This Book Is Not Yet Rated

by Peter Bognanni

  “Um,” she said. “I don’t really want to rent this; I just want to see this one part.”

  The pierced guy looked at her.

  “Can you put it in and fast forward please? I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  His expression had still not changed. He paused his own movie and looked at both of us. His eyes, I realized now, were bright yellow. He had contacts the color of a biohazard suit.

  “Do you guys know how video stores work?” he asked.

  “Yep. I totally do,” said Raina. “But these are dire circumstances. I can’t really go home right now and I have this really amazing idea for a plan I need to show my friend here. It works better with a visual aide. I’d be happy to pay you for the rental, or if you want me to sign something in the store . . .”

  The clerk’s expression went from sort of pissed to confused and sort of pissed. He searched Raina’s face.

  “These guys don’t watch Hollywood movies,” I said. “They probably don’t know . . .”

  “Oh my God!” said the pierced guy in a very different childlike voice. “Wait a second. Are you Raina Allen?”

  Raina just nodded.

  “Holy shit! I’ve seen Time Zap like fifteen times. Every time it’s on, I can’t turn it off. I love that scene with the giant ball of twine. Was that real?”

  She gave him a patient smile.

  “It was. We had a special effects guy build it. It weighed nine tons. The giant cat mansion was a green screen, though.”

  “I figured,” he said.

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Then he seemed to remember he was holding a tape.

  “Oh wait,” he said. “You wanted something. Sorry, I totally forgot.”

  He looked at the tape. Then he ejected Repo Man and shoved the new tape into the VCR. He stuck his finger on the fast-forward button, and I waited while the old F.B.I. Warning about copying movies flashed onto the screen, bathing the store in blue light.

  “When I first left,” said Raina to me, “you recommended this movie. You said it was the most beautiful movie about working at a theater. So I watched it one afternoon in my trailer.”

  I looked up at the screen and saw the opening credits of Cinema Paradiso, a movie my dad showed me as a child. It’s about a director’s childhood in Sicily, and his obsession with the local cinema. As soon as I saw it now in Box Office Video I knew which scene Raina wanted to show me. But I didn’t say anything because I wanted to see it again. So, I waited while the movie went by at super speed, thinking of what my dad said about it when I first watched it.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s a little sappy, but it’s a love letter to movies. It’s gonna be nostalgic. And you can’t help but get swept up in it.”

  Raina stopped the tape at the moment of chaos in the small Sicilian town. It is the last night the Cinema Paradiso is showing a popular movie. There’s a crowd waiting in the town square, devastated that they can’t see it. Our hero, a young child at the time, is up in the booth with the projectionist, watching the mob below.

  Just when it looks like there’s going to be a riot, the projectionist takes action. He angles the glass plate that protects the projection in such a way that the picture starts to move. Slowly it dances across the room until the picture reaches the open window. Then it’s gone.

  Our hero goes to the window and watches in wonder as the movie appears on the side of a building in the town square. The crowd roars with approval. And late at night in this tiny village, the town gathers to watch the film in the square, huddled against one another, the movie world combined with the real one.

  “Damn,” said the pierced clerk. “This scene gets me every time.”

  Raina looked at me as the film played on the building.

  “We don’t need it,” I said.

  She nodded. I spoke again.

  “We don’t need the theater.”

  “At least not the inside,” she said.

  I watched the scene play out, the tape creating wavy lines across the screen.

  “The festival isn’t dead, Ethan,” she said. “It just needs to be reimagined.”

  Then Raina walked back through the store toward the door, and I followed. We left the clerk staring, his bright yellow eyes filling with tears.

  28

  Around ten thirty that night, there was a knock at my front door. My mom had gone to bed after making a big dinner. Raina was asleep on the floor of my room. So that left me alone to answer. My heart was already pulsing in my ears. I immediately assumed it was the paparazzi or the police. Either way, the fact that I was just out of the shower and wearing no shirt didn’t seem ideal.

  I checked the peephole, but it was obscured by something. So, I took a deep breath and threw open the door. And there, in the blue-white LED glow of our floodlights stood Griffin. He was scraggly with wrinkled clothes and something approximating a beard, but it looked more like an unwashed neck. His big black glasses were smudged. In his hand were two burritos wrapped in foil.

  “Griffin,” I said. “What in the hell, man?”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “You were probably really worried about me, but here I am. I’m alive.”

  “Um,” I said. “Yes. I was worried. But also, you kinda fled the scene of a crime. Remember that?”

  He scratched his fuzzy neck.

  “Listen. There’s no time to argue right now, Wendy,” he said. “I got you a burrito. You need to come with me. The future of the Green Street depends on it!”

  I looked down at my bare chest.

  “This is the second time someone has tried to take me somewhere mysterious today, and I think I’m going to demand a little more information if that’s okay with you.”

  “Well,” he said, looking at the burritos, “I didn’t know if you liked chicken or steak, so I put some of each in there. It sounds kind of weird, but it’s pretty good. It’s like if a cow ate a chicken, and then got wrapped in a tortilla.”

  “Griffin.”

  “What?”

  I calmed myself with a long inhale.

  “A little more information about where we’re going.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sure. That’s easy. A karaoke bar.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Since I was not of age, and not in possession of a fake ID, I hadn’t spent much time in bars, let alone bars where people sing. But I’d heard about Boomtown. It was a hair and nail salon by day, karaoke bar by night. And it wasn’t far from campus. So, around the tables full of drinks and mounted screens showing odd videos of giraffes running through the Serengeti, there were still old-fashioned dryer chairs and bags of pink curlers shoved into the corner. The door was open on this warm night and the sounds of an out-of-tune rendition of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” drifted out into the parking lot.

  On the way over, Griffin had briefed me on his recent whereabouts. After the protest went south, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He started following Ron Marsh, trailing him everywhere, going through his garbage, trying to find out who he was and why he was so obsessed with shuttering our little theater. He hadn’t turned up much at first. Mostly what you’d expect: lonely middle-aged guy, divorced with a grown daughter he rarely saw, frozen dinners from Trader Joe’s, a prescription for gout medication, lots of Law & Order episodes. It was all pretty boring and kind of sad.

  “But then!” Griffin said. “He started getting phone calls late at night to come here.”

  I peered into the dark interior of the bar. A mousy-looking woman in a hockey sweatshirt was belting out the finale.

  “To sing?” I asked.

  “Well,” Griffin said. “Sometimes. He’s into show tunes. But also to meet a contact.”

  “A contact?”

  Griffin pulled a small notebook from his back pocket and started flipping rapi
dly through the pages.

  “Ten fifty-five p.m. Wednesday: R.T.D. meets with a well-dressed woman, envelopes exchanged, sings ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’”

  “Wait,” I said. “Who’s R.T.D.?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Ron the Dick.”

  He turned the page.

  “Twelve-oh-three p.m., Friday: R.T.D. meets with well-dressed woman, one envelope exchanged, sings ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ Eleven twenty-four p.m., Monday: R.T.D. meets well-dressed woman, two envelopes, sings ‘Memories’ from Cats.”

  “Are you sure it’s him?” I asked

  “See for yourself,” said Griffin, and pointed to the back corner, where a man sat by a stylish pedicure chair. The bar was lit mostly by flashing screens with lyrics crawling by, so it was hard to make out his features at first. But the longer my eyes adjusted to the light, his face revealed itself in the purple dark. His beard looked darker. He held a glass of white wine and took a dainty sip. He squinted.

  “He got the call right before I came to your house,” said Griffin. “So it’s possible the drop-off has already happened.”

  Ron was flipping through a book of songs as we watched him, jotting down numbers on a napkin. Eventually, he made his final choice and took it up to the host.

  “How long do you usually stay here?” I asked.

  “All night if I have to,” he said. “You’d be surprised how few people notice me. Sometimes the well-dressed lady keeps him waiting.”

  Griffin pulled out a dropper and placed something on his tongue. He must have noticed my odd look.

  “Gets pretty boring, and I can’t really smoke in the lot. So, these have a very small amount of THC in them. Very small. Almost none. Want a couple?”

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  He put another drop on his tongue.

  “Probably for the best. They taste horrible. Like rotten cantaloupe. And marijuana.”

  For the next half hour, I regretted my decision not to partake in the drops. We sat through three interminable performances, two country hits I didn’t recognize, and one stirring rendition of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” by a group of sloshed frat boys. Ron clapped along, sipping his wine, looking at his watch. Finally, our lady arrived.

  She was indeed sharply dressed in a blazer and a white shirt that almost glowed. She rested a hand on Ron’s shoulder. She ordered a drink, and when it arrived she slid an envelope over to Ron, who protested a little, then quickly pocketed it. Griffin snapped a picture on his phone that was mostly a blur. He looked at me, lips pursed, eyebrows raised.

  “So what’s in it?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” said Griffin.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “How am I supposed to know what’s in the envelope?”

  “I don’t know. Steal it like you did the scooter?”

  “I borrowed the scooter,” he said.

  “The criminal justice system believes otherwise. Actually, they believe I did it.”

  “Well, that’s not fair,” he said.

  Then he administered another drop.

  “Besides,” he said, “we don’t need the actual envelope. We can put the pieces together on our own. Phone calls in the night? Seedy karaoke bars? Envelopes? And a femme fatale? Clearly he’s getting kickbacks!”

  “A femme fatale? Kickbacks? This isn’t a noir, Griffin.”

  “That’s what you think! Guess where she works?”

  “Where?”

  “Real Estate Company. It’s a total fix. A con job. When this is all over, they hop in a boiler and make for the coast!”

  “How many drops have you had tonight?”

  “Don’t remember,” he said.

  We stood there peeping on them as a few performers took smoke breaks around us.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “There could be a lot of other explanations.”

  “Like what?”

  “They could be friends. . . .”

  Just then, a song ended and the host got on the mic.

  “Ronnie Magic!” he called in a cheesy voice, “Ronnie Magic to the stage please.”

  I looked at Griffin.

  “Ronnie Magic?”

  His karaoke name.

  Ron closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he stood up with a smile on his face and walked to the front of the bar. A few people applauded and raised a drink. Ron took the mic from the host and began doing some brief vocal warm-ups. Then the song began and a tuba started to huff and puff in the background. A few other horns kicked in. Ron opened his mouth and out came a golden voice that sounded classically trained.

  “Money makes the world go round. The world go round. The world go round!”

  I hardly noticed the lyrics at first since his voice was so surprising. But the song, which was the aptly titled, “Money,” from Cabaret, wasn’t exactly subtle.

  “Money makes the world go round. It makes the world go round.”

  Ron was doing a little shuffle now, side to side, snapping his fingers.

  Griffin was staring at me.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s an interesting song choice, but it doesn’t prove anything.”

  We both looked back to the stage where Ronnie Magic was really hitting his stride. He threw his head back and bellowed:

  “Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money.”

  He took a breath and repeated the chorus three more times, each time at a faster pace.

  “Well,” I said. “Maybe we should talk to someone about this.”

  ETHAN’S GLOSSARY OF FILM TERMS

  ENTRY #488

  STEVE MCQUEEN

  Not technically a film term. Just a handsome dude in a pair of aviator shades, who had his heyday in the sixties. Classic antihero.

  Nobody knows why Anjo is so obsessed with him. She has never told us directly. But I have two theories.

  She secretly likes car chases.

  She likes being romantically interested in a cinematic icon who is long dead, so she never has to take the risk of actually getting involved with someone.

  We all have our reasons for obsessing over the movies. Some are healthier than others. But I know a fellow escapist when I see one.

  Imagine how easy it would be to fall in love with someone you would never have to tell. Someone who could never be imperfect. Someone who says the same quotable lines each time, and never once expects anything in return.

  29

  The next day, there were no signs of exterminators at the Green Street. No equipment or traps. No truck parked outside. And, most importantly, no sign of Jasper in his moon suit. The one measure Ronnie Magic had actually taken was to change the locks on the doors, which would have been really helpful if rats knew how to use keys. So, I was stuck outside with Raina, cupping my hands over the glass door to see inside of the darkened theater lobby.

  “I can’t believe he changed them,” I said. “Is there any end to this man’s depravity?”

  I had made a phone call this morning to the president of the university to tell him about the situation, but his assistant wouldn’t connect me. She told me she’d relay my message, which was, essentially: I know suspicious things about Ron Marsh.

  “It’s kind of sad in there,” said Raina.

  Which was an understatement. Inside, the space didn’t catch much light from the sun. Around the concession counter were a couple objects that hadn’t been put away before our forced evacuation. A new shipment of popcorn bags. A book about the anime director Hayao Miyazaki that Lucas was reading. It seemed like we’d abandoned the place Pompeii-style, running for our lives.

  “It looks like one of those life-size dioramas at the Natural History Museum,” I said. “You know,
of dead civilizations.”

  Raina’s breath fogged the glass and clouded my view, but I didn’t step away.

  By the time I had gotten home last night from my stakeout, she had moved from the floor to my bed, and was taking up the whole thing, sleeping diagonally, arms splayed like she was falling through the sky. I had dreamed of a scenario like this basically since junior high, but now that she was there, I couldn’t make myself lie down next to her. It didn’t seem right. I couldn’t ask her if she wanted me to, and she probably just moved there because she was tired of the floor. So I turned off my desktop lamp, covered her with a blanket, and slept on the couch, curled up like a pill bug.

  In the morning, I didn’t hear her come into the living room, but when I opened my eyes she was just looking at me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  For a second, she didn’t move. Then she blinked and turned away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just . . . thanks for the blanket.”

  Then she walked into the kitchen to call her mom.

  Now, at the theater, she was so close to me that I could almost taste her breath.

  “On the left we have the hall of North American Mammals,” she said, pointing distantly into the darkness.

  “And on your right,” I said, “is the death of the Midwestern art house movie theater. There was a time when people liked interesting things, but now that age is through.”

  Raina smiled at me, and she was about to say something else when a familiar voice came from the alley.

  “It’s not through yet.”

  Raina and I both turned to find Anjo standing there with a pair of birding binoculars hanging around her neck. She looked sleep-deprived, but her eyes were bright behind her glasses.

  “Got your message, boss,” she said.