Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  Earl was an outlaw in town for the taking. He came to the Princess in 1962 and played the same game here. Each house he worked had a code for the marquee to indicate if the show was “hot.” At the Empress, an old burlesque across the street, an exclamation point was added to the title when the breasts were bare. At the Palace, just around the corner on Wisconsin Avenue, a line of running lights was left dark to signify a blue reel. And at the Princess, floodlights that showed off the architectural majesty of the original 1909 façade were lit when Earl was doing his dirty work. On those nights, the box office was instructed to call the booth immediately if any of the censor board’s checkers showed their city-issued pass. Earl could turn a hot reel cold in a matter of minutes, with hands quicker than Henry Aaron’s.

  But Earl was the master of a dead game. The dam broke in 1969 when the operators finally pushed back against the board and secured a court ruling in favor of smut and against the bluenoses. By the time the axe was falling toward the Princess’s neck, a half-dozen other theaters were running X-rated pictures full-time with two others already having gone full-on hardcore. The houses that survived the rush were those that leaped into bed with the Mob. The Milwaukee families had locked up distribution of the best softcore in the city, and the Chicago outfit ran hardcore all across the Midwest. Dick might have been a cad, but he had his limits on what he could lie about to Mother. And so, we were left with five-year-old scraps while other houses got all the newest pictures with all the bustiest girls. From that point, it had only been a matter of time.

  * * *

  There was a funereal air in the office as I caught up on the balance book while Earl sat across from me, using a small screwdriver to adjust a film splicer. “A letter fell off the marquee,” he said without looking up. “Did you see?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It says, Come One, Come Al.” He went on, looking down his nose through low-slung spectacles at the device. “We’re gonna have every guy named Al in town beatin’ down the door.”

  I ran down the end column of the ledger. Another losing day.

  “And then beatin’ off when they get here.”

  I snickered. Earl was as crude a man as I’d ever known, but he carried it with a weird kind of refinement that seemed appropriate for a silent-era palace lingering on softcore life-support. He was nearing seventy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a round, lumpy face. He spoke of almost nothing seriously and had no convictions.

  “Why do you even bother with the books?” he asked, tightening a tiny screw. “This place is fully fucked. You’re only wasting the ink in old lady Bradlee’s pen.”

  I finished my entries and closed the book. “Why do you bother fixing that thing?” I asked. “How many splices do you think you’ve got left here, old man?”

  Earl kept looking down. “Yes, you’re right. I’m just wearing out the old lady’s screws.”

  Earl and I were the only employees who had no clear next move. The doghouse lobby workers were strictly low-dollar cogs, easily movable back into other compartments of the sputtering Bradlee machine. The two part-time projectionists both had side gigs at a handful of other city theaters. The cleaning crew wouldn’t miss the spare work we threw them. The pavement princess who floated around after the shows ended, asking if anyone wanted “to get it for real,” would float to other places that drew the desperate. None of us had real homes, but Earl and I seemed to be the only dopes with no place else to go.

  As it neared twelve thirty, I hoped that Earl might be straight with me for just long enough to offer some direction. “Earl?”

  “What?”

  “What are you going to do after we close?”

  “Drive down to Zad’s on 2nd Street and get drunker than shit.”

  “I mean after the theater closes for good.” He took the kind of sharp breath that usually presaged a smart-assed comment. “And don’t say, The same thing.”

  He gave the blade on the splicer a few practice swipes and looked up. “I’ve always wanted to retire as an elevator operator. I want to die in an elevator in some old downtown office building. Just slump forward on the throttle and send it crashing into the ground floor. Take a few suits with me.” He offered a wicked and worn-out grin.

  “You gonna miss this place when it’s gone?”

  “Kid, there’s nothing to miss here.” Earl checked his watch and stood. “It’s just a job.”

  “Yeah, but it’s been more than ten years. Doesn’t that mean something?”

  “Not a fuckin’ thing.” Earl took his keys from his vest pocket and headed for the door. “It’s like these movies. They don’t mean anything; it’s just some silly shit meant to get some witless bastard’s dick hard. We’re all whores here, kid.” He put his head down and left for the booth.

  I tossed the bank book into the safe and locked it, before heading down to the lobby. Behind the candy counter, a pair of thirtysomething women in red vests and matching skirts turned magazine pages in bored synchronization. To each side, tall arches framed in elaborately molded trimming led to a dim anteroom with a broken marble fountain at its center. From there, four doorways led to the lower part of the auditorium. I pushed through the door at the far right, its ornamental glass inlays long ago busted out and replaced with plywood. I stood at the back of the room, watching the light wash over eight hundred empty seats and two dozen lonely heads.

  * * *

  Every month, a 3rd Street hustler named Buck gave me an ounce of grass in exchange for looking the other way when he cruised the auditorium. Third Street had an unofficial policy of not allowing unaccompanied women into theaters—mostly for fear that the vice squad was watching and would shut a house down on the grounds of being a place of prostitution. It was a mile easier for men to work the 3rd Street movie houses, and they had been, according to what Buck once told me, almost as far back as the silent era. It bothered some to high hell, the cops especially, but I didn’t care. The vice squad, revolted by the idea, assumed that no one would willingly permit it. If they busted a woman tricking in your establishment, they’d try to shut you down. If they busted a man, all you had to do was shake your head indignantly, and they’d do no more than scold you like a disappointed parent.

  But it also meant that each month I could sell that bag of grass to Janet. Janet was a waitress at a diner across the river on Michigan Street. She came to the Princess on the third Friday of each month, just after the coffee shop closed. I’d let her in the side door, and we’d sit together on the balcony while she smoked a joint and I sipped whiskey from a paper cup. After a decade-plus of fifty-five-hour workweeks and a steadily increasing drinking habit, she was—aside from a handful of South Side barflies who could hardly remember my first name—my only real social contact outside of 3rd Street.

  The Princess had ten days left when she visited for her April bag. We’d been sitting together, wordlessly, for a half hour before I told her.

  “What, like, forever?” she said through a cloud of smoke. She was, as usual, still in her work clothes. Her hair was a knotty mess, and she rested her clunky nurse’s shoes on the rail in front of us.

  “Yep. Final curtain.”

  “So, no more dope?”

  I shrugged. “I guess not. I mean . . .”

  “Fuck.”

  The silence resumed. We’d had the setup for about two years now. I’d asked her on a date near the start of it all. She said no. I wasn’t terribly attracted to her, but she had a way about her that intrigued me. She was normal, which to me was different.

  “I’m not sure what I’m gonna do after we close,” I said after a few minutes.

  Following a long pause, Janet blew another cloud of smoke. “What, for work?”

  “For work. And, just . . .” I stared off at the screen through the haze. A Hollywood wannabe-turned-gigolo was balling some desperate nymphomaniac in a scene that was all back skin and butt crack. “I’ve been doing this so long, I don’t know where else I fit.”

  Janet roll
ed her head toward me. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I’d be kind of lost without this place.”

  She laughed. “How old are you?”

  “I just turned forty-one.”

  “And without this, you’d be lost?” She pulled herself up in her chair as bare breasts shook from side to side on the screen. “Don’t you have any dreams? Didn’t you ever want to do something with your life?”

  I had to think about the question.

  “Maybe use this as an opportunity. It’s a chance to totally change who you are.” Her eyes were slits, and she spoke with a wispy voice. She was nicer to me when she was high. “I mean, is this . . .” She waved her fingers in front of her at all the empty seats, the sad heads, and the comically exaggerated face of the Hollywood wannabe getting rubbed off. “Is this you?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  She shrugged and slumped back down. “Or get a job at another dirty theater. If that’s what you want. You should do what you want.”

  I sat back too. I took another long sip of whiskey and let it linger in my mouth, angry and cheap. In my mind, I asked her to come home with me. I wanted to smell the fry grease on her clothes and hear those ugly shoes drop to the floor of my tiny apartment: CLOMP, CLOMP. I wanted her belly pressed against mine and to watch her apathetic face as we humped to no conclusion. I wanted the squeeze of someone I hadn’t paid or found in a misery sweat at the far end of a long, sorry bartop. In my mind, I asked her to come home with me. Even in my mind, she said no.

  “Janet?” I asked aloud.

  “What?”

  “My guy owes me one last bag. Come by on the twenty-

  ninth, it’s a Sunday . . . and I’ll have it for you.” It was our last day of operation. A crew would clean the place out on the thirtieth, the final day of the lease.

  “Okay,” she said.

  We went back to staring at the action, wordlessly.

  * * *

  When I was growing up, I never stayed in one place long enough to feel at home. My mother came from some cow town in the middle of the state. She got pregnant young by a man who was already married. There wasn’t much forgiveness for a crime like that in Depression-era cow towns, so she left for the big city, where I was born. She worked often, doing what she could and what they’d pay her to do. We moved a lot, hopping from apartment to apartment, school to school. Milwaukee is tribal to its core, and kids banded by school or by neighborhood or by church and always by race. I was the constant new kid, an outsider in my own city.

  The one constant space I had was the darkness of the nearest movie house. With a working mother, I was left mostly to raise myself, and the movies became my keeper, and the movie houses became my family. There was the Rainbow on 27th and Lisbon, with its wooden seats and popcorn served in paper cones. There was the Pearl in Muskego Way, with its marquee that lit up the entire corner. There was the Franklin on Center Street, where you could neck with the bad girls from North Division High. There was the Pix on Howell, where sailors courted hookers while their freighters were tied off at the docks. And then the Princess. For twelve years, the Princess.

  We had a week left when I met with Dick Bradlee at the Sugar Room, a pasties-and-g-string jazz bar on the corner of 3rd and Wells. It was midafternoon, before the band or dancers went on, and we sat in a corner booth, a pitcher of beer between us on the table. He was giving me instructions for the end. I took dutiful notes on what to remove from the house, who was coming to get what, and so on and so on and so on. He had yet made no mention of what might happen to me or Earl.

  The process was cold and smooth. Any equipment of value had been sold to an operator from Chicago. Some salvageable furniture was being taken for a suburban Bradlee Corp. hotel. The concession counter was to be looted by a carnival company from Tennessee. Whatever was left would be abandoned to the real estate company that owned the building. And the building would most likely sit empty until God-only-knows-when. He was planning a burial, but not the funeral.

  He finished his orders and refilled his glass. Dick had never been sentimental. He hacked limbs off the dying family business tree without so much as a glance toward the past. When he bricked over the regal grand entryway to the old Hotel Bradlee on Wisconsin Avenue, once the trademark feature of his father’s trademark property, people in the city howled that he was disrespecting the past, flushing an important historical structure down the toilet of modernism. Others lauded him, citing it as a shrewd business move, a loss of the thumb to save the hand.

  It was neither. Dick was simply doing as he did, strolling dumbly down the path of least resistance while he waited for his mother to die so he could fully divest himself of the millstone he had inherited. Once, back in the early 1960s, when we were still regular drinking buddies, we were hosting an after-bar in the balcony with a pair of 3rd Street girls and a hot reel on the screen. Dick’s girl said something about how great it must be, to be born into money as he had been. Dick sighed and shook his head. “I was born into responsibility,” he replied tragically. I had no doubt that Dick really believed that load of horseshit. He was too narrow to see his lot in any other way and too dumb to be any less narrow.

  Finally, I asked him about my future with the company.

  “Well,” Dick said, widening his eyes, “I’m not really sure what we’d have for you.”

  “There’s nothing in management?” I asked.

  He exhaled a rough, beery lungful of air. “I don’t think that . . .” He shook his head. “We’re done with 3rd Street. Damn near out of downtown altogether. So . . .”

  “I can travel, you know.”

  “It’s not that,” he said, staring at me like I was supposed to know. I knew, but I wanted to make him say it out loud. “I mean, what, we’re gonna put you out in Brookfield? We don’t have much use for a 3rd Street guy in Brookfield.”

  I nodded slowly and drained my beer.

  “No offense. Hell, I’m gonna miss 3rd Street, but this is the way of the world.”

  “Severance then?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, uh, a month?”

  What could I say? I accepted and shook his fat hand.

  “I do have an odd job for you, if you are interested.”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, sometime in the week after we vacate, they’re gonna walk through the theater, just to make sure it ain’t trashed.” He took a slip of paper from his pocket and scribbled something on it. “The week after, on this date and at this time, I got a crew ready to . . .” he leaned forward, slid me the paper, and whispered, “get the copper wire and fixtures. It’s not my gig, but I’m getting a cut, and I told them I’d have an insider who could show them around. Could be good money—cash—if it all works out.”

  I picked up the paper. The beer had gotten to me; something had gotten to me, and I felt dizzy. “You’re gonna wreck the place for copper wire?”

  Dick shook his head. “Not me. But . . . yeah.”

  I sank back in the booth, and Dick motioned to the waitress for another pitcher. “Your kingdom come, thy will be done,” I muttered.

  Dick turned back to me and nodded, grinning.

  * * *

  Earl called them his fuck books. They were scrapbooks he kept of film clips snipped from skin pictures. It was a longtime tradition among projectionists in blue houses to snip a few frames from each nude scene in a given film before shipping it off to its next destination. It was so well practiced by the early sixties that the telltale crinkle of a splice running through the feed sprocket would instinctively draw a projectionist’s eyes to the screen in anticipation of seeing some flesh. Earl had started snipping in the late fifties when the censor board was ordering boobs and buns eliminated from nudist colony pics. His ledgers contained most of what the city had never been allowed to see and a little something from every hot reel that ever ran illicitly. Most had given up on collecting after distributors began to raise holy hell and threatened to blacklist theaters that did
n’t crack down. It seemed that by the time a print had been in circulation for a year or two, and after fifty or more projectionists had taken their cut, it could be trimmed of nearly all its nudity.

  I was loading up some boxes in the office when I noticed the stack of books on a bottom shelf. “Earl?”

  He was on break between shows, reading a newspaper. “What?”

  “Are you taking your fuck books with you?”

  He had kept them up meticulously over the past decade and a half. Each film labeled, each snip carefully affixed in photo mounts so it could be removed and ogled through a slide viewer. It was practically a life’s work. But while it was an obsessive project while it was active, it was now a mere sentimental relic.

  “Nah,” he said. “Thought I’d try to sell them, maybe. That one-legged guy who runs the bookstore out on Lisbon buys weird shit like that.”

  In an instant, it all came to me: the show that would drop the curtain on the dirty Princess. “How much do you want for them?”

  * * *

  The last day was sunny and warm. It was a Sunday, typically a lousy day at the box. And the weather would probably make things even slower. It was a day for grilling hamburgers or drinking cold beer on porch steps. It was the kind of day that peeled off the most marginally respectable denizens of 3rd Street, leaving only those too crippled to walk away. We were still featuring the same tired double feature, still billed as Come One, Come Al on the marquee. I’d gone up and down 3rd Street in the preceding days, breaking the news of our demise and inviting people to come pay their respects. On the last day, there would be a single 10 p.m. show that would be free to all and open to men and women. I invited the barmen, the whores, the dancers, and the drunks. I told them that liquor would flow, and a grand time would be had. I wanted a full house. I wanted a festive atmosphere. I wanted this old trash house to dim her lights in a proper fashion.