It couldn’t have been easy roaming around the streets of Delhi, Ontario, I mean the sleepy, little town always seemed like it had slipped into a comma or something. Nothing much ever really happened there, but even nothing seemed better when summer arrived. Just when it felt like the world would be swallowed up by the cold, darkness that had brought in the shadow of death, the whole town was propelled into the most spectacular shades of green and blue and yellow that filled the senses with the sights and sounds and even the very essence of life itself. I suppose that everything seemed possible, but Hollis Danby really didn’t care, I mean he was off somewhere deep within his own mind, and nothing was ever able to get in there with him. The talk around town was that even though his physical being was present, Hollis Danby had moved on in his mind, I mean he just wasn’t with us anymore. Nobody really knew what it was, but something had shaken his faith in God to the very core. I’m not sure that it was ever meant to happen, but some of us believed that it didn’t make any difference to him either way, I mean he was pretty messed up most of the time.
It was Canada Day sometime in the 1970s, and the whole town was more excited than it had been all year. It was the celebration of our independence, and the entire country discovered the pride and patriotism we never even knew we had, hiding in the chorus of a ton of songs that reeked of Canadian content and were specially selected for the occasion. We were all Canadian, and everyone in town was marching down Main Street waving those miniature Canadian flags that were always handed out across the country. There were boats on Nine Mile River loaded with the fireworks that would eventually transform the town into a pyrotechnic paradise. Hollis Danby was sitting on the steps of the town library, anxiously waiting for the fireworks as the high school marching band in the gazebo played the national anthem over and over again. As dusk moved across the town, the excitement grew and the townspeople shuffled around in anticipation of the wondrous explosions that would illuminate the night sky like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The first rocket was thrust into the air, and exploded into a series of red, and green, and yellow lights that painted the night sky. The second rocket went even higher, and we were sure that it brushed the clouds before its blinding white light lit up the black sky so that we could see clear across the river. Rocket after rocket were fired amid a chorus of ooohs and aaahs until an errant Roman candle sailed through the front window of the Delhi Diner and igniting the gas, caused the explosion that sent the entire block eight miles high into the night sky that was now engulfed in a fireball of the deepest orange, and red, and blue. The whole town was in shock, while Hollis seemed unmoved. He was right there to witness the whole damn thing, and he was right there when Delhi Diner sign came crashing back down to earth and embedded itself into the spire of the Elgin County Court House, but he just didn’t seem to fell a damn thing. He had no idea what he was supposed to feel, but he simply felt nothing. Everything that was inside of him had turned off. In the ensuing pandemonium that went on in his head though, Hollis Danby walked out of Delhi hoping to find anything that would save him from the numbness that had reached up and grabbed him by the balls.
He walked until he just couldn’t walk anymore and then, after resting for a while he walked some more. He walked until he reached the highway that would take him as far away from Delhi as the truck driver who offered him a ride would take him. It was already dark when he was dropped off somewhere in the biggest city he could have imagined. He had no idea where he was, I mean he had never been out of Elgin County before, and the sheer magnitude of the city that now surrounded him was suffocating. He was cold and hungry, and he was tired. He felt like he could sleep for a hundred years, and he took shelter in an abandoned bus depot and settled in for the night with the homeless and the destitute. In the morning Hollis just kept bouncing along, following the others who had nowhere in particular to go, but were always on the move in some sort of chronic migration in search of food and shelter. At some point Hollis began shoving all kinds of street drugs into his head and seemed to lose track of exactly who he was. One day he decided that he was the Sultan of Delhi, and he found himself in a room on the fourth floor of the Bert Massey Centre for Mental Health, which was affectionately and somewhat humorously referred to as Massey Hell.
I met the Sultan of Delhi in the fourth floor lounge of Massey Hell, where he was sitting near the window chain smoking Belmonts, and watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island. “Which one?” he asked. “Ginger or Mary Ann.”
“I don’t know.” I said. “Does it matter?” The Sultan was sure that it mattered, I mean he believed that you could learn everything you needed to know about a man by the castaway he preferred. The two women were opposites really, I mean one was down to earth, hard working, loyal and honest, and the other was egocentric, demanding, self absorbed, skank. I have no idea if what he said had any scientific validity, but for what its worth, I had chosen Mary Ann. I began meeting with the Sultan regularly, always by the window in the fourth floor lounge where we talked about whatever he wanted to talk about. Sometimes he didn’t want to talk at all, and we just sat and watched reruns, or we’d count the prostitutes who wandered in and out of the Hardwood Motel. Sometimes we’d talk about his Sultanate, or marvel at how the Professor was able to make a short wave radio out of coconuts, until the Centre received a circular about a young man from the town of Delhi who had vanished into thin air. We were all pretty sure that the Sultan of Delhi was in fact Hollis Danby.
The town of Delhi had healed and rebuilt, and the locals turned their attention to trying to find out what happened to Hollis. After the explosion he was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t until one of the doctors from Massey Hell called Delhi’s sheriff that the fate of the missing Hollis Danby was discovered. No one in Delhi was really surprised that Hollis had wound up in some kind of institution, I mean most of the townspeople always thought that he’d end up in a place like that particularly since his parents had always been out of their minds. There were rumors that there had been some kind of family inbreeding a couple of generations ago, and I suppose it was all possible, particularly since now Hollis had suffered some kind of mental breakdown. Someone needed to share all of this information with the Sultan, and since I was the closest thing he had to a friend, I was asked to deliver the news despite not having a clue as to how best to tell him that his family was nuts, and that the Professor’s coconut radio didn’t really work at all. Hollis seemed to take the news of his real identity and family history relatively well, I mean all things considered, he handled it as best as he could. He could not, however come to grips with the idea that the coconut radio was a complete hoax. Not that it mattered really, I mean The Sultan of Delphi was convinced that a trip to Gilligan’s island would get the Professor’s short wave coconut radio working once again. Otherwise, the castaways may never be rescued.
The Delhi town council were interested in having Hollis return to Delhi. They had a job for him at the newly created Delhi Tourist Office, and were hopeful that they would be able to parlay his Sultan of Delhi persona into some kind of marketing concept that would attract tourists to the town. Hollis had no interest in working in a tourist office, I mean he was still The Sultan of Delhi. The town council deliberated, discussed and debated and finally resigned themselves to the fact that Hollis Danby was never coming back home, but they could get the Sultan Of Delhi to relocate. They were sure that it was the right thing to do, and after negotiations they agreed to allow the Sultan of Delhi to move in to the Presidential Suite of The Delhi Hotel where he would be able to hold court and keep an eye on his Sultanate from the balcony that wrapped around the top floor of the hotel. With the right marketing, Delhi was able to increase tourism and tourist dollars spent in the town by thirty percent in the first year. The town was happy, and Hollis Danby was happy. Hollis and I stayed friends, and I visited often, at least a couple of times a year until his untimely death at in a coconut mishap that occurred while Hollis was trying to build a short wave radio in order to contact the castaways stranded on Gilligan’s Island. A statue was erected outside the Delhi Town Hall that depicted the Sultan in his royal vestments and continues to be a tourist attraction to this day.