Me and Henry
"[N]othing is but what is not." (Macbeth, I.iii.155)
I could already smell the glue of the binding. The cheaper editions would crack along the spine at first opening, leaving a slice of pages to fall out before the crease. Repulsed by these inexpensive traps, consumers with bread-stuffed wallets would willingly empty their pockets for a hardcover. I had witnessed those particular hardcovers in children's bookstores, lining the shop from floor to ceiling like a second wallpaper -- priceless hardcovers, stamped with critics' accolades and the original woodcut prints.
I let out a quiet yawn, covering it with my sleeve. The boy beside me glanced over and nodded towards the teacher. I ambivalently blinked my eyes.
The story had started with a cliche. My family had recently purchased a computer, our first, and I sat hesitantly at the monitor, expecting genius to flow. My mom was at the dining room table, squinting through reading glasses -- I called from my seat for an opener. She lifted the frames to the swinging light and caught her breath on the movement. "It was a dark and stormy night" was her suggestion, the response illuminating nothing in her voice.
The weather outside of the classroom was considerably pleasant, even for the end of winter. The lesson was a lecture and our seat was the carpet at the center of the room. I was hunched back against the bookshelf as the teacher flushed the class with the intricacies of palindromes. I stumbled on and off through her words, hearing one palindrome that began with, "A man, a plan," thinking to myself, "'It was a dark and stormy night.'"
My teacher pushed her glasses back on her bridge, folding a length of hair behind her ear.
The long downward thud of my shoes against the staircase resonated between the walls. To curtail the duration down, I slid on the banister, swinging my backpack haphazardly as I turned and returned. Dad was waiting in the gym. I grabbed his hand and pulled him to the train station.
When I got home, a reverberating "plop" on the computer chair, there was that ubiquitous writers' block. "It was a dark and stormy night." I fooled around with fonts. The cursor blinked on and off. I clicked the mouse for inspiration.
I could taste the praise. I would forego schoolwork (menial chores) to have the Siskel of publishing embellish a curved thumb on the cover. A succinct summary on the sleeves, a wild author's picture in the corner, a brief biography detailing the foundations of these tales at age seven -- self-indulgence colored the motivation for every word.
I managed to type a page. At school visions of novellas danced in my head; I leaned once more on the carpet and imagined, as I absently plucked its hairs, the sound of the keyboard. The scratch of chalk inside and the moan of the cars outside could not penetrate my impatient ticks. The hour hand jittered to lunchtime, and the teacher asked the class a trivia question for us to puzzle over. The student with the right answer won a skip down to the cafeteria, ahead of classmates still locked up pondering.
My hand shot up. I leapt forward, grabbed a coat and a brown lunch bag, and was down and out with my thoughts pushed upon the words, "it was a dark and stormy night."
The cafeteria was a bleak, industrial wasteland. The line to the food was long and tangled, occasionally sharply sliced by line-cutters. The lunch lady was grim, hollering from her apron perch and shoving students along. I opened my lunch in the corner, on a greasy white table with a yellow sticker that warned of the table's inherent dangers. My friends clamored around me, poking at the sticker's adhesive and littering the white with crumbs. The cafeteria was subterranean, a glistening hell somewhere below the gym, having but one lone window touching the ceiling. I could only see the boots of the people who stomped outside.
At home, I squashed my backpack on the floor. On other days I would have admired the sound of rustling paper and the clunk of my looseleaf binder -- a third grader's imaginings of grandeur -- but now there was the omnipresent story.
There was nothing subtle about it. The narrator, Lincoln Pierce Banes, had known a Henry since childhood. Henry was a tortured soul. Allergic to chocolate, he had resided in Hershey, Pennsylvania. His younger brother had beautiful teeth and flashed them happily in Crest commercials. Henry had suffered from severe writers' block until the ego-crowing Lincoln had saved his soul with soothing advice. It was then that Henry was revealed as the most prominent children's storybook author of his day.
The weekend over, I leaned onto the hardwood table. My feet tipped forward in the chair, and I pressed my cheek to the plastic that coated the surface. My notepage was filled with doodles where room for cursive practice had been allotted. The teacher gave the letters a life and I practiced with my sketches: Henry's face dotted my i's. According to the teacher, lowercase "t" was married. The line of the ink had fallen in love with the slick sheet of paper, and, at first touch, their romance evolved and rose. The pinnacle of the relationship was the wedding; it was downhill from there, as the ink and paper's relationship grew strained and curved away from the passion of the past. Divorce followed, the pen driven to bitterly cross out any fondness that might remain for the paper. The quick movement of our wrists was a violent kick to the institution of marriage. Henry himself had never loved.
The pinnacle of his own career was a novel entitled Dice, telling of the lives and times of a Dalmatian. Searching for his original master in France, Dice moves in with Jean, a romance writer prone to pausing in front of a candle and contemplating "L'amour, l'amour, ahhh." Dice grows weary of the impassioned monotony, for Jean cares more about the drips of wax than the empty dogfood bowl, and so Dice continues on his quest.
My storytelling began to neglect Henry's woes and celebrate his achievements in raucous, bizarre fabrication. Henry wallowed less in his despair and more in critical champagne. His stories were well-received, a critic proclaiming on the back of one book that it had "some kind of feeling that makes you not want to stop reading it...in other words it is great!"
But with his rise came his fall. "Me and Henry" followed the laws of gravity. My own interest waned, yet didn't stray.
School drifted. I had to research the Wright Brothers and their marvelous flying aeroplane. When they were younger, they constructed a sled that was only slightly resistant to the force of air. As they grew older, they were confronted with bitter elders who protested their ambitions. Their bicycle shop was a success, although either Wilbur or Orville got tuberculosis. My favorite source on their lives and times was unreliable. After reading that biography, I exclaimed that it gave me "some kind of feeling," later to discover it had somehow forgotten to mention the Wrights' other siblings.
In the second grade I had invented toys out of newspaper and tape. I molded glasses from egg cartons. In the third grade, I read "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" instead. The edition my family owned featured reproductions of W.W. Denslow's original color plates and an introduction by Martin Gardner. L. Frank Baum was my hero, partly because we had a name in common.
Lincoln Pierce Banes affirms, "If you don't care for what you wrote or you are not paying attention to it while you write it the piece you wrote will come out stinky." I stretched on the new rug, my hair lounging next to the heat of the radiator. My teacher cleared her throat and smoothly peeled back the cover of the book in her hand. I listened. The first sentence produced the revelation I needed. Roald Dahl's Henry Sugar was a different character entirely from my own Henry -- as I grabbed my father's hand that afternoon, my ambition was rekindled.
I ran home that day and discovered how paperbacks were bound. With that stinging stench of glue I knew would come royalty checks. I could already smell it.
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