The Somewhat Tragic Story of Henry J.

Henry and I met at a writers’ workshop in Daikanyama. He laughed when I told him I usually avoided them because I hated to read poor writing.

‘You pretentious prick,’ he said. ‘I think I love you.’

It was my first — and only — writers’ workshop.

Henry wrote a blog. He called it stream of consciousness. He said that was his style.

This was intentional — it meant he never had to edit anything.

Sometimes he wrote what he thought. Other times, he wrote what he wanted people to think he thought. And some days, he copy-pasted articles he liked, and edited them to read like a stream of consciousness.

Those were my favorites.

Even now, I sometimes wonder why it was the lies that revealed more of Henry than the truth.

“You think all these people here know they’re bad writers?”

I shook my head.

“If they did, they’d stop, no?”

He laughed.

“What about us, man? What if we’re bad writers?”

Like me, Henry wrote.

When we met, I was toiling away at a novel about a family running a love hotel in rural Japan. On the side, I sometimes wrote articles about coffee. Mostly, I spent the better part of my days clicking a mouse to the rhythm of a nine to five office job.

Henry wrote for a semi-popular Canadian website called Artismal, covering obscure art installations. The nature of this art — largely unexplained and thus left to individual interpretation — was a fine match for Henry’s style: almost entirely fictional, and entirely too long.

Henry also wrote freelance for a local punk-rock zine — puff-piece portraits of dissatisfied college drop-outs. The types that didn’t care what people thought, but cared enough to want people to know about it.

Because of this, Henry would date the strangest girls — eccentric art curators, snarling yakuza sisters, rock band fangirls, models who saw themselves as living art. The list went on, and I stared at it in wonder.

It was a world I was forever fascinated by. A world I would never know.

And every time Henry told me about these relationships — the sex, the drugs, the art, the odd break-ups — I wondered why he never wrote them into blog posts or short fiction.

They would have been perfect.

“I’m going to be someone. One day.”

“Okay.”

“One day, they’ll talk about the stuff I write. They’ll analyze it, they’ll break it down…”

“…And they’ll work out where you stole it from.”

“Hey, fuck you.”

I shrugged.

“Doesn’t mean you can’t still be someone. You know?”

He smiled.

“It’s just a matter of time, man. Time and process.”

For a time Henry and I shared ideas. We wandered the streets of Shimokitazawa, Jiyugaoka, and Naka-Meguro, and we threw ideas at the sky like paper planes.

We did this until I realized Henry stole my ideas. Took the worlds I built to build his own. The ideas felt useless after he’d written them into something else — somehow, it felt derivative.

And so, sharing became an act of weaving something new. Something original. It was an exercise in improv theater. It was a lesson in hiding the good ideas, and sharing what I didn’t care for.

In that sense, I suppose, the time felt valuable.

“You think if you knew you were a bad writer, you would stop writing? Do you think you would just stop?”

I shook my head.

“No. I don’t think I could.”

“What would you do, then?”

“I probably just wouldn’t show it to anyone.”

“But how is that any different to what you do now?”

When I had money, Henry and I went drinking.

He sauntered up to girls at bars. Targeted groups. Introduced himself as my manager.

“My boy here is Tom Cruise’s stand-in,” he said. “We’re just here for the weekend.”

It didn’t matter that they didn’t believe him — it was his wedge into conversation. He opened doors with it. Invited himself in. Made himself furniture.

It was weird to me, how often that worked.

When I didn’t have money, Henry still went drinking.

He said it helped him write. He said people were the petri dish of inspiration. By observing, interacting, and sometimes sex-ing (his term, not mine), he got a touch closer to understanding human nature.

That he could tell me this while blatantly stealing other people’s ideas was impressive.

That he would tell me this while sipping whiskey at noon, well, that was somewhat worrying.

“So what do you think, man?”

“I think this is what I told you about last week. I uh… I think you ripped me off.”

“Yeah, I can see why you might feel that way, but look here. And here. Fundamentally, the angle is different, you know?”

“Fundamentally, you say.”

“Fundamentally, I say.”

Just another balloon, I thought, lost to the whims of the wind.

“Yeah, okay.”

Some nights, Henry and I would stumble to the station, and part ways while we could still make out the time on our watches. Most times, though, I watched as Henry slid straight through the doors of another bar.

He was a brash, loud drunk. He had too much pride for a thief.

I sometimes saw him with bruises and cuts. Bloody noses. Bloated lips. Echoes of the fights he didn’t win. The fights he never won. When I asked about it, he grinned. “Wild women,” he said. “I guess I just attract the wild ones.”

I worried about him, then. I couldn’t imagine sex so good I’d be willing to lose teeth for it.

When the bruises got more common, I got in touch with his little sister to see if he was okay.

Funny how good intentions lead to bad ideas.

You should never sleep with your best friend’s sister.

“I’m writing something, man.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Yeah. I think. Maybe. I have a really good feeling about this one. It’s special.”

“Oh yeah?”

“But I’m worried, man.”

“Hm?”

“If you pour your soul into something, and you give it everything but it doesn’t work out, what happens next?”

“You go back to the drawing board, right? Start again.”

“But what if that’s the best you’ve got? What if that’s it, and it still fails?”

Somehow, watching him there with his beer and his cigar, I got the strange sense that what Henry was thinking about, and what he was talking about, were very different things.

Henry’s sister said that ever since high-school, he took things other people did and made them his own. Homework, assignments, speeches, jokes. She said he always had friends because of it, but none of them were close.

She scratched her head and said she always thought he would end up an entrepreneur. She said the writerly ambitions were confusing. She’d never heard an idea that was genuinely his.

She said it was weird that when he finally made a close friend, that friend was me.

“I didn’t expect someone so… ordinary,” she said.

“Thanks?”

“Why do you do it?”

“Why do I do what?”

“You just let him steal them. Your ideas. He butchers them. I know he butchers them. He must. You’re a wonderful writer.”

I stared at the leather jacket on the wall. The collection of Baby-G watches on the desk. The Andy Warhol t-shirt swinging to the breeze outside.

“Have you ever read what he writes? When he doesn’t have someone to steal from?”

She shook her head. I shrugged.

“That’s why I do it,” I said. “That’s why I let him do it.”

Henry’s writing on his big project continued. One time he made a show of it, scrawling sentences on napkins at the bar.

“Inspiration!” he cried, “and this drunken bard cannot wait!”

Mostly though, he wrote out of sight, hinting at the story, but never giving it away. We were at a birthday party the night he announced it near completion.

I don’t remember whose party it was. I think we might have crashed it.

He stood upon a couch, and said this was it. He said this was the real thing. He would self-publish. Self-promote. Today, he said, he was a self-made man.

I asked him if he hoped the book to be as successful as all the self-sex he was having.

I wore a bottle of beer for that.

But it was totally worth it.

The book launched to little fanfare, priced on Amazon for some twenty dollars more expensive than anyone would think to pay.

I didn’t buy it, and I didn’t get a free copy.

Henry and I went out on the day of release, for beers and fish and chips at Good Heavens. He was smug, confident, loud, and laughing.

Everything he always was, but magnified.

We got drunk that night, and sang ourselves home. We wandered backstreets. Made loud jokes about fame, fortune, and endless fornication. Success is a process, he said, a well from which the hardest part is building an irrigation system.

But I found it, he said. I found the water.

We were supposed to meet up the following week, but I couldn’t get in touch.

I called his sister, and sat looking out the window as I listened to her speak. I listened to the words, and their cadence, and the gentle melody they played to the rhythm of traffic outside my window.

When we finished talking, I put the phone down, and sighed.

It was a beautiful day.

I bought Henry’s book, and I started reading.

According to Henry’s sister, someone on Artismal discovered Henry’s book through his profile. They laughed, snickered, and sent it to friends, who did the same.

This started a minor landslide of sales.

So bad it’s good, they said. You can’t pretend to write this stuff, they said.

The worst reviews at this point were the best reviews — they pushed the first thousand sales.

Then people began to notice something. In the stylistic discrepancies, and the sentences that didn’t match, and the paragraphs that switched focus, there was another story entirely.

There are two books in here, they said. The fifth and sixth chapters are where it starts, and the rest of it is scattered throughout butchered words, sentences, and paragraphs.

People started talking about a rural town, a love hotel, and a family business.

Henry was a genius, and the book, his message. By hiding a brilliant story in a mess of a novel, he’d painted a picture of the world we live in. Of slaves to the system, diamonds in the rough, and hope in the hideous.

Fans wanted more. Websites wanted interviews.

Henry was unavailable for comment.

“It’s yours, isn’t?”

“What is?”

“The fifth and sixth chapters. They’re yours.”

“I haven’t read it.”

I don’t know why I didn’t just tell the truth.

“Why did you let him? That could have been something special. Now it’s just lies paving a path to undeserved fame.”

I said nothing. Just stared outside, at the Andy Warhol shirt.

Still swinging in the breeze.

“Why did you let him do it?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “This time, I really didn’t.”

“Liar.”

That book, I realized, was the best Henry had. It was his heart, and his soul, wrapped up and around the words that were my very own.

I wondered how Henry felt about the result of that experiment. I sipped at coffee, and stared at a blank page I couldn’t find words to fill, and I thought about that a lot.

And in the end, I never had a chance find out.

They found Henry in a gutter, near Shimokitazawa station. He was bruised, bloody, and beaten, but the final verdict was that he choked to death.

The last person to talk to him, a hostess, said he introduced himself as Tom Cruise’s manager. Said something about visiting for the weekend. He fell over, stumbled to his feet, and started a fight with the club’s manager. He was dragged into an alley, beaten until silent, and left where he lay.

Nothing came of the police investigation, in the end.

The news made the internet, and the internet mourned his passing. But somehow, this felt like what they all wanted — the story of a tortured writer, and a hidden genius, and talent cut short.

The lost potential felt more powerful than a second novel ever could.

“Don’t,” I said. “Just don’t. Please.”

“Don’t what?”

“That whole spiel about potential. It’s crap. We always say that. He had so much potential. She was full of potential. We always do that. Always. And it doesn’t mean anything.

“Potential is literally nothing. It’s literally. Nothing. Because if you do nothing with it, it’s zero. Potential isn’t something to mourn. It’s everything you could have done that you didn’t. Because you can’t anymore. It means. Nothing. We talk about it like it means something because we all wish we had a bigger part to play. But we don’t. And Henry didn’t, either.”

“I just — ”

“No. Don’t. He was a thief, and he was a liar, and he couldn’t write to save his life, but he was my friend, and I won’t make up memories to paint him a different color.”

We sat in silence, and I wept.

There was guilt in those tears. There was regret, and loss, and sorrow.

And an unfinished story I would never get back.

One that seemed to hold so much…

Potential.

I sometimes wonder what Henry thought about his book. About the reaction to it. The fans. The money. The lies.

I wonder what he would have said in interviews, if asked. How he would have looked, answering questions. What was your inspiration? Your message? Your process?

I wonder what he would have said to me, if I’d asked.

Why?

Some days, I sit at my computer, and look at the blank screen, and I think about it.

But I never get anywhere. Not really. I never find any answers.

And I don’t know that I ever want any, either.

Music

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