Free Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Page B

in
The Big Heat:
“Oh, early nothing.” It was just a box with seats, with none of that Arabian Nights décor that filled the majestic old movie houses in big cities, although it did have a curtain that parted when the previews began. It could have been the template from which all those cramped multiplex shoe-box theaters would be cast a decade or so later. But the theater was not the point. It was only a transporting device that took us out of the town, out of ourselves for hours every afternoon. The destination was all that mattered. We looked past the theater to whatever was on the screen, and whatever was on that screen was not life as we knew it but something bigger and better.
    We were deliberately cavalier about getting there on time—just because we could be—but then, so was everyone else in those days, when you could still come and go whenever you liked while the movie was in progress. I don’t remember when theater owners began clearing the theaters between shows, but throughout my childhood and for several years thereafter, we often arrived well after the credits and then, when it was over, we sat through the previews and the start of the next show until we got to the part where we’d entered. Then someone always had to state the obvious: “This is where we came in.” If it was my mother, that was the signal to leave. As far as she was concerned, we had doneour duty and there was no point in lingering. But on those rare occasions when I was with my father, it meant we had a decision to make. We might stay if we liked what we’d seen, especially if a good scene was coming up. He liked Westerns to the exclusion of almost everything else, and he quietly but adamantly refused to go to war movies. He never said why, but I always figured it had something to do with his service in World War II, because he never talked about that either, except when he came home drunk. Then he would fall back on the sofa, grab me so hard it hurt and sing a song, or part of a song, that he had learned while stationed in North Africa. “The cigarettes are ranka down in old Casablanca, but the girls are ooh la la.” My mother hated that song. She hated all my father’s songs, I guess, because he never sang unless he’d been drinking. The song she hated most was “Good Night, Irene,” because one night down in Kershaw, she and Daddy had gone over to the Clyburns and the men got drunk and sang “Good Night, Irene” for three hours straight while their wives huddled together on the front porch.
    Once Bobby’s grandfather had nodded us in, we ran behind the concession stand in the tiny lobby, grabbed some popcorn and candy and headed inside. More often than not, we were the only customers for the first show, so we changed seats as often as we could, just because we could. We sat in the back and down front, looking up the nostrils of the actors on-screen. We sat together and apart, throwing popcorn at each other if no one else was around. Sometimes we left and walked around town and then came back. Sometimes we came in late, and sometimes we left early. It was the first time in my life where for hours at a time nobody knew where I was, and as far as I know, no one cared.
    What else did we do to fill those long, hot days? Played cards,watched television, walked all over town, up to the mill and back, out to the graveyard and then into town. Sometimes on sunny days I fetched the big magnifying glass from its spot beside the phone book at my grandmother’s and we used it to set fire to scrap paper and dead leaves on the sidewalk—we tried igniting ants, but they were too nimble for us. If it rained, we went up in the Parkers’ attic, where someone had long before abandoned a miniature pool table with child-size cue sticks (I ripped the felt when I missed the cue ball and was shocked when no one cared). Once in a while we talked an adult into driving us out to the town swimming pool, where the concession stand sold frozen Zero