Peewee. A combination movie theater and flophouse, the Rialto stayed open twenty-four hours a day. Half the audience was there only to sleep - it was cheaper than a room and warmer than a street. It was known affectionately as the Scratch House, and most rats avoided it because of the vermin, a voracious population of fleas and lice, and also because of the reek - a stench of old people, poor people, sweat and jism, mixed with the stink of the pesticides and disinfectants they dumped in once a week. But to me, given my temperament, that seemed a small price to pay. The Rialto screened old movies during the day and evening, perhaps forty films in all, which it continuously recirculated, in order to maintain a front of shabby respectability. Then at midnight, when the citizenry and its censors were tucked in bed and the cops could safely look the other way, it would switch over to pornography. At the stroke of midnight, a halt, scratched, and flickering Charlie Chan or Gene Autry would come to a clattering stop in midreel. Utter darkness would follow, a few short minutes of coughing and shuffling, and then the projector would whirr back to life, and even its sound would seem younger, brighter. The change was spectacular.
Though the Rialto had a lot to offer, attendance was always sparse, and I found it easy to creep down the empty rows and with finikin discernment harvest the choicest bits of candy bar and popcorn and even an occasional serving of hot dog or smoked ham (the all-nighters often brought lunch with them) while the projector’s beam flashed like a searchlight above me. This profusion of provender, however, was for me not foremost among the Rialto’s attractions. For there on the midnight screen, naked and enormous as Amazons, were creatures just like the ones who had transfixed me with their loveliness in front of the Casino weeks before. But here they did not wear black rectangles on their chests and thighs, nor were they frozen in photographic stillness. Here they moved like real creatures in living color and danced and sometimes writhed on carpets that had obviously been made from animals far furrier than Peewee. They writhed alone or with men - whose gross presence, muscled and sinewed like enormous baby rats, I personally found superfluous and offensive - and sometimes they writhed in each other’s arms. How I longed for that smooth skin like soft chamois - to smell it, touch it, taste it; and that thick flowing hair - to bury my face in it, to swoon. I was well aware of what the others of my putative species, the few who might venture in, would think of these velvet-skinned beings. Where I discerned angels, they would see only hideous upright animals, lumbering, hairless, and vain. And if they did not laugh, it would be only because they never do.
The pull of these tremendous and fascinating creatures was so strong that I found myself sacrificing hours and even days at the bookstore just to behold them. I haul out my telescope once again. Trembling with impatience, I wait for my eyes to grow accustomed to the flickering darkness. Peering into that Rialto of dream and memory, I sweep my telescope this way and that until I find the younger me, the careless progenitor of this present wreck, locked in the circle of the lens: I am holding a little piece of what looks like a Snickers and I am perched on a seat in the front row among the drunken snorers, the mendicant munchers, the droolers, and the masturbators. Chewing quietly I contemplate the slow disrobings, the tentative undulations, the wild gyrations of the beings I have come to think of simply as ‘my Lovelies.’ Chew and contemplate, contemplate and chew, utterly rapt, utterly happy. I am not ashamed. Sometimes I think that all anyone needs in life is lots of popcorn and a few Lovelies.
Norman acquired most of his books at estate sales, and that for me was the only sad part of the book business. Returning from one of these sales,
Though the Rialto had a lot to offer, attendance was always sparse, and I found it easy to creep down the empty rows and with finikin discernment harvest the choicest bits of candy bar and popcorn and even an occasional serving of hot dog or smoked ham (the all-nighters often brought lunch with them) while the projector’s beam flashed like a searchlight above me. This profusion of provender, however, was for me not foremost among the Rialto’s attractions. For there on the midnight screen, naked and enormous as Amazons, were creatures just like the ones who had transfixed me with their loveliness in front of the Casino weeks before. But here they did not wear black rectangles on their chests and thighs, nor were they frozen in photographic stillness. Here they moved like real creatures in living color and danced and sometimes writhed on carpets that had obviously been made from animals far furrier than Peewee. They writhed alone or with men - whose gross presence, muscled and sinewed like enormous baby rats, I personally found superfluous and offensive - and sometimes they writhed in each other’s arms. How I longed for that smooth skin like soft chamois - to smell it, touch it, taste it; and that thick flowing hair - to bury my face in it, to swoon. I was well aware of what the others of my putative species, the few who might venture in, would think of these velvet-skinned beings. Where I discerned angels, they would see only hideous upright animals, lumbering, hairless, and vain. And if they did not laugh, it would be only because they never do.
The pull of these tremendous and fascinating creatures was so strong that I found myself sacrificing hours and even days at the bookstore just to behold them. I haul out my telescope once again. Trembling with impatience, I wait for my eyes to grow accustomed to the flickering darkness. Peering into that Rialto of dream and memory, I sweep my telescope this way and that until I find the younger me, the careless progenitor of this present wreck, locked in the circle of the lens: I am holding a little piece of what looks like a Snickers and I am perched on a seat in the front row among the drunken snorers, the mendicant munchers, the droolers, and the masturbators. Chewing quietly I contemplate the slow disrobings, the tentative undulations, the wild gyrations of the beings I have come to think of simply as ‘my Lovelies.’ Chew and contemplate, contemplate and chew, utterly rapt, utterly happy. I am not ashamed. Sometimes I think that all anyone needs in life is lots of popcorn and a few Lovelies.
Norman acquired most of his books at estate sales, and that for me was the only sad part of the book business. Returning from one of these sales,
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