Life Goes to the Movies Read Online Free PDF Page B

one with the words MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU printed on a sky blue background. I caught up with Dwaine.
    “What didn’t you like about it?” I asked.
    “It’s a goddamn blockbuster,” is all he said.
    “So it’s a blockbuster. What’s wrong with that?”
    He stopped walking then and faced me, burning me with those gray metal shards in his eyes. “Are you serious, babe? Are you truly serious?
Mindless entertainment? Cunning escapism? That’s what you want, huh? That’s all you care about, isn’t it?” I stood
there. “Christ,” he said. “Well you may go to the movies to have the brains sucked out of your skull, but I don’t. I go
to be redeemed. I guess that’s the difference between you and me, babe. You want to escape from your sins; I want to be redeemed from
mine. But that’s not what I hate about that movie. A little harmless entertainment now and then isn’t so bad. Only what we just saw in
there wasn’t harmless. What we just saw is a doomsday juggernaut, the cinematic equivalent of a gigantic shopping mall. Someday, movies like that
are going to take over everything! They’re like Godzillas flattening the landscape. And when they do, trust me, there won’t be a
thing left for the likes of us, of you and me.”
    He smiled then, as if to make light of it, but it was a tight, castigating smile, a smile blending pity with scorn. Then he turned and kept walking.
    I hurried to catch up.
     
    17
     
    That was also the summer of the famous Blackout of ’77. For twenty-four hours starting on a sweltering July evening the whole city went as dark
as the sheets of newsprint Professor Crenshaw made us blacken with charcoal. In the forced darkness old people sat listening to themselves breathing in
chairs, lovers embraced by candlelight, kids pulled fire alarms, looters smashed store windows and shouldered frozen turkeys and TV sets.
    When the lights went out I phoned Venus. I had a bottle of Chianti in my room that I’d been saving for just such an occasion, and asked her if
she would care to share it with me by candlelight. Predictably she made up some excuse. Rebuffed, I took the bottle with me over to Dwaine’s
place.
    With no lights on anywhere the whole city felt like one of those sensory deprivation tanks. I couldn’t see the sidewalk under my feet, or tell
where the curb was, or say for sure what block I was on, or even what city I was walking in, in what country, on what planet, in which universe. I felt
like an astronaut spacewalking without a lifeline.
    When I got there I pressed Dwaine’s lobby buzzer, which of course didn’t work. So I stood in the street looking up at his third floor
window, which framed more darkness. I was about to give up and go when a gloomy shape stumbled toward me on the sidewalk. He stumbled right into my
arms.
    “Jesus,” I said.
    Somehow I got him upstairs to his apartment. All the way up the dark stairs he kept on making terrible sounds, his breath rattling through the snot or
whatever it was that clogged up his nose. I took his keys out of his pocket and let us both into his apartment, where I found some candles in a kitchen
drawer. By their light I saw the blood draining from his nose and from his eye—real blood, not the fake stuff. Plum-like bruises ripened on every
branch of his face. I said, “Jesus—what happened?”
    “Get—get the camera,” he said.
    “What?”
    “The camera,” he said. “Get it.”
    He wanted me to film him bleeding.
    The camera had its own battery-powered light. It felt weird, filming him, like Dwaine and I had traded places, with me seeing him as he had so often
seen me, bleeding profusely through a series of lenses. I kept saying, Should I stop now? Is that enough? Do you want me to keep on filming? I
exposed a whole roll.
    I took off Dwaine’s shoes and stretched his serape over him. I tended his wounds with cotton and iodine. Then I sat there, on the edge of his
bed, not sure what to do next, watching his face by the