Boulevard (13 page)

Mac greeted him by saying, very simply, “I'll fire you if I catch you looking at them movies all day.”

“Yes sir,” Newell answered, and his eyes focused on the cash register as he took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of last night's dose of carpet cleaner.

But he had never seen anything like that movie before, and all day he was seeing it in his head, the man unbuttoning his red flannel shirt and wrapping his belt around the shabby man's neck, pulling him forward so viciously, accusing him of something with these gestures, and the shabby man so willing to let this happen, to run his hands over the bare skin, the broad shoulders, images that would rise up in Newell's head so vivid he might have been standing in the booth with the next quarter in his hand. A few customers came in and bought magazines,
and as usual the men buying the magazines laid their money on the counter and looked down or away or up, while Newell slid the bright-colored magazines into a bag and felt himself embarrassed as much as anyone, because he was sure everyone could tell he was thinking about this movie, about these two men and what he had seen them do to each other. For it had become as vivid to him as if it had actually happened inside the little box with the screen on top of it, happened only this morning at the moment when he started to watch.

When the store closed, he balanced out the cash drawer in front of Mac, and it counted out to the penny as usual, but today Mac had mostly left him alone to run the cash register, and so the old man was particularly pleased with himself for having hired Newell. “I knew you was a kid with a brain. Most kids don't have a goddamn lick of sense.”

“I know,” Newell sighed.

Mac was counting the stacks of quarters from the movie machines, with the change boxes stacked beside him. “That movie you was watching made a lot of money today. People must like it.”

Newell shrugged. “It seemed like it was all right to me.”

“Maybe you have an eye for this stuff. What do you think?”

“Maybe I do.”

Mac handed him a roll of quarters and said, “Go back there and look at the rest of them.”

“I ain't watching the ones with the women in them.”

“Well, no shit, I already knew that.”

“All right,” Newell said, and turned and headed to the movie booths, while Mac leaned his chair back on two legs, his pants hiked up past the top of his socks and his bald white legs shining in the light.

By the time Newell came out again, Miss Sophia had arrived and started to clean. He had seen her before, an older woman with a big-boned body, cheeks sunken, mouth mostly toothless, given to wearing wigs and old party dresses while she cleaned the store. She sometimes spoke softly to Mac but ignored Newell, and tonight he hardly saw her as she emptied the waste cans and sprayed the front of the display case with glass cleaner. He had stopped after four of the movies, as much as Mac's roll of quarters would pay for, and he had seen things he never thought of seeing before. Two of the movies were very bad, featuring thin, pale, unattractive people fumbling with each other and stripping off their clothes, when Newell would have preferred they keep them on; and he watched these two movies dutifully. But the third movie was about a carpenter, a short man with black hair and a moustache and a solid, thick, carved body, bronze skin, brown eyes, who met a younger, taller man at his worksite, and took the young man back to his truck, the carpenter grabbing the younger kid pretty roughly, making him straddle the ladder that hung down from the back of the truck, and straddling the kid himself, and this all reminded Newell of the other movie, the
tree trunk and the two men facing each other across it, and the carpenter pushed himself into the lanky fellow, who made a face for the camera like something strange was happening inside him. He watched that one all the way to the end and decided to watch one more before he headed home.

The next movie was called
Night Crawler
, according to the sign on the door, and a picture above the words, torn out of one of the magazines, showed a man in shadow, back to the camera, hat pulled low over his eyes, a room of indeterminate size and shape, and the movie began exactly in that way, with the camera panning the room full of phantoms, then lingering on the bare back of the man, the curve of his deltoid, and when the man turned around, there was Rod the Rock, facing the camera, and Newell's breath left him and his heart began to thud against his ribs. He was grateful for the pause when he needed to put in another quarter because he could stand there, hardly able to believe it, before the image appeared, lagged, shook, steadied itself and became Rod the Rock again. Quarter after quarter Newell watched until he hadn't any more quarters, and he stood there with the whole tape, which he had seen through nearly twice before the money ran out, contained in his mind. But he refused to touch himself in the movie booth, because that seemed wrong to him, in some way. He waited till his excitement died down and headed to the cash register intending to ask for more quarters, until he saw the look on Mac's face, the expectancy.

“What did you think?” Mac asked, “which ones did you watch?”

So Newell told him that the first two movies had ugly people in them and that nobody would want to watch them, but the carpenter movie was pretty good. “But I really like
Night Crawler
. That's the really good one.”

Mac chuckled and said, “That one's been playing for six months and it's steady money every week. People like that guy or something. I don't know what it is.”

Miss Sophia had begun cleaning the store, running the vacuum along the carpet between the racks of magazines, wearing her favorite black wig, or at least the one that Mac claimed was her favorite, a big twisty high-combed number that made her look like a country music queen; she had wrapped a rag partway around her head, as she did sometimes to indicate she was on duty. She wore a white polyester one-piece pantsuit with flared bottoms and attractive white sandals, flats. Mac caught Newell staring at her, so Newell asked, “How old is she?”

“I don't know.” Raising his voice over the vacuum, he asked, “How old are you, Miss Sophia?”

She flicked her hair back casually, wrinkled her nose, and went on with the vacuuming. Mac laughed, and Newell, embarrassed, said good night to Mac and nodded to Sophia on his way out. He was struck by the strong, harsh bones of her face and the pale fuzz on her chin. Her nose, thick and bulbous, shaded thin lips. Because of the hairdo, which was falling as much as it was rising, Newell could not see her ears, but the lobes hung
down thick and fleshy, and long earrings hung down from the lobes and tangled in the hair; and while she could have been a woman with any of those features, Newell gaped at her in recognition. She bent over and he saw her cleavage, real as far as the eye could see, and he was confused again. So he left the bookstore with Miss Sophia in his head, instead of Rod the Rock; Miss Sophia with the body of an old woman and the face of an old man; and while he was walking away, he could not remember whether he had said good-bye to her.

July and August passed, and Newell settled into the routine of his job. He worked mostly on the day shift, running the cash register and helping with the stock. He made some changes in the store that Mac liked. At the entrance to the movie booths, Newell fashioned an attractive display featuring the titles of all the movies, as well as promotional photos when they were available. When Newell had watched a movie, he would write a short description of it on the sign, like “Hot lumberjack gets horny on a tree with bearded guy,” or something like that. The sign drew a lot of attention, and business at the all-men movies picked up. So Mac had him make the same kind of a sign for what he called the titty movies, and Newell did, though he still refused to watch them and could not write any descriptions.

One morning, watching the usual game of men choosing a movie, he noted that two of the men eyed each other and moved into the movie booth section together. One of them looked like the dark-haired man Newell had seen
before, Jack, in the courtyard. He wished he could guess which movie they were going to see together, and thought it might be the one about the house painter who comes in through the window and pulls down his white bib overalls to reveal a very large paintbrush. Newell had an instinct that the two men would choose this movie. Here was a force, in these magazines and in these movies, that drew so many people to go into the booths together. To do the same things in the booths as they were watching on the screen. To move from booth to booth, partner to partner.

Mac, who listened for a different sound, walked to the curtain at the entrance. “I don't hear no quarters falling into no machines in there. I hear a plenty else. You keep them quarters turning them movies, you hear?”

Back at the cash register he advised Newell, “You got to get so you can hear every coin drop in the slot. Else they'll stay back there and fuck all day and we won't make a dime.”

The pay gave Newell a charge, every week, the same extravagant stack of bills in cash, the same white envelope with the amount written on it, and Newell pocketed the bills and added them to the stack he kept in his room, in the wallet Uncle Jarman had given him. He paid his bills and had a lot left over, more than he had ever imagined. So he had a phone put in his room and bought new shirts and colognes and a gold chain like the one he had seen and some nice leather shoes and a shirt made out of linen. The linen shirt, a soft lavender color with
full sleeves and a narrow collar, felt so extravagant to Newell that he hung it in his closet and felt terrified at the prospect of wearing it, as though people would be staring at him and whispering, and so a couple of times he put it on, and felt self-conscious, and took it off and hung it up again.

One day in August, while he was counting the rolls of quarters in the safe below the cash register, a customer's shadow fell across him, and he looked up at the face of Henry Carlton, a five-dollar bill thrust forward in his stubby fingers. “Hey,” Newell said as he straightened up, “you want some change, I guess.”

“I didn't know you worked here.”

“I been working here since June. I never seen you come in before.”

“I haven't been by lately.”

“You want the whole thing in quarters?”

Henry nodded, and Newell counted them out. Henry started to speak, then ducked his head and turned away, and Newell said, “Look at that one about the artist model and the artist. Everybody is looking at that one. It has Roger. You know. From Blueboy.”

“Thanks,” Henry said, and slipped through the curtains. Some other people were already in the booths, and more people went in while Henry was there, and Newell was steadily counting out quarters. People were buying magazines too, and Newell was recommending the new Rod the Rock magazine
Chain of Desire
to a lot of people. They were asking about the movie, but Mac never
knew what would be available. Traffic in the bookstore remained brisk in spite of the rain, and Newell forgot about Henry until he appeared again, asking Newell what time he got off, and so Newell agreed to meet Henry at the Corral. When Newell arrived there, he pulled over an empty stool to where Henry was sitting, asking, “Well, did you like the movie?”

As Henry smiled, his face relaxed and he became suddenly very pleasant to watch. “It was all right. There was this man in the booth watching that movie you told me about, and I went in there with him, and honey, we had us a time.” He spoke quietly and matter-of-factly and rolled his eyes a bit, as if to show what a good time it had been, and it reminded Newell of the way Henry had walked off into the shadows in the warehouses that night after they went dancing.

“But what did you do?”

“You mean, exactly?” Henry giggled. The music in the room had suddenly got soft, and Henry leaned close and told Newell, in detail. Newell listened and tried to picture it. He made Henry repeat certain parts and explain. Who had remembered to bring lubrication, for example. How did they have room for so much action in those booths?

“The only problem is remembering to put in the goddamn quarter.” Henry arranged a series of matches on the bar counter in the shape of the letter N, and set fire to them, a flash of sulfur and flame. The letter burned into the polished wood of the countertop, where many other people had also burned their initials. The bartender, bobbing
back and forth to the beat, came over to inspect the handiwork and asked who that was for. Henry pointed to Newell, and the bartender said, “Welcome to the brotherhood,” dancing away again.

After that Newell went out often with Henry, which proved to be better than going out by himself. Each time, Newell felt something stirring in himself, most acutely when he happened to be in the same place as the beautiful blond man, whose face remained imprinted on Newell's memory, but at other times as well. Newell tasted the feeling and let it go, tasted it and let it go, again and again, while Henry hung out in the bathrooms and tricked in the stalls half the night. Henry was there for the night once he got started, so Newell went for air on the balcony upstairs, where a perfect stranger offered him a puff on one of the funny cigarettes. Newell held the smoke in his lungs till his ears were ringing, and when he let it out someone was shoving a bottle of popper under his nose and his head began to swim in circles.

Every time he went out with Henry he felt himself being pushed a little farther, and after a while he wondered how long it would be before he let someone back him into one of those stalls in the bathroom, before he let somebody get down on their knees in front of him, or else got down on his own knees, looking up at some stranger's face, as Henry so often did. But so far, Newell only stood and watched. So far, that was all he wanted to do.

Or did he want more? Did he know what this wanting was? This sheen of wanting that rippled across Henry's
face in the bathroom at the Corral, this hollow place to fill with something inside? Maybe this was why Newell traveled with Henry, because his hunger remained so palpable? Newell followed Henry and watched him and learned.