BooksBarbecue
Back The Schwa was Here
Chapters (28)
  1. Cover
  2. LAB JOURNAL
  3. Title Page
  4. Dedication
  5. 1. Manny Bullpucky Gets His Sorry Butt Hurled Off the Marine Park Bridge
  6. 2. The Weird and Mostly Tragic History of the Schwa, Which Is Entirely True If You Trust My Sources
  7. 3. Quantizing the Schwa Effect Using the Scientific Method, and All That Garbage
  8. 4. Making Big Bucks off of Stealth Economics, Because Maybe I Got Some Business Sense
  9. 5. Which Is Worse: Getting Mauled by a Pack of Dogs, or Getting Your Brains Bashed Out by a Steel Poker?
  10. 6. As If I Didn’t Already Have Enough Annoying Things to Do Every Day, Now I Gotta Do This
  11. 7. The Lowest-Paid Male Escort on the Entire Eastern Seaboard, Except for Maybe the Bronx
  12. 8. Are Those Your Fingers in My Mouth, or Are You Just Happy to Not See Me?
  13. 9. Maybe They Had It Right in France Because Getting My Head Lopped Off by a Guillotine Would Have Been Easier
  14. 10. Earthquakes, Nuclear Winter, and the End of Life as We Know It, over Linguini
  15. 11. The Youngest Doctor in Sheepshead Bay Gets Held Hostage When He Least Expects It
  16. 12. A Horror Movie Blow-by-Blow, with the Undisputed Queen of the 3-B Club
  17. 13. A Russian Train, a Pulsing Vein, and My Mother’s Bag of Snails
  18. 14. More Than I Ever Wanted to Know About the Schwa’s Childhood
  19. 15. Vortex in Aisle Three—Can Someone Please Clean Up the Ectoplasmic Slime?
  20. 16. A Late-Night Trip to the Land of Beef That Could Turn a Person into a Vegetarian
  21. 17. A Traumatic Experience I’ll Live to Regret, Assuming I Live
  22. 18. Larger Than Life, in Your Face, Undeniable Schwa
  23. 19. The Schwa Gets Radiation Therapy in a Room That Doesn’t Smell Too Good No Matter How Much It’s Disinfected
  24. 20. The Weird Things Kids Do Don’t Even Come Close to the Weird Things Parents Do
  25. 21. Why I Started Vandalizing Brooklyn
  26. 22. My Anonymous Contribution to Popular Culture and to My Parents’ Phone Bill
  27. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  28. Special Excerpt from SHIP OUT OF LUCK

“Huh?” It took a few seconds for me to drag my mind back to the reason why we were all here. “Oh! Right.” I went to Manny, pulled off the duct tape, and felt around his bald head for the plastic seam. I retaped the fat firecracker on the back of his head, relieved not to have to look at the Schwa. Ira fiddled with his camera, and Howie finished up our protective barricade.

“How long will it take the fuse to burn?” I asked, as illegal fireworks are not my particular academic strength.

“Twelve point five seconds,” says Howie. “But that’s just an estimate.”

We let the Schwa light the fuse, as he seemed to be the only one not afraid of blowing up, and he quickly joined us behind the barricade.

“You know, there’s gotta be a way to quantify it,” Howie says while we wait for the fuse to burn down.

“What?”

“The Schwa Effect. It’s like Mr. Werthog says: ‘For an experiment to be valid, the results must be quantifiable and repeatable (kiss, kiss).’”

“We should experiment on the Schwa?”

“Sounds good to me,” said the Schwa.

Then a blast knocks me to the ground. My ears pop and begin to ring. The blast echoes back and forth down the row of brick duplexes. When I look up, Manny’s body has flown six feet, and his head is gone again.

Ira zoomed in on the body. “Thus perished Manny Bullpucky.” He turned the camera off. Right about now every window in Brooklyn is snapping up as people wonder what morons are setting off fireworks at seven in the morning.

We hurry inside so we don’t get caught. Once we’re in, I look at the Schwa. “After that, you really want us to experiment on you?”

“Sure,” he says. “What’s life without excitement?”

I had to hand it to the Schwa. Any other kid would have flipped us off if asked to be a lab rat, but the Schwa was a good sport. Maybe he was just as curious about his own weirdness as we were.

LAB JOURNAL

The Schwa Effect: Experiment #1

Hypothesis: The Schwa will be functionally invisible in your standard classroom.

Materials: Nine random students, one classroom, the Schwa.

Procedure: We set nine students and the Schwa seated around an otherwise empty classroom (if you don’t count the hamsters and the guinea pig in the back). Then we dragged other students into the room, and asked them to do a head count.