Wages: Lure of the Cinema

[This is the sixth of 14 excerpts, running Tuesdays and Thursdays, from John Armstrong's memoir of the working life: Wages.]

Things were tight. There were no bottles to cash in and worse, none to empty. We thought twice about answering the door because the rent was late, and only the barest minimum was ever paid on the utilities, just enough to keep the service on while the balance grew like a tumour. Every time I turned on the television I waited for the picture to come up with held breath. Had the cable been cut off? No, thank Christ -- there was People's Court. TV made extreme poverty bearable, it ate up the hours and calmed the soul. Without it we would be forced to stare at the rug and consider just how serious things were but with it the days bled by and the seasons changed.

One day, soon, this would have to be addressed, but not today and maybe not tomorrow. If this bad patch could just be endured surely the great wheel would go round and something would come up. But it didn't and there was no escaping the grim truth. Six years after my last attempt at daily employment and just turned 26, I was looking for a job. Within a day or two I had one. It had been lying in wait for me.

A musician I knew worked three or four hours each morning cleaning a theatre and the guy who helped him had disappeared. It was mine if I wanted it. I wouldn't go that far but I needed it — what I wanted was neither here nor there, and, after all, I would still be in show business.

The Regal was a second- and third-run theatre a dozen blocks from my apartment. My friend Tony told me to be there at nine the next morning.

"Wear some grubby clothes," he said. Well, fine -- they were all grubby. Laundry was an extravagance I had cut out some time back. If I spent the morning washing and scrubbing the theatre I'd end up cleaner than when I started.

Morning: an evil rumour

I went to bed that night oddly excited, as if tomorrow were the first day of school. I was young, smart, charming if it suited my purpose -- there was no reason I had to stay a janitor. This was just an in, a way to get through the door. By the time I finally fell asleep I was planning the schedule of movies I'd book when I ran the place.

Eight a.m. was an hour I'd only heard about, an evil rumour. I vaguely remembered it from the last time I'd worked a straight job but time had dimmed its horror. Everyone I knew was on the graveyard shift; they only got up before noon if they had an appointment with the welfare worker or a court date. Half the time I had to leap out of bed to make the corner store for cigarettes before it closed at five. I'd forgotten all this, the sudden start when the alarm went off, the search for clothes while half-asleep, the bed calling you back with a wink and crooked finger, the girlfriend snoring in it. I wanted to smother her with the pillow.

We had no coffee. I drank a glass of water and was out the door, somehow late. Outside the streets were filled with people, warming up their cars, men scraping frost from the windows with one hand and holding their ties safely out of the way with the other. Men with lunch kits and hardhats waiting at the bus stops with impossibly beautiful, clean women, secretaries and office workers, their lipstick glowing like airplane lights in the grey morning, perfectly erect on high heels and clutching matching purses, as if a herd of starlets were all on their way to a movie set. I was moving in a daze through them, plodding along at the bottom of the ocean while they were on the shore.

The first thing Tony did every morning was make coffee at the theatre concession stand and smoke a few cigarettes before getting down to it. That seemed sensible to me -- this wasn't anything you wanted to rush into. Mops, rags, buckets, vacuum and polishing machine were all collected in the lobby waiting for us. While we considered the day Tony gave me the details. The owner was named Bhupinder, and he had the place running seven nights a week. He had an abundance of children and relatives to keep the place staffed, so many it hardly made sense to close. They must have drawn the line at cleaning, though, which is where we came in. I had pictured a relaxed affair, strolling the aisles and picking up the odd candy wrapper and stray popcorn kernel. It was nothing like that.

Condoms and false teeth, needles and urine

The Regal ran continuous showings of double and triple bills from early afternoon, when tickets were $2. For that you could stay past midnight. It was a flop-house with a big screen and jujubes. People lived there -- eating, drinking, fighting, fucking, shitting, dying, setting up camp in little enclaves of seats like tribal nations. The staff kicked them out in the early morning after the last show to wander the streets and we came in a few hours later to clean up the mess. Every morning, seven days a week and 365 days a year, for $100 cash every Saturday. It was a life sentence -- it wasn't yet 9:30 of my first day and already I saw myself, grey-haired and bent, shuffling through the lobby with a bottle of Windex and snot in my moustache.

Bhupinder was there at 1 p.m. every day to settle the books from the day before and the place had to gleam when he arrived. Not that the customers cared so long as it was warm and dry, but he took great pride in his theatre. The audience was a collection of half-wits, pensioners, drunks, exhausted whores and madmen but we prepared for them as if they were stars arriving for a premiere. Every night they tore the place to pieces and every morning we put it back together and polished it to a shine. By the time we were finished they were back for their turn. Empires could rise and fall and mountains erode while we continued our mad, pointless dance to the end of eternity. The dead would be called from their graves to stand before God and we would still be there, scraping chewing gum off the seats.

Tony finished his coffee and said it was time to start. It was a testament to human will what they could do to the place in one night and the sheer mountain of crap in the aisles alone was staggering. You needed a shovel. Not just candy wrappers and popcorn but an archaeological dig's worth of inexplicable objects: condoms, socks, syringes, false teeth, human teeth, mickey bottles, baby bottles, a dog collar, empty wallets and purses, clothing, odd shoes, piles of shit where someone had hunkered down and let fly right onto the carpet, half a cheese sandwich, a wrench, a paperback novel torn into shreds, a plastic bag full of cigarette butts, a soft drink cup filled with piss and the lid carefully replaced, pools of blood and discarded bandages. I found a small, cardboard candy box full of human hair and a masking tape label on the top that said "Mother" in ball-point pen.

Every day was bad but Saturday mornings were worse. Friday nights the theatre kicked the usual assortment of human trash out a little earlier so they could run midnight showings of concert films and cult movies.

The concert shows generated about the usual destruction, and in the rubble we usually collected a few half-full liquor bottles and plastic bags of dope and pills, which made the day a little more bearable. It was the cult movies that nearly did us in. Every seat was filled and the audience brought bushel bags of crap to throw at the screens. When an actor said "Will you marry me?", they pitched rice at the screen. Someone proposed a toast and they threw bread by the case-lot. When the characters were caught in a storm, the crowd shot water guns at each other. There was a character named Scott in one, and if someone said his name the patrons tossed rolls of toilet paper. That wasn't so bad -- I lugged garbage bags full of toilet rolls home every weekend. I could shit my brains out for a year and never run short. But the rest of it made an unholy mess by the time they'd poured wine and beer onto the stuff, on top of the usual mountain of trash, and ground it all in under their heels -- laughing their asses off all the while, no doubt -- having a gay old time. We weren't so amused.

A bucket of blood

Once we found an impressive puddle of blood behind the stage, which was really only a four-foot concrete pony-wall underneath the hanging curtains for the screen, with storage behind it. There was no stage, although it looked convincing from the aisles. We kept all the heavy equipment behind it, the floor polishers, steam cleaner, rakes and other tools too cumbersome for the janitor's closet. It was a mortal wound, from the size of the pool, as if someone had gutted a hog there while the movie ran, and took many buckets of bleach and water to swab away. I hadn't seen this much blood when I was on the killing line at the chicken plant.

When Bhupinder came to open the theatre he went straight to it.

"You get this all clean?" he said, scuffing the concrete floor with his toe.

"It took a while. What the hell happened?"

Bhupinder had a low opinion of white people, and who could blame him given the ones he saw nightly? This hadn't done anything to raise it.

"We showing Led Zeppelin and just like usual, all yelling and drunk. Then I find him when I walk through."

Bhupinder always did a quick tour through the seats before he closed up the place. If someone lost a wallet he wasn't going to leave it for us to find. He heard weak moans when he got down by the screen and found some long-haired kid, about 16 or 17, lying in his own blood. After the ambulance left, the cops had questioned the kids hanging around out front and told Bhupinder the last anyone had seen of this guy he'd run down the aisle waving a bottle, shouted "Rock and Roll!" and leaped up onto the stage. He never came back and his friends figured he'd been tossed out. Instead, those young legs cleared the wall and took him right over it, into the tools and equipment waiting in the darkness, They had plenty of sharp edges by themselves, which had apparently half scalped the lad, but he'd smacked his head pretty good on the floor and impaled himself on his bottle in the bargain, driving some nice shards into his chest. No-one heard his whimpering over the movie and he just lay there pumping blood until Bhupinder came upon him. He said the guy looked like he'd been flayed and beaten. We couldn't stop laughing. Bhupinder was a little shocked at our glee and there was no explaining it to him, any more than I would have understood why he had a bone-deep hatred of certain East Indians, whether he'd actually met them or not.

Nine kinds of ungrateful bastard

For the first while I was responsible and adult, rising early enough to calmly prepare for the day and enjoy the walk to work. I was filled with self-righteous pride. I cleaned the theatre, went home and was in my bed at a decent hour. I was a working man and a signatory to the social contract. I could have filled a fleet of zeppelins with the air of smugness I radiated. It was all a crock. I rehearsed or played shows almost every night and my vows of diligence and sobriety were doomed. In less than a week I was living my old life at night and struggling to get through my new one by day....

The alarm went off. I sprang from bed like an electrocuted frog and went to the bathroom to throw up and take a shit. I gulped a glass of water and was out the door, still half-drunk, fly open and stumbling up the street, clothes rank with greasy sweat, leaning on a parked car to puke again, eyes watering from the exertion. This was far too much excitement so early in the morning for a man in my condition. And all this had to be endured just to get to the job, which loomed ahead like the Augean stables.

The trick to work, it seemed, was never to consider the big picture. When the alarm wakes you, think only as far ahead as the toilet. While pissing think only of coffee and while drinking it try not to think at all. The day had to be approached in tiny increments -- if you thought about the whole wretched schedule that lay before you, you would be so overcome with horror and despair you would go straight back to bed and pull the covers over your head. You had to focus on the immediate task and only that; the full litany of what lay ahead was too terrible to contemplate and too vast to absorb without going mad....

Bhupinder was fairly livid when I handed in my keys. You'd think I'd spurned his daughter's hand in marriage. Wasn't he good to me? Well, no. By rights he should have been happy to see the back of me -- he was never happy with anything I did and only ever spoke to me to point out how badly I'd done something. He pulled brooms and mops out of my hands to show me the right way to do it, which as far as I could see was about the same as the way I was already doing it. If I was under the seats scraping gum with a razor-blade, he laid down beside me and went at it like a demon for about 10 seconds before handing it back with a look of disgust on his fat face.

Not at the wad of gum he'd pried off -- at me. In his eyes I was hopeless and while he knew he was wasting his breath trying to teach me, he was just such a kind and generous old fool that he persisted in the effort. If I'd taken the knife to his throat he would have snatched it back to correct my grip. And after all his hard work and perseverance I was throwing everything away without the slightest bit of gratitude. I was nine kinds of ungrateful bastard. I put the keys on the counter and left him to his righteous despair and rage at an unjust universe.

On Tuesday, in the seventh of 14 excerpts, John Armstrong moves from exhibition to distribution, and gets a close-up look at the anatomy of the porn industry.