Antsy Does Time

“Bad news, Antsy. I’m reeling from the blow, man, reeling. I knew I had to talk to you, because not everyone couldn’t understand like you, hear me?”

“So what happened?”

“The fortune-teller—the one who told me about my burial at sea. Turns out she was a fake! Wasn’t even psychic. She’s been ripping people off, and telling them stuff she just made up. Got arrested for it. She didn’t even have no fortune-telling license!”

“Imagine that,” I said, trying to hide my smirk. “A fortune-teller making stuff up.”

“You know what this means, right? It means that all bets are off. There ain’t no telling when I do the root rhumba. It’s all free fall without a parachute until I meet the mud. Very disturbing, dude. Very disturbing. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

“You probably won’t.”

“But I could, that’s the thing. Now I gotta restructure my whole way of thinking around a world of uncertainty. I ain’t none too unhappy about this.”

I thought I knew where Skaterdud was leading me, but with the Dud, conversational kickflips are not uncommon, and directions can suddenly change. “So I guess you want your year back, right?”

He looked at me like I had just arrived from someone else’s conversation. “No—why would I want that?”

“The same reason everybody else does,” I told him. “My dad’s heart attack suddenly made you all superstitious, and you’re afraid you’re going to lose all that time.”

He shook his head. “That’s just stupid.” He put a scabby hand on my shoulder as we walked, as if he was an older, smarter brother imparting deep wisdom. “Here’s the way I see it: that fortune-teller’s a crook, right? Tried and convicted. And in a court of law when someone is guilty of theft, they usually gotta pay damages to the plaintiff, right? And is there not justice in the Universe?” “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.

Gu

“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, Gu

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,” Gu

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,” Gu

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 begi

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.