People

We’re back in the PEOPLE room today for a short story about a man named Harry.

I wish I could write this story so that it would be an uplifting and encouraging read, but, unfortunately, it is neither of those things, nor does it have a happy ending.

Harry was interesting and colorful, blessed with great talent for drawing and painting pictures.  He also suffered with deep and severe character flaws.  He found it impossible to make and keep lasting friendships.

I met Harry in the early 1980s when he was using his artistic talent to prepare renderings for architects of their new building designs in the days before computer-aided drawings.  Harry’s unique talent kept him overloaded with work scheduled out five to six months in the future.   

Originally from West Virginia, Harry was a hill country soul, rough around the edges, unpretentious, direct, a sort of Crocodile Dundee type of character.  His high-heeled, engraved leather boots in rattlesnake pattern were specially made, custom fitted.  He wore the cowboy hat low over his eyes which focused attention on the snakehead mounted above the front of the brim.  The timber rattler’s mouth was spread open wide exposing the fangs which had bit Harry some years earlier, nearly claiming his life.  But it was the snake that lost its life.  Harry would live out his years with reckless abandon as though he was on borrowed time.

A chain smoker, Harry spoke with a muffled, gritty voice, and his eyes were usually squinting through the smoke.  He could be charming at times, sarcastic often, quick witted, with a dry sense of humor.  He was likable if you could handle the direct, upfront personality.  He was usually behind schedule in completing his artwork projects, as he spent a lot of time with his one really close friend, Jim Beam.

Harry owned an older model Cadillac stretch limousine which he drove as his normal ride.  In his unusual hat he made an eye-catching spectacle around town.  After one of his friends, Bob, moved to town they would take turns in the driver’s seat with the other one riding in the back like a guest. 

Bob had spent ten years in federal prison as a major drug trafficking kingpin.  He had moved in with Harry to be an artist in-training as a condition of his parole that he be gainfully employed.  Harry told me he was teaching Bob how to paint architectural renderings.  He also told me Bob’s drug empire included two DC-3 airplanes, some high-speed ocean-going boats, and an ‘army of lieutenants’ with all the armaments.  But eventually, the Feds caught up with him.

One day I hired Harry to paint a rendering of a new building I was designing for a company in town.  When he called to tell me the picture was ready to be picked up, I drove to his house in a quiet, middle class neighborhood.  I had never been to this house, but it was easy to find as the limo was parked in the driveway.  I was a little nervous as I had never met his friend, the international drug kingpin, who I imagined had probably killed people.  Harry met me at the door and we walked through an entry way that looked like the entry to a photo darkroom.  It was arranged so that you couldn’t see into the house when the door was opened.  Bob was standing beside a drafting table with the painting.  He was of stocky build, a little shorter than normal, square face, black beard and mustache.  I had seen him a couple of times from a distance driving the limo, but close up he was intimidating.  They had the living room of the house set up to be a drawing studio with an artsy look. 

The thing that caught my attention in plain sight was the safe, a heavy duty, steel Brinks type, about five feet tall, thick layered door standing open.  Inside there were several bundles, about two feet high, of neatly-stacked hundred-dollar bills.  Lying atop the pile of money was a black, uzzi submachine gun.  I was already nervous.  Bob was learning to paint pictures, but he had a long way to go.  His training was interrupted a year later when he broke parole and was sent back to prison.  Harry was never charged with any wrong doing in Bob’s case. 

Harry let his rendering business languish for a couple of years.  He moved back to his home in Tennessee and began to let his life decline along with the business.  He was arrested a couple of times for DUI and had his license suspended.  He was taken into custody for driving on a suspended license.  That’s when he called me from jail in a panic.

Sentenced to six months on the work release, non-violent program, he was going to be picking up trash along the highway.  Or he could go to work each day if he had a job.  He pleaded with me to let him come to our office and work on his painting projects.  He’d be dropped off about nine am and picked up at five pm.  At that time we had an open work station with a drafting table where he could sit and work on his projects. 

This arrangement worked out fine for his six-month sentence, and it gave us a good bit of time to talk.  I don’t know if anything I ever said got through to him in any meaningful way.  He also spent a couple hours each day visiting with his girl friend, Marjorie, in the back yard behind the office.  Marjorie was a nice, country girl from Harry’s hometown in Tennessee, half Harry’s age, trying to help him get his life in order.  I think she knew it was a hopeless endeavor.

Not long after he served out his sentence, Marjorie stopped by the office one day to give us some bad news.  She had been checking on Harry every day at his house, when one day she found him sitting in his car, in the garage, with a plastic pipe connected to the exhaust.  She found Harry but it was too late.  She came to tell us the graveside burial service was to be held the next day.

When my co-worker, Bill, and I got to the cemetery it was raining, so they had speeded up the service.  We got there just in time to hear the minister reading the standard internment words.  They were lowering the casket into the ground when we could hear a voice yelling a few hundred feet away.  It was Marjorie running across the cemetery, waving a piece of white paper, and telling them to stop the burial.  She handed the wet paper to the minister, and they pulled the casket back up. 

We stayed for a while to talk to Marjorie, and she told us the paper was a will that Harry had left for her, and she had just found it in his house that morning.  The will said that he wanted to be cremated and his ashes spread by airplane over the lake near where he lived. 

Harry will always be remembered as a tormented soul.  We are thankful we could play a small role in helping him get through about six months of his troubled life.