CHAPTER NINE

Mostly Movies

Come to think of it, I believe we did move onto Kenview Avenue before we headed to Iowa because I remember ration books and a Victory garden in the back yard and crushing cans for the war effort and also grease collections for it. I remember boy scout paper drives too. I remember I liked to break the red dye dot that turned white margarine into fake butter, to kneed the packet until the margarine turned from a sickly off-white into lovely butter yellow. I liked the feel of the soft, yielding packet. I loved Spam, the meat substitute, just like everyone else, with syrup poured over the tiny slices. All this I remember on Kenview. When we returned from Iowa, the whole war was over so we must have spent some time on Kenview before we went to Iowa. We were probably in Iowa only for the summer before August, 1945 when atom-battered Japan surrendered.

But, could all of these events and activities been memories of the Korean War? I was twelve when North Korea invaded South Korea. Did America have rationing and paper drives for the Korean War? I don’t recall. I don’t think so, but I do recall finding a box with sugar and other scarce things in Joe’s parent’s attic after Korea started and of recognizing them as hoarders. Come to think of it I do recall radio warnings about hoarding during the Korean War, but I don’t remember rationing. From memories of the Second World War, I knew hoarders were bad people, but how could this innocent and really backward couple be bad people? I liked them too much. Joe’s mom was a rotund little Catholic woman, always in an apron, cooking and cleaning and loving her Joe enormously. Later in my life, Joe’s dad would invite me over to his house on Christmas day for a shot of good cheer which I gladly accepted in my drinking years. And he was a solid union man too, like my granddad, active in his union and always strongly pro-union in his talking.

Isn’t it strange, that an important historic element like the Korean War can be confused in my mind with the Second World War? I suddenly see myself running home (isn’t that funny too, “running home like a child” though almost old enough to be in high school) to ask my stepmom about Korea, where it was, were we in danger? Like a kid I tell you! I’d heard it over the radio at someone else’s house and ran home scared to death. For all I knew, Korea was in the next county and bombs might be falling on my head by nightfall.

Confusion of wars! Those of us born in the late Thirties have more than enough war memories. Our earliest memories are of war, and our early teens too, then our twenties and thirties and now our 50s and 60s. If some of us (who learn from experience) no longer believe in the efficacy of war to solve anything, remember we’ve seen wars come and go and few of them have had lasting results. Would Nazism still be around if we hadn’t intervened in Europe? I doubt it. And look how our partnering up with Russia contributed to Russia’s power and land grab after WWII. Our taking Russia on as an ally led to the Cold War, didn’t it? And I’m certain that children raised by war-damaged men or whose fathers were killed in combat were the leading figures in the Peace Movement and the hippy mentality of the Sixties and Seventies. I taught high school in the mid-60s. The earliest hippies I met were children of abusive homes. I can’t truly measure the impact that WWII had on those households even though I know it did.

The reason I remember ration books so well is that my stepmom would send me to the store in those days and I’d bring home the wrong things, and she’d yell at me or hit me until I learned to bring the wrong things home so that I could get the spankings for them which confirmed for me how utterly bad and worthless I was. Our relationship was already going from bad to worse. It didn’t help that at every sign of illness, she shoved any enema up my ass. I remember having to tell her not to come into the bathroom anymore when I was taking a bath, but I don’t recall what age I was. I think twelve, the outside range of this current chapter. I recall the enemas stopped, but I don’t remember when. I hated those enemas like crazy.

I suffered another loss very soon after moving to Kenview that I think put me off dogs for the rest of my life. They bought me another pup, another mongrel dog. I don’t know what we called him. His coat was short and light blond, and he had long floppy ears like a Spaniel’s. I bonded with him immediately, but he wasn’t very playful. He slept a lot, and I took to lying on our couch to watch TV and put him on my chest where’d he’d curl up in a warm ball near my love-beating heart. I adored that pup. He was directly connected to the center of my chest, near my heart. Tears would fill my eyes with the love I felt. Then one weekend he grew sick. He probably had worms.

The pup sits on his haunches at the bottom of the basement steps, looking up, where stepmom insists we keep him, and a stream of mucous connects his mouth to the floor. His head cocks to the side in a pained and pathetic pose. For some reason, we can’t get him to a vet. Maybe in the late 40s not as many vets are available to city folk on an emergency basis during a weekend. So my dad drowns him in the laundry tubs over by the washing machine. I watch, sitting on the basement steps. I can’t see too much. Dad is elbow deep in the tub, and I don’t hear the pup making any resistance. Not a peep, not a whimper. To this day, I can’t bring up the feelings I must have felt at witnessing this drowning. Maybe I shouldn’t have watched. But even sadder to me is the next thing we do.

Dad gets out a shovel and my lifeless pup is in a sack. I don’t see him dead. Dad puts sack and shovel in the trunk of our Plymouth coupe, and we get in the car and drive out into the country which is not too far from our house in those days. Again, I sit in the car, and I am so small that I can’t actually see the ground outside the car from the car window, so I more or less witness my dad’s head and shoulders go through the motions of burying my pup beside the road. My dad’s head bobs into and out of view. Now I’m really suffering. It’s the thought of my poor little pup out there beside the road with no one to love him or take care of him. It’s raining in my memory and everything is desolate and empty. “Poor puppy. Poor puppy, poor little nobody dog,” I must be sensing, wordlessly, somewhere in my being. I never owned another dog until very recently, and I was manipulated into it.

TV entered my life on Kenview in the late 1940s. Ronnie’s dad was the first to get a TV on our block, and all us kids gathered from time to time on Ronnie’s porch to watch TV through their screen door. I clearly remember watching a Cincinnati Reds night game through their door when Wally Post and Gus Bell played for the Reds. Through Ronnie’s screen door, I got to watch Ewell Blackwell wing his big roundhouse pitch past batters. Ronnie’s dad was so involved in the TV revolution that he became a TV repairman. TV repairmen used to make house calls with black bags full of tubes. Then came solid state technology.

Eventually we Nobodys bought a set too and my first memories of TV are “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and “Howdy Doody”. Kate Smith sang, “When the moon comes over the mountain...,” soon after I arrived home from Belmont school. Her big voice belting that song is my sign that the good stuff is soon to follow. I loved to yell at Phineaus T. Bluster. One of my earliest celebrity crushes is on Princess Summerfall Winterspring of Howdy Doody fame. A crush as innocent as butterscotch pudding, my favorite in those days. Add to her, the movie goddesses, Veronica Lake, of the long golden hair that falls over her left eye, and, later, Gene Tierney. My crushes get a little more sinister with these “big screen” women.

At night, along came Texaco’s Uncle Milty and, later, I remember Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca’s show. TV was big, but the movies already had my affections. Later, when TV began to destroy Hollywood’s hold on America, I feared and mourned the threat as much as any movie mogul, but I soon discovered foreign films and nothing’s been the same since.

TV replaced radio, of course, for all of us, but I remember listening to “The Lone Ranger” and “Sky King” and “Superman” right around dinner time. In fact, we’d listen to radio as we ate supper. “Sky King” seemed to be the show going usually when we ate. More than once I was so scared by “Inner Sanctum” that I turned the radio off to stop the images they could create with sound effects in my imagination. I listened to “Green Hornet,” “Fibber McGee and Molly”, “Gang Busters”, “Boston Blackie”, “Lum ‘n Abner”, and of course who didn’t listen to “Amos and Andy”. “Dragnet”, “Richard Diamond: Private Eye”, “Your FBI In Action”, “The Great Guildersleeve”, “Duffie’s Tavern”, blah, blah, blah....

My god, the show names pour into my mind, and I have to stop listing them. I could list names from now till the earth is swallowed by the sun, but what purpose would that serve? All my emotion, just now, my nostalgia, pours toward the radio names, and I feel my child roots more in radio, even, than in TV and movies. Which surprises me a bit... except... radio at dinnertime on Kenview was a shared thing with my dad and stepmom and, later, my brother. Our kitchen was tiny by today’s standards, and we never ate in the dining room except, like everyone else, for special occasions. Our small formica-topped table was jammed against the stove. I sat against the wall with the stove to my left. Dad sat to my right in the doorway out of the kitchen into the dining room. He actually blocked the doorway. Stepmom sat across from me, closer to sink, stove front and frig. Later, my brother reigned in his high chair between them, at the corner of our small table.

On Beggar’s Night, we, the Kenview gang, traveled a lot of blocks collecting our sacks of candy. We roamed the neighborhood darkness freely. Nothing hid in the bushes, and no one had started the urban legend about razor blades in old people’s apples. My memory wants to tell me that once, just once, some older, kid highwayman stole my bag of candy through threats and intimidation, but I can’t confirm the tale. I’ve heard that story from others so often that I can’t tell if it’s my memory or someone else’s. I really can’t.

One house, for several years, gave out hot dogs. Everybody went to that house twice, if we could get away with it, but they most always recognized us and sent us packing. The very oldest householders, probably remembering their own sugar-starved childhoods, left out baskets of apples or some other semisweet treat that many of us would leave alone. They weighed down the bags too much. I never wanted pennies or nickels either. All I wanted was candy. I craved candy, chocolate candy, like my grandmother who in the last years of her life ate sweets like they were going out of style. It was her one indulgence, and her children and in-laws loaded her down with candy when she was in the nursing home near the end of her life.

I always went begging as a cowboy with a Lone Ranger type mask so that my mouth was free to eat as I begged. I tied a bandana around my neck and carried a gun in a holster. I think I had a vest and plaid shirt and jeans to go with the mask. My stepmom would try to talk me out of my disguise every year, and one time I did wear some full face mask until I found I couldn’t eat as I walked, then I took it off, but I really never wanted to beg as anything but a cowboy, and that’s what I went as, a cowboy, walking my straight out of a movie walk and talk, the cowpoke on the lonely, dark streets of Laredo.

Bill, down the street from us was a real dresser-upper. Never the same thing twice. One time he went as a witch, another time as a Spanish senorita with lace headdress and lace fan to wave before his face and a black lace dress. Another time as a ashen-faced ghost. He never begged with us. We’d just pass him in the dark, and we never knew him unless he came up to talk to us. He had his own friends. Later, in high school, he went to a different high school than the rest of us, acted in all the school plays and went to Hollywood after graduation.

He and I would play grandees together, kings and princes. We made swords out of the handles of croquet mallets and used coffee can lids as hand guards. He’d even make seals and drip wax to seal letters like we could see in many movies in those days. He made a great king, was very grandiose, handing out orders and tasks for we court flunkies. I soon tired of following orders and carrying sealed letters to haughty doges and quit playing with him.

Once he and a couple of his friends and his sister put up a sheet and performed a series of shadow plays for us. They directed lights onto a sheet, stood behind it and acted out vignettes. We paid a nickel or dime to attend. One vignette I still recall. They pretended to be operating on someone; shadow nurses handed shadow tools to the doctor: pliers, hammer, wrench, saw. Eventually, the shadow doctor lifted a cylindrical shape out of the shadow belly of the patient.

“The operation’s a success,” Shadow Bill, the doctor, proclaimed. “Here’s your can, Sir!”

There used to be a small decrepit, unused one-story wooden gym building on Belmont’s school grounds. Concrete pilings held it a few feet above the macadam yard. After we returned from one of dad’s road jobs, gone a year, Bill was missing from my school and so was a friend of his, Johnny. Later I learned they’d been caught under that gym building doing something forbidden. They’d been separated and sent to different schools. I don’t know when I really understood what they’d been doing under that building, but it must be obvious that in my early life I had gay friends. In fact one day as I walked home from school with Billy and Johnny, when we came to Bill’s house, they asked me to come in for a “cream” party.

“What’s a cream party?” I asked.

“We stand around in a circle and jack off,” one of them told me.

I thought about it for some time, standing there. All I know is that something didn’t sit right with me about it. I could imagine the scene and couldn’t picture doing it. I don’t think I’d yet even done the big “it” alone. I had no moral thoughts about jacking off, but I just didn’t want to do it. My imagination of the scene made me uneasy. Another thing was, I was already shy about gym and changing clothes in locker rooms. So, the long and the short of it, I said no.

Perhaps, had I a different urge at that moment, I’d been caught under that school building with the two “bad guys” too, but since I don’t think that people have much choice about sexual orientation, I actually was in no danger of choosing an orientation different than the one I have. My belief is that one either gets erections picturing the same sex or one doesn’t. I didn’t. Besides, jacking off in a male group does not guarantee one is a homosexual either. I’ve seen several movies where young boys jack off en masse while talking about young girls or watching young girls skinny dip or peeking through a window. I assume, therefore, that straight young men can also have group jackoffs. I never had that experience that I can recall, but memory suppresses a lot of things. I just don’t recall any incidence of group jacking off in my past.


When I bring up “movie stories” in which young men jack off as a group, I imagine I hear someone complain that movies aren’t reality. Well, that’s not quite true. What’s reality anyway? Movies are as real as any other reality we tell ourselves and tell others about ourselves. A movie plot is at least as real as Cousin Fred’s side of the story of his divorce from smoldering ex-aunt Clara. Creative people who try to present reality as they have experienced it are using their own experience or observed experience or experience someone else shared with them, even experience they get from books and other movies. A movie’s plot may be constructed to make a point or its reality distorted to help consciousness expand into a clearer vision of ever elusive reality (see Fellini’s “8 1/2”). An imaginative creative person uses every piece of real experience he has to make her stories authoritative.

All reality is made up anyway. Some people tell themselves god stories they get out of religious books, and some people tell themselves a gay story and some tell themselves that drinking and partying is a good way to go: eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you may die. Others celebrate celibacy. Some use psychology or literature or family lore to tell the story of their reality to themselves, but it’s all just telling stories to ourselves through mental, synaptical feedback loops. One story is as good as another. The stories protect us from the chaos of experience. They alleviate the fear of living in the relentless now and placate our animal fear of death. They’re basic survival tools. Without a story, formless experience reigns in the life of the individual. She experiences sensual overload. It’s a form of insanity, not to have a coherent story that fits into societal norms.

I once knew a young man who wore a leather thong around his right wrist because god was in that hand. If the leather thong was not on his wrist, he reasoned, god would climb up his arm and kill him. So his story didn’t fit the societal norm, he was a little crazy, but, at least, he felt safe from an angry god with the story he told himself. Where did he get the angry god story, I wonder?

Another craziness: we all tell stories to ourselves about others who we know even less about than a character in a movie, like a political figure who we only know from imaginative sound bites and political ads they feed to us. The relativity of reality is so obvious I can’t imagine there are those who still tell themselves that the very idea of moral relativity is sinful. It’s not for moral reasons that criminals need to be put away and turned around, for example, but for reasons of self-protection. When we get morality out of the criminal process, we’ll do a more effective job, I guarantee it. We’ll concentrate on what works.

I tell myself that the only way to be free of my own story, to have some real choices in my life, is to first realize that all stories are relative to the individual. Paradoxically, once I accept the prison my story builds around me, I am free to begin to change it. Without that realization, I’m living, without resistance, whatever story was given to me by family, church or state. Some people are comfortable being a character in a received story, but, for some reason, I wasn’t. I was driven to change. Don’t know why, but the process is pretty well along now, and there’s no going back. For me, movies and literature, psychology, helped me to find a new, more sensible story for myself about reality.

The big movie, “life itself”, comes without “plots”. Events happen to me or I act to achieve certain results and then I explain the consequences to myself. The largely random events of my life through which I strike lines of meaning do not occur as story elements, but I connect them as autobiographical elements into stories which I tell myself and others, into these very autobiographical stories which I share with you.

My likes and dislikes are obviously the goads to action and/or non-action that lead me by the nose through the fleeting moments of my life. Things happen to me, then I do things in reaction and more things happen to me. This reactive process must start gradually in the womb as body and brain grow into awareness, as the womb child feels pain or pleasure. I have emotions about events according to how they affect me. Meaning is how I explain my emotional life to myself, why I’m hurt or why I’m pleased by the events of my life. Feelings are the way I judge whether a justice or an injustice has been done to me. Feelings and stories are the impulse to law, to even out my feeling life, and the feeling life of the body political.

If only I was still the irrational animal I evolved from, I wouldn’t obsess about meaning. I wouldn’t ask why. I’d just stay away from the painful and embrace those stimuli and responses that help me screw and eat more efficiently than the next animal. I think we all are naturally selfish most of the time anyhow, but few of us are honest enough to admit what we are doing. Like gambling addict William Bennett who could see everyone else’s flaws but his own, we cover our more base motives with stories of excuse or nobility. Religion makes us do that, tries to make us into human beings rather than the animals we are. Human animals are naturally and fittingly selfish. I need to give myself a break. When I’m kind to myself, I’m usually kind to others. When I berate myself, I usually berate others too. We all need to be kinder to ourselves. People kind to themselves are usually kinder to others.

Nowadays the mind has to justify everything we do with our “selves”. Consciousness is the penultimate excuse maker. Mind can always justify anything I do. Fuck or kill, the mind can explain it. I believe there is nothing to morality except the noise of my excuse making. Only the sciences which attempt to explain the natural world as it is presented to the senses by appeals to the senses and the world of the sensual, makes any real “sense”. I finally got what the hippies meant when they said, “Go out of your mind and come to your senses.” So....

It won’t do any good to put down “the movies” to me. Movies were my first religion, and I'm not the least bit defensive about that. They taught me about character, about plots, about the different slants that a film maker can bring to reality with camera and color and imagination. Huge screen presences were my saints and sinners, their machinations my morality tales, and certain artistic moments were my epiphanies, my moments of being “drunk with the Lord” as the saying goes. Later, artists, dancers, authors, actors, painters and dramatists filtered into my religious consciousness and also became my mentors and moral guides.

In my life story to this day, genius of any kind is as worthy to be a religious mentor as any Bible character or event which are as much made up as any in a serious novel or movie. Reading the diaries of Van Gogh convinces me of my assertion though I can understand how a fundamentalist who equates all spirituality with negating the sensual body would not understand how anyone could describe a drinking, screwing suicide as a spiritual man. But in the book of my life, Van Gogh’s tortured life resulted from his life long battle to escape the negative mental, Christian roots he suffered under and to come to the real world of the senses without feeling guilt and remorse. His whole self story was of psychic struggle and revelation.


I’ve already mentioned in earlier chapters how my movie interest went European in the early 60s. Going from American movies of the 1950s to European movies in the 1960s was exactly like giving up an immature, overwrought protestant fundamentalism for the cooler sophistication of the Tao, but earlier, during my junior high days, American movies came alive for me and influenced me as deeply as the made up stories of the Bible ever had. In fact, American movies of the 50s made as many references to religious and moral themes as Classical European literature made religious references. In a strange way, my mental struggles with moral themes in movies and literature which were straight out of Christian Bible stories eventually led me to my dissatisfaction with simplistic Bible answers to the world’s ills, and when I added psychology as another approach to reality, I discovered how absolutely inept mental concepts, or moral platitudes, are to improving human life.

Everyone knows the Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill, but just knowing it, having it taught in schools or prisons, does not in anyway stop the killer from killing. In fact, most criminals know the Commandments only all too well, most better than the rest of us, (many, fearing the hellfire story, rediscover and tell themselves a “loving Jesus” story in prison and on death row), but I believe their belief in the Commandments and their shame when they fail to live up to them actually contributes to the lack of self worth which fuels their murderous rage when they strike someone so hard it results in death. For example, if I’m told repeatedly to honor a murderously violent parent who takes her rage out on me, and then I try to honor that “killer in the parent”, I must end up living a lie of repression and denial, of self-abnegation, or I must lash out and try to escape the murderous story of my worthlessness such a parent has put into the autobiography my brain tells me.

One other more healthy course of action is possible. I can do a rewrite or rearrangement of story elements, but I can’t do that until I know a lot more about myself and my true animal place in the world, and only a thorough course of honest self-evaluation can get me to a serious rewrite. Too many times, I am not willing to confront the hidden Bible stories I fight against or the bad stories about myself I got from others. So I continue the old stories or fight them to the death or live with a story of worthlessness instead of finding a new way to interpret the past plot elements in my story. Simply put, to recover from self-destruction, a human being needs to give herself a break, let the past go, and commence relating good stories to herself about herself and drop the bad girl stories. It all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But no progress can occur until she realizes that she has a secret story she’s been telling herself that she’s totally unaware of. When she realizes there is a secret story controlling her, recovery commences.

Being a movie and literature buff and attempting to assign meaning to paintings and literary plots eventually helped me understand my life as a life full of hidden plots that actually controlled my life. As I said earlier, one of my first memories is of a movie, the one that scared the bejesus out of me, so real to the infant, almost still a mere lap dweller, that he screamed in terror and wanted to escape even though nothing but shadowy forms stalked the darkness and scary eyes glowed in the dark. No real violence at all. What was I scared of? I think evolutionary biology has the answer to that question.



Aside from the movie scare when I was an infant, my earliest movie memories are of standing in line out front of the Belmont Theater, waiting to enter the Saturday afternoon matinee. It’s always sunny in this memory, happy time! At first someone dropped us (the Kenview gang) off for the matinees at the Belmont Theater and picked us up afterward. Then, older still, we began to walk to the theater. It was about a mile to get there through safe neighborhood streets. The theater was in the small Belmont business district which, like the district near McGee Street, contained a drugstore, a shoe store, a small hardware store, grocery store, a bakery, a small department store (from which I stole candy bars, dropping them into my empty newspaper bag until I my folks caught caught me, and I had to go admit my crime to the manager of the department store), an ice cream parlor, a florist and a quack doctor who had evening hours.

My Kenview buddies and I usually got there so early we had to stand in line in front of the theater and wait for the matinees to start. I danced with energy. I jumped, leaped and shuffled excitedly among my friends, yelled comments and made a general show of myself. As the line started to move, my excitement grew. I couldn’t wait to buy my ticket and rush into the darkness. We always scurried (no running) down to the front rows to get our favorite seats, racing others who spilled down the two aisles like streaming ant columns. Next, we saved seats for each other while we took trips to the small candy counter to lay in supplies. I always bought Dots or JuJubes, rarely caramels. What is it about chewy, sweet foods that melt in your mouth but that you can anticipate your teeth cutting into easily when you tire of sucking sweetness? Remember? Toying with the bite? Biting down just a bit and feeling the Dot give but restraining your bite until you’ve sucked just a little more sweet juice into your gullet? Anyhow... then we goofed around and yelled to friends from school, in general made sights of ourselves, until it was show time. If the show didn’t begin on time, or the film broke, we’d stamp our feet in unison until the movie began.

First came the serial and, then, the cartoon. I specially recall Flash Gordon and those dorky, unstable bullet-shaped space machines with smoke dribbling out their sideslipping tails. I also remember one about foreign agents with an American officer in a naval uniform. I think also Zorro was a serial. My most favorite cartoons were Tom and Jerry, Tweetie Bird, and the Road Runner, all three aggressive, continuous chases with lots of violence, explosions and long falls. I was fascinated! I also recall the Disney characters involved in war work and the Gremlins who could destroy American airplanes, and Goofy demonstrating various skills like playing golf.

My feeling for films and the darkened, heightened theater experience was full of awe. From waiting outside in the line to the moments just before the theater lights dimmed I experienced tummy-tickling excitement. I now recognize those feelings as akin to waiting for a grand revelation or the coming of a special religious moment, the expectation of being carried away, of the loss of self into the story the movie would tell me about reality, a reality which I couldn’t yet experience for myself, a vicarious experience I could have which would transcend the boring and/or painful everyday life I normally lived, and I do believe my home life, like Woody Allen’s, had a lot to do with my wanting to escape my everyday reality.

I went to a lot of movies. I sailed on a tramp steamer with Humphrey Bogart, fished with “Captains Courageous”, rode into battle with John Wayne’s cavalry troops, was terrified in the dungeon-like passages through which the Mummy shuffled or lumbered Frankenstein, laughed at Abbot and Costello (my generation’s comic team, followed by Dean and Jerry, and, only later, I discovered Laurel and Hardy), was awed by the landscape of Gunga Din’s India (I didn’t know it was ordinary California landscape in which the natives ambushed the British troopers), crossed castle moats with Robin Hood, sword fought with Errol Flynn’s band of pirates and charged with him and the Light Brigade into the guns on the right, left and ahead, experienced the power of Bette Davis’s Queen Elizabeth and Charles Laughton’s Henry VIII, sailed two years before the mast with Clark Gable. I uncritically loved everything about all movies and bathed happily in how they made me feel while I escaped temporarily from my normal reality. What they told me about the world, false and true, was not fully known to me until I grew older. For the nonce, it was enough that they carried me away, tickled my imagination and gave me a different reality, and it wasn’t the reality I and my peers ordinarily were surrounded by.

Sometime during this Kenview time before I became a high school dater with a steady girlfriend, I entered a period of time when I went alone to 8 movies a weekend. Movies came to theaters in three sets of time during the 40s and early 50s: Sunday-Monday-Tuesday, Wednesday-Thursday and Friday-Saturday. I don’t understand the economics of this system except for the break between Saturday and Sunday to get more real movie buffs into theaters over the weekend. Anyhow....

On Saturday I’d take in the double feature matinee at the Belmont Theater. When I got out, I’d run the mile or so to the Dabel Theater where I used to take my Martha date and catch its double feature. Then, on Sunday, I’d repeat the routine. Bingo! Eight movies a weekend. At fifty cents a crack that was a lot of entertainment for two bucks. In those days, patrons could go into a movie anytime, even in the middle of a film. Films and character types were so predictably plotted that I could figure out what was going on within a few minutes. Nowadays, you won’t catch me entering in the middle of a movie. That alone clues me into how sophisticated modern films have become. We’re not talking about crash/bang/boom movies here; we’re talking about Indies and films for movie sophisticates. If I think I’ll miss the start of a film, I won’t buy a ticket.

Interesting to me that I can see my mental decline in my old age in relation to movies. There was a time I could remember every movie I’d ever seen and something about it, some bit of plot or the whole plot or a character who meant a lot to me. Within the last couple of years, I’ve more than once accidentally brought a film home I’ve already seen. That’s okay if I like the film so much that I purposely bring it home to watch again, but when I bring one home accidentally, I’m pretty discouraged.

I also forget titles a lot more. Just now, I wanted to make a comment about two movies, and I can’t remember their names. I wanted to talk about modern movies which are so simplistic that I can still figure them out like that Bruce Willis film where he’s a dead psychiatrist. What’s the title? As soon as he showed up outside the boy’s home, I knew he was dead and ruined the movie for my wife by telling her. On the other hand, there’s that recent Indie, a murder mystery film which unfolded from back to front. Walk into the middle of that film and you’re lost. I can’t remember either title, but I recall what I took from them. Like great works of literature, a good film needs to be seen more than once in order to more deeply inhale the artistic vision. I’m doing a lot of reading in consciousness so the second film interested me a good deal.

Films with plots are not as interesting for me anymore as are films with strong characters and character development, or with films like Fellini’s “8 1/2” which play with the mind’s sense of reality and call for imaginative leaps and which challenge how people think reality functions in this world. When I was a kid, I’d come home and spill out the plots of films I’d just watched to my parents or to anyone in earshot. Plots intrigued me so much because I still had the childlike anticipation of then..? and then..? and then...? Later I began to be intrigued by films that played with my sense of reality, with my naive belief that life had a plot line which I was supposed to discover and a meaning outside myself. In short, I now like a film which ends with an insight rather than a gunshot. “Hard Eight” was a fine Indie film about desperate people, struggling to survive, until it ended with a bullet.

“The Matrix” is another case in point. By giving the movie an action plot line, it’s creators cheapened the exciting story of consciousness. Because of plot considerations and bowing to a dumbed down audience taste, they had to put in a conflict. The real story of how each of us walks around trapped in his own consciousness, not seeing the real world straight on, but only “experiencing” the sensations that light and sound waves, etcetera, give us of reality, is exciting enough. We are truly prisoners in a strange world, but it’s the world of our individual brains we’re trapped in. We are not trapped in someone else’s reality. We’re trapped in our own realities. Their is no “real” reality out there, just a world of phenomena that our brain interprets for us into some coherence so that we can live and procreate like good animals should.

Fellini taught me so much. He started me on the path toward understanding consciousness and reality as science shows us they function. He didn’t give me moral platitudes like Wayne’s simplistic morality tales did, but Fellini led me to reality, showed me how imagination works in consciousness and in works of literature and art. I think one of the chief differences between a John Wayne or pre-Sixties consciousness and a modern (or existential) consciousness as demonstrated within a film is that Wayne gives you his reality as if it ought to be everyone’s reality whereas Fellini gives you his reality as his reality. The viewer is left with his own imagination and allowed to take his own meaning from the phenomena bombarding his senses on every hand.

Scientific studies of how the brain works only strengthen my respect for Fellini’s work. I commenced to move from conservative rigidity to a liberal understanding of life partly through his work. He had it right. I learned that you truly get what you see. I gave up looking for meaning outside myself. All I found “out there” were other realities, other consciousnesses which I can only receive through language with all its ambiguities. These debates and arguments and conflicts between brains awash in reflections from particulate phenomena can never be resolved except by a giant thought controller which could make everyone share exactly the same incoming phenomena. Or we could wipe out everyone’s sensory equipment and plug in a single feed. Which, of course, brings us back to “The Matrix”, doesn’t it? “AI”, with all it’s flaws, made a better attempt to help people understand consciousness. But “8 1/2”, if we think about it, actually lets us experience the relativity of individual consciousness, and the movie did it without at all preaching.

Finally, to bring this movie section to an end: for some reason, during the time of the eight movies a weekend, I got in the habit of running the two to three miles home from the Dabel in the cool evening shadows. Running brought me great pleasure and I ran smoothly and hardly broke a sweat. I think I was excited by the contrast of the dark theater with the lowering light of summer, spring or fall evenings. I’d feel a sense of pleasure and freedom as I ran beneath the tall maples that lined so many Ohio streets. My strides seemed gigantic, ground eating, powerful to me. When I saw the “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, I was moved and recognized myself in the main character. The metaphor of running even got into one of my own books, unpublished like the others: Delinquent Lives. And in my junior year I ran the mile and half mile on the Stivers track squad and won my letter.

With all the wonderfulness of movie memory in me, I’ve got to tell you how the movie experience is now slowly being ruined and altered by pre-show advertisements which make the theater experience ever more like a sit-at-home TV experience. The excitement’s gone.

Perhaps while I’m on the subject of movies and what some old-fashioned “realists” might call just another naiveté on my part, I should admit that I still believed in Santa Claus when we moved to Kenview. That’s right, nine years young and I still believed in the Jolly Old Elf. On Kenview I learned the bitter truth from my youngish stepmom. Another moment of high shame for me. All I remember is that I was standing in the kitchen doorway, and she was doing the dishes. I don’t recall what my remark was about the coming “day of the flying elf”, but my stepmom turned and laughed, “You don’t still believe in Santa Claus, do you?” I was shocked, dumbstruck. The fat gift bringer was suddenly dead. Like my dog. Like my missing mother.

Something just occurred to me as I write about painful naivety, some more meaningfulness I want to add to my consciousness of the events of my life. Last night (August 8, 2003) I was watching “Midnight Cowboy” which I recently bought over the Internet and loved when I first saw it. I understand Joe Buck and that movie intimately. When I watched it, when it was originally released, that movie drew me in, hurt, fascinated and frightened me. Like “Five Easy Pieces”, though I didn’t yet understand myself, it was another story of my inner life. Over and over, stories of lonely, isolated men and boys broke into my consciousness and terrified me. Think “400 Blows” as another one and Marcello in “La Dolce Vita” though more sophisticated in his alienation than Joe Buck. Joe Buck’s naivety and loneliness were my naivety and loneliness in those days. I owe a great debt to the arts for, over and over, they prodded me to find out who I was and why I was in such pain.

Yes, I was lost, but, now, I wouldn’t trade those long days of struggle for anything. It was the atheist mathematician, Bertrand Russell, who said, roughly paraphrased, “You will never know what you’re made of until you stare a godless universe straight in the eye without flinching.” Since I was an “innocent” idealist for so long, without a solid family structure, maybe that’s why I was unable to give meaning to my life till more facts were in, why I stumbled around trying to find meaning when others had already accepted the status quo or learned to fear the unknown or accepted the handywipe god they were given which explained everything for them by promising a future reward and a clearer, picture window understanding after they were dead and didn’t really need answers anymore.

The religious rationale would be: put off the meaning struggle; god’ll give it to you, after you’re dead, a “go along to get along” sort of stance, an outside job rather than an inside and authentic job. I don’t want to put down those who struggle and suffer to find a religious answer either, but I’ve never met a fundamentalist who hadn’t just surrendered and quit struggling and handed their lives over to one book and a “person” outside themselves to give them every answer. They look to a supernatural “person” outside themselves to give them answers and directions, and by opening themselves to outside authority to guide them, their psychology also makes them easy marks for other, more venal dictators. Instead of an authentic answer, based in knowing themselves and understanding as much as they can about what makes the world tick (scientific truths), they settle for an answer and guidebook outside themselves.

Many people struggle with or aren’t bothered by the same lack of structure, but I also had no self worth by this time. Even by age 50 I had no self worth. I recall as my third wife was leaving me, she came to one counseling session with me. When the counselor asked her what she thought I needed to “get better” or what my issue was (I don’t recall the exact wording), my departing wife said, “He doesn’t have any self worth.”

Next appointment, I complained, “But I got all these other issues too!” I was finally becoming aware.

My counselor said not to worry. He told me as we worked on one issue, others would arise and fall into line. Which they did. It’s sort of what this autobiography’s all about. Our human issues are all in a package anyhow, balled together in the brain/body like an adamantine Gordian knot.