Maximilian Grout and I decided to have a beard-growing contest. "I just think a beard would really make my jawline pop," was his explanation. I just wanted to win.
We set the stakes at $3, which was a lot of money at the time. In fact, I'd take $3 right now. Hey, $3 is $3. But at this point, that was a lot of money because you could buy a ferry ride to Fun Island for a quarter and milkshakes were two cents and a strange coin that they don't use anymore. It was called "the grig" and it was worth $15 but couldn't be exchanged for real money, so it was basically worthless. The milkshake place really seemed to like them though. We'd find them on the street and then go looking for two cents.
But I didn't really like milkshakes, so the loss of money didn't seem all that big a deal to me. I mean, I liked having money, because Fun Island was indeed fun, and I liked the ability to purchase a milkshake even though I didn't actually do it. I suppose there was some kind of mental inertia in me which made me desire something I almost never actually wanted. But isn't that the way with money?
"We're pretty young to be growing beards," I said. "I guess we should give it a week."
"A week," replied Maximilian Grout, because it seemed like the thing to say in agreement. Just so we could be sure that there had been no loss of information in the transmission. Once, a woman on the streetcorner told me I would be a great king over all the Andals, but it turned out that she had just asked me directions to the nearest phone booth, and I really annoyed her by cheering and walking away to go hunt for a suitable crown, so she cursed me. It was a minor curse. I grew out of it.
So we gave it a week and then reconvened. Maximilian Grout had a beard that was two feet long and bright blue. I had nothing.
"So I guess I win," we both said at the same time.
"What do you mean, 'I win?'" we both asked at the same time.
"Look, saying exactly the same thing at the same time is really going to cut down on our ability to communicate," we both said at the same time.
Maximilian Grout held up his hand. I waited. "I'll go first," we both said at the same time.
There was more of this, and it involved tigers, but I'll skip to the point where we both decided that since we hadn't really specified what the rules of the contest were, we couldn't determine who had won. Maximilian Grout pulled off his fake beard at one point and said, "Well, if you win by having the shortest beard, then I was just faking it, so I win."
To which I replied, "Well, if you win by having the longest beard, you were cheating, so I win."
Like I said, there was more of it. The tigers didn't appear until fairly late in the story, but they weren't important. In the end, we both felt like we'd lost. Which is a parable for competition if there ever was one, I suppose.
Since neither of us actually had $3, we couldn't take the ferry to Fun Island anyway. Which was fine, because Fun Island is really more an ideal than a place. That's what the sign at the ferry said anyway.
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