by James Boice
Ralph said, “Nothing, it’s just—we don’t really know. We didn’t really know him anymore. We’d see him around town sometimes, but . . .” Ralph shrugged. “We didn’t really talk or anything.”
“You’re telling me you two were living in the same town with him all this time and don’t know if he got married or something?”
Ralph said, “Definitely was not married. If we knew one thing about him, he never lost his touch with women.”
Potsie said, “My kids used to look for him around town, try to spot him when we were in the car. There he is! The Greaser Guy! They thought he was funny, with the jacket and the sideburns and everything. To them, you’re only cool if you’re wearing acid-washed jeans, drive a Lamborghini, and have hair like Duran Duran. They didn’t know who he was, to them he was just a local character out of step with the times, you know?”
“Did you tell them who he was?”
“Yeah. But they didn’t really get it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, you know how kids are. It was their game, and Dad was intruding. But, you know, I’d try to wave or honk at him. But it was like he never saw. He stopped coming around after you left.”
Ralph said, “The only reason he ever let us hang out with him in the first place was because of you.”
“That’s not true,” Richard said. “He loved you guys.”
“He tolerated us,” Ralph said. “He loved you. You were the link. As far as we were concerned, when you left, Fonzie might as well have too.”
Potsie said, “All I know is he was still a mechanic, and he still had the motorcycle and the leather jacket and the women. The guy’s life began at age sixteen and stopped at age twenty-five. Period. No childhood, no adulthood. Eternal young man. That’s why he is, was, and ever shall be the coolest.”
“Amen,” said Ralph.
“I was thinking about that earlier,” Richard said. “The women part especially. The crowd today was impressive. But, I don’t know, it also made me a little sad for him. Part of me would rather one woman showed up for him—just one—instead of a thousand. One woman who had been there for Fonzie all these years, through all the hard stuff, who knew him better than anyone. I was thinking of Lori Beth. I want Fonzie to have known what that’s like, to have a partner committed to riding out every storm, who’ll be there for you no matter how bad it gets. I want Fonz to have had that. I hope he did. But after today, it doesn’t seem so.”
They sat there in silence for a few moments.
Richard said, “What happened to his bike? Is it in the lake too?”
Potsie said, “No. But I heard it’s totaled. They probably scrapped it.”
“I still don’t understand how he crashed.”
“I mean, you know, it was rainy. It was foggy.”
“But he’d ridden in those conditions a thousand times. And he knew that bridge. He knew what he was doing. He was always careful.”
“All it takes is one slipup,” said Potsie.
Ralph said, “It’s like Kirk told the papers. He skidded out and hit the guardrail. Went flying over. He might have walked away if it hadn’t happened where it did, on the bridge.”
Richard said, “Kirk.” He stuck his finger into his mouth and pretended to puke.
Ralph chuckled. “Remember him from the old days, huh?”
“I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing that nasty little face again. I can’t believe he’s still around.”
“Not only is he around—he’s in charge. He runs the show over there,” Potsie said. “And he hasn’t changed a bit. Just has more power now. You can imagine what that’s like.”
“It’s tragic,” Richard said. “When we were kids, Fonzie seemed invincible. The one thing you could always count on was that he would show up and save the day. And that no matter what, he would be all right in the end. He was like Superman. And what ends up taking him out? A puddle.”
“Look,” Potsie said, “he wasn’t invincible. He wasn’t Superman. He just seemed that way to us because we were kids. Fonzie was a human being. He was a guy, a great guy, sure, an incredible guy, but in the end? Just a guy. Whose life was just as fragile as anybody’s. He would have been the first to say it: any of us, anytime, one wrong move.” He snapped his finger. “In a blink. Even Arthur Fonzarelli.”
“No, you’re right,” Richard said. “You’re completely right. He was just a person. And we were just kids.”
“Just kids,” Potsie said.
“Everyone gets old,” said Ralph. “No one stays cool forever. Not even the Fonz.”
• • •
THE MEN’S ROOM AT ARNOLD’S used to be Fonzie’s office. More often than not you could find him here, standing at the mirror combing his hair, reluctantly dispensing his wisdom to an eager gaggle of the uncool—Richie often among them—or adding another girl’s phone number to the wall he used instead of a little black book. Once in sophomore year of high school Richie scored with a girl. Scoring back then meant making out a little in the back seat up at Inspiration Point. A momentous occasion. A breakthrough after years of struggle. He thought he was a man afterward. Life from that moment felt clear, laid out in a simple, orderly grid: Richie Cunningham, women, constant scoring—manhood. But the girl turned out to be Fonzie’s girlfriend. The guy went through them fast—who could keep track? Richie was not a man after all. He was a creep, he was worse than a creep, he was a subspecies of base humanity. And he had committed a terrible crime against the toughest guy in town. Before this, Richie had not known where he stood with Fonzie. It seemed like Fonzie had been giving him a chance, for reasons Richie could not comprehend. The distant, dangerous hood had begun sitting near Richie and his friends at Arnold’s, listening to their conversations. He would even sit with them sometimes, and they’d talk like something approaching friends. In those moments, Richie felt all lit up inside. Like he existed. He would look around the room, seeing if others were noticing that Fonzie was sitting with him, if others were seeing that he was visible now. But other times, Fonzie would act like Richie did not exist. Look right through him in public. Not answer him when he spoke to him. That made more sense to Richie. He felt more comfortable when that happened. The guy associated with bikers, hustlers. He was hard. Never smiled. Always seemed to simmer with anger. Why would Fonzie want to be friends with a Boy Scout like Richie? He could not tell what it was—if Fonzie liked him, or just saw him as something to look at and listen to when there were no better options.
When Fonzie found out what Richie had done, he summoned him here to this very bathroom. To kill him.
There was no escaping the inevitable. Richie went. Potsie and Ralph stood outside the door, praying for him. His knees were shaking. His mouth felt like a bag of peanuts. He was already feeling little flashes of what the pain would feel like all over his head and body.
Fonzie stood there, gripping the sink, his back to Richie. Wouldn’t even look at him. Finally, Richie said, “Well, go on. Get it over with.”
Fonzie didn’t move.
Richie said, “Whatever you’re going to do to me, I deserve.” Then he said, “What are you going to do to me?”
Fonzie said, “I don’t know.” Then he said, “I mean, I don’t want to do anything.”
Richie did not understand.
Fonzie said, “But I have to. I have to hurt you, Cunningham. You know that.”
Richie did. Reputation was everything to the Fonz. It was his most secret weapon against a world that wanted nothing but to push him around. If word ever got out that Fonzie let Richie’s transgression go unpunished, it would open the gates, and rushing in would come every other cheat and manipulator and liar, every self-serving double-talker, running over each other to try and take chunks out of him until there was nothing left. That was the world, as far as Fonzie was concerned. Living meant protecting yourself from it.
He took a step toward Richie. Just that step made Richie flinch. Fonzie stopped. “Know what I’
ve been doing, when I’ve been standing here waiting for you? I’ve been trying to get myself angry, you know? Angry enough to fight you. But all I keep thinking about is that mechanical Santa.”
The previous Christmas, Richie got a present for Fonzie—a three-in-one wrench. On Christmas Eve, he dropped in on him at his garage to leave it for him, thinking he would be with family somewhere like everyone else. But Fonzie was there, he was sitting all alone, eating food out of a can. The guy had nowhere to go, no family. Fonzie would not have liked Richie knowing this about him, so he left before Fonzie saw him. He went home and talked to his father about it, and they returned to the garage together and convinced Fonzie to come join them at their house. He had too much pride to accept that kind of pity—they had to lie that they needed his help fixing the broken mechanical Santa Claus for the front yard. He fixed it for them, and they fixed his Christmas. He even said grace at dinner. “Hey God,” he prayed, “thanks.”
“Nobody was ever nice to me like that before,” he said now.
“What are you saying?” Richie said. “That it evens out? Good deed, bad deed?”
“No, what I’m saying is I don’t want to hurt my friend.”
Richie said, “Friend?” He smiled. “Did you just say I’m your friend?”
Fonzie did not answer. He did not have to.
Then he said, “Anyway, truth is, even if I wanted to wallop you I probably wouldn’t do a very good job. I haven’t been in a fight in years.”
“That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe it for a second. You’re the toughest guy in town. You fight all the time.”
“No, see? That’s just my reputation. If you represent yourself right, your reputation does all your fighting for you. What’s important isn’t whether you’re tough, but whether or not people think you are. It’s been years since I’ve thrown a punch. Now if you tell anybody that, that will no longer be the case.”
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody. Not my friends, not anybody.”
“So what do we do?”
It was a conundrum. They talked it over. A serendipitous solution was reached when the door opened while Richie was standing near it and smacked him in the face, giving him a black eye he let everyone attribute to Fonzie.
The girls’ phone numbers had been painted over years earlier, replaced by new vandalism—a limerick about Heather Locklear from Dynasty, and the apparently controversial statement that Ozzy Osbourne ruled more than Iron Maiden. Being a writer, Richard always had a pen. He took it out of his pocket and wrote right where the man himself would have, once upon a time:
Long Live the Fonz
–RC
• • •
WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE house the red light on the answering machine was blinking. He hit PLAY. The tape rewound, then the beep sounded, followed by a voice that was still big despite being staticky and faint over a long-distance wire.
“Richard! Gleb Cooper, how the hell are you? Your wife gave me this number, said I could reach you here. She told me about your loss, my sincere and heartfelt condolences. I know it’s a difficult time and I’m slime for asking, I don’t mean to push, but when you’re ready we need to touch base about Space Battles. I just got off the phone with the prince. He’s asking for an update. He’s excited, Richard. We need to give him an answer by Saturday. Call me, please. Again, my sincere and heartfelt cond—”
Richard went to the next message.
“Hello, Mr. Cunningham,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Margo Sealock. It was a pleasure meeting you today, considering the circumstances. Martin and I would love to host you tomorrow morning at our home to discuss the campaign ad we mentioned, if you’re available. Will ten o’clock do?” She provided the address and left a number to call to confirm. He called it back, left a message: He’d be there.
He picked up the phone and dialed Lori Beth. He sat in the recliner and tried to tell her everything about the trip, the calling hours, the people he saw again. He tried, but he couldn’t get it all across. It was too immense. All he could do was give her basic facts: who, what, where.
“So it’s real,” she said.
“It’s real.”
“It’s just starting to sink in for me,” she said.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you too. But you’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Yeah. No, wait. It looks like I’ll need to stay another day or two. Some work has come up.” He told her about the Sealock job.
She said, “It’s exciting. It’s just like Fonzie that something good will come out of this.”
After they hung up, Richard called the airline to change his flight then opened a Tab he found in the fridge and turned on Joanie’s big-screen Magnavox. Letterman was on. They were racing office chairs on skateboards propelled by fire extinguishers. It reminded him of things he, Potsie, Ralph, and Fonzie used to do for fun when they were kids. It went to commercial and an ad for Governor Johnson came on. A serious man wearing a suit an IRS agent might wear was seated at a desk in an office. The shot was poorly framed—the governor was off-center, and you could see the boom mic dropping in and out from the top. The zoom went in, pulled back out, slammed back in again. It was never completely in focus. Johnson spoke in a monotone: Abatement spending for the industrial sector should forfeit the budget rights of the tax cuts to the economy . . . Richard zoned out. Nothing but more noise in a world of it. No one needed another guy in a suit on TV lecturing them with wonky gibberish. People craved honesty. They needed it. An honest piece of cinema would get their attention. That’s what Richard would do for Sealock.
TUESDAY
RICHIE ONCE HAD A DATE with a girl who lived in Whitefish Bay. When he rang the doorbell to pick her up and take her to Arnold’s for dinner, he felt like he was made up not of cells but of insufficiency. Whitefish Bay was the neighborhood where the chief executive officers lived, the chairmen of the board. She was nice, but so is everyone, he thought, and she could see it all in his eyes. He was quiet on the drive. The words just would not come. She asked him what was wrong, but he could not tell her. He gave her nothing. What was the point? He wasn’t rich. She would never be interested in him. They did not even make it to Arnold’s before he told her this was a mistake, that they had better call it a night. She was confused, she protested that he was wrong. But he turned the car around. When he dropped her off back at her house and drove away, he was relieved. He felt like he had been smart enough to avoid something. He went on to Arnold’s. Fonzie was there. Fonzie said, “What are you doing, where’s your date?” Richie told him. “Cunningham,” Fonzie said, “you idiot. She liked you. She didn’t care that you weren’t rich. If she did, she wouldn’t have gone out with you in the first place. The only one who had a problem with you was you. You could have had a beautiful date with a fantastic girl. But you put things into her head that she didn’t have. That’s not fair to her. And now you’ve got nothing. That’s what you get for being so smart.” Richie knew Fonzie was right. He asked her out again. She said no. She was not interested in someone so insecure. Next time he saw her, she was following Fonzie around, begging him to notice her, to take her out. He never did. It was an important lesson, and one Richie remembered the next time he met a girl he thought was out of his league: a tall brunette in a library named Lori Beth.
Now, after a career spent attending cocktail parties in Beverly Hills and meetings with film industry power players in Bel Air, Whitefish Bay seemed less daunting than it had that night. He wished he could go back and do it over. He would knock on the door, his eyes steely, unfazed. She would smile, like she had the first time, but now he would believe the smile, he would not try to guess what she was thinking behind it. In the car, he would have all the words.
There was not much about youth that was not simply regret.
• • •
THOUGH MOSTLY THESE HOUSES NOW were no longer the castles they had been, Sealock’s house was an ex
ception. The massive stone-and-wood French Normandy mansion on a densely treed yard that spanned two or three acres would have fit in fine in Beverly Hills.
Margo Sealock opened the door. “Richard,” she said, smiling. She was wearing a gray turtleneck sweater and green pants and was barefoot. She smelled good, and he felt at ease at once. He stepped into a vaulted foyer where an imposing staircase curved up to an upper floor. She welcomed him, took his coat—a Green Bay Packers parka he found in Chachi’s closet—and asked him if he found the place okay, fretted when he told her he missed his exit and had to turn around. She led him into the house, talking over her shoulder to him. “We can’t thank you enough for doing this. I know how busy you must be.” She offered him water, coffee, gave him a clearly oft-given tour of the house—its history and trivia. “The wood for this doorframe came from the hull of a sunken ship off the coast of Newfoundland.” She was assured and sharp, a smiling conversationalist who, aside from her severe hair, presented herself conservatively as the astute, dynamic wife of a midwestern public official. She had that skill a lot of actresses had that made him feel like he had known her longer than he had, that could have almost convinced him they had more in common than they did.
“Has it been very hard being back here without Arthur around?” she said.
He did not answer right away.
She looked at him.
He said, “It’s just strange to hear someone use his first name. The only one he ever allowed to do that was my mother.”
