because it's there.
It only took a minute for the game to be over, and my character was raising all three of his arms in triumph to the sound of canned cheers. I sighed and put down my controller. "Hey, is it just me, or is this game less fun than it used to be?"
Ira and Howie don't have an opinion. Somehow I didn't expect them to. "The new version comes out in a month. It'll be tons better," says Howie.
I nodded in agreement because I didn't want to talk about what was really going through my mind. I was thinking about bamboo. Last year, my science teacher said that when a bamboo plant is established enough, you can actually watch it growing before your eyes. I wondered if it was sometimes the same with humans—because I was feeling this weird vertigo, like I had suddenly sprouted far beyond Howie and Ira. I knew it just like I knew that no future version of "Three Fisted Fury" was going to interest me like it did a year ago.
I heard footsteps coming down the stairs, but at first glance I didn't see anybody there.
"Hey, Schwa," I said.
The moment Howie and Ira realized who it was, they picked up their game controllers and quickly started a new game, ignoring him. It made me mad, but I didn't say anything. For Howie and Ira, it was okay when the Schwa was just a plaything—just some weird object that had strayed into their airspace like a UFO—but once they lost interest in him, he was no longer welcome on their radar screen.
"I've solved at least part of the mystery," the Schwa said, ignoring Ira and Howie just as well as they ignored him.
"Which mystery?"
"Crawley's granddaughter."
At this, Ira and Howie couldn't help but show a little bit of interest.
"What did you find out?" I asked.
"Take a look for yourself."
He hands me this printout of a page he must have gotten from some old Internet newpaper archive. An old society page from the Daily News. It shows a picture of a baby with the caption: Mr. and Mrs. Charles Crawley III announce the birth of a daughter, Lexis Lynn Crawley.
As Ira and Howie huddled around me to look at the picture, Schwa got shouldered out of the way.
"Lexis?" said Ira. "She's named after a car?"
"Spelled differently," I pointed out.
"Well," says Howie, "it looks like she didn't have a peg head at birth."
In fact, it didn't look like there was anything wrong with baby Lexis at all. "Hey, wait a second," I said. "Look at the date on that article—she's not a little kid at all. She's our age."
"Hmm," said Ira. "Whatever's wrong with her, maybe she wasn't born with it."
"Maybe she developed leprosy at puberty," says Howie. "I hear that happens."
"Yeah, maybe in Calcutta or something, but not in Brooklyn."
"Maybe she traveled," says Howie, "and brought it back with her, like the flu or mad cow."
"Well," says Ira, "whatever's up with her, you'll find out soon enough." He and Howie returned to their spot on the floor and picked up their game controllers.
"C'mon, Antsy, you playing or what?"
The Schwa may have been used to being treated like he wasn't there, but it didn't mean he had to like it. I could see an anger beginning to rise in him, simmering like beef stew in my mother's Crock-Pot, which meant indigestion and heartburn were only moments away.
"Heyl" he shouted to Howie and Ira. "The ice cream man's giving out free Popsicles," he said. If they heard him, they ignored him. He got louder. "Did you hear Martians invaded Long Island?" No response. His Crock-Pot began to boil. "Tidal wave's headed for Brooklyn," the Schwa shouted at them. "We have five minutes to live."
Howie and Ira just kept on playing.
I could see what was about to happen here. It was what you call "en passant." It's a move in chess. One pawn gives an enemy pawn the cold shoulder as it moves two squares ahead. So the ignored pawn has the right to kick the rude pawn's sorry butt off the board, just because it wants to. It's the only move I know where you get busted just for ignoring the enemy.
So here I am standing in my own basement, watching Howie and Ira walking straight into an en passant. It was their way of putting our friendship to the test. We've had enough of the Schwa, is what they were silently saying. Are you our friend, or are you his?
I should have done what I always do when I'm losing a chess match: accidentally knock over the board. But the Schwa made his move before I could do a thing, cutting in front of me and advancing on Howie and Ira. I stood back and let him do it. It was his right, and I wasn't going to rob him of it. He got in front of them, blocking their view of their video game. "Hey, in case you haven't noticed, I'm here."
Ira paused the game to keep his character from getting mauled by Howie's mutant. "We know you're here," Ira says. "Now do us all a favor and stop being here."
Then the Schwa reached over and ejected the game from the system. The screen went black.
"Let's see if you notice me nowl" And he cracked the game disc in half.
This was the unthinkable. All three of us stared at the Schwa in shock. The Schwa dropped the broken disc and stormed upstairs. Howie and Ira looked at me, still in denial that the game had indeed been destroyed.
"You gonna let him get away with that?" Ira asked.
"Shut up! Just shut up, okay?" I ran upstairs after the Schwa, taking three steps at a time, not even sure what I was gonna do when I caught him. He broke my game, so a pounding was in order, right? But I didn't feel like pounding him. I felt more like pounding Ira and Howie. By the time I got upstairs, the Schwa was already out the front door. I didn't catch up with him until he was halfway to the corner, and I practically had to wrestle him until he stopped.
"What, are you totally psycho?" I shouted.
"Maybe I am!" he screamed back at me. "Maybe that's just what I am. Maybe I'm that quiet guy who suddenly goes nuts and then you find half the neighborhood in his freezer."
I gotta admit, that one stumped me for a second—but only for a second. "Which half?" I asked.
"Huh?"
"Which half of the neighborhood? Could you make it the people on the other side of Avenue T, because I never really liked them anyway."
I could see him trying to force down a grin. "You're not funny."
"So you gonna tell me why you trashed my game?"
"You said I'd be a legend."
"What?"
"Going into Old Man Crawley's—surviving to talk about it. 'You'll be a legend,' you said. But I'm not. Not even Tiggor and the Tiggorhoids care. They've already forgotten I exist."
"Why do you even care about those boneheads?"
"It's not just them," he says. "It's everyone. I'm sick of being looked over. Shut out. And now even Crawley's forgetting about me, and picking you for granddaughter duty."
"So what? It doesn't look like it's gonna be much fun."
He took a deep breath. "Sometimes . . . sometimes I'm just afraid I'll end up like ..."
But he refused to finish the thought. He left and I didn't follow him, because I knew he didn't want me to. Instead I just went back home. Dump the board. End the game. Nobody loses.
When I got back home, Howie and Ira were playing another video game.
"That guy's one egg short of a full deck,"
Howie says."You should sue," says Ira.
I tried to say something, but words failed me. I understood why the Schwa did what he did. He had stood in front of them, and still he wasn't visible. He broke the game, and even then it didn't change anything. By tomorrow Howie and Ira will have forgotten about it.
Sometimes I'm afraid I'll end up just like . ..
Just like who? And suddenly I could hear the Schwa's voice in my head. Just like my mother. That's what he was going to say!
"Are you gonna play, Antsy, or just stand there?"
I wanted to talk to them about what the Schwa had said, but I knew it was pointless. It was like Howie and Ira were now on the other side of thick soundproof glass.
"I'm not feeling too good," I told them. "Maybe you guys should go."
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know. Maybe I feel a case of leprosy coming on."
They stood and said their good-byes. It took a bit longer and was a bit more awkward than the usual "see ya." Maybe because somewhere deep down we all knew that this wasn't "see ya." This was more like "so long."