RETORTMAGAZINE.COM

'Fonzi just eats it. He doesn’t even look sad or embarrassed.'

Fonzi gets all kinds of shit at school.  There’s the name, for one.  Everyone thinks it’s hilarious that a Pakistani kid was named after a character on Happy Days.  I’ve tried to explain to the other kids that there’s no way that’s true, because Happy Days was a show from the 1970s.  Fonzi, like everyone else in our grade, was born in 1992.  1991, at the earliest.  If his parents named him after someone on TV, his name would be something like Jesse, after Jesse Katsopolis from Full House.  Or Steve, after Urkel from Family Matters.  Something current.  But it doesn’t matter.  The kids in our grade are assholes and they believe what they want to believe.  So, when kids see Fonzi in the hallway, they’re always saying stuff like, “Eyyyyy….,” or doing that shit where the real Fonzie looks in the mirror and goes to comb his hair but stops because it looks so good already.

Fonzi never responds.  He just puts his head down and keeps on walking.

Fonzi also gets ragged on because he shit his pants in gym class once.  It was the week of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test, where you have to do all the sit-ups and pull-ups and stuff.  He was doing sit-ups on one of those super-firm gym mats, just flying, on pace to do like seventy or eighty in a minute.  Danny D’Agostino was holding his feet and all of the sudden we heard him yell, Aw, Goddammit.  Then Danny just stood up and backed away and everyone rushed over and saw all the liquid shit all over the mat.  The gym teacher, Ms. Adler, threw a towel down and gave one to Fonzi so he could wipe his legs or wrap it around his waist or something.  Fonzi just wiped the sweat off his face and walked into the locker room.  Didn’t panic or run or anything.

You’d think people would get over something that happened in sixth grade.  You’d think that, but you’d be wrong.  Like I said, the kids in our grade are assholes.

But the main reason why Fonzi has such a hard time at school is his sister Farah.  Farah’s a lesbian, has been one for about three months now.  Or at least that’s how long she’s been telling people.  She came out after our school had this huge assembly called Puma Pride!, which was named after Paulie the Puma, our mascot.  We had to have the assembly because administrators thought a Hate Crime was committed on campus, after Rich Nguyen called Luke McNeal a faggot during a fistfight in the lunch room.  Everyone knows Rich didn’t kick Luke’s ass because Luke’s gay.  Rich kicked his ass because Luke ripped him off on an ounce of weed, told him it was White Widow when it was actually Maui Times Kush.  But it’s not like either of them could tell the school that.  So, when they got called into the Superintendent’s office and had to explain why they fought, neither of them said anything and so the school just ran with the whole faggot thing.

Anyway, during the Puma Pride! assembly, a bunch of teachers got up and talked about how kids should be proud to be gay, how there’s nothing wrong with it and how if you’re gay you should come out because if you don’t you’ll just keep a huge part of you bottled up for years and years and you’ll never really be the person you should be.  Most kids just laughed and cracked jokes about how Ms. Stevens and Ms. Adamsley-Brinker are totally gay for each other because they always wear Puma Football sweatshirts on Casual Day.  But I guess Farah took it to heart, because once the assembly was over she asked her AP History teacher, Mr. Prescott, if she could talk to him about something important.  The next day at school, Farah had one of those pink triangle buttons on the lapel of her peacoat and, well, everyone knew.

So, now that Farah’s out, everyone thinks Fonzi’s gay too.  Like there’s a gay gene in his family or something.  Kids ask him if he’s got a date with Potsie over the weekend, if he’s gonna suck Richie Cunningham’s dick after sixth period.  Stuff like that.

And the thing is, Fonzi just eats it.  He doesn’t even look sad or embarrassed.  He just looks numb, like he’s pumped full of Novocain or something.

——————————————————————————————–

© Thomas Mundt 2010

Thomas Mundt lives in Chicago.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in places like The 2nd Hand, The Northville Review, Red Fez, 3am Magazine, Thieves Jargon, and Six Sentences