Arthur

Aaaaaaaaay, it's the Fonz...


Somehow I don't feel like signing stuff like this. It doesn't feel like art, (if you can call my other stuff art.

I was in the fourth grade when I heard someone say that Fonzi wasn't cool. TV culture had taught me that he was, and I never questioned it. But the kid saying this was Ricky Farley, and that kid was so cool I didn't want to question it.

Other things that I remember about him:

• He was thin, but he told me that he gained weight in the summer because he just sat around watching televsion. Gym. class made him thinner. I thought this was strange since my brother and I had an aversion to too much television in the summer (we probably made up for it in the fall, though).
  
• Ricky Farley was the first kid that I ever heard admitting to smoking marijuana. He joked about hearing his mom come up the stairs and him putting a joint out and waving the smoke around with his arms just before she came in his room. I knew what the stuff smelled like because of the freaks and hippies in the woods behind our house ...oh, and we found a bong once the summer before. I remember thinking that his mother must have been dumb.
  
• Ricky Farley had a parakeet called "John Bird," a play on the "Waltons" character brilliantly played by the genius Richard Thomas. He said it knew about 10-15 things to say. I had parakeets and never got them to talk, they are dumber than parrots. Later, I named my next parakeet John Bird and followed his suggestion to train it with a tape recorder. It never worked, but my sister still makes fun of me about that recording.
  
• Years later, I saw him leave a guitar at the music shop to be fixed. If I remember correctly, the guitar was a semi-hollow body, like maybe a 1972 tele-copy. The knobs were crushed into the body, and the bridge was messed up. As soon as he left the store, the guy behind the counter began swearing to himself about the shape of the guitar. Ricky was only a year older than me, but I remember thinking that guy was still cool because he could destroy a guitar like that and not seem to care.

I never got over feeling that this guy was too cool. Only now I have to re-think much of these early thoughts and re-evaluate them. Today, Ricky is probably working for Anderson Consulting (now called Accenture, I think).

--gh