The Schwa was Here (28 page)

My relationship with Old Man Crawley is this long, involved story. All you really need to know is that (a) he’s filthy rich from a life of scrooge-like living; (b) he and my dad are business partners in a restaurant called Paris, Capische; (c) Old Man Crawley hates me less than he hates most everyone else, which I guess makes me the closest thing he has to a friend.

So I leave his place with the invitation, and as I’m walking down the street, I open it. Crawley musta known I’d do that, because inside is a second envelope that reads
Open this one, Anthony, and there will be severe consequences.

Fine. I brought the thing home and put it in my mother’s hands. She looked at it like it might be a bad report card or a telegram telling her that someone’s dead like they did back in the days when death notices came by telegram and not by e-mail.

“It’s from Crawley,” I told her. “Just open it, say yes, and let me get on with my life.”

She opened the envelope, pulled out a fancy-looking card, then looked at me like she was gonna kill the messenger.

“Is this some sort of joke?”

“Why? What’s it say?”

“See for yourself.” She handed it to me and I looked it over.

The “honor” of your family’s presence

is requested on Saturday, the 29th of June,

on board the
Plethora of the Deep

for seven days

to celebrate the 80th birthday

of Mr. Charles Jameson Crawley.

A suitable gift is expected.

Okay, so my experience with cruises is limited to the Circle Line. That’s the boat that goes around Manhattan while some underpaid high school dropout points out all the tall buildings as if you can’t see them for yourself, and if you’re lucky, you ram into a careless speedboat, adding some actual excitement to the tour. But this invitation was for the real thing. And not just any cruise ship—this was the
Plethora of the Deep,
the largest, most luxurious ship in the known universe.

I saw this whole thing about it on TV, and how Caribbean Viking cruise line had to build new docks in every port just to fit the
Plethora.
It’s got a Junior NASCAR go-cart speedway, the infamous Cavalcade of Waterslides, an underwater lounge with glass walls so you can watch the propellers make sushi out of any passing mermaids, and a world-class roller coaster. Just the thought of it makes me drool like a knuckle-dragger from the Jersey Shore.

And my mom says, “Forget it. I don’t do boats.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but realized even before a word made it from my brain to my vocal cords that protesting would be no use. My mother does not make decisions; she makes proclamations. The kind that guys on horseback posted in kingdoms of old to subdue the peasants.

“Tell Mr. Crawley ‘thank you, but we respectfully decline.’”

I closed my mouth, realizing this would take a peasant revolt. The kind with torches and pitchforks.

“Okay,” I said to my mom. “I’ll tell him,” and then added, “I don’t want to miss the Fourth of July anyway.” That got her attention.

“Why? What are you planning?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much.” Then I left her to the darkness of her own imagination.

Last year, the Fourth of July was a blast. My friends Howie and Ira and I got our hands on some real fireworks that the Sheepshead Bay Rotary Club had purchased but couldn’t get permits to use, on account of they don’t officially permit anything in Brooklyn.

In
my
neighborhood, however, the Fourth of July is all about broken rules and losing fingers. Not that we were stupid enough to do anything dangerous. We hadn’t had a Roman candle fight since, like, the third grade. We took every precaution with the fireworks. We figured we could set it off from my front porch and light up the sky above the whole neighborhood like they light up the Statue of Liberty. And the best part about it was that we only had to light one fuse, because the thing was automated. Once you started it, it cycled through like some sort of explosive computer system. To be extra safe, just so that we didn’t set my house on fire, I angled the fireworks away from the house.

Here’s something I learned about fireworks last year: If you don’t aim them straight up in the air, they take on this trajectory called “gravity’s rainbow.” In other words, they go up in one place, arc across the sky, then come down somewhere else, blowing up the pot of gold at the far end.

Have you ever seen those war movies where the enemy relentlessly bombs the good guys in their foxholes and the good guys all form lasting friendships that eventually threaten their marriages? Well, let’s just say that us kids on East 56th Street made the folks over on East 53rd Street bond in ways that could be considered unnatural in certain religions.

With my mom attempting to sink our all-expenses-paid cruise, I went looking for an unlikely ally in my father, who, after his heart attack this past year, shed his workaholic ways and had finally given himself permission to speak the word “vacation.” Not that he’s actually taken one, but at least now it was in his vocabulary. The thing is, he and Mom had been talking forever about going somewhere, but whenever it came up, it was like, “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know, where do
you
wanna go?” I think the fear is that someone’s going to suggest visiting relatives in Italy who we don’t know but feel some genetic guilt about.

I presented the invitation to my father later that afternoon. He was out back tending to our yard. A few months ago, I killed all the plants in the yard and half the plants in the neighborhood in a tragic gardening accident. His doctor suggested he turn our dead yard into a Zen garden to help him relax. So now our backyard is all volcanic rocks, bonsai, and sand that gets pushed around by a rake. It’s really cool, for like the first ten seconds.

I crossed the garden, ruining the pattern of sand with my footprints, and handed him the invitation. My dad’s easy to laugh but slow to smile, so I know this smile is genuine.

“Well,” he says, patting his newly slimmed waistline. “I guess I’m gonna need a new bathing suit!”

To which I reply, “Mom says we’re not going.”

Dad’s smile fades, and he hands me back the invitation. “Well, it was a nice idea.”

“But—”

“No buts. Your mother and I have an agreement: We don’t go anywhere as a family unless we both agree to it.”

In the past, this has served our family well, on account of the time Mom wanted to take a walking tour of Amish covered bridges and the time that dad wanted to follow Bruce Springsteen on a six-city tour. These are examples of what we call “midlife crisis,” which is when parents go temporarily insane because they realize how boring prime-time TV has gotten, and a crisis at least makes things interesting.

“The Caribbean’s too humid anyway,” Dad says, and returns to his raking. Watching him reminds me that things have not been normal in our home—and by normal, I mean loud. See, one thing you need to know about my parents is that they love yelling at each other. Even when they’re expressing affection, they do it at a volume that can bring down enemy aircraft.
“Whadaya mean you love me? I love you more! What are you gonna do about it, ha?”
But ever since my dad’s heart attack six months ago, it’s all been daisies and sunshine. Any conversation that might raise blood pressure is avoided like the plague.

“We’ve become very midwestern,” says my sister, Christina. “It’s disturbing.”

My brother, Frankie, is convinced it will pass, and normal volume will return. Frankie just finished his second year of college and works selling time-shares in the Bronx to really, really stupid people—because anyone who would buy a time-share in the Bronx has got dog intelligence, at best.

“You can’t pass up a deal like this,” Frankie tells them. “It’s a full-service resort—and subway convenient.” One thing I can say about Frankie: He could sell anything to anyone. He’s the number-one salesperson at Bronxe Pointe Vacation Villas, so I figured he could tweak Mom just enough to get her aboard the
Plethora of the Deep.

“I’m not a miracle worker,” was all Frankie could say.

I convened that evening with a few of my friends in my attic, which had become a hangout spot in our neighborhood on account of the little attic window has a very revealing view of Ann-Marie Delmonico’s bedroom. This was not something I advertised or took advantage of much, but word got around anyway. What also got around was that Ann-Marie Delmonico’s attic window has a very revealing view of my bedroom, too. For reasons that should be obvious, both Ann-Marie and I now follow a strict closed-curtain policy. It’s what you call a mutual understanding, like the way most nations, except the crazy ones, promise not to nuke each other.

That being the case, any view from my attic is entirely in the imagination of the viewer. Which leaves my friend Howie out in the cold, since his imagination is a field of tumbleweeds, without even a breeze to make ’em roll.

So there we were in the attic, me, Ira, Howie, and this new guy, Hamid, all of us comparing and contrasting various complaints we had about our parents. While the others seemed to have plenty of gripes, I only had one at the moment: my mother’s inconvenient cruise-a-phobia.

“That stinks, right?” Hamid said when I told him. “My father hates flying, so we never go anywhere we can’t drive. I’ve never even met half my relatives, right?” Hamid ends most of his sentences with “right?” as if he needs to double-check with you to make sure he actually has an opinion.

“You don’t know how lucky you have it,” Howie says. “Not meeting my relatives is not an option, and there’s no end to it not being an option.”

Ira, by the way, was videotaping the whole thing. He had taken to making a video log of his entire waking life and then editing it down to webisodes that he posted online. At the last count, they’ve been viewed twice, both times, I think, by him.

“I’ll get more people watching once I get to Israel,” Ira said. “People like controversial places.”

“When are you going?” I asked.

“Next week,” he told us. His family was going on this big Holy Land extravaganza with their temple that would end with his sister having her bat mitzvah at the Wailing Wall, with like fourteen thousand other Jewish-American kids whose parents opted out of the big gigantic party thing in favor of something more meaningful and less expensive.

“My parents are all freaked out,” Ira said. “They think we’re going to get blown up the second we get in the shuttle bus from the airport.” Then he turned to Hamid. “No offense.”

Hamid is Muslim—half Palestinian, in fact. His parents and Ira’s parents are part of an ethnic dinner group.

“No offense taken,” said Hamid. “As long as you promise to give the finger to some random soldier in Gaza, right?”

“Good as done,” said Ira. They tapped fists and all was well. This is why I love America. No matter what our cultural upbringing, we can all be equally idiotic in peace and harmony.

“So that leaves three of us stuck in Brooklyn all summer,” Howie said, a bit satisfied with the fact.

“Actually,” said Hamid, “my family won’t fly, but we’re driving up to Niagara Falls and taking a train across Canada.”