I toyed with telling him about Old Man Crawley’s threat to get him fired if I didn’t walk the dogs . . . but didn’t. Crawley and his dogs were my problem.

I finished up my fettucine and began thinking about what the Schwa’s dinner was like tonight. Did he have to cook it himself? Did he cook for himself and his dad? Or was this one of the lucky nights when the Schwa could relax and Aunt Peggy did the cooking? Then I wondered if Aunt Peggy ever forgot to set a plate for him, like his dad.

“Listen, I was thinking about having a friend over for dinner.”

“Someone new, or the usual suspects?”

“New.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No such luck.”

“Who?”

“They call him the Schwa.”

My dad piled some more fettucine onto his plate. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Does something have to be wrong with him for him to be my friend? Is that what you mean?”

“Take it easy. I just thought I heard something funny in your voice.”

I didn’t think my dad had it in him to tune into someone’s tone. He never seemed to be able to tell when Mom was about to get mad at him, and he usually needed one of us kids to tell him what brainless, insensitive thing he had done. But this time he called it right.

I decided to be direct. “He’s invisible,” I said.

To my dad’s credit, he took this in stride, although he did stop chewing for a few seconds. “Does he become visible again when he takes off his ring?” Dad asked. “Does he hang out with elves and dwarfs?”

It took me a few seconds, then I got it, and laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “He’s got hairy feet, too.”

“Well, make sure he wipes them on the doormat, or your mother will brain him.”

7. The Lowest-Paid Male Escort on the Entire Eastern Seaboard, Except for Maybe the Bronx

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.”