But what was I talking about?
Oh, yeah—the Schwa. See, that was the whole point with the Schwa: You couldn't even think about him without losing track of your own thoughts—like even in your head he was somehow becoming invisible.
Okay, so like I said, I don't remember when I met him—nobody does—but I can tell you the first time I remembered actually noticing him. It was the day Manny Bullpucky jumped from the Marine Park Bridge.
It was Saturday, and my friends and I were bored, as usual. I was hanging out with Howie Bogerton, whose one goal in life was not to have any goals in life, and Ira Goldfarb, who was a self-proclaimed cinematic genius. With the digital video camera his grandparents had gotten him for his bar mitzvah last year, Ira was determined to be Steven Spielberg by the time he got to high school. As for Manny Bullpucky, we kinda dragged him along with us to various places we went. We had to drag him around, on accounta he was a dummy. Not a dummy like Wendell Tiggor, who had to repeat the fifth grade like fourteen thousand times, but a real dummy. More snooty people might call him a mannequin, or even a prosthetic personage, because nobody calls things what they really are anymore. But to us normal people in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, he was a dummy, plain and simple.
As for his name, it came in the natural course of human events. Dad had brought him home from work one day. "Look at this guy," he says proudly, holding him up by the scruff of his neck. "He's made of a new ultra-high-grade lightweight plastic. Completely unbreakable."
My older brother Frank looks up from his dinner. "Bullpucky," he says—although I'm editing out the bad word here, on accounta my mother might read this, and I don't like the taste of soap.