A Theater on Third Street

Alex insisted we stay out because Martha had given birth to a girl and he didn’t want to be in the same house as it. They decided to name it after himself. “One Alex in the house is good enough,” he said, tugging my sleeve toward the first open pub he spotted. I had nowhere better to be and, since Janice and I separated, could never fall asleep before the crack of dawn. Nine years.

I liked being around Alex, maybe even needed him. He stopped me from calling Janice on more than one occasion, knowing my first word to her would breach the restraining order. “Wanna get dinner?” Alex said at 2:43AM.

"We already had dinner,” I said, tipsy and unsure.

“That’s not what my stomach says.”

“You’re confused because you ordered breakfast.”

“Riiight, now I need dinner, a real hardy meal. Steak.” He reached out in the air to mime a piece of meat and drooled. I grabbed the ghost steak and took a sloppy bite. “Hey!”

I shoved him to cut it out. “Nothing’s open.”

“Everything can’t be closed. The dead of night’s an open market.” The wrong sort of market. Unless we preferred munching on unknown, unprescribed medications from a shoddy drug store or the comfort of a semen-lined porn theater, this part of town was dead.

After Alex almost got run over by an out-of-service taxi, he told me about a night he spent in a cab, driving circles around the city just to avoid Martha and her baby. Forty minutes had passed when the driver pulled over and turned in his seat. “Alright,” Alex recited in a raspy voice, “either you give me a real destination or show me a packed wallet.” Alex splayed a girthy leather pouch—now empty in his reenactment—and folded over a hundred dollar bill as an advance. The driver accepted it and drove past sunrise.

“Why don’t you get a divorce?”

“I can’t do that to her. Truth be told, little Alex is her pet project. She doesn’t even notice I’m gone. No, I’ll wait ‘till she and her brother are in college to pack up and zip.”

My forehead curled. “Brother?”

“There’s talk.”

Next to a swinging traffic light, the neon letters “E-A-T” choked on their last bit of light, blinking every four, sometimes two seconds. “What’s that, food?”

“No,” I said, “it’s a theater. I bet they’ve got a concession stand, though.” I hoped it would be one of those dine-in places that serves hot food to you right there in the recliner seat, but I could tell from the outside that was not the case. The building’s paint was chipped, the brick looked loose. Faded movie posters showed old-news stars, faces who had come and gone, consumed by fame or discarded by it. The box office was empty, save for a taped notice. “$7.50 PER PERSON. BE HONEST."

Alex decided to be cheap and grabbed a stub. “I’ll save it for the concessions.” I paid for both of us and took another ticket for the only movie they were showing, Possessed to Kill.

The concession shelves were well-stocked with an assortment of candy. Several bars had to be at least a decade old, judging by their outdated logos. An unplugged chicken rotisserie with steak kebabs sat adjacent. Blue and white foam bubbled out of select pieces. Not even Alex in his drunken halfwit state dared to chance the stomach cancer. The movie’s soundtrack hummed all the time from the sole screening room. Light flickered and reflected through the circular window. Muffled, frantic voices mingled, interspersed with a woman’s screams.

“CALL FOR SERVICE,” a note read next to a walkie-talkie on the counter-top.

I squeezed the call button. “My friend and I would like some food. And drinks, if you have them.”

“Five for three candy,” buzzed a voice through the receiver. “Seven for meat. Six for drinks.”

I thanked him and walked behind the counter. While Alex helped me decide, a rhythmic thumping came from the side stairway. We watched the steps, waiting for the manager to appear. A water bottle came tumbling down toward us and rolled across the carpet. “How much did he say for drinks?”

“Who cares?” Alex said, chugging it down. “Eugh, it’s warm.” A second bottle banged down after it. “This one’s sticky.” He threw it at my chest. I thumbed several paper bills and placed it under the locked register’s left corner, so it was only partially visible. The exact amount might’ve been a few dollars off, but who was counting. We were in a part of the world that didn’t exist. The staff didn’t care enough to have some kid guard the fruit snacks. Nothing and no one stopped people from ransacking the shelf, StickyNote and walkie-talkie be damned. And yet the shelf was plentiful. I got a queasy, “empty train car” feeling in my stomach. Finding a car all to oneself is cause for elation, but the reason it’s abandoned soon becomes clear. The stocked concessions felt like an answered prayer, but the foam oozing from the chicken legs told me otherwise. I expressed none of this to Alex, who housed a second chocolate bar at that moment.

There were a surprising amount of moviegoers present, that is, more than one. The projector buzzed louder than the movie itself and the fuzzy image fit an ill-shaped wall. An older man up front snored into the next dimension. A woman my age chewed her hair in the row behind him. One couple appeared to be on a date—a squinting man of one hundred and a wife with about the same number of years on her.

“I would’ve liked some popcorn,” whispered Alex, directing my attention to the very corner of the theater where a dirt-covered man or woman in a puffy jacket sat. They’d rolled the popcorn machine over there and were helping themself to handfuls. The metal door flap clanged each time their hand punched through for more. The attached butter faucet squirted in their greasy hand before it shoveled into their mouth.

Alex and I found the only pair of seats that wasn’t shit-stained or gutted by a switchblade. Though it was difficult to ascertain where we were in the story or how much had unfolded, the determined femme fatale character was armed and on a mission to kill an ex-husband or break another heart that week. As she dashed from train car to taxi, cafe to flower shop, someone behind us flashed a green laser pointer at her cleavage whenever she stopped to ask an authority for directions or during momentary introspection. The awful distracting green light brought me back to hazy morning seminars at university, a light signature trail of fog all along the dewy campgrounds. I would’ve stayed if they’d had me.

A wifebeater kingpin behind a desk found his way in front of our girl’s handgun, a peashooter specially fitted to her five-inch pocketbook. Before she could muster the courage to take advantage of the situation, a couple of identical goons shook her down. They lifted her by the arms and, instructed by the kingpin’s wave of the hand, held her out of the ninth-story office window. The audience howled and hollered, even the sleeper stood out of his seat to attack the screen. The music built and the sounds of busy traffic bustled from below the woman’s flailing hair. The moviegoer’s green penlight flashed against her dangling necklace, a clear memento from a past lover. Wheels screeched down the side aisle of the small theater, but it wasn’t from the sound system—the popcorn fountain crashed into a bricked-over exit, its glass shattered, butter spewed like oil. The crowd of losers exploded into silence.

Our girl’s screams abruptly faded into darkness and we were met with a sputtering film projector. Shoe heels clapped the second floor, then the lobby staircase, and finally to the bottom of the screening room, right in front of us. Fluorescents from the lobby were the only source of light; they flickered while the door swung open and closed, open and closed like a saloon’s flaps. The older man removed his shiv from the white sheet and returned to his seat, expecting to be scolded like the rest of us.

The dense stubble on the projectionist’s face twitched while he grit his teeth. Stains of varying hue littered his white tank top. One boxing glove groped his left fist. He looked at no one in particular. “If you want to see the rest of the movie,” he breathed, “you must fight me.” His eyes remained glued to the floor. He had always wanted this, but became shy like an all-too giddy child.

No one moved; I almost laughed. Alex sucked the sugar off his thumb and stood up. I grabbed his arm and he shook me off. The projectionist shivered with anger and excitement, unable to stand in one place. Both of them faced each other in front of our seats. I got the strange feeling that Alex had been here before, but if he had been, it was his job to lose.

He swung an arm out at the projectionist’s curled hair and a boxing glove swatted it away. Alex found himself in a grisly headlock. The audience cheered and ripped fingernails into their seats. I winced and felt my feet inch closer to the fight, like a schoolteacher who’d missed last weekend’s pay-per-view. The projectionist elbowed Alex’s forehead, bringing him to his knees. Somehow I had stepped in the middle of them. I gripped the projectionist’s scalp in one hand for leverage and, with all of the force of a playground bully, struck a right hook into his bony jaw. The teeth or my hand cracked from the blow. Alex could no longer tell where he was, and why it was spinning. I instructed him to grab the dazed projectionist’s legs and help me carry him out.

We dragged him up the lobby staircase and into the projection booth, stopping and starting to catch our breath. With little grace, the projectionist fell from our grasp and hit the cold checkered tiles, still unconscious. A plated ham and cheese sandwich laid on the table next to newspapers and notebooks. I gave it to Alex, who collected himself on the floor.

I looked through the square hole which hung above the theater and began to finger the projector tower. A large wrapped spool of glistening film stock clung to the secondary machine. Three or even four movies were primed for successive viewing. The hard part of setting it up had all been done; it only needed to be fired up again. I clicked it on, heard it choke like a motor engine, and sat in the stool just under the hole in the wall. The audience had relaxed down there in the dark, like nothing had happened. Not one member had excused themselves.

As our girl rampaged through ex-cons and betrayed her affections, it was impossible to tell if it was morning or night. All the while, a little voice in the back of my skull half-expected Janice to waltz through the door.