Crazy Henry Writes a Cookbook.

"Putting peanut butter and grape jelly on a clump of uncooked ramen noodles does NOT make for good food!" I said heatedly to Crazy Henry, when he kept pushing this concoction on me for lunch one day last year. We were at his place, supposedly to pack up his turtleneck sweaters to take down to the Goodwill Store. He has about thirty of them. He needed my help because, as he freely admitted, he couldn't trust himself to do it alone -- he loved those turtlenecks too much. But once he started growing a beard they just got too difficult to pull on in the morning. His beard bristled out as stiff as porcupine quills.

I thought it a very poor return on my willingness to help him get rid of the turtlenecks to offer me such an outlandish meal. So Crazy Henry made himself an uncooked ramen with pbj and ate it in front of me with such relish that I grudgingly asked for a bite, just to see how bad it really was. And it wasn't half bad, at that. So he made me one, too. The combination of brittle, tasteless noodles and thick cloying peanut butter with grape jelly was strangely satisfying -- so I asked for a second one, with a glass of milk.

"With crazy recipes like that, you oughta write a cookbook" I said to him jokingly. And that was all the encouragement he needed. With a sparkle and a twinkle, or a sprinkle, in his eye, he forgot all about the turtlenecks and showed me dozens of index cards on which he had written down his strange and uncouth recipes over the years. Most of them he had never actually made -- like his raisins steeped in anchovy butter. They came to him in dreams at night, he said. So he wrote them down and threw them in his nightstand drawer, usually forgetting about them in the morning. But now that I had praised his ramen pbj, one of his latest dreams, he understood at long last his true calling. He would write "The Turtleneck Cookbook."
"See, I'll be photographed wearing a different turtleneck for each recipe I demonstrate!" he told me happily.
"So we're not packing them up to take to the Goodwill?" was my only response. I'd seen these sudden frenzies come upon Crazy Henry before. They petered out in a matter of days -- sometimes in just a few hours.

But this time Crazy Henry fooled me completely. He went to his Aunt Smedley, who was the city mayor at the time (before she got kicked out of office for running an influence peddling racket in the Ukraine) to ask for help; she, in turn, got him something called a Young Entrepreneur Grant -- which enabled Crazy Henry to hire a professional photographer and a ghost writer for his cookbook, which was snapped up by the first publisher he offered it to. But they did change the name of it. Instead of "The Turtleneck Cookbook" it became "Bad Food Today!" And was a runaway success. In fact the book did so well that Crazy Henry opened up a Bad Food Academy in Scranton, Pennsylvania (the city offered him an old abandoned shoe factory, rent and tax free.) He taught classes there for about six months, having his profile written up for the New Yorker and letting Sixty Minutes do a segment on him. 

I was pleased with his success, of course. And I didn't try to butter him up, now that he was rich and famous, either. "I never thought you could pull it off" I told him frankly. "And I still think you're going to mess things up one way or another -- you always do."

The perks of finally having a rich friend who was generous were great. I freely admit that. Crazy Henry bought me a fly fishing rod that took some guy out in Montana two years to make --  out of Chinese bamboo, shellac from Myanmar, and cashmere thread smuggled out of Bhutan. I broke it on my second cast. When I told Crazy Henry I'd broken the darn thing he straightaway went and bought me a set of antique polo mallets to put in a big vase and display in my living room. That's what I call thoughtful. 

Just as Crazy Henry was getting ready to put out a second cookbook -- "More Bad Food" -- the other skillet dropped, so to speak. He found out about some crazy medical condition called Pickwickian Syndrome. The condition moved him so much that he publicly dedicated all future profits from "Bad Food Today!" and "More Bad Food" to finding a cure for Pickwickian Syndrome. But he didn't set it up as a tax write off, which he could have done, and so it came to pass that he never made another nickel from his cookbooks. And when Pickwickian Syndrome was proven to be a hoax to scam good-hearted donors, like Crazy Henry, he was laughed out of Scranton and dropped by the media like a hot potato.

I offered to sell the antique polo mallets he had given me, if he needed the money, but he just shook his head sadly and said thanks, but no thanks. Then I saw that old sprinkle in his eye again, as he asked "Do you know what happens when you cook a pot of barley and mung beans for too long?"
"No" I said breathlessly. "What happens?"
"I dunno" he replied. "Let's go find out!"