CRAZY HENRY GOES ON STRIKE
"I've decided to go on strike" said Crazy Henry to me, at exactly 2:15 p.m. on September 4th of this year. We were at the Brothers Deli out in St. Louis Park. It was my treat, naturally. I had the matzo ball soup with an egg cream and Crazy Henry got corned beef on rye, slathered with horseradish/beet juice sauce. I love that they keep bringing you bright green sour pickles as soon as your bowl is empty. I could live off of those sour pickles and that matzo ball soup for the rest of my life. I'm sure the sodium would kill me off in a couple of weeks.
"I'm going on strike" he said as he finished up the last of the coleslaw. "Can I get a chocolate egg cream?"
"Sure" I said. "Get anything you want. Waddya mean you're going on strike -- you don't even have a job right now."
Which was true. He'd been working for his aunt, who's the mayor, at some social media job -- but when some nosy reporter found out he only had a vocational school education and wrote a big story about it she had to fire him to save her own neck. He got money now by running a so-called Hugging Booth down on the Nicollet Mall. He carried around a card table, which he would set up on the sidewalk with a sign that said "Free Hugs -- Donations Accepted." And since he looked pretty harmless and let his black hair fall over his eyes in bangs he got a few touchy-feely women who wanted a hug and then would put a dollar in the jar he kept on the table. He said the manager of the downtown Wells Fargo bank came by one time and asked for a hug and then put a twenty dollar bill in his jar -- but I'm not prepared to believe that.
The cops didn't hassle him much, he said; as long as he moved his card table every half hour or so they left him alone.
I tried to get the waitress' attention so I could order Crazy Henry his chocolate egg cream, but she kept ignoring me like I wasn't there.
"That's what I'm going on strike about!' said Crazy Henry. "I'm going on strike against that rude waitress that won't come over here! I absolutely refuse to pay for anything I've eaten!"
"You're not paying for anything anyway" I pointed out. "This is my treat, and you know it. Now, do you want the chocolate egg cream or not?"
"No" he said resolutely. "I'm on strike against the Brothers Deli until they give in to my demands for more attentive help!"
"Suit yourself" I said. I got up and paid the bill and we went out to my car. I noticed Crazy Henry took a half dozen sour pickle spears with him, wrapped up in a napkin.
At his place I explained that he was not on strike by not going back to the Brothers Deli -- he was boycotting the place, not striking against it.
"Oh" he said meekly, looking so crestfallen that I decided to try and cheer him up by asking about his monkey search. He used to have a pet monkey, but it got run over by a beer truck months ago. He really misses it -- although it was not housebroken and kept trying to bite everyone, including me. So I asked if he had found another monkey dealer willing to break numerous laws to sell him an illegal animal. That cheered him up, all right.
"I have a lead on a ring tailed marmoset" he said happily. "I might be able to go pick it up tomorrow."
"Where?" I asked.
"Panama" he said.
"Who's gonna man the hugging booth while you're gone?" I asked, more as a joke than anything else. But Crazy Henry took my question seriously.
"I may have to do hugs down in Panama to make enough money to fly back with my marmoset" he said pensively. "How do you say 'free hugs' in Spanish?"
We looked it up on Google and this is what we got: "Abrazos gratis -- aceptan donaciones."
Crazy Henry wrote it down on his wrist, and then I helped him pack.
He was back a week later, beaming with joy. But it wasn't a ring tailed marmoset he brought back.
"That" I told him when I met him at the airport "is not a ring tailed marmoset. That is an iguana."
"The man said he just needed to be fed some unripe bananas and he'd fill right out and get his fur back" said Crazy Henry.
"I think your brain has gone on strike" I told him derisively as we put the ugly reptile's cage in my trunk. The darn thing glared and hissed at me as I closed the lid -- I could tell it was cursing me with some kind of Central American witchcraft. It was evil.
On the way back to his place all Crazy Henry could talk about was how he had read up on ring tailed marmosets; their diet, their sleeping patterns, their mating rituals, and so on. I finally turned to him and said "You can't ever turn that ugly old iguana into a ring tailed marmoset no matter how hard you try to fool yourself. Get real, man!"
Crazy Henry was quiet for a few minutes. As we pulled up to his place he turned to me and said very earnestly: "I've decided to boycott reality."
Most sensible thing he's said to me in years . . .
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