MOVIE STRUCK.(movie fan narrative)(The Talk of the Town)

Tracking shot, please, of a twelve-year-old boy running north on Lexington Avenue as a 1933 twilight begins to fall. He is sprinting for home, on Ninety-third Street, and guilt makes him fly. He must be there in time to get a little homework under his belt before his old man arrives from the office, and in time to assume the bored, everyday look of a kid just back from his school's afternoon rec program, instead of from "King Kong" at the RKO 86th Street, where he has really been. Panting, he lets himself in the front door, checks out the mail for a Popular Mechanics, checks out the dog, grabs a banana, falls on his bed, opens a math book, and gives himself over to thoughts of Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray (Fay Wray!), jungle drums, aerial machine-gun fire, and the remembered velvety dark of a movie theatre in the afternoon. The thought Lucky again crosses his mind, and in time he may actually find a pencil and begin to write down fractions. The boy (he is me) went on being lucky. No one at home or at school ever twigged to his stolen movie afternoons, and for the rest of that school year, as in the year before, he made it down to the Eighty-sixth Street casbah a couple of times a week, where there were five theatres to choose from, each offering a double feature to deepen his budget of guilt and joy, make critical inroads on his allowance, and hook him, once and for good, on the movies. What I saw on those stolen afternoons (and, on the up and up, sometimes on weekends) was a cross-section of early-thirties Hollywood, which was just then coming into high gear. Paul Muni's "Scarface" and "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" slip into view, as do Cecil B. De Mille's "The Sign of the Cross" (with Claudette Colbert as a Roman temptress bathing in ass's milk), the Barrymores in "Rasputin and the Empress," Dick Powell in one of the Busby Berkeley musicals, the Marx Brothers (with the dopey Zeppo singing "Everyone Says I Love You" to Thelma Todd), the vine-borne Johnny Weissmuller, Jimmy Cagney shot dead in his pin-striped suit in "The Public Enemy," and Laurel and Hardy forced to share their bed with a chimp and a flea circus. One afternoon, I found myself alone in the dark with Bela Lugosi's pallid, orally fixated Count Dracula and realizing, even as I stared, that I wouldn't be able to call out for help that night, when he returned, in his cape and slippery hair, to break in on my sleep.

Quality was not much of a factor in my afternoon choices, but I had already noticed that although the flicks were clearly wasting my mind, as my father would have put it, they were richly nutritious to some other side of me. One bathed in this scummy Ganges and arose refreshed, with surprising memories. Most of my friends still go to the movies, but not many of them are moviegoers in this sense, and while I sometimes wonder at the prodigious thousands of hours I have spent in the popcorned dark, there is an avid, darting kind of selection one learns there--a process at once ironic and romantic which plucks up scenes and faces, attitudes and moments to save from the rush of events--that felt like a saving knack for those times and times since.

When I moved along to high school and then college, I found movie-permeated ...