Little Boy Blues (18 page)

  Not Minding That It Hurts  

It was still hot outside when we left the movie theater. I had expected that. It was the darkness that took me by surprise. We had gone in while it was still broad daylight, and now it was full dark, an impenetrable darkness made even thicker and blacker by the humid heat of a late-summer night and the myriad tiny white-hot lights burning in the ceiling that projected well past the ticket booth, all the way out over the sidewalk, where the lights mapped a bright island on the concrete sidewalk. The ceiling supported an electric sign that spelled out, in a foursquare block-letter style, the word WINSTON, blazing in the night. Time had gotten away while I wasn’t looking.

“What are you waiting for, honey?” my mother said. “Let’s
go.”
I was stuck in that island of light. We had crossed the thickly carpeted lobby lined with wall sconces generating just enough illumination to make the small room resemble a cave. We had pushed through the lobby’s heavy metal doors draped in lush velvet curtains, passing out of the twilit dimness of the lobby into the abrupt brilliance of the outside foyer. And there, between the theater
and the real world, with my mother marching ahead, already almost to the sidewalk, I stopped to let my eyes adjust to the hot light that seemed to set the night on fire. The first things I saw when my vision returned were the heavy chrome and glass cases set into the walls flanking the foyer. Each case contained half a dozen stills from the film we had just seen, and every image shimmered like a tiny mirage. And there I stopped.

Mother was still speaking, but I barely heard her. I was too busy concentrating on the scenes depicted in those glass cases. My eye moved from one image to the next, dawdling the longest on Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence striding down a sand dune toward a dynamited train lying on its side in the desert. Beside it was one of Lawrence smeared with blood after butchering Turkish soldiers on his way to Damascus. The movie ate up all the space in
my head, addling me so thoroughly that I could not find words to express what I felt. I was not the same person who went into that movie theater, and I was having trouble catching up with myself.

Lawrence of Arabia
was by far the most complex film I had ever seen, starting with an early scene in British headquarters in Cairo where Lawrence was a mapmaker. A soldier pulls out a cigarette. Lawrence lights it for him and then lets the match burn all the way down to his fingers. When another soldier tries the same thing with a lit match, he drops it, exclaiming, “Ow, it ‘urts! What’s the trick?” Lawrence calmly replies, “The trick, William Potter, is not
minding
that it hurts.” A few minutes later, a black-clad Arab guns down Lawrence’s guide in the desert and then threatens to take his compass. “Nice English compass,” the killer says. “How about I take it?” Lawrence says, “Then that would make you a thief.” Impervious to pain, brave, resourceful—Lawrence’s exploits looked like the stuff of Boy Scout training manuals. Then, a bit at a time, it all came undone. He lost his Arab army and then his confidence. The capture of Damascus from the Turks felt hollow, even to me, although I wasn’t ready to give up on Lawrence. I walked out at the end not knowing what to think. Part of me was still mentally charging toward that wrecked train. But another part of me grappled with Lawrence’s uneasiness in his role as hero. I didn’t know quite what to make of him—it would be years before I understood that I wasn’t supposed to—and this disturbed me, had been disturbing me, in fact, since the movie started.

No sooner had the opening credits disappeared off the screen than Lawrence got killed in a motorcycle accident. The death of the hero in the first five minutes of a movie was not something I was used to, and for a while I nursed the hope that perhaps he would come back to life, injured but alive. But no: the rest of the
movie, all three hours plus, was a flashback. And in case you forgot how it all started, the filmmakers had inserted a scene at the very end where Lawrence, on his way home to England from Arabia, sees a motorcycle—the very instrument of his death—coming toward the car in which he’s riding.

“Honey, hurry up!” I looked up out of my reverie to see my mother standing fifty feet down the sidewalk, waiting for me to catch up. Reluctantly, I followed her, and as soon as I passed from that pool of light—that enchanted territory—the spell was broken. The vividness—so intense that almost fifty years later I can still remember almost every detail of that movie and every detail of what I felt while watching it, even what I ate and drank while I watched—all that vanished in the split second in which I passed from light to dark and hurried to catch up with my mother.

I stared at the grille on the dashboard. It was a grille for a radio, but there was no radio in our car. That Plymouth was built in 1952, the year I was born, when radios were still optional luxuries on automobiles, although I didn’t know anyone else who didn’t have a car radio except my Uncle Tom, and with him it just seemed part of his preacher profile: black Chevrolet, black suits and black lace-up oxfords that he wore even on vacation.

“How did you like that?” Mother asked me.

“I liked the part where they blew up the train.”

“That was good,” she said without much enthusiasm. She looked over. “Did you rinse that thing out like I told you?”

I was holding a plastic orange fitted with a green straw that I had bought at the concession stand. It said Weeki Wachee on the side and it had held orange soda.

“Yes’m.”

“Not many girls, though, hmm?”

“What?”

“You mean to tell me you didn’t notice there weren’t any women in that movie?”

I didn’t answer right away. This was one of those questions that had hooks in them. When my mother liked something—a person, a movie, a flower arrangement—she said so. I always liked that about her, and almost always agreed with her. Lately, though, the assuredness that I admired in my mother had begun developing cracks. About the time I turned eleven, she had stopped saying what she thought so forthrightly. She had taken to asking questions, and that usually meant some kind of trouble. It could mean that she didn’t like the movie we had just seen. But it could also imply that she was unsure, that she was waiting to hear what somebody else thought before she cast her vote. Her trick, I had learned, was not to appear indecisive. Don’t be wishy-washy, she told me over and over. “Remember what they said about your great-grandfather: ‘He was a man of strong opinions.’”

“What would a girl do in that story? And it was true, right? A true story?”

“Well, you’ll be noticing quick enough.”

I hated it when people talked like that, told me I’d be shaving soon and looking at girls—treating me, in other words, as though I were still a little boy. Coming from my mother, it was even more galling, because over the course of the last year, I had become her confidant. With my father out of the picture more often than he was in it—I knew better than to ask when he’d be coming back—she had begun talking to me as an equal, confiding in me about her fear of being alone, of how to make ends meet, about the peril and the embarrassment of living with an unreliable alcoholic.

I shouldn’t call it confiding. As far back as I could remember, my mother was a talker. But lately, she had begun rattling on all the time. She talked when I was in the room and she talked when I wasn’t. It was a monologue that never stopped, a litany of complaint and worry and unhappiness without end. I didn’t know what to say to any of this, and luckily no response seemed required, although I was determined that I would never let her down, that I would step up and help out and be responsible. But then in the next breath, she’d be asking if I’d done my homework or telling me to get to bed or pick up my clothes or be nicer to one of her friends. It was all very confusing, and all I knew was that I was sick of being a kid. More than anything, I wanted to be grown up.

My mother, though, never talked for long about anything having to do with sex, and without any prompting from me she changed the subject.

“Thank you for doing such a good job on those bulletin boards.”

Before the movie, we had spent the day in her classroom, getting ready for the first day of school. I put up her “Welcome Back!” bulletin boards around the class, cutting the letters out of construction paper and then using the leftover paper to cut leaves and stalks of corn. I wanted to draw a horn of plenty, but she said that could wait until Thanksgiving.

It was the end of August, and still hot, even at night, so I rolled my window down and hung my head out to catch the breeze. By propping my elbow on the armrest, I could put my whole head out the window.

“Be careful, honey.”

“I’m fine, Mama.”

“Where did that ‘Mama’ come from? Who says ‘Mama’?”

“You called your mother ‘Mama.’”

“I just think Mother is so much prettier, don’t you? Pull your head in.”

I unlatched the vent window and angled it to get the breeze on my face.

“Are we going to the diner tonight?”

“No, honey, it’s Monday, the diner’s closed. We’ll go to the K&W. The line won’t be long now.”

During the school year, we ate out almost every night because Mother said she was too tired to cook after teaching all day. We ate at two restaurants, alternating between a diner just up the highway from the apartment and the K&W cafeteria across town, where I slid my tray past the salads as fast as I could, heading for the relative safety of the fried codfish and chicken livers and roast beef (“Hon, you want the aw juice with that?”). Going out to eat every night was never special to me, it was simply what we did, another part of our routine, like church or Boy Scouts. I liked it at first because I got to order dessert every night. I learned to like it a good bit more once I discovered that eating my supper in restaurants made me the envy of my schoolmates, or at least, for once, an object of no more than benign curiosity. I hated being different, hated answering questions about why my father was never around, or why he didn’t have a job, or why he had a different job this month, or why my mother had to have a job at all. Here, at last, was an instance where being odd-man-out made me look exotic and sometimes even cool.

We passed a pool hall, and the sight brought to mind a scene from the movie in which Lawrence, back from the desert, is walking through the officers’ club in Cairo and breaks up a snooker game in progress by grabbing the cue ball and smashing it into
the other balls. The aggressive awkwardness of the gesture spoke to me. Lawrence was not like the other soldiers. He said the wrong things at the wrong time. People rolled their eyes behind his back. But he was a hero, a smart man who didn’t fit in but succeeded anyway.

“I said—are you listening to me?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m listening.”

“So what was the message?”

“To be brave?”

Movies—stories of any kind, really—had messages; so I was always taught. Bible stories, fairy tales, movies—everything had a point, like a sermon. Travis had to learn to kill Old Yeller even though he loved him once Old Yeller got hydrophobia (which, along with quicksand and rattlesnakes, mainstays of my Western movie diet, were all things of which I was deathly afraid). No one who took me to the movies ever so much as acknowledged the possibility that it might be enough to be saddened by the respective fates of Old Yeller and Travis. I had to learn that for myself and it took an embarrassingly long time, as long as it took to learn that there are some stories from which we learn little or nothing, but that those stories are good stories, too.