I never said Crazy Henry didn't have talent; it's just that he gets distracted so easily that he never sticks to anything long enough to make his mark.
Take Bollywood, for instance.
We were making snickerdoodle cookies at his place, to throw at the crows that infest his neighborhood. Crazy Henry's theory of animal control is that if you feed animals, including crows, stuff that is full of wheat bran, they will experience digestive distress. which, in turn, they will associate with the place where they ate the stuff that gave them a belly ache, and thus never come back to that place again. Crazy Henry calls it humane poisoning.
I call it a waste of good cookie dough.
Crazy Henry had just slid out the last dozen snickerdoodle cookies when his doorbell rang.
I answered it, to find a tall dark skinned gentleman in a crisp white turban smiling toothily at me.
"Is this the home of Mr. Henry van Jones?" he asked politely.
"Sure is" I replied. "C'mon in and I'll get him for you."
The man in the crisp white turban came in and sat on the sofa in the living room. He kept a smile fixed on his face like a Band Aid.
When Crazy Henry came in to shake his hand, the man in the crisp white turban began talking rapidly and enthusiastically. I didn't pay any attention to what he was saying, because just then the smoke alarm went off in the kitchen -- so I ran in there to find that Crazy Henry had not turned off the oven and had left one of his oven mitts inside of it. It was now beginning to roast. I got the mitt out, opened the kitchen window, and used a cookie sheet to fan the smoke out the window. Then I had to get on a chair and disconnect the battery from the smoke alarm because it wouldn't stop bleeping.
When I finally came back into the living room I found Crazy Henry signing a sheaf of onion skin papers.
"What's going on here?" I asked.
"I'm goin' to Bollywood!" replied Crazy Henry, obviously very pleased with himself.
"What the what?" I exclaimed. "What for?"
"To play the sitar in some movies."
"How is that possible?" I asked him in disbelief. "I never seen you play a sitar before."
"Oh, I studied it back in ninth grade."
"You did not!" I was indignant; Crazy Henry and I had gone all through grade school and high school together. He couldn't play a shoehorn, let alone a sitar.
"You were sent back a grade and had to repeat ninth grade twice" I reminded him.
"Yeah, but that second time I went to a sitar camp up in Toronto for most of the year -- bet ya didn't know that, didja?" he replied unctuously.
"But . . . but . . . but . . . " I spluttered, completely evicted from my comfort zone.
Crazy Henry -- maestro of the sitar? In a pig's eye!
"It's some kind of scam" I told him, scowling at the man in the crisp white turban. "I bet he wants money from you to cover the cost of your trip to India."
"Nope." Crazy Henry flashed a wad of greenbacks in my face like a fan dancer. "Fact is, Amahdi here just give me ten thousand dollars travel money to get to Mumbai by next month."
Amahdi silently bowed to me. I felt like sticking my tongue out at him, but for the sake of international relations kept my trap shut.
"Well" I said to Crazy Henry. "Good luck and don't forget your old friends back here around Minnehaha Falls."
"Never in a million years" he said, with tears in his eyes. We embraced.
Amahdi just kept on smiling. He offered me a wad of cash, too, just on general principles I guess -- but I waved them away. The whole thing was a fantasy, so why not add to the fantasy and spurn a small fortune in cash?
Crazy Henry sent me a few postcards from Mumbai, and called me once or twice to say that the place was lousy with turmeric and coriander. They even stuffed his mattress with it. When I asked him how the Bollywood movie business was he just said "Oh it's just like any other business, y'know -- I get up at seven to be at the studio by nine and then go home at six to eat dinner and play some curling with the local team. We make two movies every week -- I got a contract to make a hundred movies this year."
So he was a roaring success. By golly, I was glad for him. He always was a friendly and honest guy -- he deserved a big break like that.
Just before Thanksgiving he came back to his old apartment on Stintson Boulevard. But first he stopped by my place, cuz he didn't have a key anymore to his own apartment. I went over with him, burning to get all the latest Bollywood gossip.
"When do you go back?" I asked him.
"I guess I'm not going back" he replied nonchalantly. "Did you know there's no winter in Mumbai? I need snow in my life."
What was there for me to say? He was absolutely right -- life without snow and icicles is a wretched existence. Torture, really.
So I helped him unpack and told him the crows were all gone, for now.
But when they came back in April I promised to help him make more purgative snickerdoodles.
No comments:
Post a Comment