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C H APTER 4 The Cat and Dog Picture Shows WHILE WE WERE UVING IN NEDERLAND BEFORE I STARTED SCHOOL, MY FATHER worked days at the Stlll Oil Company, which would eventually fire him for getting too old for manual labor. Once or twice a month my mother used to take me with her to Beaumont on the bus for shopping, or going to the doctor, and these trips always involved taking in a movie at the Jefferson or Liberty and having lunch at the counter in Kresge's, the biggest dime store in the city. I don't remember Nancy's being with us, and if I had thought about it at the time, I would have been glad she wasn't. I wanted the experience of eating a Kresge's toasted ham sandwich and drinking a Coke from a glass to be mine alone, not even to speak of walking into the lobby of the Jefferson Theater and stroking the legs ofthe naked statues of men and women set into niches cut into the walls. Years later, I realized the 1920s movie palace that was the Jefferson had been conceived and built with a classical theme in mind, but when I first encotmtered it I simply accepted that naked ladies with their breasts exposed and men with leaves over their pee-pees were regulation movie house furniture. I didn't know why they arranged things that way, but I was glad they did. I don't remember any part of any of the movies I saw as I sat beside my mother in the Jefferson Theater at that time. I remember the way things smelled, the way the plush seat felt against my bare legs, the nipples on the naked stone ladies, the huge marble urinals in the restr(X)m, the fact my mother didn't want to talk ro me during the movie, and the way the silver light from the screen looked washing over the profile of her face as she sat beside me. She didn't seem real at those moments, and I wondered during each movie projected who she was, this lady beside me, and whether she'd tum back into my mother again after The End came up on the screen this time. What if ' 8 THE CAT AND DOG PICTURE SHOWS 19 she didn't! What ifthat woman was gone forever, and I'd have to find a way to live with this new one? Though I was always glad to enter the lobby of the Jefferson with my own ticket in hand, by the end of each picture show I was glad to walk out of the darkness and into the glare and heat ofthe Stm outside the lobby, the sidewalk beneath my feet hard, gritty, and spotted with spit-out wads of chewing gum melted into it forever. Here was the real thing, and the woman holding my hand was the same mother that put me on the bus in Nederland, btought me to Beaumont, and took me back home. Pretty pictures in the dark were fun, but I wanted my fountain Coke and my toasted ham sandwich. Something that happened once in the Jefferson reinforced my growing sense in my pre-school years that it was imJXlSSible to predict what would upset my mother (or my father, for that matter), what would get me deeply in trouble , and what would simply be a passing irritation to her, of no more consequence than the rain showers that came evety day on summer afternoons on the Gulf Coast. You couldn't go outside without getting soaked, but half an hour after the rain stopped things were as hot as ever. I forget what picture show was playing that day, probably one of those that involved lots of scenes of a man and woman staring at each other until they kissed and then arguing in loud voices afterward, but it was one that didn't touch me. I was bored enough that I finally began to beg my mother to let me go to the restroom by myself, something I knew was hopeless since she never let me go into the men's but always took me into the women's when she went. The movie must have been one that engaged her, though, because she finally told me to go ahead and come straight back. In the Jefferson Theatre's men's room, the most impressive sight for me was...

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