Joking about the hereafter is probably easier done on this side of that great divide, I suspect Harry would agree today if he could forget the pain long enough to think at all. There is always room for a deathbed conversion so he may have fooled me but I would bet he is debating the finer points of sin with Satan today. Harry was a man who never worried about life after death until his heart disease got so bad that debauchery was out of the question. He drank and screwed and smoked his way through seventy three years without pause and at the end he cursed his fate because his prostate gave out before his heart did. This was truly a man who would screw a knothole in a board if he could find someone to hold it upright for him. I once saw him out with a woman who looked like she was wearing loose stockings when she had none on. I asked him about it later and he said, "With all of those wrinkles there's a lot to choose from". Harry was incorrigible, but his heart was good if you had a gun to his head.

My gun came into my hands early in our relationship, when Harry got tangled up in a little Real Estate investment deal that went bad. I bailed him out by finding a buyer who was willing to take him out of the deal. They needed the losses at the end of a tax year that had been too good for them. I told the investor the truth that there was one chance in a thousand that the deal would actually make money, but against all odds it eventually did and the investor went looking for Harry trying to recover his losses from not getting his losses. Harry told him to piss up a rope and I wound up holding this poor schmuck off Harry while he got out of town for a while. He couldn't even deliver losses on cue; that was how bad dealing with Harry was for anyone who tried. Harry was always careful with me after that and he only made passes at my women when he thought I wasn't serious about them. He never tried to set me up with any deals once that transaction of the vanishing losses took place; he was not completely foolish about money.

To say I liked Harry would be an exaggeration, I was amused by him, I was bemused by him, I was even in awe of his chutzpah, but liking Harry was an impossibility. I woke up after a memorable drunk with Harry on a Saturday morning and my wallet was missing. I went down to look for it in my car and my car was missing. I came back up to use my phone and my phone was missing. I found a taxi out on the street after raiding one of my stashes of cash and went over to Harry's house. There was my car, my empty wallet was on the dashboard, and my phone was in the back seat. When I finally got Harry's attention by dragging him out of bed by the hair he told me that he left when I passed out on my sofa. He took my wallet because he lost his money at poker before we went out so he needed my cash to recover his losses, when he lost all my money he came back to my place. I was still sleeping so he took my phone and my car and my empty wallet and went home so I couldn't bother him before he woke up. Then he asked where the hell I hid my money, like I should have told him?

Yes Harry and Satan do belong together, they are brothers under their skin regardless of the fact that one is a demon and the other was only human. Harry was funny in the way that disasters are funny, if you get the irony you can laugh through your tears. Harry stole a church out from under its congregation once. That foreclosure was the only time I heard Harry try to justify his greed a little. He bought a loan against the church for ten cents on the dollar, collected payments until he got his money back and then put the property into foreclosure. The poor guy who was the pastor of the church had no money and no prospects of money sufficient to repay that note and Harry wanted the land under that church. Harry said when I asked him about the transaction, "God could get them money if he really wanted to hear from them every Sunday".

Nothing Harry ever did deserved the lousy way he died, strapped down in bed with tubes stuck in every orifice. They revived him no less than seven times over two months and every time they did he swore at the first person he saw. He never put together a living will and he taught me one final lesson, don't let the medical professionals do things their way. I saw Harry the day he died and he looked so sad and shrunken there that I was glad when he finally keeled. It was the last joke on me that I had to watch him slide downhill that way. The cognac and the cigars I enjoy are in part a tribute to the part of me that was amused by Harry. The old putz had a bad ticker for twenty years, but he never let it stop him in his search for the perfect lay, the perfect drunk or the perfect smoke until they strapped him into his final bed. Then he tried to talk the nurses into joining him for one last fling. Hang in there Harry, hell is better than that bed.