on’t be glum, young lady. You’ll spoil the party. My party.

Dejavue knows her mind is playing tricks. Nobody behind her on the staircase has said a word. Nobody calls her young lady anymore. Nobody has a voice like Mr. G. His delightful film anecdotes. Once she caught him reading a hefty film tome during the break between double features. A born teacher, he crammed the Saturday program calendars with vital statistics (date, country of origin, cast, director, awards) plus tidbits like “director’s cut” or “banned in Franco’s Spain” or “black-listed writer’s first screenplay in twenty years”.

Tonight is the last picture show. “The Music Man.” In the lobby at the top of the stairs Mr. G’s chair at the ticket table is empty. As always the tall trim white-haired man who rips tickets in half stands at the auditorium door. Dejavue has never known his name. She smiles, then scurries to her favorite seat. Row D, seat 1. The auditorium in this senior citizen’s center, with soft padded chairs and a slanting floor, feels cavernous. Where is everybody?

Don’t worry, young lady. We’re sold-out! Everybody’s beelined for the food.

Food? Dejavue chuckles to herself. After draping the seat with her multi-colored shawl, she heads for the large assembly room where early-birds chat and snack cozily. Tonight the usual “pay-what-you-wish-but-don’t-be-a-hog” refreshments are free. Mr. G’s floating voice rasps on,

Hey, give me some elbow room. It’s my party, right? Same old same old, my brother would say. Dave, he’d say, can’t you serve some chips? Old people can eat chips. And I’d say, Mel, not everybody who comes to my movies is old. And he’d say, That’s my point. Buy some chips. Grease is good for the joints, oils the old gears. And I’d say, Mel, you’re just like some of my true believers, Big mouth, funny money. Make a donation, make a donation.

Laid out on a long folding table are mounds of sawdust cookies, thin pretzels, tea bags, Styrofoam cups the size of whiskey shot glasses, cartons of whole milk in plastic bowls of ice cubes, jars of powdered dairy substitute, white plastic spoons and a box of brown plastic stirrers. A jar of decaffeinated is on hand, but hardly needed; the regular coffee brewed on the machine is weak enough for the nursery.

As Dejavue hovers over snacks, the voice floats among the munchers.

Never made a real dime off these screenings. Wasn’t my point. A few dollars. Just to cover the rent. My films would’ve disintegrated in the garage... just like the missus and me... But I gotta make somebody happy... Skinny pretzels! Where’s the mustard? Al’s still chewing his gum?

Dejavue plucks one dry pretzel, then wanders around the corner to the art studio. On the walls seniors have concocted ripoffs of Grandma Moses and Picasso. Perched in cabinets, on table tops are ceramic clowns, ballerinas and kitties.

God save us!

The voice has followed Dejavue; she remembers the obituary: He studied art history upon leaving the military —

“Hawf! Hawf! Hawf! Hawf!” The strangest laugh, half hiccup and half spasm, bounces into the art studio. “Hawf! Hawf!” It belongs to a neurasthenic young Brit with a bad haircut and cheap tight jeans.

Do you think he ever had a girlfriend?

Ever polite, Dejavue suppresses a smirk. She too has wondered about the Nit Brit — her nickname for him — who guffawed like a ten-year-old at the classic Loony Tunes. In the third row center he always sat beside a diminutive crone, who could have been Nit Brit’s grandmother, but for her tinny Philadelphia accent.. Bent over, pale as a yellow onion, in clothes at least forty years behind the times — did she ever smoke, date a married man, have an abortion? Did she find Mr. G’s films scandalous?

Everybody’s been young once upon a time, young lady. Every kind of person’s here: professors emeritus, insurance salesmen, kindergarten teachers, housewives, film students from across the street, even a poetess — you!

Dejavue’s stream of consciousness continues: But ForeverAmbe r— that’s what I call her — annoyed you once. Was it “Last Year at Marienbad”? That was the only time I heard you snap or growl at someone.

ForeverAmber — that’s not bad, young lady — She probably reads mysteries because they always have a solution.

Eight o’clock. Thirty minutes to showtime. The snack bowls are emptied and stuffed again; conversation thickens like smoke. The ticket queue lengthens: middle-aged marrieds from the Northeast or New Jersey, students from West Philly, gay couples and the elderly from around the corner. A fortysomething chick is making more coffee: skin-tight grey exercise shorts and big ash blonde hair. Go-o-o grrrrrrlll! She looks like Mr. G.

No, she’s the daughter of the guy who manages this place. Known her for years.

A bony Greybeard trots after Blowsy Hera after pouring her coffee. Tone-deaf, he turns every last word of hers into applause. Dejavue has seen him around Center City. In the library. Borders Bookstore. Nose in the remainders like a praying mantis.

Joe thinks he can still wow’em. Any bets he’ll get her phone number?

Dejavue always avoids Blowsy Hera who sat down beside her one evening and blared, “That’s a gorgeous sweater! Handmade?! You always wear such great clothes!” Then the loud one opened her newspaper and inveighed against some bureaucratic conundrum somewhere.

Oh? It’s Saturday night and you don’t want to talk about police brutality or starvation in Africa or race riots in Great Britain or death row injustice, young lady? You want Marcello? Vicariously, of course?

Correct. Dejavue doesn’t go to the movies for her own biography.

A wiry senior, the only other black person at this memorial, keeps moaning he left his ticket home. The pretty West Indian student of French has not yet arrived. Nor the fiftysomething husband with his Pillsbury dough wife and their biracial prep-school son. Nor the African market queen with her huge wig. The chubby light-skinned woman with the obese preadolescent son is here, but she doesn’t count. A nurse for the man in a motorized wheelchair, she always rolls him to the front row and leaves before opening credits. The paraplegic is a massive pink lump with white close-cropped hair. Every week Dejavue still wonders what happened to him. Vietnam? A turnpike pile-up? A ricochet bullet? A degenerative disease?

At least he’s not a no-show, yet. Like me.

As usual Dejavue hugs the edges of the small-talk all around her. She avoids couples and introduces herself only to other solitary women beyond a certain age: the well-toned elder with a smoker’s baritone; the fragile senior with the crimpy ‘Sixties beehive; ForeverAmber, and a Russian emigre.

“I met you before at ‘Ivan the Terrible’. One and Two.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I used to live two blocks from the Soviet Embassy in the Bronx.”

“I drive to New York all by myself one time.”

Neighborly chitchat. But Dejavue feels cheated with Mr. G gone. His W.C. Fields face and cosmopolitan taste. How he grilled contemporary Hollywood: the fatty-acid sitcoms, blood-saturated thrillers, charred sizzlers! Costumed in winter plaid flannel shirts or summer short-sleeved polyester blends, he always gave first-class for a working-class price: five dollars for a double-feature. Chaplin and Bunuel, Renoir and Kurasawa. The last time Dejavue had wanted to thank him for “The Pagnol Trilogy,” but a pudgy patron stood in her way. Couldn’t get a word in edgewise, had to catch a one-hour bus.

Young lady, I’m just a fly on the wall. Never made a movie. Never my story.

And with that the voice rose like a happy face balloon, sailed back to the auditorium, to the top of the blank white screen, and watched his fans’ watch his last reel and testament, their swansong to themselves.

Row B, seat 3:
A bad seat. I’m late. The director was my great-uncle. Let me take a bow.

Row C, seat 9:
“The Third Man” blew me away. Christ! I grew up on MTV.

Row J, seat 12:
“The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” How can you hate the French?

Row J, seat 11:
There’ll never be another Alec Guiness. There’ll never be another Alistair Sims. There’ll never be another Terry-Thomas.

Row J, seat 10:
Terri Thomas? Who’s she?

Row E, seat 5:
You’re looking for something. You’re searching. I see you come here every Saturday with your aunt and uncle. It’s obvious. You telegraph it. But you won’t find it. You’re not satisfied with yourself, so you won’t find it. You have to accept yourself. I can help you. I’ve worked with people like you. I give classes. Small groups. One on one... I know you like me.

Row D, seat 1:
I knew it. He’s been sniffing around for months. I go to all the classic films, just like him. He cut his shaggy hair, dumped the old guy with walking T.B. He’s been sniffing for months.

Row E, seat 6:
Searching? I come here to watch cinema. With my aunt. She speaks four languages. And her husband. I like you?

Row G, seat 8:
“Potemkin”. “Pepe Le Moko”. “Roshomon”. I could go on all night.

Row I, seat 5:
Did you lock the car doors?

Row D, seat 1:
She’s attractive in an arty, Eastern European way. But she’s competitive, even with me. We’re all the same. Under the skin.

Row H, seat 20:
No French tonight, but I’m here. She’s here. Never more than two blacks. Each alone.

Row C, seat 3:
Yeah. I’ve got AOL. No phone?

Row D, seat 2:
I’m waiting for my birth certificate.

Row C, seat 3:
Birth certificate? To get a phone?

Row K, seat 16:
He always came with an old gent. Figured he wasn’t gay, but you never can tell.

Row J, seat 20:
Maybe you better “go” now —.

Row J, seat 19:
— “Music Man’s” got an intermission —.

Row J, seat 20:
— But you know how you are.

Front row, in the aisle:
— How did I lose my mobility? An accident. Isn’t everything? Heredity. War. It doesn’t matter. Who’s a spectator? Everybody’s in somebody else’s film. Everybody’s a director. A chair with a motor can zoom, pan, fade in, fade out, cut.

 

[END]

© 2004 Yvonne Chism-Peace - Contributor's Bio