Screening Room (17 page)

The greatest trick of all is what happens inside our minds. Moviegoers crave the illusion of another world. From time to time, we need to imagine that we can inhabit a different reality, a cosmos of beautiful people, dramatic events, times different from our own. Through wars, stock market crashes, and alternative forms of entertainment, people have continued to attend movies in large numbers. When television first appeared in the 1950s, the prophets thought it would replace the movies. It did not. Similarly, when home video appeared in the 1970s, the prophets thought it would replace the movies. It did not. Likewise for DVDs in the 1990s. Evidently, there is something about an evening out of the house, about watching a story unfold in the dark while surrounded by a crowd of strangers, that cannot be replaced. Could M.A. have foreseen so much back in 1915, as he looked out of his hotel window at people lining up in front of a ramshackle store? Did he know that he would become a magician?

I remember the years during my early adolescence when I sat in the balcony section of the old Malco on Main and Beale and watched movies. I saw maybe two or three movies per week, sometimes three movies in a single day. In the cool dark of the balcony, the movies became my alternate reality, tilting and stretching my mind, and when I left the theater, entering the other reality, I began imagining that I could set scenes, I could bring in a backdrop here or there, I could position people around me, I could change the camera angle from sideways to overhead. I began seeing life as a series of
scenes
.

In my mid-teens, I started to work summers in my family’s theaters in Memphis. I can date each period of my life at this time
by the movies carved into my brain, as I was forced to hear the sound track of every film over and over for weeks. The summer of 1965 was
Doctor Zhivago. Somewhere, my love, there will be songs to sing / Although the snow covers the hope of spring
. The early summer of 1966 was
The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming
. Late summer 1966 was
Alfie. What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?
Early summer of 1967 was Sean Connery in
You Only Live Twice
.

My chores included making sure that the soda dispensers were mixing the right ratio of water and syrup and that the ushers swept up the spilled popcorn. Most crucial was my job supervising and adjusting the oil, butter, and salt for the popcorn. Popcorn is the cotton crop of the movie business. Half the total profit of a movie theater comes from the food sold, and popcorn has the highest profit. Without popcorn, it is possible that the movie business, and all of Hollywood, would come to a halt.

At first, in the silent-film days, movie theater owners hated popcorn. It created a mess. Moviegoers would have to get up out of their seats during a movie, leave the theater, buy popcorn from a street vendor, gulp down the popcorn in two minutes, and return to the theater. In the mid- and late 1920s, theater owners stumbled upon a secret: they could sell a bag of the stuff for thirty or forty times what it cost to produce and make enormous profits with popcorn. At the same time, an inventor named Charles Manley from Butte, Montana, designed the first electric popcorn machine. Theater popcorn, and the movies as a whole, roared through the Depression after an initial slump. A nickel bag of popcorn was something people could afford, along with the relatively cheap ticket price of a movie.

We made the popcorn in a big steel kettle that could hold half a pound of popcorn. First you switched on the electric heater. Then you poured in the coconut oil. If you waited more than ten or twenty seconds to pour in the oil, your kettle and motor
burned up, and the manager began screaming at you in front of the patrons. The general rule of thumb on the oil was half as much oil as volume of popcorn kernels. You waited about ten seconds, to give the oil time to get hot, then you poured in the popcorn and salt. The teenage concession girls, who wore so much mascara and eye shadow they looked like raccoons, tended to pour in way too much salt and had to be restrained. Next, you turned on the motor that shook up the kettle. When the cooking was finished, you turned off the heat immediately and left the motor running for another ten seconds or so.

During the summers that I worked in the theaters, I developed a high-level expertise in making popcorn. I could tell when it was cooked with too much oil or not enough oil. I could tell when it had sat too long under the heat lamp. I could tell if the buyer had switched brands. I ingested a great deal of popcorn, not all of it willingly.

On lunch breaks I would go over to the Pig-N-Whistle on Union Avenue for barbecue and fried onion rings. A sign on the road showed a merry pig standing on its toes and scarfing down a barbecue sandwich. The onion rings at the Pig were the best in the city. They were made of big, thick, munchy slices of onion fried in a light wheat and corn batter, with some exotic seasoning like paprika. The Pig had an interesting ambiance. The building itself resembled an English Tudor pub, with dark wood walls, dark trim, and dormer windows—as out of place as a spaceship from Mars. But nobody paid attention to the building. What people did was park in the big parking lot that wrapped around the building and dine in their cars. The white gravel parking lot of the Pig-N-Whistle must have been half the size of a football field and hosted forty cars when things were jumping. The carhops wore immaculate white jackets and had names like Cadillac and Preacher. The customers were mostly white, middle-class teenagers from Central or East high schools with time on their hands in
the summer. And there were some powdered young ladies from Miss Hutchinson’s School for girls. These were the kids who planned to matriculate at Sewanee, “the University of the South,” Memphis State, Ole Miss, the University of Alabama, and Louisiana State.

During the summers of the mid-1960s, the parking lot of the Pig was always jammed with automobiles, their radios belting out “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and “Ticket to Ride” and funky tunes like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” One of the boys would always have his hood up, fondling his engine. Teenage girls coasted up in their T-Birds and little MG Roadsters wearing Villager A-line skirts and matching tops in apricot or baby blue, flesh-colored stockings even in the fierce August heat, two-tone saddle shoes, and straight shoulder-length hair. Furthermore, these young ladies would be perfectly decorated with eye shadow and lipstick, not a hair out of place. Ninety-five degrees in the shade, no problem. The boys wore Bermuda shorts and untucked polo shirts and loafers without socks. They would look at me in my business attire, with my sweat-stained white shirt and skinny tie, and say, “Are you some kind of joke or what?”

The parking lot of the Pig was a dance floor. It was a meeting place, a holy mating ground, a watering hole, a place to primp and to strut and to eat good barbecue. The boys would get out of their parked cars, cigarettes dangling from their lips, saunter over to a car filled with girls, and squeeze into the vehicle. To demonstrate their manliness, they’d lean out of the window and flick their ashes on the ground, then wave over a carhop to clean up the mess. But the carhops had their white jackets and their dignity, and they would usually decline.

Couples necked. Engines revved. Guys jockeyed for telephone numbers. Next year’s football lineup was discussed. Girls would make pilgrimages from car to car to visit their girlfriends; in each new vehicle, they’d look at themselves in the rearview
mirrors and reapply their makeup. The girls had to try very hard to act dumber than the boys, while at the same time retaining their gentility. The worst possible thing one of these southern belles could do, an abomination so disgraceful that she might refuse to be seen in public for weeks thereafter, was to burp after downing her barbecue.

In the summer of 1965, when I was sixteen, my father appointed me assistant manager of one of his theaters. I was flabbergasted. My only qualifications were that I was good at making popcorn and good at math. I cannot imagine my grandfather ever making such a mistake. Since M.A.’s untimely death a few years earlier, the business had been directed by my father and two uncles. As assistant manager, my most important job was to run the theater on the manager’s days off. The manager of the theater, Phil, was a small, sour man with a heavily pockmarked face and a small supply of greasy hair, which he carefully swept over his bald head. About fifty years old, Phil was always making passes at the sixteen-year-old girls behind the concession counter. When Negro moviegoers walked into the lobby, Phil would stare at them suspiciously, as if they were planning to steal ten bucks from the cash register. From my first day on, Phil eyed me with disdain and resentment. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that I had received the job only because I was the owner’s son. And he was right. In retrospect, I should have refused the job. It was a poor business decision on the part of my father. But I felt a certain pride and excitement at having been given so much responsibility. And I felt that this was the first step toward a glorious career like that of M.A.

Phil could talk with a cigarette in his mouth, and he did. He smoked constantly and later died of lung cancer while still in his fifties. Despite his rough ways, Phil had a tender spot when it
came to his granddaughter. He spoke of her lovingly and cherished the framed photograph of her on his office desk, once getting enraged when the cleaning woman misplaced it. I stayed clear of Phil as much as I could.

Now, forty-five years later, I cringe when I hear Lara’s song from
Doctor Zhivago
, reminding me of that summer of 1965. My greatest responsibility on Phil’s weekend off was to collect the box office and concession receipts and take the money to the bank. Before leaving the theater, the money stayed in a safe in Phil’s office. On weekends, I sat at Phil’s desk, careful not to disturb anything. One Sunday night, I returned to the office after briefly stepping out to the toilet and discovered that the money had disappeared from the safe. I had apparently forgotten to relock the safe after the last deposit. Phil got paid $90 a week, I got $60, and the amount stolen was something like $500, greater than my total salary for the summer. When Phil learned of the theft on Monday morning, he said nothing, but his mouth registered a slight smile. I deserved to be fired.

I remember the Monday morning I had to tell Dad about the stolen money. He was in the dining room with Mother, eating a cinnamon roll, and I stood trembling in the kitchen, afraid to come any closer. “Dick, you have to take him off the job,” said Mother.

“Everyone deserves a second chance,” he said.

“You know what the employees will say,” Mother said.

Dad thought for a few moments. “Probably they will,” he said.

I couldn’t eat for two days. I made a token attempt to pay back some of the lost money, but I should have paid it all back, even if it took me years.

In the summer of 1967, after my first year of college, I worked at the Summer Drive-In Theater, way out east on Summer Avenue. Drive-ins had sprouted up like weeds after World
War II and were really the forerunner of the modern mall, a big arena where people could eat, socialize, bring the kids, and find entertainment. I remember the rows upon rows of parked cars, the sound speakers slung over the car windows, the vast movie screen framed against the night sky like a floating mirage in the desert, the young children in their pajamas nestled in the backs of station wagons, and the moviegoers staggering back to their cars with huge trays of popcorn and Coke and frankfurters with pickle relish.

My father and uncles wanted their drive-in parking lots to be G-rated, suitable for families, and gave me the task of making sure that couples were not copulating in their parked cars. For this assignment, I was issued a strong flashlight. Still a virgin myself, I was instructed to patrol the aisles between cars and shine my light into any car where I suspected X-rated activity. The first night, I hurried past the vehicles without daring to look in, afraid I would see some of my friends or they would see me. I could easily pretend I was a janitor. Keeping my flashlight aimed at the ground, I stooped to pick up paper cups and candy wrappers. The parking area became exceptionally clean. On subsequent evenings, I could not avoid noticing some couples entwined in the backseats of their cars. I would avert my eyes and tap on the hood with my flashlight. I remember that one couple, interrupted in their passion, asked for their money back.

Nancy, one of my cousins, has been talking with me for hours in a sunny alcove at her home. Every so often, she refreshes my teacup with a new bag of chamomile and hot water. The teakettle sings a clear musical note from her kitchen.

A year ago, Nancy and her husband, Jimmy, built a lovely pond in their backyard and stocked it with koi. To personally select the fish, Nancy and Jimmy drove a hundred miles to a premier koi reserve in Little Rock. “First thing,” says Nancy, “we gave each fish a name. That’s important. Once you get to know them, fish are not that different from people. Huraki, Akiko, Kano. We gave them Japanese names so that they would feel at home. Except for Jezebel, who is always causing trouble.”

“A koi reserve in Arkansas?” I ask, always astonished at Nancy’s endeavors. She tells me that the koi farm in Little Rock was started in the 1950s when a businessman from that city went to Tokyo to begin importing Japanese-made radios. The Japanese, apparently never having met a southerner before, were fascinated by the way this guy talked. At their insistence, he taught several Japanese fellows how to speak with a southern drawl, and they gave him in return a dozen live koi, which he brought back to Arkansas in a special container. Breeding and selling koi became far more profitable than marketing radios.

Every morning, Nancy sits on the stone ledge of her pond and summons the fish, one by one.

Nancy and I graduated from the same school in Memphis, White Station High School, forty-five years ago, and we are reminiscing about a beloved teacher there named Gene Crain, who taught speech and drama and directed extracurricular activities ranging from the debate club to the school plays and theatrical productions. From time to time, he directed and acted himself in professional theater companies in Memphis. Walking in his slow loping stride, he would come to the school at night and on weekends for rehearsals or simply for personal chats about the various catastrophes that arise in a teenager’s life. He wasn’t married. As far as anybody knew, he had no romantic attachments. Gene Crain was the kind of teacher who made his students his life.