Free The Boy Who Never Grew Up by David Handler

want?”
    “I’d like to learn as much as I can about his boyhood,” I replied. “About his father—”
    “What about him?” she demanded.
    “Their relationship. I gather it wasn’t so terrific.”
    She stuck out her lower lip, weighing this. “And what good will this do?”
    “A lot of Matthew’s movies are about childhood. Yet audiences know very little about his own. They’re curious.” I sipped my milk. “It may also be good for him right now to do some looking back.”
    She nodded, her eyes glinting at me. “If it means helping him, I’m all for it. But if it doesn’t …” She reached across the table and grabbed me by the wrist. She had a grip of iron. “You don’t want Bunny Wax for an enemy, mister. Believe me.”
    “I believe you,” I assured her, watching the color drain from my hand.
    She relaxed her grip. “Just so we understand each other,” she said, smiling.
    “We do.”
    “About what, Ma?”
    We both looked up. Matthew was standing, or I should say lurking, there in the doorway.
    One look at him and I knew just what Shelley and Sarge meant when they said that Matthew Wax was tearing his hair out.

Chapter 3
    I T WAS QUITE SOME BALD PATCH. IT STARTED WHERE his forelock should have been and it wandered all the way over behind his right ear. He was down to bare white scalp in many spots. A few thin, reddish brown tufts still clung to life in others. The rest of his hair was shaggy and unkempt. He looked like a kid who’d used his haircut money to buy comic books and then tried doing it himself—with his mom’s pinking shears.
    “Just so you understand each other about what, Ma?” he repeated, tugging nervously at his ravaged forelock with his fingers.
    “Nothing, sweetheart,” she replied, gazing up at him with a mixture of pride and awe. And maybe some fear. “Here’s your friend. Say hello.”
    He loped over to me and stuck out his hand. “Glad you could make it,” he exclaimed, as we shook. “Stewart, right?”
    “Make it Hoagy.”
    “As in Carmichael?”
    “As in the cheese steak.”
    “Hey, I love cheese steaks!” He grinned at me happily. “Especially with tons of onions and hot peppers. Man, they’re great!”
    “That they are.”
    If this was Matthew Wax down, I didn’t think I wanted to be around him when he was up. He was a bundle of energy—an eager, boisterous, overgrown kid. He was uncommonly tall, seven or eight inches over six feet, and gawky of build, like a teenager who hasn’t filled in yet. His shoulders were narrow, his arms skinny and unusually long, so long that his hands hung nearly down to his knees. They were surprisingly small, delicate hands, and the backs were covered with freckles. So was his face. His skin was fair, almost pasty. He had a rabbit nose, pink and busy, and a jaw you could shovel snow with. He had shaved recently but not well. He wore glasses, thick ones with wire frames that had broken at the hinge and been Scotch-taped together. The eyes behind them were earnest and bright. He wore a faded Bedford Falls T-shirt, old jeans that were three inches too short for him, and a new pair of Air Jordans. He had huge feet. They made him look like a Great Dane puppy. It really was hard to believe he was thirty-eight. So much of him was kid. I would have said happy kid, too, if it weren’t for his hair. His hair made him look positively haunted.
    “Okay, okay, you’re Meat ,” he announced.
    “Am I?”
    “That’s what I’m gonna call you—Meat.”
    “I’ve been called worse things.”
    “Can we have ’em for dinner tonight, Ma?” His fingers went up to his scalp again, worrying it like a gardener trying to pull out crabgrass.
    “Have what, sweetheart?” she wondered.
    Before he could answer, Lulu came out from under the table and yawned. She was feeling ignored.
    Matthew wrinkled his rabbit nose at me, mystified.
    “That aroma of the San Pedro docks at low tide is Lulu,” I explained.
    He looked down. “Oh, wow!