“Probably, yeah.”
“So there you go.” And he tapped me on the forehead to indicate the passage of knowledge into my brain.
“Uh . . . I lost you.”
He threw up his hands. “Haven’t you been listening? That year will come from the fortune-teller’s life, not mine. Damages, see? She pays cosmic, karmic damages. Simple as that.”
In this world, there is a fine line between enlightenment and brain damage, and I have to say that Skaterdud grinds that line perfectly balanced.
21 We’ll Always Have Paris, Capisce?
The Saturday before their flight, the Ümlauts had a garage sale. It was more than a garage sale, though, since official foreclosure was three days away, and everything had to go before the bank took possession of the house. Most of what they owned was either on the driveway or on the dead front lawn. The rest was in the process of being carried out. I added my muscle to the effort until everything that could fit through the front door was outside in the chilly morning.
They had advertised the sale in the paper, so scavengers from every unwashed corner of Brooklyn had crawled out from under one rock or another to pick through their belongings. No question that there were deals to be made that day.
Gunnar seemed less interested in the sale than he did talking about what lay ahead.
“We’ll be staying with my grandma,” he told me. “At least for a while. She’s got this estate outside of Stockholm.”
“It’s not an estate,” said Kjersten. “It’s just a house.”
“Yeah, well, if it was here, it would be considered an estate. She even paid for our plane tickets. We’re flying first class.”
“Business,” corrected Kjersten.
“On Scandinavian Airlines, that’s just as good.”
That’s when I realized that somewhere between yesterday and today, Gunnar had already made the move without anyone noticing. His head was already there at that Swedish estate, settling in. Getting the rest of him there was now just a shipping expense. I marveled that in spite of everything, Gunnar was bouncing back. Suddenly he was looking forward to something other than dying. He wasn’t even wearing black anymore.
I helped Kjersten sort through things in her room, which felt kind of weird, but she wanted me to be there. I’ll admit I wanted to be there, too. Not so much for the sorting, but just for the being. I tried not to think about how quickly the day was moving, and how soon she’d be heading out to the airport.
“There’s a two-suitcase limit per person on the flight to Stockholm,” Kjersten told me. “After that, there’s an extra charge.” She thought about it and said, “I think I might have trouble filling both suitcases.”
I guess once you start parting with all the things you think hold your life together, it’s hard to stop—and then you find out your life holds together all by itself.
“It’s just stuff,” I told her. “And stuff is just stuff.”
“Brilliant,” Gunnar said from the next room. “Can I quote you on that?”
Later in the day Mr. Ümlaut came by with a U-Haul to take away what few things didn’t sell, which wasn’t much, and to say his good-byes.
It was cordial, and it was awkward, but at least it happened. A ray of hope for the danglers.
“He says he’s got an apartment in Queens,” Gunnar told me after he left—which I suppose was a giant step up from a room at a casino—so maybe our little visit did have some effect after all. “He says he’s looking for a job. We’ll see.”
Later that day I got a call from Mr. Crawley demanding that I come to Paris, Capisce? I hadn’t been there since my father’s heart attack. Neither had my dad—he was still at home recuperating, and leaving restaurant business to everyone else, under threat of brain surgery by my mom.
“You will report at six o’clock sharp,” Crawley said. “Tell no one.”
Which of course was like an invitation to tell everyone. In the end, I only told Kjersten, and asked her to come with.
“For our final date, I’m taking you to a fancy restaurant,” I told her. “And this time no one’s grounded.”
When we arrived, I discovered, to my absolute horror, that Crawley had installed something new to complement the ambience. On the restaurant’s most visible wall was a giant framed poster of me pouring water over Senator Boswell’s head. There was a caption above it. It read:
PARIS, CAPISCE?
French attitude, with a hot Italian temper.
It just made Kjersten laugh, and laugh and laugh. I tried to tell myself this was a good thing—that she needed to laugh far more than I needed, oh, say self-respect?
Wonder of wonders, Crawley was actually there—in fact, I found out he had been there on a regular basis, training the staff, through various forms of employer abuse, in how to run a top-notch restaurant. When it came to the poster of me and my victim, he was very pleased with himself. “I also rented several billboards around the city,” he told me.
“Where?” Kjersten wanted to know. I was a little too numb to hear the answer.
“Are we done yet?” I asked Crawley. “Can we eat now?”
“Oh,” said Crawley, “but the festivities are just beginning.”
Waiting in the restaurant’s second room was a film crew from Entertainment Right Now, a daily show that featured movie news and celebrities doing scandalous things. Today’s celebrity in question was none other than—yes, you guessed it—Jaxon Beale, lead singer of NeuroToxin. He sat relaxing at a table with a plate of fake food in front of him. He looked shorter than he does in music videos.
Kjersten was instantaneously starstruck, and suddenly what began as humiliation became something else entirely. “You knew all about this, didn’t you!” she said to me.
I neither confirmed nor denied it. Today I was getting more mileage from silence than from ignorance.
I wasn’t quite sure what this was all about, or why Crawley had requested my presence, except to maybe show off the fact that he somehow dragged a celebrity in through our doors . . . but then someone bodily grabs me, puts me in my white busboy apron, and someone else puts a pitcher of water into my hands. I stood there looking dumb, one episode behind the program.
“Roll camera,” the director shouts, and Jaxon looks at me, doing the bring-it-on gesture with his fingers.
“C’mon, what are you waiting for? Do I get an official welcome, or not?”
I can see Crawley grinning and wringing his fingers in anticipation in the background like Wile E. Coyote, and I finally get it. So does Kjersten.
“Omigosh!” says Kjersten. “You’re going to dump water on JAXON BEALE!”
It’s the first time I ever heard Kjersten, star of the debate team, say “Omigosh.” All at once I realized that, for this wet, shining moment, our roles were truly reversed. Not only was I Mr. Mature, but now she was the goofy fourteen-year-old.
“Well,” I said, smooth as a Porsche on ice, “if my buddy Jaxon wants water, then water he shall have.” I strode up to him as Kjersten squealed with her hands over her mouth, and I said, “Welcome to Paris, Capisce?, Mr. Beale.” Then I emptied the pitcher over his head.
He stood up, shaking the water off, and for a second I’m worried that maybe he’ll get mad and punch me out, but instead, he just starts laughing, turns to the camera, and says, “Now, that’s celebrity treatment!”
From here, I didn’t need a road map to know exactly where this was leading and why. Crawley had paid Beale a small fortune for this publicity stunt, and it was money well spent. Say what you want about Creepy Crawley, but the man is a marketing genius.
“It’s all about spin,” Old Man Crawley said while Jaxon Beale signed a waterlogged autograph for Kjersten, and other arriving guests. “There are lots of egos out there. Once this piece airs, celebrities, politicians, you name it, will be climbing over one another to get drenched by you.”
Thanks to our celebrity encounter, it became a date to remember. Even more special, because I knew it
would be our last. I tried not to dwell on that, though, because we’d shared enough sad occasions together. We deserved for this one to be happy. I ordered in Italian—I don’t speak it all that well, but I can order like a pro. Still on her Jaxon Beale high, Kjersten was all gush, flush, and blush for a while. “I probably looked so stupid!” she said. “Like one of those lame adoring fans.”
“Naa,” I told her. “You’re cute when you’re embarrassed.”
By the time dessert came, everything settled down, and the dating balance was restored. It was different now, though. For the first time, I felt more like her equal. Maybe now she saw me that way, too—and it occurred to me that a relationship isn’t about being two distinct kinds of people—it’s about feeling comfortable in whatever roles the moment required.
I guess that’s why my friendship with Lexie survived through Norse gods and echolocation—we always seemed to be what the other one needed.
“Tell you what,” Lexie told me as we sat in her living room one afternoon, planning her grandfather’s next kidnapping. “If we both happen to be in between relationships, I see nothing wrong with going out to dinner, or a concert now and then.”
I think it was good for both of us to know that as long as we were both there for each other, we’d always have a social life, even when we had no social life.
On the morning of the Ümlauts’ flight to Sweden, we had a funeral.
I’d like to say it was symbolic, but, sadly, it was all too real. Ichabod, our beloved family cat, finally went to the great windowsill in the sky. We decided to bury him in the Ümlauts’ backyard, since there was already a sizable gravestone available that otherwise would have gone to waste. Gunnar spackled over his own name, then chiseled out ICHABOD on the other side, and it was good to go.
Christina had written a heartfelt eulogy that I suspect she had been working on for months, the way newspapers start preparing obituaries the instant a celebrity gets a hangnail. With all the family pictures covering the little wooden crate, and the solemn air of the occasion, Ichabod’s memorial service actually brought a few tears to my eyes. I didn’t mind that Kjersten and Gunnar saw me cry over a cat. After everything I’d been through, I had a right. And realistically, who would they tell in Sweden?
With Ichabod laid to rest, we went inside to find Mrs. Ümlaut sweeping the empty kitchen, because “I don’t want the bank to think we’re slobs.”
“She’s just like our mother,” Christina noted. I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning.
Christina wanted to go home and mourn privately, but I made her wait, because I wanted to see Kjersten and Gunnar off. The luggage was at the front door, waiting for the arrival of the taxi. Six pieces, and a couple of carry-ons.
Gunnar looked at his house with no outward show of emotion. “We had mice,” he said. “And the drains never smelled right. It’s just as well.” I’m sure he felt a lot more than he let on, but it was his way. Kjersten, on the other hand, had moist eyes all over the place. Every corner seemed to hold a hidden memory. She looked fondly into empty places while Mrs. Ümlaut kept going around the house, up and down the stairs.
“There’s something I forgot,” she kept saying. “I know there’s something I forgot.”
Eventually Kjersten gently grabbed her, and gave her a hug to slow her down. “Everything’s taken care of, Mom. Everything’s ready.” The two rocked back and forth for a moment, and I couldn’t tell whether Mrs. Ümlaut was rocking her baby girl, or if Kjersten was rocking her anxious mother. Kjersten grinned at me over her mother’s shoulder, and I offered her an understanding smile back.
There’s no question I was going to miss Kjersten, but the kind of sadness I felt wasn’t the kind that brings up tears, and I’m thinking, Great, I cried for the cat, but I’m not crying for her—but I think she was okay with that.
I think we both knew if she stayed, our relationship wouldn’t have gone much further. Ours was like one of those fireplace Duraflame logs that burns big and bright, then drops dead an hour before the package says it will. I think it’s best that we left it here, before it became useless.
“So,” I asked her, only half joking, “once you get there, do you think you’ll start dating guys your own age?”
She looked at me with a grin, then looked away. “Antsy, I think you’ve aged at least two years over the past few weeks,” she told me. “No matter what, you’re going to be a hard act to follow.”
For that, I gave her the best kiss of my career—during which Christina said, “Oh! Is that why you brushed your teeth this morning?”
The taxi finally arrived, honking from outside in repeated little blasts like a fire drill. Gunnar and I brought the luggage to the cabdriver, who, like every New York cabdriver, acted like it was an insult to his profession that he had to load luggage.
Thanks to all the horn blasts, neighbors had come out onto their porches to watch the Ümlauts’ departure. Then Mrs. Ümlaut threw up her hands “Ah! Now I remember!” She ran back into the house and came out with something in her hand. “This is for you,” she said to me. “Someone wanted to buy it last Saturday, but I told them it wasn’t for sale.”
She handed me the stainless-steel meat tenderizer.
“To remember us by,” she said with a wink.
This was the first hint that she had a sense of humor—and a twisted one, too. I was impressed.
“It’ll be one of my prized possessions—I’ll keep it with my rare paper clips,” I told her, and she looked at me funny. “No, really.”
“You must visit us!” she said, which I figured was about as likely as me visiting the International Space Station, but I nodded politely and said, “Sure.”
Then I heard a gruff voice from somewhere down the block intrude on our tender farewell moment.
“What about our plants, hah?” I turned to see the same paunchy, beady-eyed man, who had made nasty comments before, peering down from his second-floor balcony. From this angle, the guy looked like what you might get if you crossed a human being with one of those potbellied pigs. “You gonna send us back some freakin’ tulips?” he mocked.
Mrs. Ümlaut sighed, and Kjersten shook her head as she got into the taxi. “Why does everyone confuse us with Holland?”
“I know this guy,” says Christina. “His kid’s in my class. He eats pencil sharpenings.”
“Go on,” grunted the pig-man. “Get atta here! We don’t need ya!”
I’m about to tell the guy off—but then I hear a bang, and I see that Gunnar has jumped up on the trunk of the taxi—and, to the driver’s extreme chagrin, Gunnar climbs up so he’s standing on the taxi’s roof.
“You can’t get rid of me!” he yells to the pig-man. Then he turns to address all the neighbors, speaking loud and clear: “I’ ll be everywhere—wherever you look. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ ll be there. I’ ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad, an’ I’ ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”
I had to smile—I even applauded, because at last Gunnar had found a real quote. And with all due respect to John Steinbeck, as far as I’m concerned, Gunnar owns it now!
Gunnar took a long, elaborate bow, then hopped down from the roof, and did something very un-Gunnar-like. He gave me this sudden, death-grip hug that crunched my bones like a chiropractor. When he let go, we stood there for a moment, feeling stupid.
“Dewey Lopez didn’t get a picture of that, did he?” I asked.
“If he did, it’s your problem now.” Then he jumped in the taxi. “Ciao.”
Kjersten put her hand out the window for one final farewell grasp, and the taxi driver floored it, nearly leaving Kjersten’s hand behind with me. I watched as they accelerated down the street and turned the c
orner.
“Someday,” said Christina, “I hope to have friends as problematic as yours.”
My thoughts were still on Kjersten. I wish I could have come up with a quote like Gunnar did—y’know, the absolute the perfect parting words to leave Kjersten with.
But what do you say to a Scandinavian beauty who’s about to get on a plane and fly out of your life?
22 A Weed Grows in Brooklyn
Just as Old Man Crawley predicted, Paris, Capisce? had celebrities dragging their nails over one another’s backs to get in the door. We ended up having to schedule celebrities—one per night—so they didn’t all arrive at once. Dad, still recuperating, took the calls from home, chatting with agents, and the stars themselves. It was great! I got to meet more famous people than I thought I’d meet in a lifetime, then pour water over their heads.
With all this celebrity appeal, the restaurant was packed every night with people hoping to eat a fine meal, spot someone famous, and see them get drenched—either by me, or this guy they hired who looked and sounded like me, which I still find too creepy to talk about.
Christina even got into it, selling the pitchers we used on eBay for prices that could fund her college education someday.
Long story short, by the time Dad was ready to go back to work, Paris, Capisce? was the hottest restaurant in Brooklyn. We were all realistic enough to know that trends pass, that it wouldn’t last forever, but we’d also been through enough to know we gotta enjoy what we got, when we got it.
“It’s gonna be different now,” he told us. “Now that the restaurant’s always busy, there’s going to be a lot more work.”
So he doubled his staff, and cut his own hours in half, leaving the stress for someone else. He even has time to cook at home with Mom again, and watch a game or two on the weekends with me.
“When I finally go, I’m sure it’ll be a heart attack,” he said to me. “But let’s hope I go like your grandpa”—whose ticker didn’t give out until he was pushing eighty-eight.
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