What are the qualities that make a hero? Take the case of Henry Quim. Diminutive, asthmatic, myopic, and dandruff-plagued, Henry was certainly no matinee idol with movie-star gook looks. Just look at him. Don't glance at him. Stop for a minute and take a real look. See him by day, working as a quality control inspector on the packaging line of a prophylactic factory, and passing the time wondering why the product comes in a size called, The Magnum. It seems to him an unreasonable accommodation for a product that is, after all, elastic. "Perhaps," he says to himself, "It's just a lousy marketing ploy." Watch him at the end of his shift as he goes home to an empty apartment, driving under the speed limit in an ancient Hudson.

But wait- see Henry Quim later that night, shuffling and coughing his way into a stall in the men's room at the dog track. The door closes. From inside the stall comes the smell of burning catnip accompanied by the roar of bongo drums and sexual thunder. The stall door bursts open and there he stands- six foot, eight inches of strapping bull Afro-American dressed in red bell-bottoms and a knee-length pink zoot suit with a matching mink-banded fedora. See him now as Hank, The Shank.

"Stand back and watch yo daddy shine. Cuz I be stylin' so mighty, mighty fine." The words come scrolling out like steel shards from the teeth of a machine tool. "You think you know da haps? You think you go dancin' on a dime? But yew clock be tickin' on da wrong, wrong time. See what I'm sayin'?" He reaches into his pocket and fondles The Magnum. It's going to be a long night.

Like all those comic book superhero characters who transmogrify, Henry and his superhip alter ego, The Shank, never age. They never grow a day older. This nightly ritual has played out in pretty much the same way for fifty years or more. If you're going to watch all this, perhaps it would be best to go back a few years- back to that fateful afternoon in the late 1940s when it all began. The whole affair started with utter innocence as Henry thumbed through the pages of Modern Photography Magazine hoping to catch a glimpse of some fetching model posing in the nude. There in the back pages, amid patchwork columns of advertisements for everything from bar-bell sets to Chinchilla ranch startup packages, Henry saw the ad that would change his life.

OWN A PIECE OF THE HOLY GRAIL
That's right! If you act now, you can actually own a piece of the very cup used by Our Lord at The Last

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