Read Online Flicker by Theodore Roszak - Free Book Online Page B

It was hot, heavy work, but, stripped down to a clammy tanktop (in which she cut quite a sexy figure), she was going about it with complete self-assurance. “May I help?” I asked.
    She refused. “If that son of a bitch knows you can run these fucking machines, he’ll never show up. Goddamit! It’s
his
job.” I was assigned to the ticket counter and espresso machine.
    Though Clare chewed him out royally when he returned, Sharkey’s erratic absences continued, culminating in a week-long disappearance. We later discovered he’d spent the time in a Tijuana jail, charged with drunk and disorderly conduct. Clare had no choice but to hire a replacement; that was costly. The price of a union-scale projectionist could wipe out a week’s worth of the theater’s earnings. After that, she decided it was time for me to learn the projectors, even though she knew that once Sharkey had trained me, he would feel even more license to goof off. As eagerly as I looked forward to assisting Sharkey, I was troubled by one unresolved issue that lay between us. I had, after all, taken his woman from him … or at least that was the self-congratulatory slant I privately placed upon things. A man like Sharkey was bound to be hurting over that. Should I apologize … make excuses to save his pride? I needn’t have worried. Without being asked, Sharkey put the matter to rest on our first night in the booth.
    â€œListen, pal, I want to thank you for helping me out with Clare.”He dropped the remark as he pulled on the frayed undershirt that served as his official projectionist’s uniform. As far as I can recall, this miserable little rag, sweated yellow front and back, was never sent out to be washed. “I’ve been hoping somebody would take the old girl off my hands for a while.”
    â€œOh?” I said, shaping the vowel to mean
is that what I’m doing, helping you out?
And “Oh?” again, meaning
for a while?
Sharkey, assiduously polishing the projectors, failed to hear the implied questions.
    â€œSeems like what our Miss Swann needs is something more on the effete side, you know? Lots more sex in the head. You’re just the man for the job. See, the woman just never did know how to be an animal. God knows I’ve tried to warm her up. But it’s like trying to move a glacier with your bare hands. Myself, I’m strictly a steak and potatoes man. And you can hold the potatoes, serve the meat raw. Now, Clare … like you’ve probably noticed, she’s happy just to read the menu.”
    I’d noticed nothing of the sort. If anything, I found Clare’s sexual appetite voracious, and her erotic imagination nearly overwhelming. But if that was the way Sharkey preferred to see it …
    I remember distinctly the impression I carried away from that first lesson on the machines. Now that I was to lay hands on them in earnest, I realized what strange instruments they were. The picture out front on the screen that evening was Cocteau’s
Beauty and the Beast,
a gossamer-fine fairy tale that came as close as any film ever has to capturing true magic. But here inside the dark, tiny hotbox at the rear of the theater was a brace of wheezing, rasping, thirty-five-millimeter projectors with no more magic to them than a couple of broken coffee grinders. And there was Sharkey, sweating over his task like some frenzied demon toiling in the bowels of hell, muttering away, pleading with these rattletrap monsters to please be on their best behavior. How could the delicately wrought elegance of such a movie emerge from these infernal contraptions? In the sweltering booth the machines, which broke down regularly, snagging and singeing the film, seemed at war with the hapless movie that was forced to run the risky gauntlet of their pitiless gears and wheels. From their menacing look and sound, the projectors might almost be intent on devouring the fragile artistry