Henry Fool 1963

Romantic, randy, affectionate, articulate, educated, erudite, genuine, gentlemanly, passionate, pithy, gregarious, giddy--oh, and a little bit alliterative.Oh and here's a fake biography I concocted for classmates.com:MY FAUX-CALLED LIFEThe day after graduation I was discovered by an agent who whisked me off to New York where I starred in the Off-Off Broadway production of a recently discovered play written by Eugene O'Neil in the 1920s, The Drunken Diplomat. After winning an Obie as the dipsomaniac seeking world peace, I sought my fame--and found it in Hollywood. My mellifluous voice was considered so distinctive that I became a disc jockey for the Muzak played in all elevators in Southern California.After five wonderful years of whispering, I decided to shift gears. Rejected by Greenpeace and Amnesty International as too short and too hemp-free, I began sleeping with the enemy. For the rest of the 1980s I flew commando missions into Antarctica and clubbed baby seals. I was so successful I was eventually recruited by the CIA to do the same sort of clubbing (plus electrodes to various body orifices) in Nicaragua and Chile. I was adored by my American sponsors, but was expelled from Chile because I was the only person housed in the Presidential Palace who dared castigate Augusto Pinochet for his malodorous flatulence. Soon after this international embarrassment, the Contras lost their funding from the United States--and I have not returned to Latin America (to the chagrin of Salma Hayek, who let me deflower her on a fragrant January night in Veracruz in 1989.)Tired of humid climes, I sought my next fortune as a salmon fisherman in Alaska. I worked in a small fleet who sold their catch to passing oil tankers. Unfortunately, I sold some putrid, rotting fish carcasses to the cook of the Exxon Valdez--the captain consumed it, went mad and wrecked his ship on the rocks of a pristine Alaskan coast. To avoid the newshounds, I fled to Des Moines and enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Iowa. (The obscurity of a skilled writer is the safest haven in the United States.)As the 1990s dawned, I atoned for my sins by working as a security guard for Salman Rushdie. The pay was miserable, and the author was an arrogant vulture, but I had found my calling--defending an unknown author from death at the hands of illiterate zealots. I quit after an outrageous indignity: Rushdie made me take his cat to the vet while he cavorted onstage with U2. I stayed in England, and won a few chip-eating contests. I then swam the English Channel with the Spice Girls to combat cancer. (Even with that star power, we only raised 50 shillings. And the girls spent that on diet soda and Twizzlers.)I decided after that fund-raising fiasco that I should pursue my original love: the theater. I played a cat with chronic fur-balls and mange in a Laughlin production of Cats, and a moldy loaf of bread in the Prague production of Les Miserables.While on holiday in Budapest, I befriended Alan Greenspan. His incessant bragging about the robust American economy so annoyed me that I engineered the bursting of the dot.com bubble in the fall of 2000. After that, I briefly ran George Bush's presidential campaign--and told him to focus on the threat of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism. He fired me, and I have been homeless the last six years.Well, that brings me to the present: Memorial Day weekend 2006. Appropriately, I will be sleeping in a Veteran's Cemetery in the shadow of Westwood. My pet kangaroo and I spend most days boxing on the pier at Santa Monica for spare change--I've never known such devotion and tenacity from any human companion. My soul has withered but my heart has been purified by 25 years of globe-trotting and obscure Asian cuisine. The afterlife promises to be a stultifying disappointment after this astonishing life.Sad update on Valentine's Day 2007: My beloved kangaroo was killed in the ring by Mr. T. Her absence will eat at what's left of my soul.