Free Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Page A

someone from the ball field or school, my mother turned a cold eye on this new acquaintance and usually discouraged further contact. We didn’t know his people. We didn’t know where he came from. Did you notice that he didn’t use good grammar? It’s all right to be friends at school. You should be nice to everyone. But you have to choose your friends carefully. What this meant, in practical terms, was that she chose my friends. But Bobby turned out to be a great friend, and never mind the good references. Better yet, his grandfather owned the local movie theater, and we went almost every day.
    The Kershaw movie theater—what Mother always called “the show house”—wasn’t much to look at, just a drab little brick building that anchored the two-block business district on its northern end (you could walk that district, from the car dealership to the diner, in the time it took to drink a Coca-Cola). The only colorful things about the theater were the movie posters beside the front door, the same posters stapled on telephone poles all over town. They were printed in rainbow colors that bled from top to bottom and the movies that would be shown that week were listed in descending order. Bobby’s grandfather showed three or four movies a week. You could see a Western for a couple of days, and then it would be what they used to call a woman’s picture—something with Lana Turner or Susan Hayward having a hard time of it—for what seemed like an eternity. But no matter what it was, Bobby and I went, and we stayed all afternoon. We memorized our way through repeated showings ofa Gidget movie, a Doris Day comedy, a piece of sub-Arthurian trash with a great dragon, and one about a circus with a terrific train wreck and Charlton Heston looking out of place in modern clothes and a clown who turned out to be the bad guy. We had no scruples. We’d watch anything.
    Every day, Bobby called my grandmother’s and asked what time I wanted to go. I always said as soon as we could, which meant right after dinner, which was what they called lunch at my grandmother’s. I’d wait for him in the big green porch swing where I sat every morning to read the funny papers. As soon as Bobby came into sight, I’d dash down the walk to the front gate flanked by a fence sagging under a scuppernong vine, and we’d each grab a fistful of the bronze-colored, grapelike fruit. Some of it we ate; the hard, unripened ones we just used as ammunition on each other. Then we’d head uptown. “Head uptown” sounds strange, because “town” was only a block away, just on the other side of the railroad tracks, but that was how my family said it. At the end of the block, where you turned right and crossed the tracks, the big live oaks stopped and everything turned white and gritty—the sidewalk, the buildings, even the sky. It was like walking through the desert, but in less than five minutes we were inside the brick movie theater, basking in the air-conditioning.
    I don’t know what made me happier, the movies or the air-conditioning. In the early sixties, it was still a rare thing for families to air-condition more than one or two rooms with window units, and my family had none at all. At night, I slept with my head at the foot of the bed to get closer to the little oscillating fan whirring on my dresser. The fan didn’t do much more than move the hot air around the room, but at least it sounded like it was cooling things off. The only store in Kershaw I remember havingair-conditioning was the grocery store, and once you got cooled off, it wasn’t much fun. But the movie theater—like all movie theaters in my youth—was an oasis of cool. Air-conditioning was still such a novelty that the theaters advertised it on banners that hung from the marquee. COME IN ! IT ’ S COLD INSIDE , and icicles dripped from the word COLD .
    The interior of the Kershaw theater epitomized what Gloria Grahame meant when she walked into Glenn Ford’s hotel room