Do You Mind If I Cancel? by Gary Janetti

Author:Gary Janetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

I DON’T FEEL WELL

I go to St. Mel’s grammar school in Flushing, Queens, a few blocks from my house. My mother walks me there on my first day, and, like most gay seven-year-olds, I cry hysterically when she leaves.

We start each morning at school by standing next to our desks and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. During these first few days, standing next to my desk, hand over my heart, I would become overwhelmed with one thought—“I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.” The second we sat down, before the teacher had time to even start the lesson, I would approach her desk (it was only female teachers, this was the ’70s) and say “I don’t feel well,” and she would immediately send me to the vice principal’s office, who would then call my mother and have her come pick me up.

This went on about once a week for a year or so. A stomachache, a headache, a sore throat, I would rotate them the way you would meals you cook for dinner. When I was in the second grade, after God knows how many phone calls from the vice principal, my mother refused to pick me up. She had had it. “He’s faking,” she tells the vice principal. The vice principal then looks at me and asks, “Are you faking?” Are you out of your fucking mind? “No, I don’t feel well.” “He’s sick, you have to come get him” and with that she hangs up. Everything’s going to be okay, I say to myself, everything’s going to be just fine. But I couldn’t help but think I should have spaced these out a bit better. I’d really been pushing my luck lately. (The perverse thing was that my sister Maria frequently did get sick and refused to stay home from school, she said she didn’t want to miss a thing, the twisted fuck. My mother practically had to beg her not to go. I, on the other hand, had been seemingly immune to everything—no chickenpox, no flu, no ear infections. And Maria got them all. When she had pink eye, I took the towel she used and for days rubbed it all over my face, practically shoving it into my eye sockets. I would’ve eaten it if I could’ve gotten it down. Nothing. This was my earliest illustration of irony.) And now, just like that, my mother was there in the vice principal’s office and she pulls me into the hallway.

“Here,” she says shoving two baby aspirin into my palm. “Take these.” Oh, God, she was planning on leaving me here!

“I’m sick,” I say.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re not coming home.”

Lady, you don’t want to go up against me. “I’m REALLY sick.”

“Get back in that classroom!”

I’m not going to lie, part of me was impressed that I’d driven my mother right up to the edge and I could see she was going to be a formidable adversary. I was even a little excited for the challenge.

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