A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Mortality

31 Mortality I was eleven years old and watching a Saturday matinee at the Liberty Theater when I realized I would die someday. Every kid in town was there. Every kid in town went to the movies every week back then. Every Saturday you played outside in the morning , came home, ate lunch, got a quarter from your mother, and raced to the movies as fast as you could. The man who owned the theater was about sixty, and every week, before the movie began, he slumped down the aisle wearing the same baggy gray suit—your grandfather’s suit—like the one Broderick Crawford wore on Highway Patrol on television. He would trudge up the stairs on those flat feet of his, slump out to center stage, and hold his hands out in front of himself to quiet us down—like Al Jolson quieting a vaudeville crowd. Then he would launch into the same tired speech: “Saturday matinees aren’t a right, gang. We don’t have to put on your kind of shows, and if you don’t behave, we’ll stop showing the kind of movies you like.” Feigning chastisement, we would give him his moment of silence, but he knew it was futile. We knew it was futile. The ushers and the ladies at the candy counter knew it was futile. Saturday matinees may not have been a right, but all those quarters sure as hell counted up. Every seat in the house was taken. The whole town knew all hell was about to break loose, but what could he do? What could anyone do? 32 MORTALIT Y Sighing to himself, resigned, already defeated, he would signal the projectionist to roll it. The lights would dim. The newsreel would begin. The old man would slump off the stage and trudge back up the aisle to his tiny, cluttered office behind the candy counter to count his quarters. Out in the theater, the chaos would start slowly and eventually reign supreme—a chaos I’d known all my moviegoing life—a chaos incubated and sustained by row after row of my roundheaded , buzz-cut, baby boom peers. Whoopee cushions blatted. Rubber band slingshots twanged. Jujubes flew. One especially raucous Saturday, in the middle of an old Roy Rogers movie, a chocolate-covered cherry splatted against the screen, hitting Trigger on his giant Technicolor ass and oozing down. The stain remained there for years. I remember Vivien Leigh flouncing through it when they rereleased Gone with the Wind. Spilled, syrupy, ten-cent-a-cup vending machine soft drinks ran in rivulets down the sloped floor under the seats, and we tracked the sticky residue up the once luxuriously carpeted aisles to the art deco men’s room, where someone always clogged the urinal with heavy brown paper towels. So there I was, sitting, behaving myself, awash in the noise and the churn, watching yet another cowboy movie. The good guys had the bad guys pinned down in the rocks up a box canyon, and everyone was shooting it out yet again. Somebody—one of the good guys—sighted his rifle and pulled the trigger, and a bad guy jumped up, grabbed his belly, and fell dead. Between television and the Liberty Theater, I had witnessed this scene hundreds of times before, but for some reason, sitting there that day, I was suddenly aware that I would die some day. The news arrived with a jolt, and it was not easy to accept. I had always thought of God and Jesus as good guys, as biblical versions of Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy. They wore white robes if not white hats. And according to the nuns, God and Jesus stood up for the little guys. They suffered little children to come MORTALIT Y 33 unto them. Sitting there in the dark, now aware I too would die, I thought either God and Jesus had double-crossed the nuns or the nuns were in on it and had double-crossed me. Not that it made any difference. No matter how much I believed, no matter how hard I prayed, we were all going to die— every kid in the room. I remember turning away from the screen, looking up at the once classy, now dusty fleur-de-lis sconces on the theater walls and dreading absolutely everything. There was always a point in those old cowboy...