"Men are free to choose."
I was staying at Crazy Henry's place. It was only temporary. I'd been laid off back in March and then evicted in June when my savings ran out. This current rainy day was turning into a cloudburst, but I was sure I could get another job soon. I was ambitious. fairly young, respectful towards my elders, and had some vocational school training. Piece of cake.
But in the meantime Crazy Henry let me stay in his spare bedroom, which was sweet of him.
But then, he'd always been a sweet guy -- although nuttier than a fruitcake. We used to go to Sunday School and Bible Camp together when we were kids; he was a good listener back then, and wanted to become a missionary to some faraway band of marauders in Central Asia or a piranha-worshiping tribe in South America. But then his father was killed in an accident, and he took care of his mother and sisters by working for carnivals during the summer. He made a ton of money doing something with Kewpie dolls, but he never would talk to me about those times. And he stopped going to church completely. He liked to spend his Sundays baking brownies, and reading Cliff Notes -- out loud, to me.
This particular Sunday he was reading the Cliff Notes for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale to me. He was having trouble pronouncing the name of Polixenes, and kept calling him 'Poligrip.' Since I was chowing down on his walnut fudge brownies, I didn't bother to contradict him. I was comfortable, and filled with a sugared benevolence for all humanity. Let him pronounce it 'Polycarp' for all I cared.
But then he stopped at the beginning of Act Three, which was something about an oracle and visions and stuff which kinda bored me (truth be told, I think I was approaching a glucose coma and needed to be revived with a glass of milk.)
After a long pause, during which I considered keeling over right where I was on the couch to begin a long winter's nap, Crazy Henry suddenly said, out of the blue: "Religion may be the opium of the masters, but I still think there's something in it!"
Then he flung himself into a cheap rattan chair from his patio to brood. I could tell he was brooding because he wiggled his ears. Whenever Crazy Henry tried to do some serious thinking, he wiggled his ears like the fins on a goldfish.
"I"ve always been interested in the Quakers" I told him sleepily, wondering if I could get him to bake some oatmeal raisin cookies later on.
"C'mon" he said to me urgently. "We're going to church!"
"What church?" I asked.
"ANY church!" he replied, throwing me a dark blue necktie from the coffee table and a pair of black socks from under his rattan chair. I never used to take such abrupt orders from him; in fact in the good old days I'd just tell him to go to hell. But now that I was dependent on him for a place to live, I was discovering my inner toady.
All the places of public worship were closed. Locked up tight as a drum. Some even had chains looped through the handles on their massive mahogany doors. The last place we stopped, a huge old church in the middle of downtown, made of granite and with a steeple that needled the sky, had the most ornate and massive doors I'd ever seen, like a castle in Robin Hood's time. There were a bunch of plastic flowers strewn in front of it.
"Door worshippers!" cried Crazy Henry in amazement.
"Huh?" I replied intelligently.
"These poor people can't get in, so they leave offerings at these doors instead" he said to me.
Just then an old lady in a paisley shawl shuffled up the steps and reverently laid down a pink plastic rose in front of the doors. She smiled at us weakly, then made her way down the steps to wander slowly down the silent street.
The rest of that Sunday Crazy Henry descended into a fine lunacy, which he called an 'epiphany.' He found a hardware store that was open and bought tools, an oil can, a ladder, wood putty, shellac, varnish, and lemon scented furniture polish. Then we revisited all the places of worship we had been to that day, so Crazy Henry could oil the door hinges, fill in scratches and gouges with wood putty, sand them down, and apply a coat of varnish or shellac over them. I got into the spirit of things by polishing up the doors with a bit of Pledge on a rag. We tightened hinge screws and applied naval jelly to rusting door knobs and handles.
And that became Crazy Henry's new religion: Door Repair and Maintenance.
Every Sunday he would get up early, dress in dark slacks, a white shirt, and a conservative necktie, then visit places of worship to see what he could do to get their doors looking good. If they were made of glass, he attacked them with a squeegee. If they were cheap plastic jobs from Home Depot he painted smiley faces on them. But he especially loved working on the grand mahogany doors. He kept them looking like a Cecil B. DeMille movie set.
Me, I continued to stay home on Sundays. My religion is Watchful Waiting, an offshoot of Do-Nothingism.
***********************************
