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| Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, football player
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Fisherman's Friend |
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When I was about eleven, there was a man who lived catty-corner from me. He was a fisherman and he paid me a buck to go kill grasshoppers with switches for his bait, another of my many hustles. He took me out a couple of times to go fishing with him.
Well, I crossed over to his house one time and knocked on the screen door to come in, and there was him and his wife screwing on the couch like it was no big deal. The guy said, "Come in." Bright-eyed kid that I was, I didn't run away. I looked, and looked intensely, to see what was happening. It was like he was saying, "Hey kid, you oughta try this some time."
So I did. I started messing around with his wife. She was very receptive to me, welcomed me, showed me all kinds of things I wasn't going to learn anywhere else. I got hooked on it. At lunchtime in grammar school, while he was off at work, I was running down the street six blocks to her house to get some. And though he never said anything to me, I've got to believe the fisherman must have known what I was doing. He was a young guy. They were probably both younger than my mother. (Austin, Texas, 1965)
from Confessions of an NFL Casualty by Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson, with Peter Knobler (Putnam, © 1987)
© 2000 Nerve.com, Inc.
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