Henry Hills was a comet who refused to learn the constellations. When Michael Mycon and I first folded him into our odd, hopeful orbit, we thought a cooking show might give him a script, a mize en place for life: chop, stir, taste, breathe. Wise Guy Italian Cooking Show. Between our time on projects in California and his new start in Seattle, we imagined a gentle arc ahead. Instead, Henry made every day its own improvisation.
In California, our off-hours became expeditions to secondhand stores, Henry’s favorite stage. He treated the aisles like a swap meet with fate. He’d unlatch his worn shoes, wiggle his toes with theatrical relief, and slip on a stranger’s scuffed oxfords, announcing, “Equivalence achieved.” To Henry, money complicated the purity of exchange. He bartered stories for jackets, jokes for hats, and, when challenged, offered a smile so guileless that clerks often surrendered and laughed as he shuffled out in something “new.”
When we moved him to an apartment in downtown Seattle, near Harborview, we hoped proximity to care would be a guardrail. The city’s steep streets felt like a treadmill aimed at the clouds. Henry strutted them like a boulevardier, but trouble walked beside him. A scraped knuckle became a ticket to the emergency entrance, where he learned the choreography of triage too well. The fluorescent mercy of hospitals, the quiet that hummed in his bones—he mistook them for a kind of love.
We didn’t always see what he did with solitude. Once, while we were away, he rigged a fishing line out the window, lowering a bucket with the same ingenuity he’d use to ice a cake. The world, to Henry, was always a market—give, take, pass along. The law was a thing other people believed in the way some people believed in astrology.
Michael kept the cooking dream bright. He’d set up lights, lay out onions and herbs, coach Henry to talk through the sizzle. For a few minutes, the camera consecrated him. He was Chef Henry, apostle of garlic, philosopher of salt. He told the lens that food was a way to push back the dark, that steam was a ghost you could hug. We’d watch him stand a little straighter as the pan sang.
Staying clean was a daily negotiation. Some days Henry won. On those days, the air around him felt like the first ten minutes of a movie you know you’ll love. Other days, he clung to shortcuts—the hospital’s soft beds, an elixir pressed into his palm, the invisible economies of the street. Michael and I, commuting between shoots and schemes in California, couldn’t always be there to catch him mid-fall. Absence gained a gravity we hadn’t accounted for.
What Henry feared most was the dark, and then the dark inside the quiet. We learned to leave lamps on timers, to stock his fridge with small, bright tasks: grapes to wash, parsley to mince. When the show worked, it was because the kitchen was a lighthouse. When it didn’t, we became search parties.
He was difficult, dazzling, infuriating, tender. Our adventures were less a map than a series of weather reports. But even now, when I hear onions hit hot oil, I think of Henry declaring, “Listen—that’s daylight.” In that sound, he was brave, and for a moment, none of us felt alone anymore.
Michael tried to keep Henry clean and sober, he was afraid of being alone and afraid of the dark. Michael had been clean and sober for years and was helpful at time communicating with Henry. Henry had many hidden demons that showed up on a regular basis and was hard to control his behavior. I received a call from US Customs asking me if I had known of a suitcase with my name on it that Henry was bringing back from Europe. They stated it had contents not able to go through customs and wanted to know my involvement. It wasn’t long after that we parted ways, I could write a book on all the adventures we had with Henry in a very short few years. Our friend John Rowlands took many photos of our adventures.
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