Cinema Penitentiary

Part One

The Child

(1958-63)

Chapter 1

My block in Bryn Mawr, a low-rent neighborhood outside of Renton, Washington, was originally named after John Keats. Long before I was born, someone who hated poetry came along and renamed it 85th Street.

Although adults were having plenty of fun horsing around in the new Methodist Church and throwing garden parties at the Women’s Club House, there wasn’t much for a seven year old kid to do besides climb rocks and steal candy from the corner grocery store. Fortunately, it was only a mile and a half to Renton, where three movie theaters lined the main drag.

The Roxy catered to adults but sometimes showed movies for the whole family. The Renton, specializing in the kind of movies normal teenagers liked, was across the street. I didn’t go there much, preferring The Rainier, way down at the end of the block, where they showed cruddy movies for the cruddy kids.

Some kid in my second grade class, knowing that I was hooked on movies, came over to my table during lunch and boasted that he went to see movies every Saturday afternoons at the YMCA in downtown Seattle for two cents. I convinced my mom to get me a membership and let me take the twelve-mile bus ride every Saturday with my new friend. For awhile, I enjoyed the trampoline, the swimming pool, the wrestling matches, and the pool table as much as the two cent movies. Then I met a kid about three years older than myself who suggested we bag the athletics and check out a real movie theater.

The Embassy showed a different kind of triple feature on each day of the week, and Saturday it was science fiction and horror. That first Saturday, I saw Invasion of the Saucer Men, about pygmies with giant heads and long fingernails who stabbed lethal doses of alcohol into the bloodstreams of teenagers, The Devil Girl From Mars, about an alien bombshell who walked along deserted mountain roads in a sexy black costume on her way to destroy the human race, and Night of the Blood Beast, about a monster that impregnated an astronaut with a litter of alien parasites and then stopped the male mother’s heart without destabilizing his blood pressure.

The theater was a masterpiece of spatial disorientation. It had two entrances, one on the corner of Third Avenue, next to the G.O.Guy drug store, where the smart people bought their candy before going into the theater, and the other around the corner on Union, across from a pool hall. The floor plan of the theater seemed to vary in accordance with the angle through which it was entered. Finding the way out was even more difficult, and I was never sure from which exit I would emerge.

When I walked out of The Embassy on that first Saturday afternoon in the year 1958 with Russian satellites spying on us from Earth’s outer orbit while our drunken fathers pounded the faces of our promiscuous mothers, I rolled the titles of those three movies over my tongue like the soft drool of melted salt-water taffy.

Had the faces from those movies disappeared when the lights came up, I might have forgotten them and gone on to live a normal life. But their ordered and disordered features lingered in my mind as I lost interest in the people around me, the classmates who said the toilets were broken just to watch me try to hold it in after lunch and then fink to the teacher when they saw I was shitting my pants. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. They were nothing like Georgianna Carter, who posed throughout Night of the Blood Beast like a burlesque dancer on an archeological dig. Four years later, at the same theater, I would see her again, recognizing her right away, in a Jack Nicholson biker movie that was the only other thing in her life she ever did.

Coming out of the Third Avenue doors while Miss Carter wondered if humanity had been right in killing the blood beast, I spied the marquee, two blocks up the street, of another theater, and asked the guy who I had met at the Y what he knew about it. He said he never went there because they showed only double features. I told him I wanted to check it out and he said he wasn’t stopping me, then disappeared around the corner and I never saw him again.

From the outside, The Garden seemed fancier than The Embassy, if only because of its larger marquee. Since I didn’t want to worry my mother by arriving home four hours late, I waited until the following Saturday to go inside.

The Garden was like the Roxy in that it combined adult and family fare. But instead of getting a preview of Butterfield 8 before a Jerry Lewis movie, the kids at the Garden got to see the whole movie. After a double feature of Peyton Place and Love in the Afternoon, I walked up Pine Street to 4th Avenue and discovered The Colonial. It was smaller that the Garden, and also offered double features for a quarter.

Since Peyton Place had been over twice the length of two horror movies, it was already getting close to the time my bus was scheduled to leave Second and Madison, so I shouldn’t have gone in, but I paid my quarter anyway, figuring that if I just watched one movie, I would be able to catch the next bus, and wouldn’t get into much trouble.

When I went inside, Battle Hymn was on the screen. One of the things I noticed about the adults in these theaters was that they rarely arrived at the beginning of a movie. Most just came and went as they pleased, so I did the same, leaving after about an hour of Battle Hymn, which had Rock Hudson as an ex-bomber who built an orphanage for Korean kids who lost their parents in the aerial attacks for which he felt guilty.

The first thing that struck me about The Colonial was that there was no concession stand. The popcorn, the candy, and the cokes all came out of a vending machine. No concessions also meant no authority figures in the lobby, and that gave me the feeling that I could do anything I wanted, not only in the lobby but also in the auditorium.

Unfortunately, it gave everybody else that same right, and four years later, during the summer I lived with my mother and sisters on Queen Anne Hill, the summer I turned eleven years old and spent virtually every day in one of these three theatres, a man changed seats several times before slipping into the seat next to mine, where he made a quick and clumsy grab for my dick.

I ran out of the theater and up the street into a department store where I jumped on the escalator and rode eight floors to the restroom where I hid and panted and waited for the fear to subside. Then I ran all the way home, not even slowing to look at the posters of future movie releases that decorated the windows of a reprographics shop on Second Avenue in the near deserted area between downtown and Queen Anne Hill that came to be known as Belltown,

I never returned to The Colonial after that, but continued patronizing the Embassy until it started showing porno movies in the seventies. It wasn’t that I had anything against porno; I was just afraid to go in there. I kept going to The Garden during the porno era because they kept the place clean and ran advertisements in the daily newspapers. Sometimes the critics would even review them, which helped me pretend they were real movies, and not just smut.

Chapter 2

The worst thing about having friends is that you are subject to the regulations imposed by their parents. This means that if you stay overnight at someone’s house, you have to go to bed at whatever hour their parents have settled upon. It’s not hard to understand the logic of this. After all, they can’t have you roaming around the house while everyone else is asleep. But there are other things parents do that are not so reasonable. Like thinking they can protect their kids by restricting the movies they are allowed to see.

The first movie I missed because of the censorious concerns of a friend’s over-protective mother was The Rebel Set. She was about to drop us at the Rainier when she over-reacted to what she interpreted as the glorification of juvenile delinquency on the movie’s poster. I threw a fit. I cried. I called my mother. It didn’t work. I wound up wasting that Friday night at my friend’s house, eating homemade popcorn and watching idiotic television programs, including one called The Hathaways, about a family that had adopted monkeys into the household. It was the most wasted weekend night of my life.

The best Friday nights were to be had at the Rainier, where I would watch anything, provided there were gangsters, rock and roll music, or the prospect of seeing a monster. I sat there watching The H-Man, unaware that somewhere in the world people were following the story with interest, not simply mouthing the title of the picture to themselves while waiting for a humanoid form to appear within the blue or green slime, occasionally distracted by fires in the sewer or a pretty girl coming out of a manhole. Was this really a detective movie with an atomic monster killing off the gangsters? When it was over, I waked out into the rain, hoping I wouldn’t dissolve in it, leaving nothing of myself for the world to remember except my clothes in the wet street.

Whatever The H-Man was, it wasn’t nearly as scary as The Blob, which had come out earlier that year. At one point, as The Blob rolled into town, I went to the concession counter for a Butterfinger and my older sister mistakenly thought I had left the auditorium in fright. I protested my lack of fear, bur she and her friends just laughed at me. It would be another year before anything scared me so badly that I had to flee the theatre. That would be during the part in The Tingler when red blood gushed from a black and white faucet.

Any promise of a human mutation would hold my attention for 80 minutes. 4-D Man was a jazzy story about a guy who stole his brother’s girlfriends. The brothers were scientists, and halfway through the movie, both had figured out how to walk through walls. The one who couldn’t hang onto a girl used this power to rob banks. To replenish the energy lost in these efforts, he stuck his hands inside people to transfer their life force to himself, killing them with old age while his claylike wrinkles disappeared. There was nothing scary about 4-D Man, but the limited interior palette gave the film an unearthly claustrophobia of misplaced space.

I wasn’t exactly thinking that way at seven years old. I just thought the blue walls looked creepy. And the idea of a 4-D man appealed to me even though I didn’t know there were only supposed to be three dimensions. And the idea of an H-Man was creepy, even though I had no idea what the H stood for. The things that scared me in their literalness were the more practical mutations, like the Wasp Woman. I was already afraid of those long-stingered insects that collected around mud-holes. The idea of one being human-sized and coming after me in the shape of my mom was terrifying.

The Renton catered to teenagers who liked wholesome movies such as Tammy and the Bachelor. Unlike a lot of the kids my age, I didn’t close my eyes and make throw-up sounds during the smooching scenes. On the contrary, I was fascinated by the different types of women and girls in the movies. Tammy was a cockeyed portrait of a Southern girl that was both adoring and condescending. Although set in the South, she seemed to be the only southern character. Everybody else had strong Yankee accents and treated Tammy as if she were an angelic dimwit. I liked her, and was also taken by the woodsy landscapes around the Mississippi River. Most outdoor movies I had seen were set in the mountains, the deserts, or the plains, so this offered something a little different to look at.

But I wouldn’t have gone to the Renton on purpose just to see a Tammy movie. I was there for the second feature, a Gary Cooper western called Man of the West. Although most of the type-A Westerns played at the Roxy, sometimes the ones at the Renton were better. Of course, the Roxy had shown Rio Bravo, which was the best Western I had ever seen, but a lot of those popular ones, like Cimarron, The Big Country, and North to Alaska, were just family crap. The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw seemed like a comedy for kids, but adults were the only ones in the theater laughing. I didn’t know what to make of this sheriff with a funny accent who didn’t know how to use a gun yet scared off the real gunfighters and also had some kind of special relationship with the Indians. It wasn’t anything like a western, but it wasn’t anything else either.

Anyway, I saw a lot of good Westerns at The Renton, which is the most I can say for that place. Otherwise, there wasn’t any fun to be had there. You would never hear a Johnny Fuckerfaster joke in the bathroom at the Renton, nor would you see any one signing or redeeming a four-dotter. Instead, there would be some creepy egghead standing around the lobby showing off a dilly bar stick that could redeemed for a free dilly bar at the Dairy Queen. And maybe there would be a really ugly girl standing beside him and showing her braces when she smiled. These kids who went to the Renton were the kind of teenagers who could drive a song like Michael Row the Boat Ashore to number one on the pop charts. Yet it was in such a crowd that I got my first public boner.

It came during the scene in Man of the West in which Jack Lord held a knife to Gary Cooper’s throat while he forced Julie London to take off her clothes. Three years later, there was a similar scene with Lee Remick in Experiment in Terror. The awakening of one part of my body paralyzed the rest of it, and I watched these scenes confused as to where I fit into what was happening on the screen, whether I identified with the victim or assailant. The hero was as helpless as the heroine, with the villain unlocking the swell of fear and desire. Time stood still, then the suspense was broken by heroic action and sexuality sank into the politics of gratitude. I came out of my dream like Lonnie castigating his uncle Hud for attempting to rape the housekeeper. You wanted to do it too, Hud sneered at his nephew. Sure I did, Lonnie replied. But not like you. Not mean."

Rio Bravo was a healthier experience. Kids under twelve, when free of any parental guidance or supervision, have an innate sense of quality in regard to the popular arts. Hours can be wasted trying to explain to an adult why Rio Bravo is a better movie than North To Alaska, but a kid knows that the latter is phony and the former a masterpiece. Same goes with Jerry Lewis pictures. I saw three of then in 1960. Visit to a Small Planet seemed like Jerry Lewis trespassing on somebody else’s movie. The Bellboy, on the other hand, was total Jerry Lewis. A few years later I found out that Visit to a Small Planet came from a Gore Vidal Play and that The Bellboy was Lewis’ first outing as a director. And it is only now that I understand why Cinderfella was the worst, most tedious and unfunny Lewis movie of that year. It was because Lewis, having got a taste of directing, wasn’t going to let Frank Tashlin tell him what to do. Since it was Tashlin’s project, Lewis ended up destroying the movie by trying to take it over. When I was just a kid under twelve, the only thing that mattered was that Cinderfella sucked.

In third grade, I went overboard on a book review assignment. By copying the topic sentence from each paragraph in William Shirer’s The Rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, I had condensed the book down to sixty handwritten pages. This so impressed the teacher that I was brought under observation by the staff and made to read my paper into a tape recorder to preserve my achievement for future generations. I never confessed the gimmick, but let them all think something amazing had happened.

It was near the end of the fourth grade that I found myself in the Roxy watching Mein Kampf. Since newsreels were often shown before the feature, it took awhile to realize what I was looking at. Despite the business about my Hitler paper the year before, I had no idea what the narrator was talking about as images of World War One and the beginning of the National Socialist Party were shown. By the time the scenes from the Warsaw Ghetto came on, I realized, This man is Hitler, and this is what he did.

For the rest of the movie, I sat there in shock, unable to accept that these things were real, that this had really happened. This was no movie, it was an artifact from Hell. Never had I imagined such horror. When I left the theater, I took those images with me, and have never let them go.

Chapter 3

The Garden, The Colonial, and The Embassy mirrored the Renton theaters in a new setting that hadn’t been fouled by the incomprehensible world of adults. The similarity of the theaters had not occurred to me at the time. I did not realize that I was drawn to the Embassy because it was my re-invention of the Rainier. It was true, though, just as The Colonial was my Renton and the Garden my Roxy. But they were 12 miles away from that screaming house in sub-suburbia where I was a somnambulistic child pursued by eyeballs, and where a witch stirring a cauldron guarded the door to my parents’ bedroom.

At the Garden, I was no child among parent-like people, but one of the anonymous figures taking refuge in a movie theater. The woman who sold me the ticket never told me I was too young to see the features inside. I paid my quarter, got my child’s ticket, and went inside where the secrets of the adult world were brought into the open where I could contemplate and try to understand them.

In the spring of 1959, I was learning more about my father from Home From the Hill than from playing center field for the little league team he coached. I was in center field because I was a lousy ball player and did not have many opportunities to embarrass him way out beyond the batting capabilities of most of the kids. Once in a while I would fumble a pop fly, but there was always the sun to blame for my lack of hand to eye co-ordination. My inability to hit the ball was another issue, one that could not be so easily explained away.

Don’t be afraid of the ball, the coach yelled at his sissy son, like some French officer in charge of the firing squad telling the Spanish prisoners not to be afraid of the bullets. When I realized that I was just as likely to be hit by the ball by standing there dumb as by swinging the bat, my father’s estimation of my athletic abilities was fractionally heightened. Go out swinging, boy! he cried, seeing no shame in failure if the failure was the failure of action and not the result of passivity,

Unlike Robert Mitchum in Home from the Hill, my father had no bastard son to take on hunting trips. He had no source of secret pride. The only manhood he had was his own, and violence toward those weaker than he was the easiest expression of that manhood.

Maybe if my mom was a drunk too, my father wouldn’t hit her so much, I thought while watching Days of Wine and Roses. Although the movie was about alcoholism, it didn’t have much to tell me about my dad’s drinking. This drinking between a man and a woman created a different world from that of an alcoholic family man.

I did learn one thing from that movie, though. I learned that when a serious movie was made about adult problems, it was usually shot in black and white. The opposite was the case for movies about troubled adolescence. Whereas the cheap JD movies came out in black and white, the good ones, like Rebel Without a Cause were in color. I guessed this was a way of telling the audiences that, even though the movie was about bad kids, it wasn’t just for thrill-seeking teenagers, but for the contemplation of serious-minded adults.

Inane war movies like Marines, Let’s Go were in color, but the ones with ideas, like Phil Karlson’s Hell to Eternity, about how the attack on Pearl Harbor affected the friendship between a white kid and a Japanese-American family, were in black and white. Musicals were almost always in color, as were Westerns. The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, which I saw with my father in a South Dakota drive-in, was in black and white. This bothered me. Years later, when I was reading books on Hollywood directors, I discovered that movie had bothered a lot of people, but for different reasons. It was dismissed as an indoor western, which meant, I guessed, that it lacked the rock formations that distinguished many of John Ford’s Westerns. That didn’t bother me, though, because I saw it at an outdoor theater, surrounded by the black hills of Dakota. I think it failed because the adults did not consider it a serious enough Western to warrant its being filmed in black and white.

Chapter 4

On my tenth birthday, my dad treated me and ten friends to the Orpheum Theatre for a double feature of Morgan the Pirate and The Green Helmet. It was my first trip inside the Orpheum and the only time my dad ever took me to a first run movie. We did go to a lot of sub-run theatres, especially after my mom filed for divorce and he went to live with his artist friend in a loft on Yesler Way.

It was right in Pioneer Square, and there was a long staircase leading up to the entrance. Then you had to walk up a couple flights to get to the studio. The place was filled with paintings of naked women, and I imagined my dad sitting around having a few beers while his friend duplicated the anatomy of his nude models on the canvas. Then I imagined how much fun they must have had with so many naked women around all the time.

It surprised me that my dad knew so much about the theatres on Third and Fourth avenues. Before the movies, we would go to the public market and buy cold cuts wrapped in butcher paper. I felt special gnawing on slices of bologna and ham during the movie, while other kids were sucking on candy, as if I knew something they didn’t know.

There were some other theaters my dad took me to that I hadn’t known about. The Columbia was a small box on Rainier Avenue that showed a lot of horror movies. It had about 400 seats, which made it a little more than half the size of the Colonial. There weren’t any doors between the lobby and the auditorium, just a thin corridor. You walked through it and suddenly found yourself on a dark staircase. If you didn’t watch your step, you could fall headfirst into the theater.

Out in Ballard, where my grandmother lived, was an even smaller theater, The Bay. We saw lots of movies there, including The Gallant Hours, which starred Jimmy Cagney, one of dad’s favorite actors, as Admiral Halsey, who he seemed also to admire. When he was drunk, though, he didn’t have many nice things to say about admirals, especially his father-in-law. My mom had been the admiral’s daughter and my dad was the punk who got back at the navy by marrying her. He must have thought it quite an achievement at the time, but he failed to better himself as a result of his victory.

I don’t know why he preferred crummy little theaters like these to the movie palaces. Maybe he felt like he stuck out in a big place and could be cozily anonymous in a dump. He also took me to a lot of drive-ins. I liked walking around in them, playing on the swing sets and visiting the concession stands, but they were crappy places to watch a movie. The first one always started when it was still light outside, so you could hardly see the picture. And those little speakers sounded worse than transistor radios.

If we were downtown, he would take me for a swim at the YMCA after the movie. Nobody wore swimming trunks in those days, and it was kind of weird to sit naked on the edge of the pool with him as he told me how much he loved my mother, suggesting that I let her know how much he loved her and encourage her to drop the divorce proceedings and let him move back into the house.

I guess he was comfortable with naked men because he had been in the Navy, but I hated those YMCA evenings. On Saturday afternoons, though, the gym and the pool were reserved for kids under twelve. Being a kid swimming naked with other kids seemed like a normal thing to do, but treading water with my naked dad in a pool filled with creepy old naked men made me want to get far away from the smell and the noise of adults.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the divorce was already in the courts at the time of my tenth birthday, so I guess that trip to the Orpheum Theatre was also something of a going away party. My dad had spread