picture show
Krista Eastman
In the olden days, in my hometown of Reedsburg, Wisconsin, my friends and I were told by Elmer V. Krueger, the lonesome proprietor of the Badger Theatre, that the movie would not play unless there were eight paying customers. A skinny tower of thick brown suiting, a writer of deeply felt verse, Elmer had been operating this theater since 1960. I know this and many facts of his life because he self-published in faux-leather binding an autobiography called Endless Echoes. It was one of a trilogy of his books that were always on display behind glass at the back of the theater, one of its pages open to the improbable sight of John F. Kennedy standing on the theater’s stage during a campaign stop in 1959, Jackie sitting beside him.
Endless Echoes compiles Elmer’s original poetry, his treasured Biblical verse, literary quotations, favorite psalms as well as favorite non-religious melodies, the nicknames of every kid he knew growing up (Biff, Slug, Zizzie, Mud, Goosey, Gusky), the number of people who attended Crocodile Dundee in 1987, the number who attended the sequel in 1988, photos of every theater employee, every note written in his high school yearbook, as well as the story of how Elmer became “an entrepreneur in small-town America during the Depression.” In brief, by the 1950s, Elmer was traveling from farm town to farm town nearly every night of the week showing movies outdoors with a portable projector, screen, and popcorn popper.
Meanwhile on Main Street, my three friends and I jumped up and down in our deep tans and the trendy T-shirts of the early 1990s as Elmer, pushing 80, sat inside waiting. We pointed with great exaggeration at the marquee, our mission to get four of the people passing by in cars to spontaneously consider going to a movie in the middle of the day. In other words, there we once were, half-formed instincts leaping for Hollywood, our pockets full of the cheaper candy we’d already bought from the gas station next door.
In Endless Echoes, Elmer writes:
How Fast Have Fled the Youthful Schemes, And The Times We Still Revere! Remembered Now as Memory Dreams In a Retrospect Sincere.
In this, my memory dream, we fail to summon the sufficient number of paying customers and then walk to a pay phone to tell my mom we’re standing on the corner, that the movie didn’t play. What happened then was that my mom rolled her eyes as only an analog mother could, muscling it through landline. If I were a real writer, you’d be watching this now on streaming and in the editing room they’d have added a nostalgic cast of light. Everyone’s cotton would look thicker and the physical world would appear simpler somehow, every edge of it purpose-made and built to last. Viewers would say to each other at parties, “Elmer!” “Oh my god, Elmer!” And, “What’s going to happen to him?” (Elmer will die in 2005 at the age of 92, following a lifetime of praying in churches named St. John.)
Meanwhile, the memory of the Badger Theatre lobby lives on for the purpose of haunting me. The oily babble of the sculptural water fountain in the corner, the display case lit to advertise Endless Echoes, Timeless Treasures, and Eternal Embers, the dark red carpeting
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almost imperceptible in the low brown light, then a short step down to sticky linoleum and a small glass case of candy, a popcorn machine, an ancient chest freezer full of ice cream favors. When you exited the theater, Elmer would be there in the lobby too. With restless perfectionism, with a knack for business, he’d spring from his low seat and ask, “Did you enjoy the show?”
I did. But what I’d like to do now is dwell forever in this dark theater, the sun rising and setting outside without me. I will win the lottery, you see, and then I will squander every easy penny restoring the theater to the way it once was, not to its original glory but to the dirty floor days of 1986 or 1987. I will sort through the orange push-ups while the ghost of Elmer toils endlessly around the edges of the whole affair, wiping down the glass case but also adding my photo into his thick scrapbook of employees. “Local Girl stocks the freezer with some of our most popular treats!” he writes. Elmer and I work well together because we have the same affliction, our nostalgia keeping us crisp and on task. We write and re-write our sequels, our prequels, our re-makes. Together we serve as guardians of self-published time.
Elmer puts his heart into it while my own spins with commonplace confusions about the pain of time passing. What is the break, the cut, between then and now, that I wish to delineate and weep over? Can it be located? What is the meaning of the story about waiting outside the theater? To say that something was once so simple, to show that at one time we used to wait for things? To confess that I remember that fruitless waiting with something like fondness?
Elmer writes:
Still Lives The Soul in Yesteryear, Recalling What Has Passed. Another Time Is Dawning Here! In Memory May It Last!
In the dawn of a new time, I restore the Badger Theatre and welcome everyone in—how I welcome them!—the nerds, the stoners, the Neanderthals, the Medieval European serfs. In my day, I tell them, in my day, we would wait outside if we didn’t have enough customers! I step onto the stage and in so doing pass Jackie O., who somehow remains in this unfashionable town, in her costly coiffure. Why don’t the Democrats visit anymore?, I ask, but she’s looking for someone, probably JFK. I’m reminding the audience that chewing gum is not allowed when a bat drops down from the ceiling and a kid employee runs down the long aisle, his goal to swoop the bat out the stage door with the bristle end of a broom. When finally the bat has flapped out and the crowd has stopped its roaring, a moment of low embarrassment creeps in as we realize it is our cheering during human mishap that entertains us better than anything.
Next we watch Back to the Future on loop for seventy-six hours. The time is long and so encampments form, messy but innovative efforts at achieving physical comfort on the floor or across the stiff little red seats. The nerds sleep a lot. The jocks of course like to throw stuff. The serfs and Neanderthals in particular laugh at things the rest of us strain to see and because of this, I spend large chunks of time scrutinizing their screen-lit faces. I see that the 1980s was nostalgic for the 1950s, the set to which Marty McFly time travels having been done up like cake. The windows of commerce sparkle, skirts flounce, a pre-Fall innocence suffuses even the dark little plot points of bullying and rape. The idea is that Marty’s accidental arrival in the past changes the future in a way that threatens his existence. The stakes are so high, the rising action so clean and quick, I think it’s clear to all of us we’re watching a classic in the making on repeat for days.
Eventually, the screen goes dark, the theater quiet. Someone says it’s flooding outside. Now we’re truly stuck in self-published
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time, on page 129 of Endless Echoes, in a section Elmer has reserved for jokes: “Well, says Uncle Louie, at least when I fix things, they stay fixed. I’ll say they stay fixed, snorted Aunt Minnie. When you fixed that cuckoo clock, next morning the cuckoo bird came out backward and yelled ‘What time is it?’” You have to wonder if this is a joke that will land with those I have assembled, in this atmosphere of confused measurement. What will make you laugh when the future is running funny, when it is failing to go on out ahead, eddying around you instead in turdy little waves of longing and regret?
I don’t have thoughts so much as a dippy well of endless reminiscences so I tell the crowd about what used to be funny, about how we used to laugh at granny jokes: granny on a skateboard, granny on a surfboard, granny at the drive-through window asking “Where’s the beef?” As kids, we played granny too. We’d pull on an itchy wig of tight gray curls, curve the spine, loosen the knees, take a cane and teeter around, our voices crumbling into the gravel of granny voice, our eyes flinty, dark, and aggrieved. In our dowdiest play clothes, we did the prevailing version of Old Lady, approaching our victims as we yelled “Listen here, sonny!” In the performance of granny, she always said that, existing as she did to scold and wallop, to hit the youth atop their heads with her bag of bitter candies.
The story rouses the Neanderthals. They indicate with voice and gesture that once they enjoyed this kind of thing too. Around their cooking fires, a whipper snapper would also evoke the physicality of the old, launching into culturally established portrayals of old lady. “Old Lady” would shuffle and stamp, shuffle again. Old Lady would make the call of a bird, caw-cawing with eyes turned skyward. Old Lady would pull out a tool she carried on her hip and without looking chuck it violently at the other
children. For us, the ensuing laughter would have been uncanny, issuing as it did from the throat of our familiar.
We’re all of us taken by this notion of a joke shared across time immemorial. We adore continuity! For what other reason do the time-sick gather? Amused, I attempt a call back. “WHAT TIME IS IT?” I squawk and hobble and spin, “WHAT TIME IS IT?” A sticky silence follows and I begin to doubt what I’d characterized as our common cause. In the absence of interested onlookers, I wrap up my project of pulling crowds of ghosts across the befuddling distances of time.
Time will not wait and it will not fold and it will not gather. You cannot seize it, not in costume nor in fantasy. What’s left for you but the carpeted palace of your sad, soppy yearning?
In the olden days, we experienced long lapses in manufactured entertainment. For example, you could go to the movie theater and not be let in. Other times, you’d be at the theater and a movie in progress would snap and lurch to a splotchy halt, the result of the film coming off the reel. There in the darkness we’d respond first with tentative confusion, wondering how it was we’d been flung from the wings of story. But then we’d recall the contract that had been made. In the recording we’d called before coming, Elmer promised laughter, a certain runtime, popcorn made with “real Reedsburg butter.” Though we lacked outrage and anonymity, we wouldn’t miss our chance to dwell in pandemonium. In the dark gap between reels, we would issue synchronized groaning and meaningless whooping, we would humor the teen boys who yelled innuendos in the dark.
For three minutes, maybe four, the movie wouldn’t play. The lights came on and some rose to cross their row of seats, picking sticky steps across a floor washed with ice cream, heading up the
worn carpet to the bathroom. The young lofted their feet high on the chairs in front of them and sank very low in their seats, the better to hatch their plans for the interim. The lapse provided time to scour the crowd, to notice couples still in the process of untangling baldfaced desire, to take notes and gossip and prepare a constellation of tiny tales for later. Who all was here? What all were they doing? The crowd calmed, began to bore slightly, the lobby filled, then a new rustle of candy packets being opened, of people handing another round of Red Vines down the row. Always near the entrance, Elmer’s three books remained illuminated in their case, a dusty little placard advertising their pleasures, noting they’re for sale.
I can’t overcome the distance between then and now but I also can’t stop imagining having done it, how the past could or should give way to a future that feels familiar, that recognizes itself, that steps forward to save us all somehow. If I could get back inside that old theater, could I do the impossible, could I push pause on the non-stop show of our dying? Could I get lost in my own thoughts again, the way I once did as a kid? Because I’d like very much to tell stories that are long and strange and dubious, that connect time to time to time, that contain nothing but the innocence of the amateur. Might I also say stupid things out loud? Because what I’d like is to approach the empty ticket booth of my youth and, in broad daylight, in full view of more reasonable persons, confess into the moony glass of days gone by: I didn’t know you could lose time like this. I never knew about that.
In the distance overcome, I’ll be the person who opens and closes the doors, who stands in front of the theater to let every creature and cosmology in. This time, I’ll make sure that the movie plays, that we hold tight to the minute we have for dreaming. I’ll summon everyone back into that theater so that altogether we can emerge from it once again. This time we learn from history.
This time we leave the oil in the ground. We walk outside after a matinee to find the odd sun surprising us. Or we walk out into the night and wonder out loud about the passing of the day. Do you remember that feeling? What time was it? This could be anywhere. We could be anyone.