Little Boy Blues (8 page)

Going to the movies was my most exotic thrill as a child. It happened so rarely that stepping into any theater was an event, the closest thing to real magic that I could imagine. The gilded ticket booth out front, popcorn geysering forth inside a glass-walled machine at the concession stand, the rich velvet curtain parting just before the newsreels and cartoons and previews—it was like the church had run off and joined the circus. And you never knew when you were going to get to go or if you would ever be allowed to go again. So you didn’t miss a single detail of the experience.

Even when Disney movies came to town, no one I knew got to go to every one. After I saw
Snow White
, I returned home and acted it out for the other kids in the neighborhood and then we played
Snow White
for days. Other kids taught us the plots of
Toby Tyler
and
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. (None of us had the guts to re-enact
Old Yeller
, our first encounter with tragedy.) Bible movies were the best fodder for backyard epics. My mother donated a threadbare beach towel that served as a costume for Moses parting the Red Sea, Ben-Hur racing in a chariot and
Samson before he lost his hair. No one liked playing the blind Samson, because the rest of us just ran away and hid, but pulling down the temple on the Philistines did cheer us up.

In the years before I started school in 1958, our apartment complex was crawling with kids my age. After that, our stock company drifted away one actor at a time, as parents saved up enough for down payments on new houses and departed for neighborhoods a notch above ours, leaving me without companions: that exodus was my first lesson in the realities of a semi-broken home, since unlike everyone around us, my mother and father and I weren’t going anywhere. By the time I was nine, the neighborhood was nothing but families with tiny babies. Even then, for a little while longer, I trooped out to the backyard and acted out scenes from old favorites, but with no one to play with and the weight of my years on my shoulders, I soon gave it up.

In the summer of 1961, everything changed about the way I looked at movies. Mother and I spent July living in the house where she grew up in Kershaw, a tiny mill town “just a little bit south of North Carolina” she always sang as we approached the outskirts (passing the sign that said THE KU KLUX KLAN WELCOMES YOU TO KERSHAW—when I asked what the Ku Klux Klan was, she made a face like she had smelled something rotten and said, “White trash”). Mother loved Kershaw because it was always home in her mind. I loved it because it was nothing like Winston-Salem. Both town and city were products of the industrial Piedmont South. Kershaw had a cottonseed-oil factory on the north end of town, complete with a mill village where the white factory workers lived (black people lived on the south end
and everyone else lived in between). Winston-Salem had tobacco factories and textile mills, and it was big enough to boast two modest skyscrapers when I was a child (the Reynolds Building was designed by the same architects who designed the Empire State Building). But the apartments where we lived, postwar constructions thrown up as affordable housing for GIs coming home from World War II and Korea, seemed a thin and depthless world. What few trees stood there were barely taller than I was. Going to Kershaw was like stepping into three dimensions. The houses weren’t all alike, and the towering trees, pine and live oak, cast everything beneath them in deep, green shadow. Even the soil was more interesting. Winston-Salem was all red clay. Kershaw, riding the cusp of the coastal plain, had soil so sandy white that it reflected the noon sun like a mirror, although in the shade, it was always cool and a little damp, and it gave off a pungent odor,
sharp and sour, that hung in your nostrils like bleach. I should have hated it but I didn’t.

Mother’s family home, an old one-story wood-frame house with a wraparound porch, stood across the street from what was once the train station and was now a welding shop. I was cautioned constantly not to stare at the welder’s torch, so I sat in the porch swing and closed one eye when I stared across the street, having decided that it would be worth it to go blind in one eye. From the same spot, I could spend hours monitoring the diesel train engines shuttling their loads of cotton bales and pulpwood back and forth on the track that ran between the house and the stores uptown. Behind the house lay an unmown field that my mother told me had once been a garden that she worked with her daddy when she was my age. There was also a chicken coop without any chickens and an empty garage covered in wild grape and honeysuckle. Inside the garage I found a rusty sling blade that I took into the field, where I mowed—or pretended to mow—the weeds, without visible effect.

The best thing about Kershaw was that you didn’t need a car to get anywhere, except the town swimming pool and the graveyard, and by the time I was nine, I was allowed to roam wherever I wanted. Mostly this meant going uptown to the drugstore for a Coca-Cola at the soda fountain. The drink became of secondary importance once I discovered that if you had purchased something, they didn’t mind if you sat down at the magazine rack and read comic books all afternoon. Even the small chores I was assigned—bringing in the newspapers twice a day and hauling in wood for the kitchen stove—seemed somehow more grown-up than the sweeping I had to do at home. And once, after the smell of death had hung in the air for two days, I was the one sent
under the house to drag out the maggot-ridden carcass of a cat that had gone there to die. I had never had the nerve to go under the house before, and in the gray light of the crawl space, I had to feel my way, crawling on my belly and trying not to bump my head as I navigated toward where the smell was the worst. The crawl space, with its shadows and spiderwebs—a place where even dirt, pale and powdery, seemed to have gone to die—frightened me more than the cat, which I located with no trouble and hauled out like a trophy. Standing there in the blinding sun, holding the cat by the tail, I was delighted and still a little terrified, but I had no time to savor the moment, as my mother swooped down and stripped me bare right there in the yard and then hustled me into the house for a bath. I never dreamed about the cat, but that crawl space crept into my dreams for years.

When I was small, my grandmother lived in the family home place with my mother’s one unmarried sister, Aunt Kathleen. Then, when I was seven, Grandmother was moved to a nursing home in Winston-Salem, where she died two years later. Now Kathleen lived in the house alone. I don’t know why we went to stay for several weeks, unless it was simply all my mother could afford in the way of a vacation, because she and her sister despised each other. Kathleen was nine years older than my mother, and as Mother explained it, until she was born, Kathleen had been the baby of the family (Mother’s two older sisters were old enough to be her aunts). When Mother came along, she displaced Kathleen as the favorite and Kathleen “never got over it.”

They conversed by quarreling. Most of the fighting concerned whatever small alterations Kathleen made to the house. Mother wanted to know what Kathleen had done with Mama’s gravy boat. Mother told Kathleen she was going to burn the house down
when she bought a hotplate for the kitchen so that she wouldn’t have to cook over the woodstove. Mother thought Kathleen was obese, smoked too much and embarrassed the family by inviting men to the house to do who knew what. I found these arguments hard to follow, because to my eye nothing ever changed in that house. Even the peppermints in the candy dish in Grandmother’s bedroom had been there so long that the individual pieces had fused into one big, rocklike mass of white and red stripes impossible to pry apart. Kathleen’s responses to my mother’s accusations were always the same: she was the one who lived there and she could do what she liked. Even I understood that in her mind, especially after Grandmother was gone, it was her house, to do with as she saw fit. This response only enraged my mother. She felt every bit as possessive about the house as Kathleen did, and to be reminded in this way that she was, in fact, a visitor, a guest, an interloper—that it was, in short, no longer her home—was, as she put it, like being slapped in the face. “I think there’s something wrong with her mind,” Mother said. “Mama and Daddy had her tested, and they say she has the mind of a twelve-year-old.”

I suspected that Kathleen didn’t like me any better than she liked my mother. One afternoon, when Mother and I were getting in the car, she sent me back into the house to tell her sister when we would be back. “Well, that’s just fine, Mr. Bullshit,” Kathleen said after I delivered my message. When I got back to the car, still giggling, because I had never heard that word but I knew it was dirty, Mother asked me what was so funny. When I told her, she raced back into the house and I could hear them screaming at each other in the kitchen all the way out on the street.

They fought every day—the squabbling fading in and out like static from a radio as they moved about the house—and I did
whatever it took to make myself scarce. For once, luck was with me. I knew only one boy my age in Kershaw, a kid named Bobby Parker. A friend of my mother’s had recommended him as a playmate. All my friends were vetted in this fashion. If I brought home someone from the ball field or school, my mother turned a cold eye on this new acquaintance and usually discouraged further contact. We didn’t know his people. We didn’t know where he came from. Did you notice that he didn’t use good grammar? It’s all right to be friends at school. You should be nice to everyone. But you have to choose your friends carefully. What this meant, in practical terms, was that she chose my friends. But Bobby turned out to be a great friend, and never mind the good references. Better yet, his grandfather owned the local movie theater, and we went almost every day.

The Kershaw movie theater—what Mother always called “the show house”—wasn’t much to look at, just a drab little brick building that anchored the two-block business district on its northern end (you could walk that district, from the car dealership to the diner, in the time it took to drink a Coca-Cola). The only colorful things about the theater were the movie posters beside the front door, the same posters stapled on telephone poles all over town. They were printed in rainbow colors that bled from top to bottom and the movies that would be shown that week were listed in descending order. Bobby’s grandfather showed three or four movies a week. You could see a Western for a couple of days, and then it would be what they used to call a woman’s picture—something with Lana Turner or Susan Hayward having a hard time of it—for what seemed like an eternity. But no matter what it was, Bobby and I went, and we stayed all afternoon. We memorized our way through repeated showings of
a Gidget movie, a Doris Day comedy, a piece of sub-Arthurian trash with a great dragon, and one about a circus with a terrific train wreck and Charlton Heston looking out of place in modern clothes and a clown who turned out to be the bad guy. We had no scruples. We’d watch anything.

Every day, Bobby called my grandmother’s and asked what time I wanted to go. I always said as soon as we could, which meant right after dinner, which was what they called lunch at my grandmother’s. I’d wait for him in the big green porch swing where I sat every morning to read the funny papers. As soon as Bobby came into sight, I’d dash down the walk to the front gate flanked by a fence sagging under a scuppernong vine, and we’d each grab a fistful of the bronze-colored, grapelike fruit. Some of it we ate; the hard, unripened ones we just used as ammunition on each other. Then we’d head uptown. “Head uptown” sounds strange, because “town” was only a block away, just on the other side of the railroad tracks, but that was how my family said it. At the end of the block, where you turned right and crossed the tracks, the big live oaks stopped and everything turned white and gritty—the sidewalk, the buildings, even the sky. It was like walking through the desert, but in less than five minutes we were inside the brick movie theater, basking in the air-conditioning.

I don’t know what made me happier, the movies or the air-conditioning. In the early sixties, it was still a rare thing for families to air-condition more than one or two rooms with window units, and my family had none at all. At night, I slept with my head at the foot of the bed to get closer to the little oscillating fan whirring on my dresser. The fan didn’t do much more than move the hot air around the room, but at least it sounded like it was cooling things off. The only store in Kershaw I remember having
air-conditioning was the grocery store, and once you got cooled off, it wasn’t much fun. But the movie theater—like all movie theaters in my youth—was an oasis of cool. Air-conditioning was still such a novelty that the theaters advertised it on banners that hung from the marquee.
COME IN
!
IT
’
S COLD INSIDE
, and icicles dripped from the word
COLD
.

The interior of the Kershaw theater epitomized what Gloria Grahame meant when she walked into Glenn Ford’s hotel room in
The Big Heat:
“Oh, early nothing.” It was just a box with seats, with none of that Arabian Nights décor that filled the majestic old movie houses in big cities, although it did have a curtain that parted when the previews began. It could have been the template from which all those cramped multiplex shoe-box theaters would be cast a decade or so later. But the theater was not the point. It was only a transporting device that took us out of the town, out of ourselves for hours every afternoon. The destination was all that mattered. We looked past the theater to whatever was on the screen, and whatever was on that screen was not life as we knew it but something bigger and better.