By the time I was fourteen going on fifteen, I had graduated from a
paper route and odd jobs to working as a movie theater usher and janitor and
playing in a rock and roll band. I could have just played for fun, but this was
my kind of in-your-face, rebellious raspberry to Whitie. “Look at this, Daddio,”
I was symbolically saying, “not only did I buy my drums myself, but I’m also
making money with them.”
Truth be told, back then, at the beginning, it was the grunt work that
made me the money that kept me largely independent of parental interference
(and of any insistence I go out for sports), even if I’d already started
thinking of myself as “a working musician”. I worked three or four times a week
as a ticket-taker and usher at the Wapa Theater and then made a little extra
sweeping up the popcorn, popcorn boxes and candy wrappers, and scraping the
chewing gum and half-sucked candy off the floor. After my father’s night
janitor at the Teddy Bear Restaurant retired, I also took up that job for a
while, after I got off work on movie nights and every other night of the week
but Sunday.
Working at the movie theater was fun. My best friend Mark worked there
with me for a while as well, which made it more fun still. And the concession
stand was run by the theater-owner’s daughter, Barbara (who was a year younger
than I was), and a classmate of mine called Debbie. They were both shy girls
whom I’d never really gotten to know at school other than to say hi, but here
at the movies, we chatted and joked and laughed during the lulls in our work
and generally had a good time.
The Wapa’s manager was a young guy called Leslie who was from out of
town, someplace in Indiana. He drove a powder-blue Caddy convertible and
dressed to the nines, but lived in a rented mobile home in a court on the north
side of town. He was easy to work for and was always good-naturedly kidding us.
When he found out Mark and I were old-movie buffs he used to now and then
invite us to his place to eat popcorn and watch the black and white classics
that he collected and projected on a screen in his living room.
Leslie didn’t own the Wapa. The building was from the turn of the
century, had originally housed an opera house and theater and was quite grand
inside for a small-town cinema, with a main floor and two balconies. One of the
balconies—referred to as “the third balcony” for some reason the logic of which
escaped me—had long since been hidden from view by a lowered acoustical ceiling,
above which lived a colony of brown bats that would swoop down in the darkened
theater and flash their scary silhouettes across the silver screen during
projections, eliciting shrieks from the girls and nervous laughter from the
boys in the audience, especially during viewings of Christopher Lee’s stunning
portrayals of Count Dracula.
I liked to imagine what it must have been like back in the building’s
pre-Great War beginnings, when early twentieth-century Wapakoneta residents
arrived in gala dress for the first shows at what was then the Brown Theater. It
had been owned from the 1930s by the husband of a grade school teacher of mine
and she had inherited it when he passed away.
Leslie leased the movie theater part of the building from her. A former Ball
State University student, he had done some acting in college and had a real
love of Hollywood and theater, but this appeared to be as close as he could come
to getting into show biz.
I also became friends with the projectionist, ‘Herbie’. That wasn’t his
real given name, but he preferred his moniker. Herbie was a couple of years
older than I was. He was shy and overweight and didn’t have many friends. At
school he was a popular enough “folk figure”, since he was the photographer for
the high school yearbook (known as The
Retro) and for school newspaper publications. We didn’t have a school paper
per se, but rather, a column in the Wapakoneta
Daily News entitled The Lantern.
Herbie’s nom de guerre at school,
then, was ‘Flash’. When he showed up with his 35mm camera around his neck,
everybody was glad to see him, but he wasn’t the sort of guy most of his classmates
hung out with. He wasn’t one of the “cool kids”.
I didn’t feel cool either, but I tried to make eccentric, rebellious and
non-conformist work for me. I felt it should work for Herbie too. To my mind,
he was eccentric enough to be non-conformist-cool. He was a conscientious
projectionist and a surprisingly mature and artful photographer. And his
“secret cool” that nobody saw during school hours was that when school was out,
he was a biker! Herbie had a Honda Superhawk. That and his Pentax camera were
his two prized possessions. They were also props in his dual-life persona. Seeing
him mounted on that bike with his oversized denim jacket, engineer boots and
two-hundred-plus pounds of humanity, you’d have thought Herbie was really
bad-assed, somebody you didn’t want to mess with. You’d never have guessed he
was a melancholy, easy-going boy with a big sad heart who hadn’t had it easy. 
Another thing Herbie was in charge of was changing the big metal letters
on the marquee whenever the feature film title changed. I used to help him do
that and found it a lot of fun. It involved going in through a restricted-admission
lateral entrance from outside and climbing a narrow staircase on which a tall
folding step-ladder was leaned up against the wall and covered that side of the
staircase practically from top to bottom. The staircase led to a cramped store
room, in which the wall on one side bore a series of large pigeonholes
containing several sheet-metal cut-out copies each of every letter in the
alphabet. Reading from a paper where the theater manager had written down the
title of the upcoming movie, we gathered the letters necessary to spell it out
twice (once for each side of the marquee), placing them in a sturdy wooden box.
Then one of us would grab the box and the other the stepladder from the
staircase. We would also take along another wooden box to put the letters in
that we took down. Once the two-sided ladder was set up under the marquee,
Herbie would climb up one side of the ladder and I’d climb up the other
carrying the empty box. He’d take down the old title letter by letter, handing
them to me, and I’d put them in the empty box.
Then I’d take that box down, carry up the other box holding the letters
for the new title and hand them to Herbie as he called them off: C-H-A-R-A-D-E,
for instance. Up close some of the letters looked kind of pitted and scratched
and rusty. But when we would climb down to inspect our handiwork against the
lighted marquee, they looked like for a New York premiere.
Herbie and I remained friends even after I quit working at the Wapa. A
couple of summers later, he would announce he was joining the Air Force. People
said, “Herbie? The Air Force?” But I wasn’t surprised. Herbie was a guy who
knew what he wanted...and it wasn’t this. He had gotten into a special
experimental training program that the Air Force was trying out on overweight
recruits. It was not your regular Basic that did fat guys a lot of good but that
didn’t get to the root of their problem. This was a rigorous regime of healthy
eating, psychological motivation, and intensive, scientifically engineered
physical exercise.
A few months later, Herbie came home on leave and had to tell my mother
who he was when he showed up to say hi. She didn’t recognize him! And if he hadn’t
spoken, I wouldn’t have either. It was as if he had gone into training as William
Conrad and had returned home as Steve McQueen. We were amazed and Herbie was
pleased, self-satisfied and more self-confident than I’d ever seen him before.
After he shipped out for overseas, I would never see or hear from him again.
The job at the Teddy Bear was a routine janitor’s job, but I managed to
make that fun too. I was always my own best company, so working alone in the
place after hours was okay with me. A couple of years earlier, I had enjoyed
working at the Teddy Bear during business hours in the summer or on Saturdays
because the older girls who worked there always treated me a little like a pet and
I wasn’t all that used to that kind of attention from the other sex. Whitie had
me in the back a lot, peeling spuds and cutting them for french fries, washing
dishes and helping with other types of food preparation, while he was out
behind the counter.
My most fun relationship was with a bouncy, bubbly girl called Linda,
who was about eighteen at the time. She pretended to flirt with me, which
caused me to have an instant and terrible crush on her and to loath her older fiancé
who often dropped by for coffee and to see her. The Christmas that I had turned
thirteen, Linda blocked my path under the mistletoe that hung above the kitchen
door and laid a big wet kiss on me that left my lips smeared with her bright
red lipstick, and then laughed her head off at the combined look of shock, embarrassment
and contentment on my face.
But it wasn’t like Linda was having a laugh at my expense. She genuinely
liked me, as if I were an adoptive kid brother, and we shared little inside
jokes and secrets. For instance, I had started pilfering smokes from Whitie’s
packs of Pall Malls when I was twelve going on thirteen. The first time Reba
Mae smelled smoke on me she said if she caught me smoking again, I’d be
punished. But I wasn’t put off by the warning. I simply tried not to get close
to my mother if I’d just had a smoke. Then I got greedy and started helping
myself to Whitie’s cigarettes to the point that he noticed. My father was a lot
more pragmatic than my mother, so his warning message was more economic than
moral: If I was going to smoke I should “buy my own goddamn cigarettes,”
because he didn’t plan to support his habit and mine too. So I took him at his
word, found a corner grocery store that wasn’t picky about whom they sold
tobacco to and, by age thirteen, was smoking several cigarettes a day. Linda,
for her part, smoked incessantly and usually had one going in an ashtray on the
shelf above the work counter in the kitchen, so when we worked there side by
side on Saturdays, we would take turns smoking and if my father or mother came
into the kitchen while I was having a smoke, she’d swiftly grab my cigarette
and take a drag, leaving the end marked with her lipstick.
That part of working at the Teddy Bear during the daytime when it was
open I sometimes missed, though not the almost constant bickering between
Whitie and me, since none of the work I did was ever quite up to his exacting
standards of quality control. Speaking of which, I don’t think there has ever
been another restaurant in our town (or anywhere else) that had a more thorough
clean-up routine than the Teddy Bear. After closing each evening every member
of the staff had a specific cleaning task to do. And after they had all gone
home, Whitie would go back and re-do every single one of those tasks—always
alternating between whistling tunelessly and cussing under his breath. For
himself, he reserved the jobs of re-ordering the refrigerators and cleaning and
polishing the stainless steel back counter, soda fountain, under-counter
refrigeration unit, fryers and grill. By the time he was done with them, these
pieces of equipment always gave the impression of being brand new and having
just been installed the day before. So when I came in, long after closing, the
place was practically spotless, except for the dining room floor, which had merely
been swept clean.
My job was, first, to mop it thoroughly with hot water and industrial detergent,
to dry it with a squeegee and floor rag, and then to wax it with a thin layer
of fast-drying liquid wax and buff it with the industrial buffer that Whitie
kept in the back room—a machine so powerful that, more than use it, I was
dragged around the room by it. The whole process took a couple of hours and I
took advantage to turn it into some quality alone time (as if I hadn’t already been
enough of a lone wolf).
After making sure all of the curtains were drawn over
the front windows, I would put a quarter into the cigarette vending machine and
get myself a pack of Winstons or Salems, depending on my mood, and light up
with a book of the free advertising matches that were in a fish-bowl by the
cash register. Then I’d take a couple of “special quarters”—the ones painted
with red fingernail polish that the restaurant got back when the maintenance
man came to service the machine and change some of the records—and, putting
them into the coin slot on the colorful Wurlitzer jukebox, I’d choose eight of
my favorite tunes—usually ones that would have been the last choice of any
other kid in town, numbers by Peter Nero, Duke Ellington, Enoch Light, Henry
Mancini, Ferrante and Teicher, Frank Sinatra, Mantovani, and so on. Finally,
being very, very careful not to leave a single mark or drop of water on the
stainless steel fountain, the meticulous last inspection of which would surely have
included a final obsessive once-over with my father’s own pocket handkerchief,
I would build myself a vanilla phosphate with extra “dope” (trade jargon for
syrup) and light on the ice. Then, and only then, I’d be ready to get down to
work. I “danced” with my mop to the sounds of the Duke’s band playing Satin Doll, to Ferrante and Teicher
playing Theme from The Apartment (a
movie that had made me fall in love with Shirley MacLaine and loath Fred MacMurray
even more than I originally had), Mantovani’s orchestra playing Hernando’s Hideaway, Frank singing I’ve Got You Under My Skin, Peter Nero mixing
The Yellow Rose of Texas with Mozart
in a fascinating fugue, and Enoch Light and the Light Brigade playing a rousing
rendition of Whatever Lola Wants,
among a list of other personal favorites.
There, alone by night in my father’s restaurant, I could be whoever I
wanted to be. I didn’t see myself as a confused, unhappy fourteen-year-old boy.
I was a cigarette-smoking adult with a vanilla phosphate that could just as
easily have been a tall scotch and soda. And I could pretend that the famous musicians
on the jukebox were my personal friends. I could see myself playing with a
studio band in New York City instead of mopping the floor in my dad’s soda
fountain and grill. I could imagine myself a whole other life that I had no
doubt would eventually come true, one where I was doing what I wanted to do and
was really good at it. I would be a writer and musician and was sure my
combined arts would be my ticket out of here and into a brand new and glamorous
world.
To be continued...
You can read Parts 1, 2, and 3 of The Reluctant Athlete at the following links:
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