Murder Read online

  My father was not like other fathers or other men. Not in our town he wasn’t. He wasn’t a professional, so had no contact with those who were; he was not a union boy and had no contact there, either. He was not in retail or had a clothing store—there were plenty of those. He had a theatre; it was a sacred duty to him, to do what his mother needed him to do. That is, in a certain way he had no other life—and we were left to decide who we were. My family is a strange combination of children who grew up really without a father because he had almost no time for us. Nor was he distinctive of any class. So we grew to adulthood, my brothers and sisters, where some of us were middle class and some were working class. That is, whom we strongly identified with was very much different among children born a year or two apart to the same mother and father.

  Back to the drive-in—here where I walked, cleaning the lot on those summer days, alone, using a stick with a nail as a spear, picking up paper cups and empty containers, used prophylactics, as the wind blew dust up in little squalls—saddened by the emptiness of it all—that was where my father’s soul was—where it had to be. It was up there on the desperately blank plywood screen—that looked fifty or sixty feet high—where heads would appear at night as big as tractors, and cars in our lot, filled with moms and dads and squabbling kids, would be watching from far below.

  My father’s soul could and would be nowhere else. His family had the business in town and he borrowed the money—so much money then for him he showed my brother and I the cheque in some astonishment, and bought one more outlet to entertain the public. But it was a public he had not that much to do with.

  I often watched him with other men, hoping that he had a connection with them—with any of them, really; with anyone at all, really—and he never quite did. The only things he had a connection with were in celluloid, up there, in the night. That’s where he belonged, from the time he was born. In the end I don’t think he really belonged anywhere else.

  Everything he did he had to do himself, learn by himself and measure for himself. There was no one to help him. His father was a diabetic patient of Banting and Best, but died in treatment in Montreal in 1923. There is a rather short but poignant letter I have from the doctor there—given to me by my cousin Catherine, a notice of his death written to my grandmother. That is all I have of my grandfather, and what my father had of his. He left behind a wife and three children, and a small business in a nondescript part of the world, a world away from the world he must have envisioned for himself when he left England over a decade before. My father walking the drive-in yard in 1961 was the benefactor and also the victim of that world, bringing what must have seemed like exotic places and climes to our hometown. That and the fact that he reminded his Irish stepfather of the English bloke Janie McGowan had first married were some of the reasons for the hundred beatings he took.

  But he never spoke of that once to me; or to anyone, really. But it did make him more devoted to his mother, and to the business that he came back to help run after the Second World War. That is when his narcolepsy became noticeable. His sleeping sickness. Perhaps it was his escape. But he was grounded from flying a Spitfire and remained on duty in London.

  He was a big man with a barrel chest, and large hands. He could have been a stagecoach driver like his own grandfather, or a woodsman like some of his uncles. He could have worked the docks, but all of that had been in a way denied him. It is strange to say that kind of work was denied him, when the work in a business was granted. But in a way that is how I feel when I think of him. Friendships were denied, as well. His must have been a lonely adolescence. When we were children and played hockey—or when my older brother who had some real talent did—I would see him at the games, cheering, usually alone. Sometimes with another man his age, who would look upon him as a curiosity Someone who may have grown up beside him but had formed no meaningful relationship with him.

  But he had a relationship with the movies. He explained to me once, and it took him a good twenty minutes, how they were now making the dinosaur monsters better—oh yes, long, long before Jurassic Park. They were able to make them look more alive. He was pleased with that, and pleased when later after I saw the movie he touted, I told him I believed he was correct.

  “Yes—they swing their tails better now—and their eyes move so you almost believe they are looking at you,” he said. It was almost as if he was going to say, “What will they think of next?”

  Of course he was always comfortable with children, because hundreds surrounded him every week at movies and matinees. Sach and the Bowery Boys; the Little Rascals; Abbott and Costello. He ran those on long-ago Saturday afternoons at our theatre downtown. There might be snow and wind outside, but in the darkness of that hall, children could imagine the world away on city streets, see New York and London, fly to the jungles of Africa. The children cheered and yelled, and traded comic books before the lights went down. Almost every Saturday someone lost someone. Or something.

  “My sister lost her mitten—it’s red.”

  “Have you seen my brother—he has freckles.”

  “I lost my money for my bag of chips—and now I can’t get a bag of chips.”

  The child would get a bag of chips.

  He was always patient with them; his relationship with children came because in some way—in some deep, hopeful way—I believe that is where he could hide. He could hide in the children’s movies that he ran on a Saturday afternoon, and be ten or twelve years old all over again. He could hide there and not be beaten—or alone, because so many children gathered around him now, like friends he never had when a boy.

  He never fit into the adult world he was forced to live in. Oh, he pretended he did, and people very well might have thought so, but we his own children knew better.

  He had never been allowed to. It is strange, but sometimes I think there might have been one movie he was looking for—the proverbial movie he could hide in, as well.

  From thirteen to sixteen I worked at the drive-in in the summer months, got my paycheque out of petty cash—sometimes a nice twenty-dollar bill along with a five and a two. I would hand french fries out, or hand out speakers down at the ticket shed—that is, when we stopped having speakers attached to the poles and had them stored in boxes. The workers came and went, the cooks, the canteen staff, the projectionists, all of them or many of them living off petty cash, as well, as close to Hollywood and fame as any of us would ever get, I suppose.

  His favourite actress was Irene Dunne. And Bette Davis. He loved Alan Ladd in Shane and Gary Cooper in High Noon. He ran Moby Dick again, and Gone with the Wind. The only problem with Gone with the Wind was just after Butterfly McQueen said, “Oh, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies,” the screen went dead. Our projectionist tried to find the last reel, but it wasn’t there, and finally my father told the patrons to come back tomorrow night at the same time; the last reel would be found, and they could listen to Clark say to Scarlett, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  And before they left, he would give anyone who wanted, a free french fry and a Coke.

  When people showed their displeasure, they lay on their horns, and flashed their lights. Some, when the speakers were still attached to the poles, would drive away and tear the speakers off.

  * * *

  —

  I am not exactly sure if we ever got the last reel of Gone with the Wind that time around. But slowly my father’s business was up against it—slowly the engine of progress worked against him, against open-air theatres in general—slowly the age of theatres became streamlined and monopolies began to take control. Just as when my grandmother a generation before had to face her adversaries and borrow money against her business from a lumber baron so she would not be forsaken, and travel to Montreal to get the monopoly on the talkies, now others were coming along. Famous Players asked to buy my father out and he said no. But you see,
a movie theatre exists of first runs. You have to run a movie before your competition if you want to stay in business. So we closed the Opera House because of television, and then little by little the Uptown lost its place among the corporations, and he started to lose his first runs. The distributors for Fox and Paramount, and MGM made contracts with the Famous Players theatre across the river, and he was left with United Artists. He struggled on. He would not give up or in. He was protecting his mother’s legacy and that of his father, who he remembered only slightly as a shadow of a man in bed.

  One night he took a shotgun and went across to the drive-in to sit in the canteen to stop the break-ins into our stock room that the police didn’t seem able to solve. He was, as always, alone—and of course the ragamuffins who worked for him had relayed the message to those who stole from him that he was sitting there with a shotgun. So that night no bandits came.

  He had not caught on to what I knew from the time of ten: the idea of where loyalty laid.

  One of the real reasons he lost his first runs at the theatre is that he could not afford them. In a small town like ours you might get away with showing a first run for five days—but to be told you had to run it longer or you could not get it—or if you did get it for five days like you asked, you would have to pay the company 60 percent—meant that your profit margin was so slim it wasn’t worth it. But if you didn’t take it, then you would not be considered an outlet for their product. That is, they would take other movies from you. This was the debacle my father began to face when he became a sole independent. They wanted him gone, in one way or the other. And he, as always, was alone.

  Little by little then, little by little, flesh took over the screen. Perhaps he didn’t even notice. The Hammer films of the fifties and sixties, where the tops of the ladies came off during an earthquake or being chased by a monster; to the Story of O and other semi-erotic masterpieces of the late sixties and early seventies, like Emmanuelle or the more elaborately and openly sexual 99 Women. In these movies, the women were submissive and open to all suggestion, from titillation to anal sex to whippings. If they were not open, they were as repressed as nuns. But many of these movies took place in convents, so the nun’s erotic predilections could be exposed, as well. The men were supposedly all-knowing, sexually urbane, often middle aged and wearing something like corsets to hide their stomachs, where learning to have intercourse in a hundred different positions was the high point of their civilized behaviour, and showed that all was and were equal. All other human emotion was absent except sexual mimicry. But you see, it was all still verboten. That was the secret of it—exciting because it was all still taboo. The sex comedies were always in my mind the most mindless—showing that sex was profane, naughty and a sin, while pretending it was all for a good laugh and bashing the ministers of the church and the church ladies who in secret performed oral sex on young seminarians. (ha ha ho)

  The drive-in movie theatres were always open to those movies, showed them for one reason: to have cars by the poles. I am not sure I can detail how it came about—except to say a new independent strain of movie was happening, with many divergent asides, believing it was an exercise in expression and sexual liberation. This looking back was as nonsensical as some of the queries of the new #MeToo movement today, the new safe-space attitude of young women and men—but it all comes from the same place if you look closely enough at it. The regimental idea of who we are supposed to be forced upon us by popular culture that ends in a kind of hysteria, and will not stop until there is a sudden shift of focus. Then it will seem as pallid as most other things, and be exposed for what it is. Seeing these movies again, on the internet, is to realize how pallid and infantile most were—and how easy the dark web can transport you from those movies into the darker regions of our psyche within a minute—and how essentially all these movies can be brought into any home at any second of the day. There is nothing at all upsetting about most of it, excepting when they insist it frees one. For the price is always there, to be paid, somewhere in some way by everyone. And the last thing they offer is freedom.

  This was all a part of the mechanization of art and the mechanization of sex.

  That my father walking the grounds of the lonely drive-in and giving out free coffee on a cold May night was a part of this revolution that wasn’t a revolution would surprise him. But he hung on to it, to keep going. Just as he hung on to his theatre in town when there was no longer any hope. He wouldn’t close it down, even if it meant it only operated three nights a week. Or two. Even if it meant he had to travel to Moncton to find what happened to a picture from Paramount or MGM that wasn’t delivered because someone in a Famous Players theatre wasn’t going to put it on the bus to a theatre that was not part of their cabal. Or they would put part of the movie on the bus to us—the first two reels—or the wrong movie—the movie he ran only a week before. It would circle back to him in grave hilarity, at his own expense. There he went in his car, sadly chasing these elusive reels to bring them to a theatre where everything else seemed to be in death throes, too. The mills were going, the air base, the mines—all was being diminished in the name of a progress we couldn’t keep up with, while new television satellite dishes bloated our grey skylines, and videos replaced television programming itself.

  He became a man doing a job that no longer seemed to count, while protecting the memory of his mother, who the younger generation no longer remembered. Yet he prided himself in doing; believing, I suppose, that one could kick a dead horse.

  The drive-in screen blew down and he had to build a new one. He built a new canteen that still sat alone in the middle of a great, empty lot; that looked as part of a movie set as any from a thousand movies he ran. From those old Westerns, or the movies of the man on the run—which was so much a part of the American experience that it became a Canadian one.

  He struggled to pay the heating bills at the theatre in town. He struggled until he operated it only three nights a week.

  Now the staff at the drive-in became younger, and even more transient than before. The cooks came and went from the fryers, the projectionist changed, all was open to vagary. For a while he had the help of my younger brother, who along with a few dedicated young people steadied the ship, played dusk-till-dawns. But Duane Eddy guitar solos gave way over the intervening years to Marilyn Manson without my father really noticing. He put up the prices on hot dogs and hamburgers stingily, asking for a dime or fifteen cents more. That would keep us going, he supposed.

  Then his wife, Margaret, our mother, died, and I suppose that was the end. He never drank before—ever. He began to. He never missed a night at the theatre or the drive-in—he started to. To him there was nothing much left. Maybe a million miles of film his own brother as projectionist had put through the reels, waiting for the change-over signals while smoking a Player’s Filter. Now that didn’t matter, either. Maybe every time he played a risqué film like Peyton Place, in 1958, he made sure he played some Christmas special for the nuns to come en masse and sit their bums in the seats. That was his penance, I suppose. That did not matter, either. Whatever film played there were no more trips down to Saint John to haggle with the distributors.

  That my grandfather’s grand piano sat in the silence, near the golden curtains of the Uptown’s large screen, waiting for some maestro to play, showed the end of an age had come.

  * * *

  —

  He sold out—for next to nothing. Thousands and thousands of dollars less than what he might have received. It was as if once he let go, left it behind, he did so for good. He wanted to rid himself of everything. Especially his guilt over our mother’s death. After our mother died at fifty-eight years of age, what else mattered? And so, nothing did or seemed to. You see, he always thought, assumed, she would be there—for she always had been. She had stuck with him when many others would not have: a man obsessed with a business where he was never home—at the office during the day, and at
the hall at night. At the end he must have realized how the business had destroyed their lives. For it had, as business will. He did not realize that until it was too late, and not being an articulate man—he never was—it was just one more thing he could not articulate. For a while he said he wanted to kill the doctor who botched the operation—for the doctor had done exactly that—but that gave way to silence and sadness.

  At night he would watch videos of old movies that took him back to other days and times, of Casablanca and Key Largo, of Judy Holliday and Barbara Stanwyck, that he would watch in the semidarkness of the den, alone—his wife dead and children now gone. Alone as he had been most of his life.

  An entertainer with no one left to entertain, and all he once entertained with out of date.

  The last few years of his life he actually made some friends, and knew some people. His sadness might have gone away—I am unsure if it ever really did. He took trips now and again, showed up places. He went out and played cards, and had a companion.

  After he died, however, people did remember him. People wrote and told me tales of how he was the man at the theatre who had been kind to them when they were a little girl or boy—that they had lost their money and he had let them in for free, or bought them a bag of chips and a Coke; or that he caught them sneaking in and told them to go take a seat. That he was always there for them week after week—that he never was cross—or even when he was, they knew he didn’t mean it. That once he went down all along the seats looking for a young girl’s mitts. That you could not really not like a person like that; that in a way, inside his theatre, in those days, way back when, you could tell by his smile he was full of love.