by Peter Straub
—
The quarter goes through the slot at the bottom of the window, the ticket leaps from its slot. For a long time, before “Jimmy,” I thought that unless you kept your stub unfolded and safe in a shirt pocket, the usher could rush down the aisle in the middle of the movie, seize you, and throw you out. So into the pocket it goes, and I slip through the big doors into the cool, cross the lobby, and pass through a swinging door with a porthole window.
Most of the regular daytime patrons of the Orpheum-Oriental sit in the same seats every day—I am one of those who comes here every day. A small, talkative gathering of bums sits far to the right of the theater, in the rows beneath the sconces fastened like bronze torches to the walls. The bums choose these seats so they can examine their bits of paper, their “documents,” and show them to each other during the movies. Always on their minds is the possibility that they might have lost one of these documents, and they frequently consult the tattered envelopes in which they are kept.
I take the end seat, left side of the central block of seats, just before the broad horizontal middle aisle. There I can stretch out. At other times I sit in the middle of the last row, or the first; sometimes when the balcony is open I go up and sit in its first row. From the first row of the balcony, seeing a movie is like being a bird and flying down into the movie from above. To be alone in the theater is delicious. The curtains hang heavy, red, anticipatory; the mock torches glow on the walls. Swirls of gilt wind through the red paint. On days when I sit near a wall, I reach out toward the red, which seems warm and soft, and find my fingers resting on chill dampness. The carpet of the Orpheum-Oriental must once have been a bottomlessly rich brown; now it is a dark noncolor, mottled with pink and gray smears, like melted Band-Aids, of chewing gum. From about a third of the seats dirty gray wool foams from slashes in the worn plush.
On an ideal day I sit through a cartoon, a travelogue, a sequence of previews, a movie, another cartoon, and another movie before anyone else enters the theater. This whole cycle is as satisfying as a meal. On other mornings, old women in odd hats and young women wearing scarves over their rollers, a few teenage couples are scattered throughout the theater when I come in. None of these people ever pays attention to anything but the screen and, in the case of the teenagers, each other.
—
Once, a man in his early twenties, hair like a haystack, sat up in the wide middle aisle when I took my seat. He groaned. Rusty-looking dried blood was spattered over his chin and his dirty white shirt. He groaned again and then got to his hands and knees. The carpet beneath him was spotted with what looked like a thousand red dots. The young man stumbled to his feet and began reeling up the aisle. A bright, depthless pane of sunlight surrounded him before he vanished into it.
—
At the beginning of July, I told my mother that the high-school girls had increased the hours of the Play School, because I wanted to be sure of seeing both features twice before I had to go home. After that I could learn the rhythms of the theater itself, which did not impress themselves on me all at once but revealed themselves gradually, so that by the middle of the first week, I knew when the bums would begin to move toward the seats beneath the sconces—they usually arrived on Tuesdays and Fridays shortly after eleven o’clock, when the liquor store down the block opened up to provide them with the pints and half-pints that nourished them. By the end of the second week, I knew when the ushers left the interior of the theater to sit on padded benches in the lobby and light up their Luckies and Chesterfields, when the old men and women would begin to appear. By the end of the third week, I felt like the merest part of a great, orderly machine. Before the beginning of the second showing of Beautiful Hawaii or Curiosities Down Under, I went out to the counter with my second quarter and purchased a box of popcorn or a packet of Good & Plenty candy.
—
In a movie theater nothing is random except the customers and hitches in the machine. Film strips break and lights fail; the projectionist gets drunk or falls asleep; and the screen presents a blank yellow face to the stamping, whistling audience. These inconsistencies are summer squalls, forgotten as soon as they have ended.
—
The occasion for the lights, the projectionist, the boxes of popcorn and packets of candy, the movies, enlarged when seen over and over. The truth gradually came to me that this deepening and widening out, this enlarging, was why movies were shown over and over all day long. The machine revealed itself most surely in the exact, limpid repetitions of the actors’ words and gestures as they moved through the story. When Alan Ladd asked “Blacky Franchot,” the dying gangster, “Who did it, Blacky?” his voice widened like a river, grew sandier with an almost unconcealed tenderness I had to learn to hear—the voice within the speaking voice.
———
Chicago Deadline was the exploration by a newspaper reporter named “Ed Adams” (Alan Ladd) of the tragedy of a mysterious young woman, “Rosita Jean d’Ur,” who had died alone of tuberculosis in a shabby hotel room. The reporter soon learns that she had many names, many identities. She had been in love with an architect, a gangster, a crippled professor, a boxer, a millionaire, and had given a different facet of her being to each of them. Far too predictably, the adult me complains, the obsessed “Ed” falls in love with “Rosita.” When I was seven, little was predictable—I had not yet seen Laura—and I saw a man driven by the need to understand, which became identical to the need to protect. “Rosita Jean d’Ur” was the embodiment of memory, which was mystery.
Through the sequences of her identities, the various selves shown to brother, boxer, millionaire, gangster, all the others, her memory kept her whole. I saw, twice a day, for two weeks, before and during “Jimmy,” the machine deep within the machine. Love and memory were the same. Both love and memory accommodated us to death. (I did not understand this, but I saw it.) The reporter, Alan Ladd, with his dirty-blond hair, his perfect jawline, and brilliant, wounded smile, gave her life by making her memory his own.
“I think you’re the only one who ever understood her,” Arthur Kennedy—“Rosita’s” brother—tells Alan Ladd.
Most of the world demands the kick of sensation, most of the world must gather and spend money, hunt for easier and more temporary forms of love, must feed itself, sell newspapers, destroy the enemy’s plots with plots of its own…
—
“I don’t know what you want,” “Ed Adams” says to the editor of The Journal. “You got two murders…”
“…and a mystery woman,” I say along with him. His voice is tough and detached, the voice of a wounded man acting. The man beside me laughs. Unlike his normal voice, his laughter is breathless and high-pitched. It is the second showing today of Chicago Deadline, early afternoon—after the next showing of At War with the Army I will have to walk up the aisle and out of the theater. It will be twenty minutes to five, and the sun will still burn high over the cream-colored buildings across wide, empty Sherman Boulevard.
I met the man, or he met me, at the candy counter. He was at first only a tall presence, blond, dressed in dark clothing. I cared nothing for him, he did not matter. He was vague even when he spoke. “Good popcorn.” I looked up at him—narrow blue eyes, bad teeth smiling at me. Stubble on his face. I looked away and the uniformed man behind the counter handed me popcorn. “Good for you, I mean. Good stuff in popcorn—comes right out of the ground. Grows on big plants tall as I am, just like other corn. You know that?”
When I said nothing, he laughed and spoke to the man behind the counter. “He didn’t know that—the kid thought popcorn grew inside poppers.” The counterman turned away. “You come here a lot?” the man asked me.
I put a few kernels of popcorn in my mouth and turned toward him. He was showing me his bad teeth.
“You do,” he said. “You come here a lot.”
I nodded.
“Every day?”
I nodded again.
“And we tell little fibs at home ab
out what we’ve been doing all day, don’t we?” he asked, and pursed his lips and raised his eyes like a comic butler in a movie. Then his mood shifted and everything about him became serious. He was looking at me, but he did not see me. “You got a favorite actor? I got a favorite actor. Alan Ladd.”
And I saw—both saw and understood—that he thought he looked like Alan Ladd. He did, too, at least a little bit. When I saw the resemblance, he seemed like a different person, more glamorous. Glamour surrounded him, as though he were acting, impersonating a shabby young man with stained, irregular teeth.
“The name’s Frank,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “Shake?”
I took his hand.
“Real good popcorn,” he said, and stuck his hand into the box. “Want to hear a secret?”
A secret.
“I was born twice. The first time, I died. It was on an army base. Everybody told me I should have joined the Navy, and everybody was right. So I just had myself get born somewhere else. Hey—the army’s not for everybody, you know?” He grinned down at me. “Now I told you my secret. Let’s go in—I’ll sit with you. Everybody needs company, and I like you. You look like a good kid.”
He followed me back to my seat and sat down beside me. When I quoted lines along with the actors, he laughed.
Then he said—
Then he leaned toward me and said—
He leaned toward me, breathing sour wine over me, and took—
No.
“I was just kidding out there,” he said. “Frank ain’t my real name. Well, it was my name. Before. See? Frank used to be my name for a while. But now my good friends call me Stan. I like that. Stanley the Steamer. Big Stan. Stan the Man. See? It works real good.”
———
You’ll never be a carpenter, he told me. You’ll never be anything like that—because you got that look. I used to have that look, okay? So I know. I know about you just by looking at you.
———
He said he had been a clerk at Sears; after that he had worked as the custodian for a couple of apartment buildings owned by a guy who used to be a friend of his but was no longer. Then he had been a janitor at the high school where my grade school sent its graduates. “Good old booze got me fired, story of my life,” he said. “Tight-ass bitches caught me drinking down in the basement, in a room I used there, and threw me out without a fare-thee-well. Hey, that was my room. My place. The best things in the world can do the worst things to you; you’ll find that out someday. And when you go to that school, I hope you’ll remember what they done to me there.”
These days he was resting. He hung around, he went to the movies.
He said: You got something special in you. Guys like me, we’re funny, we can tell.
—
We sat together through the second feature, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, comfortable and laughing. “Those guys are bigger bums than us,” he said. I thought of Paul backed up against the school in his enveloping red shirt, imprisoned within his inability to be like anyone around him.
—
You coming back tomorrow? If I get here, I’ll check around for you.
—
Hey. Trust me. I know you are.
—
You know that little thing you pee with? Leaning sideways and whispering into my ear. That’s the best thing a man’s got. Trust me.
———
The big providential park near our house, two streets past the Orpheum-Oriental, is separated into three different areas. Nearest the wide iron gates on Sherman Boulevard through which we enter was a wading pool divided by a low green hedge, so rubbery it seemed artificial, from a playground with a climbing frame, swings, and a row of seesaws. When I was a child of two and three, I splashed in a warm pool and clung to the chains of the swings, making myself go higher and higher, terror and joy and grim duty so woven together that no one could pull them apart.
Beyond the children’s pool and playground was the zoo. My mother walked my brothers and me to the playground and wading pool and sat smoking on the bench while we played; both of my parents took us into the zoo. An elephant extended his trunk to my father’s palm and delicately lipped peanuts toward his maw. The giraffe stretched toward the constantly diminishing supply of leaves, ever fewer and higher, above his cage. The lions drowsed on amputated branches and paced behind bars, staring out not at what was there but at the long, grassy plains imprinted on their memories. I knew the lions had the power not to see us, to look straight through us to Africa. But when they saw you instead of Africa, they looked right into your bones, they saw the blood traveling through your body. The lions were golden-brown, patient, green-eyed. They recognized me and could read thoughts. The lions neither liked nor disliked me, they did not miss me during their long weekdays, but they took me into the circle of known beings.
(“You shouldn’t have looked at me like that,” June Havoc—“Leona”—tells “Ed Adams.” She does not mean it, not at all.)
Past the zoo and across a narrow park road down which khaki-clothed park attendants pushed barrows heavy with flowers stood a wide, unexpected lawn bordered with flower beds and tall elms—open space hidden like a secret between the caged animals and the elm trees. Only my father brought me to this section of the park. Here he tried to make a baseball player of me.
—
“Get the bat off your shoulders,” he says. “For God’s sake, will you try to hit the ball, anyhow?”
When I fail once again to swing at his slow, perfect pitch, he spins around, raises his arm, and theatrically asks everyone in sight, “Whose kid is this, anyway? Can you answer me that?”
He has never asked me about the Play School I am supposed to be attending, and I have never told him about the Orpheum-Oriental—I will never come any closer to talking to him than now, for “Stan,” “Stanley the Steamer,” has told me things that cannot be true, that must be inventions and fables, part of the world of children wandering lost in the forest, of talking cats and silver boots filled with blood. In this world, dismembered children buried beneath juniper trees can rise and speak, made whole once again. Fables boil with underground explosions and hidden fires, and for this reason, memory rejects them, thrusts them out of its sight, and they must be repeated over and over. I cannot remember “Stan’s” face—cannot even be sure I remember what he said. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis are bums like us. I am certain of only one thing: tomorrow I am again going to see my newest, scariest, most interesting friend.
“When I was your age,” my father says, “I had my heart set on playing pro ball when I grew up. And you’re too damned scared or lazy to even take the bat off your shoulder. Kee-rist! I can’t stand looking at you anymore.”
He turns around and begins to move quickly toward the narrow park road and the zoo, going home, and I run after him. I retrieve the softball when he tosses it into the bushes.
“What the hell do you think you’re going to do when you grow up?” my father asks, his eyes still fixed ahead of him. “I wonder what you think life is all about. I wouldn’t trust you around carpenter tools, I wouldn’t trust you to blow your nose right—to tell you the truth, I wonder if the hospital mixed up the goddamn babies.”
I follow him, dragging the bat with one hand, the other cradling the softball in the pouch of my mitt.
At dinner my mother asks if Summer Play School is fun, and I say yes. I have already taken from my father’s dresser drawer what “Stan” asked me to get for him, and it burns my pocket as if it were alight. I want to ask: Is it actually true and not a story? Does the worst thing always have to be the true thing? Of course, I cannot ask this. My father does not know about worse things—he sees what he wants to see, or he tries so hard, he thinks he does see it.
“I guess he’ll hit a long ball someday. The boy just needs more work on his swing.” He tries to smile at me, a boy who will someday learn to hit a long ball. The knife is upended in his fist—he is about to smear a pat of butter on his steak. H
e does not see me at all. My father is not a lion, he cannot make the switch to seeing what is really there in front of him.
—
Late at night Alan Ladd knelt beside my bed. He was wearing a neat gray suit, and his breath smelled like cloves. “You okay, son?” I nodded. “I just wanted to tell you that I like seeing you out there every day. That means a lot to me.”
———
“Do you remember what I was telling you about?”
And I knew: it was true. He had said those things, and he would repeat them like a fairy tale, and the world was going to change because it would be seen through changed eyes. I felt sick—trapped in the theater as if in a cage.
“You think about what I told you?”
“Sure,” I said.
“That’s good. Hey, you know what? I feel like changing seats. You want to change seats too?”
“Where to?”
He tilted his head back, and I knew he wanted to move to the last row. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
We changed seats.
—
For a long time we sat watching the movie from the last row, nearly alone in the theater. Just after eleven, three of the bums filed in and proceeded to their customary seats on the other side of the theater—a rumpled graybeard I had seen many times before; a fat man with a stubby, squashed face, also familiar; and one of the shaggy, wild-looking young men who hung around the bums until they became indistinguishable from them. They began passing a flat brown bottle back and forth. After a second I remembered the young man—I had surprised him awake one morning, passed out and spattered with blood, in the middle aisle.
Then I wondered if “Stan” was not the young man I had surprised that morning; they looked as alike as twins, though I knew they were not.
“Want a sip?” “Stan” said, showing me his own pint bottle. “Do you good.”
Bravely, feeling privileged and adult, I took the bottle of Thunderbird and raised it to my mouth. I wanted to like it, to share the pleasure of it with “Stan,” but it tasted horrible, like garbage, and the little bit I swallowed burned all the way down my throat.