Dark and Other Stories by Mawyer Gary

Author:Mawyer, Gary [Mawyer, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gary Dale Mawyer
Published: 2012-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Balcony

About eighteen months later I got a phone call from a fellow named Phil, who introduced himself as the new manager of the reopened Alhambra Theater. They didn't call it that. The new name was The Movie Palace but we won't bother with any more new names. This is the story of the Alhambra.

Phil wanted to hire me as the assistant manager-projectionist. He would then be the manager-projectionist. Obviously the division between labor and management had broken down. "That's OK," I said. "I let my union membership lapse anyway."

This was not the only change. The theater would no longer have afternoon shows on weekdays. The manager-projectionists would each work five days a week. Obviously some days would overlap and we would both be there. On those days Phil would manage and I would project. In this division of labor Phil would have most of the business responsibilities and I would have most of the film prep and projector and equipment responsibilities.

I accepted at once. The pay was adequate and the hours were perfect. It was the old days all over again. The explanation for the adequate pay, of course, was the projectors themselves. Bennie was dead. He had retired and died like some human truism about work keeping you alive. A fully trained projectionist was not something optional in an antique theater with 1935 Simplexes. I was already the last living person who understood the crazy antique wiring. My first tasks were to train Phil and renovate the projector lamp houses from carbon arc to xenon bulb technology.

The projection booth was a little dusty but the projectors, Number One and Number Two, were still greased and ready to go from two years before, with my old thumbprints still on the gearboxes. The screen was the same, the curtain was the same, the switchboard was unchanged. I was amazed the new owners hadn’t rewired, but I guess that would have been a huge expense. They had re-upholstered some of the seats but the huge, dusty vertical space of the house still had the same old paint as ever. I had forgotten how big the theater was. There was the same old opera-sized stage behind the screen, and the orchestra pit and the hatch behind it leading into the corridor under the stage, the six dressing rooms, and the furnace room which also contained the old aircraft-carrier-sized air conditioner. At the end of the corridor the stairs to the back of the stage had still never been swept in human memory, just like before, and a very rusty iron door leading outside had not been opened very recently. Next to it the prop doors were frozen shut, beyond them the long-abandoned, unseen, rotting wharf of the loading dock.

I was able to tell Phil things he did not know; for instance, there was no structural steel in the building. At ground level the walls were immensely thick. There was the perfect slope of the house down toward the stage, and the perfect throw, as we called it, from the projectors on the lower balcony to the screen.

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