Spaceballs
Friday, July 21, 2006
Paying for Fletch
I remember summer days I would prepare to walk to the movies. This was when I lived on Mead street in Kalamazoo, on the border of Parchment, some time before I turned 13. The day before I'd have compiled a mixed tape off the radio, using an old-fashioned tape recorder (I'm not sure whether or not they were "old-fashioned" then, the flat kind with splayed buttons like bucktoothed piano keys). I'd record anything I thought was worth recording, Don Henley, The Gap Band, Mr. Mister, with radio chatter violently beheaded between takes. I didn't have earphones: I listened to it out loud, though the recorder's tinny speakerbox, holding it at my side as I walked to the Eastowne 5 Theater. I could feel the sound of "White Horse" dissipate into air about three feet ahead of me, like a crank-toy rolling down a hill.
I walked down Mead street. I crossed the street away from the fenced-in, unruly dogs that dotted my street (the worst were owned by our neighbor, who named his fat, drooling pitbulls after types of liquor: Tequila and Brandy, etc.) Those yards I thought contained the more angelic sort of dog I'd linger in front of and make the half-whistle I never quite learned to make. At the end of Mead, I'd pass the fence and walk the path through the field that went to Spring Valley Elementary. Even at that young age I may have felt some nostalgia for the simple, cowardly life of the seven-year-olds who went there. The Playsets were made of recycled car tires. They looked dangerous: swings that looked like bombs and springy, black-rubber dragon's backs roiling out of the yard like traps. There were woods behind Spring Valley I remembered I was afraid to enter as an elementary school tyke; and at the risk of sounding like a two-cent Mark Twain, I boldly ventured into those woods, unafraid, having had years of experience in those woods by that time, armed with my jerkoff tape recorder, which was probably emanating some approximation of the "The Boys of Summer."
Down a hill and still within sight of the rubber tire play area there was a foothigh creek with soft-bodied grey animals swimming through it. A trail led to a rubber tire graveyard, spread out and ascending a hill into some hermit's yard. A few refrigerators stood gaping at angles among the tires like open-mouthed Easter Island monuments. Deeper into the woods there was a horseshoe-shaped pond with waist-high reeds all around it. You entered the peninsula at your own risk. It was usually swampy and shoe-grabbing, full of the horned adult versions of those things swimming in the gentle water downstream.
Above that, up a steep hill spattered with dry knuckles of grass, lay the very touchstone of civilization: a graveyard for nuns.
It was located behind Nazareth College, founded in 1889 by the Sisters of St. Joseph as a hospital. It was a vast gothic wraith of a building, with stony arms each clutching a tennis court as if they were live children. The graveyard was the spookiest thing about it. The tombstones all seemed to be sliding down the hill towards the horseshoe-shaped pond and pointed toward the sky in every direction. I hurried from there quickly, and turned down the tape recorder--for perfection's sake we'll say it was playing a buckety Rockwell tune--when I passed.
I remember further up Gull Road there was a--what?--a Frosty Boy? Is that what it was called? The ice cream was terrible and tasted faintly of toothpaste but I ate it.
Finally, I'd reach the Eastowne 5, which was in the Eastowne Mall. The entrance shared a shabby, cavernous hallway with a video arcade and The Final Curtain, a two-sory bar with an old-time-movie theme. Pictures of John Wayne and William Powell were lacqured into the bartop, and Casablanca was pretty much running on a constant loop high above the bar. The Five was still playing first-run movies in those days.
I remember standing in the red-trimmed lobby a few days after school had started and thinking I was happy the summer was over. I was looking at a movie poster for Return to Oz at the time.
I remember walking across the hallway when the movie was over and playing Ms. Pac Man in The Final Curtain while my dad talked things over with the bartender and chuckled.
I remember before the movie began there were no ads, just a psychedelic lava pulsing on the screen in primary colors.
I remember paying for Fletch and sneaking into Brewster's Millions.
I remember showing up all dusty from graveyard dirt and paying to see Spaceballs.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:19 PM,
2 Comments:
- At 5:10 PM, Howardgirl2002 said...
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This is great, man. You brang back soooo many Kalamazoo memories. I lived on Mount Olivet from age 1 until age 13. So I remember this neighborhood. I used to love the nachos at "The Final Curtain" and those 99 cent movies at Eastowne. *smile*
- At 5:11 PM, Howardgirl2002 said...
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Oh yea P.S. - and I used to take the same trail through the woods behind Spring Valley to Nazareth College. but you know if you take a wrong turn it would lead you straight into a swamp type area.
