| Wooden Circus Lindsay Kaplan |
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| When Henry Killbride was of legal drinking age, his father, Edmund, took him out for a porterhouse and gave him a silver plated flask. Engraved on one side were his initials, HK, on the other, a five-pointed star. Under the star there was a wise saying someone once told Edmund. It was: I have reached the age that when someone tells me to wear socks, I don't have to. Edmund had worked as a gardener for an estate in Princeton before he married Angela in 1954. He was in charge of sculpting large plants into animals. He could use chicken wire, sheet moss and any shrubbery of his liking to create a llama, a giraffe, or a penguin. The owner of the estate especially enjoyed the penguins. He was a crazy Jewish man with hair that stuck out in all directions. He had a thick accent and liked to sit barefoot on a bench next to a flock of penguins with his wife while Edmund worked under the bulging sun. His feet were calloused and smelled like sweaty leather and rubbing alcohol. Edmund would call the small man Big Al, but his business associates knew him as Albert Einstein. "Henry," Edmund said to his son, "When I was your age, a man gave me a pair of pruning shears for my birthday." He plunked the flask on the table and smiled at his son. "I learned a lot from that man." Not knowing what else to say, he repeated the only other words he could recall from his elderly German employer. "Mazel tov!" Henry carried the flask with him his entire life, even when the tabloids labeled him an angry, depraved alcoholic. He never minded because the flask was always empty. By the time the name Henry Killbride became a sensation, the man Henry Killbride had sworn off spirits. Days after his father gave him his birthday present, Angela drove her car off of a bridge in what Henry would insist on calling a drunken labor of love. = After Henry Killbride was pre-posthumously published, "Wooden Circus" stayed on the New York Times best seller list for close to four years. It won myriad awards and prizes, among them the Pulitzer and the Nobel. Killbride was named America�s Poet Laureate, though he had never written a poem. The phrase Killbridian was coined, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as, "Relating to or being in accordance with Henry Killbride�s theory of the incongruent tendencies of the universe." Henry�s face was on the cover of magazines across the globe. He was photographed with three presidents, seven kings, countless senators, six prime ministers and the Dalai Lama. He appeared on television and radio shows, and traveled in the back seat of a navy blue Lincoln with a chauffeur named Wallace. Wallace served not only as Henry's driver, but was also his companion, his agent and his latter-day biographer. He wrote the praise on the green dust jacket of the third edition of "Wooden Circus" and took the head shot that was tacked up in high school literature courses across America. In the black and white photo, Henry's eyes were closed, his eyebrows lowered in an imperceptibly anxious train of thought. His lips curled to one side, his square jaw rounded by a slight half-smile. The flash of the Polaroid camera had caught him off guard and reduced him to a sour image of a tormented literary genius. In the picture, he looked uncannily like his mother. When asked what his favorite book was, Henry often responded, "The Divine Comedy." He had never read a word of Dante, but was tickled by the idea of god doing standup. If pressed for an influential author, he would say Thomas Carlyle, but only because he, too, was forced to switch to his left hand after a freak accident. In all honesty, he enjoyed reading the backs of cereal boxes and toilet stalls. His favorite author was "SBNB," who wrote long series of poems in marked up stalls across the Hudson Valley. In an interview with the balding Chuck Bradshaw, he was asked why he had tried to commit suicide. Henry sat, uncomfortable, in a heavy armchair that barely supported his bulging rear. He wore a white seersucker shirt and thong sandals. The set lights reflected eerily off his greasy hair. "Because," Henry answered slowly, "I felt like life gave me blue balls." Never one to be put off by common vulgarities, Bradshaw responded, "You should never get to the point where you feel life owes you a hand job." Henry nodded grimly and stared into the camera. "Life's a cock tease." |
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