Whitechurch

by Chris Lynch

  “Don’t have it,” he blurts finally. “D-don’t have your money. Oakley. Not all of it at least.”

  “What?” I’m more surprised than anything, but I shouldn’t be, should I? “What, Adam, haven’t we been over this already?”

  “No, no, you d-d-don’t understand. I g-got your money. F-from my savings, and what I got outta people’s pockets …”

  “Adam!” I say, mock-horrified.

  “Only when I’m desperate,” he says. “But then, anyway, I was all s-s-set to pay you back, ’cause the rat wasn’t really a payback in the end … b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but it’s all gone away again….”

  “Adam, what is it now, you got a gambling problem? Drugs? What?” I chuckle as I say this because Adam Everly is the man who would never have any of those problems. The unseemly problems. The character problems. Adam has his ands full with all of life’s other problems.

  He stares at the floor, clenches his fists. Walks in place, like he’s doing a little fox-trot here by himself.

  “No, I got a n-n-numbnuts problem. I was trying to do something smart. Something smart. Bought some soap. Some cheap s-s-soap p-p-p-owder.” He stamps his boot at the memory. “Thought I was smart. Thought I was makin’ a move, Oakley. Thought this was the score for sure. From this guy who came in … real cheap … increase our margin on the laundering … thirty b-b-b-bucks … shit made about as much suds as a b-b-b-box of sh-sh-sh-sh-sugar.”

  “Oh” is all I can say. Which is not quite enough to make Adam Everly shake his guilt. He hands me a twenty-dollar bill. Then he smacks himself on the side of his head with the heel of that same hand.

  I grab his wrist as he’s about to do it again. Only then does Adam look at me.

  “That’s really stupid, Adam. Don’t do that.” There is a hardness in my voice that I hadn’t planned. His regular stupidity, the stupidity I like, of rats and sudsless suds and all that, that’s the stuff I can bear. That is different. “It’s not that much money. Don’t hit yourself over my money. Just don’t do that, all right? I’ll hit you myself if I feel that bad about it, then we’ll both feel better.”

  This, for whatever reason, calms Adam Everly. “I won’t eat nothin’,” he says with a small smile and no stutter. “And I’ll just have water.” He leads the way back up the slope toward our table. “You don’t have to worry about takin’ me to dinner. We’ll call that even.”

  “Even my ass,” I say, giving him a small shove in the back. “You are washing my socks for fuckin’ ever.”

  We take our seats again, and Chellie comes sailing over to the table. “I got a job for somebody,” she says, waving a cordless phone.

  Adam grabs the phone eagerly, anxious, I suppose, to start paying down that mounting karmic debt.

  “Okay,” she says, “you just keep hitting Redial. And when the radio-station guy answers, tell him you want to hear ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ by the Drifters.”

  Chellie does not wait for acknowledgment from Adam Everly before turning away. Now that is optimism.

  “Chelle, Chelle,” I say, bringing her back. “Where are your folks? They helping you out?”

  Chellie beams. “No way. They cleared out to give me the whole place to win or lose on my own. Kind of special too, their first Saturday night off in years, so my dad said they were going on a date.”

  “Sweet,” I say.

  “Damn sweet,” Chellie says and bolts off to take an order from a bunch of noisy kids from the junior college who have come and filled three of the big long rectangular tables against one wall. Two of the other part-time waitresses are helping out, but Chellie is still twelve times busier than she ever was in here before. The difference is she’s the boss. And she’s in that dress. And she can’t get the smile off her face. I swear I can smell smells that couldn’t be on the menu. Fried clams, sausage, peppers, onions, and pot roast. Whatever song buzzes over the radio, whether it’s “Misty,” or “I Fought the Law and the Law Won,” is somebody’s special tune, and inspires a singalong.

  Adam Everly is scrunched way down in his hair, dialing numbers on Chellie’s cordless, covering his free ear with his hand, wincing with concentration amid the katzenjammer of Chellie king’s little masterpiece of an evening. The squawkie radio is playing “Roll Over, Beethoven” now, so still we have not gotten through.

  “Just hit the redial, Adam,” I say. I cannot take the job over or he’ll be devastated, so I act strictly in a support role. “Would you like a drink?”

  “W-water’s fine,” Adam says quietly. “What’s the movie, anyway?”

  This was the tightly held secret of the week. Not only what the movie would be, but where it would come from and how Chellie would run it. Nobody seemed to recall when the Rialto last screened anything, and the inner workings of the place were a complete mystery. Chellie would give out nothing but buzzwords in advance. It would be old, it would be classic and classy and golden age. An event. A throwback. A happening. A moment.

  “When’s The Moment, Chelle?” I call out over the laughter of the college kids and the crackly croak of Elvis Presley singing “Teddy Bear.”

  “Order something, ya stiff,” she calls back, which hardly seems like an answer although, ya, I suppose it is.

  I pick up a hand-lettered—neatly and lovingly and almost calligraphy hand-lettered—menu. I read it up one side, past the salmon pate sandwiches and tandoori chicken roll-ups and falafel and vinegar mussels, and down the other, past profiteroles and banana fritters and baked cheese and cinnamon-yogurt apples. There is no pot roast, but I don’t quite feel like complaining.

  “Yes!” Adam Everly shouts, shutting the phone off and slapping his palms loudly on the table.

  “Now what’s up?” I ask.

  He says nothing, but raises one hand and extends a pointer finger. He’s pointing at the air, at the airwaves. Adam Everly is beaming with … is that pride I see?

  And this very special special request goes out to Michelle King, the Queen. Proprietress of the newest, gotta-get-there night place in the kingdom ….

  Everybody claps and hollers as Chellie, in her fine dress, balancing a tray of full-pint full-strength ciders over her head, weaves blushing among the tables while the Drifters sing down on her, Wellll, Saturday night at eight o’clock/I know where I’m gonna go …

  “What a goofy song,” somebody says, laughing, singing along.

  “What a party,” one of the college guys says, raising a glass to Chellie.

  Everyone in the room does likewise, toasting and cheering Chellie while she stands there, blushing, beaming, bursting, winning….

  There is now a great racket, a clattering, coming from the projection room. Rather, from the small rectangular openings high on the wall of the projection room.

  The crowd is clapping and vocal again, at the first signs of cinema life. Like in a haunted theater, small flickering lights, clicks and clacks of sound magically spill out of the rectangles even though nobody has seen anyone go up there. There isn’t even a visible entrance.

  Chellie is as stunned as everybody else. I take my opportunity.

  “I think I need to tell you something.” I start mumbling an explanation.

  “You don’t have what?” Chellie asks me.

  Adam Everly slinks down in his seat, then quickly sits back up. “Oh boy,” he says, because the movie is starting.

  The line-slashed black-and-white figures begin to play on the big curtain, which is reluctant to open. A couple of patrons get up to help, each pulling gently but steadily on one decaying sheet of dusty curtain, towing it to the wings. By the time the screen is clear, Moe is already slapping Larry on the broad bald middle of his head.

  Everybody is clapping. Everybody is happy. It’s the Three Stooges, and that can’t miss. Chellie is watching the people, her people in her place, as they enjoy themselves. Chellie claps, she claps for that. She smiles, covers her mouth, claps again like a child, or like an insanely proud stage mother. This is all hers, and it’s
sweet now.

  The Stooges are in form too. They’re testifying at a murder trial, telling everybody who killed Cock Robin. Rhyming and rapping and doing this cockeyed film-noir foolishness. Fine foolishness. Curly is madness. He is genius.

  Adam Everly may have laughed this hard at some point in his life, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

  All of the jumping night side of White-church—which, with the Chinese restaurant closed, means everybody at Café Cinema—is in agreement. This is the funniest film in the slickest cabaret serving the funkiest tandoori … just the best of everything. Chellie wins.

  Then the Stooges solve Cock Robin, but we won’t give it away.

  The social whirl of Whitechurch pauses while whoever it is changes reels. More ciders, more food, more good things for Chellie, more IOU from me. Even the reel changing is interesting, though. Who the hell ever gets to see reel changing? Numbers, bubbles of oil, slashes across the white of the screen. If there was a rock-and-roll band standing in front of that show it would be a brilliant backdrop. And since rock and roll doesn’t stop in Whitechurch, this is it.

  Funny, how something so small and silly as this, something concocted by a regular, determined and unreasonably hopeful small-town dreamer girl from the CC, funny, how something like that can suddenly change the everything of a town, making it livable and likable and worth your time.

  “You’re the queen, Chellie King,” I call as she scoots from one happy table to another. She immediately bees it my way. “Hot damn, you did it, Michelle,” I say right up close to her because she’s right up close to me. I use the full-name Michelle, which nobody much says. And like the Beatles said it too. Mee-chelle. Ma Belle. “What’s Ma Belle anyway?” I ask, to make it academic, to make it less dangerous, because I’m scaring myself a bit, and because the sound of Mee-chelle Ma Belle is suddenly the most heart-twisting sequence I ever heard.

  “Means my place or yours,” Chellie says, not helping me out much.

  “Shush!” Adam yelps, shocking everyone into doing just that. Adam saying shush is like Pauly saying I love you to somebody besides me. Uncharted islands, those. “The next one’s starting.”

  Adam Everly’s mighty roar is plowed over by the MGM lion’s, and the screechy, blarey trumpets of the opening of the movie, volume way too loud and sounding like it’s being played inside an oil drum.

  Everybody is clapping enthusiastically, though no one knows yet what the film is.

  But they know Frank Sinatra is in it.

  And now they know Kim Novak is in it.

  And Darren McGavin.

  “What’s The Man with the Golden Arm?” one of the college boys calls out.

  “Shit, it’s James Bond,” another one answers, and they high-five and knock foreheads.

  Adam Everly leans over the table. It’s hard to see now because the lights are way low, unlike for the Three Stooges, who did not rate dim lighting because they are not art. “I didn’t know Sinatra played Bond.”

  Chellie, who is standing, like a sentry in the middle of the room, must be beaming in on every conversation. She answers both tables. “Sinatra’s a musician, dummy. It’s about heroin.”

  “Whoa!” the college boys call. “Like Trainspotting. Cool.”

  Adam Everly is cautious, wading into the conversation. He’s concentrating on the credits. “That can’t be, Chelle. They didn’t have heroin yet in the fifties. And even if they did, Frank never would have touched it.”

  “Shut up, will you!” And the speaker isn’t me, isn’t one of the college guys, isn’t even Chellie, who would have every right to be saying it. The voice comes down from the projection booth.

  Nestor. That explains much. Nestor, and the Rialto, have their very own homemade book in the library, where Ophelia Lennon keeps it on display in a glass case, and if you are a close personal friend of hers, you may leaf through it carefully.

  Nestor owned the theater when it was a theater. He ran it when it truly was the center of social life for all Whitechurch, and for several smaller towns beyond, if you can imagine smaller towns beyond. When Nestor would run Ben Hur or The Public Enemy or The Hound of the Baskervilles in his Ajax-clean theater, back when those curtains were new velvet an inch thick and throwing no dust, you had to get to the theater early on a Saturday Night at the Movies or boy you would be going home early, apologizing to your date. Little brass lanterns popping straight out from the walls lined both sides of the main hall and practically went on throwing light after they were shut off, that was how much Nestor polished them. You couldn’t drop one kernel of popcorn on Nestor’s floor during the show without it seeming that he was crawling under your seat to grab it up so the next crowd didn’t have to put up with nobody’s filth.

  He loved movies, introduced movies himself from up on his stage. And he bought the movies. Word was that bachelor Nestor spent almost every dime he made from the fifties to the eighties collecting the prints of films he played. He didn’t spend anything on dates, he said, because his whole life was a date. I met him one time in the library, when I was looking at his book. He sat down next to me, flipped it back to the beginning, and we leafed through it together. He never said a thing to me.

  “Jeez,” I say, “I guess this really is an important film, if god himself tells you to shut up.”

  For a while, everybody is cool and into it. Darren McGavin is creepy. Kim Novak is sweet. And as for Sinatra, he may not look like a contemporary Hollywood heroin casualty, but he sure convinces you that something is bothering the crap out of him, and that’s good enough. For a while.

  But the Whitechurch Film Festival Jury is not very tolerant. They’d really prefer Trainspotting.

  “Choose whiskey,” one of the guys yells at celluloid Frank, as if he didn’t have enough problems already. “Choose the Mafia. Choose the toupee. Choose to sing ‘My Way’ fifty million times—”

  “Choose to shut the hell up,” Nestor’s voice booms, and immediately you can feel the change in atmosphere.

  I try to remember the last time I actually saw something worth getting into a fight about. Nothing comes to mind. Lots of nothing comes to mind, and this moment fits right in.

  On the screen, Kim Novak soldiers on, desperately trying to talk to deranged Sinatra through his apartment door.

  Off the screen, Chellie King is standing next to me, practically emitting sparks, as she wills the crowd to love a movie they are not going to love.

  “Put the Stooges back on,” one of the college guys says, and the way he says it sure sounds as if bar service has not been discontinued at that table.

  “Th-th-that sounds like a g-g-good—”

  “The Stooges are on,” I say. This is bothering me suddenly. This is bothering me so much that I have trouble understanding it myself. I’m grinding my teeth because I did not see it coming. Being small, that’s okay. I know small. I do small. I live small, and that’s fine. Pathetic is not. Stupid things happen, and good ideas fail. That’s routine. It’s the way you react that proves whether or not you’re a schmuck.

  It occurs to me that, for all my lack of action, I am not a patient individual.

  “We-want-the-Stooges!” comes an anonymous call from somewhere.

  And I am surrounded by schmucks.

  “We-want-Trainspotting!” comes the response from the other side of the room.

  “We-want-cider!” add the college guys, laughing louder than required.

  “Quiet over there, we’re trying to hear the shitty movie,” another schmuck says.

  Then, Adam Everly does what I should be doing, if I was the kind of person who did things.

  Adam Everly stands. “Should we beat them up?” he says, very grimly.

  It is a pathetic moment, but more beautiful than most. Adam Everly, god love him, couldn’t beat up old Nestor if it came down to that.

  The lights go up before Adam Everly gets tough. Nestor is screaming up in the booth, and doing some kind of violent thrashing around. The image on the screen look
s crazed, first there, then sped up, slowed, stopped, torn away. I jump to my feet.

  “That is it!” Chellie yells. “We are closed now. Show is over!”

  “That is right!” Nestor yells. He is standing at the back of the theater, the front of the restaurant, which is what it will be from now on. Nestor is in his eighties, bent over to about five feet tall. He’s got uncombed, weirdly yellow hair that grows on the sides but is also dragged across the glistening top of his head. “I knew I shouldn’t have done this. You are too ignorant. You young people, this town. Too stupid. Don’t deserve my fine films. Don’t understand nothing unless people are cursing and fucking all over the place. Should have burned my theater like I wanted to. It doesn’t deserve this. Get out now. Get out!”

  Nestor appears to have forgotten that he doesn’t own the theater anymore. When nobody responds, nobody speaks or moves, he clutches his big tin film canister that looks like he could be carrying a bicycle tire inside, pulls it tight to his chest. He turns and storms off, but with his bad leg only half of him is up to storming, while the other side drags along behind.

  I take a step to follow him, because now this seems important to me. I want to say something, something maybe like I like old movies, Nestor, or Remember me and you and your book and the library, Nestor? But I hear myself. I hear how it sounds. Nestor would probably clock me with the big canned Man with the Golden Arm.

  He has managed to freeze time though, Nestor, even if he’s frozen it less than he’d like. The college guys are collecting their gear and pulling out. The other unsatisfied filmgoers are taking advantage of the diversion to slip away, with only small mutters of “Thanks,” and “Night, Chellie” as they scramble to find someplace that is still selling cider.

  Chellie King does not seem sorry to see people go. She is all business as she starts collecting glasses and dishes off a table. Until tears slalom down her face, drop to her chest, disappear into her magnificent velvet dress that almost matches her sad old crumbly theater. The curtain will now smell like tandoori forever. She looks up, comes to her friends’ table and tells them to beat it.