The Schwa Was Here

As for what I did next, it came, as most of the world's great ideas do, while I was on the can. Maybe the shock of the Schwa's vanishing act did something to my insides, but what­ever it was, there was no way I was making it home on a bicycle without a pit stop. So there I am in the stall at Fuggettaburger, trying not to look at the Pisher toilet-paper dispenser, and I catch sight of the things people have scrawled into the wall. The stuff you usually find on the walls of a bathroom is about as Neanderthal as you can get—which is why we often call the boys' bathroom at school the Wendell Tiggor Reading Room. The Fuggettaburger bathroom had its share of unreadable phone numbers, and poems that started. Here I sit, broken­hearted. Then, suddenly, as I'm looking at all this drivel, I get an uncontrollable urge to put something up there myself. I take a pen from my jacket pocket, and I start scratching a picture onto the wall. I'm not on the short list when it comes to artistic tal­ent, but I can do faces okay. So I draw this face. Just a few sim­ple lines, wispy hair. Then beneath it I write. The Schwa Was Here. And, for a final touch, right on his forehead, I draw an upside down e—you know, like a schwa in the dictionary.

Just like that.

By the time I leave Fuggettaburger, I'm a man with a mission. I went down the street to the pharmacy and bought myself one of those black permanent markers. Not the skinny kind, but the real thick ones. I drew the same thing right over a bus- stop billboard, only this time it was with much thicker lines. I did it on a park bench. I got on the subway and put Schwas inside as many cars as I could. A few people made noises. Mumbled words like "vandal" and stuff like that, but I just ignored them, because I knew this wasn't graffiti. This wasn't tagging. That's all about making your mark and labeling terri­tory. I was making someone else's mark. The Schwa Was Here. I didn't care if people saw me, I didn't care if I got caught, be­cause what I was doing was noble, and God help anyone who tried to stop me.

That day I must have put up maybe a hundred Schwas all over Brooklyn, and when I finally got home, my hand was cov­ered in black ink. I felt like I had run a marathon—that feeling of exhaustion and incredible accomplishment all rolled to­gether.

It was past eleven, and my mother was waiting at the door. "Where were you?" she yelled. "We almost called the police."

"I was vandalizing bus stops and public restrooms," I said. She grounded me until the fall of civilization, and I took it like a man.

Dad was sitting in the living room watching TV, with Christina dozing in his lap. Frankie was asleep after a day of community service. I told my dad he should give Old Man Crawley a call. I told him it was important. He gave me that "what?" expression, and I gave him that "don't ask me" look.

When I got to my room, I didn't go to sleep. I knew what

I had to do. I got online and pulled up the Queens phone book. Margaret Taylor. She was the person selling the house. There were fifty-six Margaret Taylors in Queens, and two hun­dred sixty-seven M. Taylors. The next morning, I began making calls.

22 My Anonymous Contribution to Popular Culture and to My Parents' Phone Bill

"Hello, is this Margaret Taylor?"

"Yes, this is she."

"Are you selling a house in Brooklyn?"

"Brooklyn? No, I'm sorry."

"Okay. Thanks anyway."

The Schwa didn't show up the next week, or the next, or the next. I wasn't surprised. I went to the attendance office to check if his school records had been transferred, but someone had misplaced his entire file. That didn't surprise me either. What surprised me was the Schwa face I saw drawn in the Wendell Tiggor Reading Room. It looked like the faces I had drawn around town, but I hadn't drawn one in this bathroom. Plus, The Schwa Was Here was written in a handwriting that didn't look like mine at all.

"Hello, I'm calling for Margaret Taylor."

"You found her. What can I do for you?"

"I hear you're selling a house in Brooklyn."

"Honey, if I owned a house anywhere, I wouldn't be selling it."

I dreamed about the Schwa one night. In the dream I was standing in the middle of Times Square. A bus goes by, and on the side of the bus, instead of an advertisement for a Broadway show, it's a picture of the Schwa. I look at a bus stop—there he is again. I look up in the sky, he's on the Goodyear Blimp—and finally the giant electronic billboard overlooking Times Square has him on a live video feed.