Getting Stuck on “The Button”

This is an afterword I wrote about my short story, "The Button," which will appear in another little e-book I'm putting together, Through the Brightening Air. The e-book will also contain the poem "Red Lion in Winter" and "Last One Close the Door." What with the Red Lion building finally being torn down, and the passing of Andrea Dubnick, this has all become much more contemporary than I thought it would be when I started.

I first conceived of “The Button” as a kind of performance piece disguised as a short story. It came to me on one of those rainy, foggy nights depicted in the beginning of the story. The idea, as I saw it, was to tell a story that in some way encompasses the venue, The Red Lion Pub, as well as some of my own personal memories of hanging around and about on that stretch of Lincoln Avenue in 1969 and the early 1970s. It was to be like a ghost story you tell when you’re in an old place with a haunted history. And at the end of the story, you throw in a line like, “And sometimes, on certain nights, you can still see the Headless Brakeman, swinging his lantern, whistling in the pelting rain … ” Then someone way back in the room starts to whistle, and everyone screams.

At least that was the idea.

I wrote the story in haste, trying to complete it for a reading I was scheduled to do at the Red Lion – the scene of the crime, so to say. I grew up with the Twilight Tales reading series, up on the second floor of the pub. Twilight Tales and I go back a long way. That was where I first read “The Measure of All Things.” It was down in the bar where Marty Mundt said to me, “You know, that character, Axel, the dinosaur who won’t stop saying, ‘Hiya!’ – you should do something more with that character.” I had already been thinking of writing another saur story, with Axel at the center.

Andrea Dubnick and Tina Jens, the two movers-and-shakers that made Twilight Tales move-and-shake in those days, also encouraged me to write more about the saurs, Axel in particular. They went to the extent of greeting me with “Hiya!” every time they saw me.

Tina still does.

Marty’s enthusiasm sealed the deal. I wrote “Bronte’s Egg,” and then “In Tibor’s Cardboard Castle,” and I even got a lick in of “Orfy” as a work in progress on two occasions before the pub closed its doors in 2007.

The reading series had incredible staying power, especially for all the years (over a decade, if I’m not mistaken) it was held at the Red Lion. Tina Jens and her many minions worked hard to keep it going. Many readers of top caliber read there: Gene Wolfe and Algis Budrys at the top of that list, at least for me. Many writers got their start there, not only learning how to fine-tune their writing but how to fine-tune their reading of their writing.

We learned to play the room.

I’ve seen big-time writers, Hugo winners, read into their pockets with muttering, racing voices, like a reading was an endurance race. At Twilight Tales, you had an audience, and you learned to read to them. Some nights the audience was tiny. Some nights they filled the second floor all the way back to the upstairs bar.

On summer nights there was the patio in the back, with the big tree that grew right through the floorboards. According to Twilight Tales’ own book, Tales From the Red Lion, in some background contributed by writer/director/all-around-talent Lawrence Santoro, it was under that tree that Chicago’s Shakespeare Rep Company got their start with a production of The Tempest. With the right set of readers on the right night, that patio would be filled as well.

I read at all those incarnations and set-ups upstairs at the Red Lion. The ones I liked best were inside, with the “stage” set against a group of windows in the back of the place. The audience would sit at tables in the room. Someone would screw a high-power light into the ceiling to help the reader be seen (and for the reader to see what she or he was reading). If you were reading, looking straight out into the audience, to your right would be the wall that came against the wall of the building next door – 2440 North Lincoln Avenue. The same building mentioned in “The Button.”

Several times I wondered if, in a world if infinite possibilities, it would be possible to commingle the ghosts of the building next door with the ghosts of the Red Lion.

Yes, the Red Lion had a great history of being haunted, and people I knew who would never confess to a belief in ghosts (and what does it mean to “believe” in ghosts anyway?) said they experienced very odd, strange disturbing feelings and sensations up on that second floor. You can read more about it in Tales From the Red Lion. What’s important is that I knew about the ghosts – everyone knew about the ghosts, alleged or real.

Mate this knowledge with the crazy idea that ghosts may be our experiences of time travelers, and you see what I might have been getting at with “The Button.”

 

When one works at the “art” of fiction, one sometimes wonders if it’s possible to break the wall between fiction and non-fiction that doesn’t fit the simple category of “lies.” We get plenty of examples of the latter every day in our media: in advertising, in advertising that tries to pass itself off as journalism, in corporate communications, in marketing – you know the drill.

It’s something else I’m talking about, something more akin to alchemy. It doesn’t call for the “willing suspension of disbelief,” but for the willing suspension of the rules of reality – or the suggestion of it. The idea, figuratively or literally, is to make a story that becomes real – or at least “real,” or in Philip Dick’s terminology, “apparently real.” When one thinks of it that way it seems Borgesian – “The Circular Ruins” revisited.

In other words, I wanted to see if I could make myself, and an audience, hear Rad Tate and Gideon Faust kick out the jams next door.

Well, I had my chance, and I blew it.

I had the venue. I had the gig. I had the story – mostly.

It was all in my head, and I wrote at a furious pace to make the deadline.

At the last minute, when I tried to print the story, it wouldn’t print. The document got locked up. I tried to retrieve the raw copy from the document and transfer it to an email, which I could send to my office and print out there.

It wouldn’t print out there. The email wouldn’t even open.

Every effort I made to retrieve and transfer my story hit a brick wall, lined with concrete and reinforced with titanium.

The thought occurred to me that I shouldn’t try to read the story, but tell it – I said I wanted it to be like a performance piece after all.

I chickened out. I read an awful piece I cobbled together at the last minute because I didn’t want to read anything I’d already read there. More’s the pity. The crowd was right. The moment was right. Even the weather was right – it was a tad chilly, and damp, and foggy, just like the weather described in “The Button.”

But I wasn’t ready to push myself and to trust myself to do the job of being a storyteller.

There was a thing I used to tell my short story students when they seemed to be caught and struggling in the mechanics of language and structure and their own expectations of what they should do: I’d say, or scribble on the board, or on their handed-in assignments, “Trust the story.” In other words, let the story lead the way; you follow.

Alas, I couldn’t follow my own advice that night, and I crashed. Crashed and burned.

It would be simple, and simplistic, to blame it on the ghosts.

You can always blame it on the ghosts.

It took me a while to return to the story. When I heard that Tina Jens was planning a new edition of Tales From the Red Lion, I told myself that this was the moment to get it down – to “do the thing” I hadn’t been able to complete before. I started the story from scratch, since I had nothing more than the notes I’d salvaged from my preliminary work. I made the deadline, and what you read here are the results of my walk down Lincoln Avenue one chilly, foggy night, when I thought I could see the rotating beacon atop the “Playboy Building” (as it was known in 1969), and I felt all the places that once stood on the street still stood there. Past and present and future were all there, intermingled.

 

I write this in the autumn of 2013. Since I first conceived the story, more of what I remember from days past has disappeared – physically.

A month or two ago, the building that housed the Red Lion was finally torn down. My friend, the author Wayne Allen Sallee, posted the photos he took of the hole in the ground where the Red Lion once stood.

Last month, Andrea Dubnick, who hosted many evenings of the Twilight Tales reading series and edited so many of the chapbooks that came out of that series, passed away.

And Delphyne Woods, a person who embodied “The Sixties” more than anyone else I ever knew, was found dead in her apartment in September. And she may have been dead for more than a week before she was discovered.

We live in a world of ghosts, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes we meet the ghosts and sometimes the ghosts meet us.

And sometimes we are the ghosts.

 

Oh yes, one more thing – about that button.

The button referred to in the story was one with the fist drawn and designed by Frank Cieciorka. It was a pen and ink line drawing, or a woodcut, very bold and very distinct. Google the name and you’ll find an image. It’s iconic. Mr. Cieciorka, alas, died in 2008, another ghost in a world of ghosts.

Like the narrator of the story, I bought that button in the little head shop that resided in the same building that later became the Red Lion. That button got me into a lot of trouble. I had an Algebra teacher who was a fanatical Christian, who demanded I take the button off in her class.

And at the event at the Aragon on December 29, 1969, mentioned in the story, I had to chase that button down. A guy I met had taken it off my shirt and, after inspecting it, put it on his own shirt and headed out of the ballroom. A joke. Hah-hah. I could have let him walk away with it (hey, weren’t we not supposed to be into possessions, then?), but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why, but I liked that button and I knew it was important that I retrieve it from the casual acquaintance (who was probably one of those Joe Cool jerks, so impressed with his own slickness, he thought he could walk around and take what he wanted – a carte blanche socialist. In those days, in Chicago, most socialists were carte blanche socialists, I soon discovered).

Later, I put the button on my guitar strap, along with a dozen other buttons I’d gathered over the heyday (What Panther, Black Panther, Yippie!, the omega, the peace sign, a shiny little bug-shaped button that resembled a roach. The button stayed put for over thirty-five years, but I took it off the guitar strap when I wanted to use it as a prop for my reading/performance piece.

Almost immediately, I lost it.

It slipped it into a pocket, or under a stack of junk. It re-emerged after my fiasco at the Red Lion and since then I have lost it and rediscovered it several times.

It used to worry me – losing my “time machine,” but I don’t worry much about it anymore. It’s a time machine, as I said, and as such it’s probably getting around, returning to the scene of many crimes and a few triumphs. And wherever it’s gone to, it’s probably having some amazing adventures. But I have no doubt I’ll see it again.

It’s probably not true to say that nothing is ever lost, or that nothing ever completely goes away, but I can’t quite give up the old habit of hoping. The button is in the world – hope is alive.

Thank you, Frank Cieciorka. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Delphyne.

Thank you all.

Night of the Thirty Dollar Martinis

For Delphyne Joan Hanke-Woods (November 11, 1945 – September 2013)

 

We were in Anaheim. It was 2006. I was staying at the Marriott, near the convention center. The bar had a little patio alongside the pool. I’d been out there several times already in that past week. I was in town for the worldcon (the World Science Fiction Convention, L.A. Con IV, if you’re not familiar with the lingo), and had a chance to catch up with random gossip with Janis Ian, and later got to meet David Latham, with whom I had been corresponding for a number of years (he was encouraging me to write a screenplay of “Bronte’s Egg,” and he wanted to help me in that task any way possible).

The patio was a good spot. The weather had been warm and humid, but not oppressively so (not that I remember). You could catch a good view of the moon, but not too many stars and planets – hey, it’s Anaheim. The last time I was there it took four days before I caught a glimpse of the Santa Anas.

The con was pretty much over. Delphyne – Joan, I keep calling her Joan because that was her name when I first met her – and I had been to dinner with Chris Barkley, who was celebrating his birthday.

A good night, but the con was winding down. Joan had been a day short on her hotel booking at the Hilton next door. She needed a room for a night before she caught her flight back to Chicago. Of course I told her it was okay to share my room for the night.

We were friends – not lovers. When we shared rooms at cons we shared rooms. End of that story – except for me to mention that she snored aggressively and couldn’t sleep unless the TV was on (forgive me, Joan, but an honest writer has to get these little details out sometimes).

After the birthday dinner, Joan and I had moved onto the patio. She had picked up a taste for vodka martinis from me (I am an evil man, as she was fond of reminding me), and so we ordered a couple – good ones. Straight up. We picked out the brand. The first round came to about thirty bucks apiece. It was insane – thirty dollar martinis? I mean, we were both still “working” then, but, but – thirty dollar martinis?

The waiter brought them. And they tasted like they were worth every penny.

We took advantage of the booze as the booze took advantage of us. We talked and talked and talked. We both got in about two lifetimes worth of stories. All we needed was for a psychotherapist to be sitting at the next table taking notes.

I can’t remember the details of what we said to each other. One of the benefits to drinking and baring your soul is that afterward you don’t remember which parts of your soul you bared, or which parts of your friends’ souls were bared to you. You experience all the benefits of catharsis with none of the burdens of memory.

I think we did make some discoveries. One thing I discovered was that Joan was the person who designed the Screaming Yellow Zonkers package.

Screaming Yellow Zonkers – look it up. It was a candy-coated popcorn snack. It made design history by being one of the very first food packages to have a black background. I know about this because my dad had designed an orange juice container with a black background and the clients rejected it on the grounds that consumers wouldn’t buy food in black containers (they later relented). Joan’s foreground was filled with little surreal Peter-Max-type characters. It was distinctive and direct. And even if the product didn’t catch on, the name was referenced in the local monster-movie-extravaganza Saturday night show, Screaming Yellow Theater, hosted by a guy (the late Jerry G. Bishop) who called himself Svengoolie.

“No way! You worked on the Screaming Yellow Zonkers design?”

“I didn’t work on it. It was me. I designed it.”

“Jesus! You should be in the Hall of Fame!”

Another discovery we made was that childhood, for many, was a train wreck you spend the rest of your life extricating yourself from.

The other discoveries, more or less, orbited around that one overbearing fact. Folks who tell me, “You’ve got to get over that,” or “I live for the moment,” misunderstand how time – and “getting over,” and “living for the moment” – really works. There are no moments in isolation, not in reality. We can isolate moments in art, but that’s another thing. And even when we isolate them, the strings that connect this moment to another moment still show. If they don’t, the artwork is usually empty and meaningless – or it calls attention to other moments by the sheer act of denying them.

My dad lived to 2005, changed continents, changed a lot of things, but he never escaped Poland in 1939. My mother is still living like a refugee even though she hasn’t changed addresses since 1954. Time is a sequence, but not a simple one. And anyone who tells you they’re living in the moment is telling you a lie, though they’re not lying to you. 

And then we ordered two more martinis.

It put a brighter spin on things.

Even when you started out life in a train wreck, it’s a funny train wreck – we laughed.

We laughed and laughed.

The sky above us was dark (the moon had set by then, or disappeared, or had moved on to another party) but we were bright. Not illuminated (except by the vodka), but illuminating. We were like a couple of sea-dwelling denizens who brought our own light with us wherever we went. We had expunged and expiated and come out the other side, laughing. We had allowed our raw emotions to dictate what we said, and we discovered that much of what we were saying was about pain. And anger – at least in my case (Joan was always lecturing me about my anger, especially when I was driving). Most human beings spend so much energy holding themselves together, there’s little of themselves left afterward to do anything with.

“Captain, we’ve used all our power to maintain the shields. There’s nothing left for the proton torpedoes!”

So we stopped holding ourselves together. And it wasn’t like the pain went away, but it felt much lighter, much more bearable. And rather than live for the present it was conceivable to live for tomorrow – a tomorrow that wasn’t just another version of today, but a real tomorrow. A future.

Not to underplay the peril ahead. It was 2006 but we could see what was coming. Not just the lousy economy. Not just the wars. Not just the lousy politics (though both of us were Chicagoans, and had great hopes for that local guy, the new senator, Obama – wouldn’t it be just crazy-beautiful if he could win a presidential election?). We weren’t as fast as we once were. Health would be harder to maintain. Time must have a stop. But that was still some time away. We were good for a few more decades – and they would be our best decades.

By then the martinis ran out. The hour was late. Joan had to catch a plane the next morning. I had to go to Disneyland or Los Feliz … I can’t remember the order of my progress.

I do remember the great sense of elation – and illumination, and relief. And confirmation – a confirmation of our own reality. We weren’t people playing the parts of an artist and writer. We were those people.

I do believe we were happy. Late night wanderers down the hallways and through the concourse might have mistaken us for the rising sun.

Happier moments we may have had together, out of many happy moments (like this one I just recalled: she told me that when we were on our way to Madison once, to Wiscon, on Route 14, me driving, the windows open on the warm day, just rolling past miles and miles of farmland, was one of the happiest moments she’d had in years), but that one, that night, that bar and those martinis …

Every Draft is a New Universe: Writing “Last One Close the Door”

This is a piece I plan to include in another little e-book that’s almost ready, called Through the Brightening Air, which will contain my stories “Last One Close the Door” and “The Button.” I’m doing these forewords (or afterwords – I haven’t decided) as little extras, so you’ll get something more than an old, reprinted story for your three bucks worth of electrons.

At first, I was going to delay this post a day and write something about the people I’ve recently lost or am losing – Delphyne Woods back in September, and today word reached me that Andrea Dubnick passed away. And a colleague of mine at Columbia, Arnie Raife, is in hospice. These are all good people, and I want to share the few memories I have of them. But there’s a heaviness that comes with loss, and I still can’t come to terms with it.

I will say that today I received word that Windycon, will have a memorial for Delphyne on Saturday afternoon. The Art Show will also have a special showing of her work.

And, I wasn’t planning on having a special dedication in the e-book, but the other story, “The Button,” is so much about the Red Lion Pub and the Twilight Tales reading series, and Andrea did so much for “TT” – and she edited so many of the Twilight Tales chapbooks, including the first edition of Tales of the Red Lion, I have to dedicate the book to her now.

 

Somewhere back in my undergraduate years I started up a story called “The Small Town Theater Owner.” I can’t say it was “the usual thing” – it was the usual thing for me: angst in the night – worn, grubby urban landscapes and lonely, alienated protagonists struggling for human contact. Mr. Thompson, the theater owner, lost between a world of dreams and an all-too-real world of diminished expectations and decay.

We were all into angst in those days, by “we” I mean all the young serious young men of late adolescence, of an intellectual/aesthetic bent – all six of us. I think we all met in the same old church basement coffee house while everyone else was out having a good time.

I could have buried that story as I did so many of the stories I started in the mid-1970s, but there was an appeal to the location: the little neighborhood movie theater, the bright marquee, the fading maroon carpeting, the lonely little candy counter, the ubiquitous smell of popcorn, the dark auditorium with the sticky concrete floor, the worn seats, the wilted nicotine-colored curtains around the damaged screen.

And overhead, the light from the projection booth, like a light from heaven shining down on a world in sore need of redemption.

And the movies. Always the movies. From Tomb of Ligeia to Battle Beneath the Earth; from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I don’t know how many drafts I went through on that story. I literally “went to school” on that it. Paul Pekin, who was teaching at Columbia College in those days, ran me through the opening paragraphs and showed me how I was using a first-person narrator while most of the observations in the opening were those you’d expect from a third-person narrator.

Now, the sensible student would have just changed the whole story from first- to third-person narrator. That’s what a sensible student would have done. I re-imagined the thing with the first-person in mind. Complete rewrite.

Then I rewrote the rewrite. And re-wrote the rewritten rewrite.

Six or seven years later, I was still sticking the latest version of “The Small Town Theater Owner” into a 10x13 envelope, with room for the 9x12 return envelope which, for six or seven years, the editors always utilized.

When I told people about the story, they always seemed to like the subject matter. I’m from a generation that grew up going to the movies at little neighborhood places: the Brighton, the Marquette, the Colony, the Hi-Way, the Coral, the Midwest … Theater chains made their incursion into the independent market in those days. There was a “multiplex” in the Ford City shopping center – three screens. The Evergreen Plaza shopping center had two theaters – “Cinema One” and “Cinema Two.” It seemed pretty classy to a young kid, and it was designed with all the touches that made the 1960s version of “modern” architecture distinctive – not like the stacks of twenty-odd boxes with seats and projection booths that showed up a decade or two later, one indistinguishable from the other.

Half my childhood memories consist of movies. The other half are of those little theaters.

I know I’m not the only one.

But the problem with “The Small Town Theater Owner” was this: it had no reason to exist. It had an emotional center, the sense of loss and the sense of dreams abandoned, lost in a morass of one’s heritage and address. The setting is there. The characters are there. The trumps of doom are waiting to play over the ruins of the Alma Theater – but why? Not ‘why the place or people?’ but why the story?

I didn’t have a necessary or sufficient answer for that one. I didn’t give up on the story, but it took some years until I could answer the question.

I had to go back to science fiction to find it.

As I have said many times before, my undergraduate training in fiction writing consisted of many instructors trying, with the best intentions, to beat the science fiction out of me. Graduate school picked up the truncheon, but it was too late. Blame my wife. Blame Delphyne Woods. Blame Algis Budrys.

Blame them all.

But blame me first.

I hung around the science fiction paperback racks at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s downtown like an angel thrown out of paradise, or a child banished from the playground. I picked up The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction regularly again; I read the other sf magazines a bit more irregularly, but I tried to keep my eye on what was being done. Someone out there – everyone, perhaps – was having fun. And I wanted to join them.

And eventually I did.

Near the end of the 1980s – the very late 1980s, like 1991 – I was reading a lot about particle physics and theories of multiple universes. I especially enjoyed Rudy Rucker’s The Fourth Dimension.

And before Stephen Hawking, there was Heinz Pagels.

I combed through The Cosmic Code a dozen times. Now, Pagels himself, as I recall, was fairly skeptical about the notion of multiple/parallel universes, but not entirely dismissive.

What fascinated me about this notion of universes beyond our immediate residence plays into that sfnal notion of “literalizing the metaphor.” Writers create alternate universes all the time. What if some of these universes were real?

Well, they are real – real for us, the writers. And it’s fun to work with them, because intrinsic to the notion of an exponentially expanding pattern of realities is another notion very dear to the core of much science fiction: that what is here is not the only way things can be.

“It does not have to be this way.”

I wrote up a draft that I kept under 5,000 words. I kept the word length down because I wanted to have the story critiqued at the Chicon V writing workshops in 1991. The critiques were sort of what I expected. Hard science fiction writers can’t stand multiple universes and do their best to pull the plug on them whenever possible. Why was I using a teenaged narrator? And worse, a female teenaged narrator? Why didn’t I explain more about this strange organization that used these young people to survey and police the inter-dimensional activities in other universes? Why didn’t I explain more about why Mr. Thompson abandoned physics and became a theater owner? Another sharp spear thrown at my story: multiple universe stories had “been done.” What was new to say in this story?

All the answers were in the story, but the workshop readers were missing them, so it seemed, or they just weren’t interested.

It had been my policy when I sent a manuscript out to be critiqued, that I also send the story to a magazine, sort of as an “insurance policy” or reality check. Very often, the critiquers in such workshops are very smart people who know every possible reason why your story doesn’t work, though they themselves can’t write a saleable story. This doesn’t preclude their being right very often, but just in case their judgments were based less on what I’d done (my story) and more on what I didn’t do (write something not like me, but more like the stories these critiquers enjoyed and were familiar with), I wanted a comment from an editor – someone who was actually in a position to buy my story – to balance off the critiquing crew.

In this case I chose Kim Mohan, who at the time was the editor of Amazing Stories. I’d sold a story to the previous editor, “A Man Makes a Machine,” that ran in 1990. So for once I included a cover letter that stated I was fairly certain this story would need more work, but I wanted to know if this version looked interesting to him in its current state. If not, I’d just move on. If it did look interesting, I’d send him a revised version as soon as I’d finished with the workshop.

Kim was a great editor to work with. In reply to my cover letter, he said he’d withhold judgment until he saw my revised version. That version came in a little over short story length, “novelette” length, and most of the rough edges I had to leave in the workshop version were effectively smoothed out in the revision.

Amazing sent the contract back pretty quickly. I couldn’t be more pleased. The story may not have been a prize winner, but it floated, like all short stories and bars of ivory soap should. I was planning to write more stories set in that same universe (or universes) – did write more (see “Auteur Theory” and a few others, like “The Unremembered Gate” and The Last Labyrinth, are still on the launching pad), and I finally had my small town theater owner down.

Amazing Stories was a great magazine in those days. It had gone from digest-size to full-size, and glossy. Each story got a full-color illustration. The illustrator for “Last One …,” Mark Maxwell, did an incredible job. He got the sleeping projectionist in, with a bunch of posters lining the booth (including the gloriously-named forgotten Roger Corman opus, Swamp Women), the projector and the light emanating from it, that square of light that catches on the glass from the booth window, and some errant particles – as if from a ring accelerator – flying right out of the illustration. It’s a beauty and one of my favorite illustrations for one of my stories that I’ve ever seen.

Yes, it was a splendid thing to have a story in Amazing in those days.

The only problem was that nobody read it.

Even among the fans – fandom, for some odd reason (or maybe not so odd) preferred to think of Amazing as doomed from the get-go and were so determined that their prediction come true, few of them bought the magazine themselves. It was one of the things I discovered in later years about fandom: collectively, they like nothing better than large quantities of cheesy and cheese-flavored snacks, chocolate in quantity rather than quality, and predicting the failure of well-intentioned projects. So, with great fiction by George Zebrowski, Robert Silverberg, Tanya Huff, Greg Benford, Harry Turtledove and dozens of others to ignore, I was lucky to have my story ignored at all.

“Last One Close the Door” takes place in a town where the factories have closed, the downtown area has been decimated. Twenty years later (I’m writing this in 2013), I can’t say all that much has changed for many towns and communities. If anything, things have gotten worse.

What does it say for a science fiction author that only his most depressing speculations turn out right? I have no cell phones or compact computer devices in the story, and their absence may date my vision. But the loss of all those little movie houses – along with their function as being a sort of avenue for dreams for all the residents in the little neighborhoods and towns where they reside, that part I got right. Different avenues may exist, new media has come to prominence, but I can’t help feeling the loss. I won’t, I can’t, say the new media is any better or worse than the neighborhood theaters, but I’d feel better in a world where we can have the option, the choice, of indulging in one over the other.

Which is to say, I miss being able to slip into the Brighton Theater on a Thursday night, after a rough day, and catch a double feature in a nearly-empty mini-palace, while I muse over the relative values of the “real” universe over its imaginative rivals occupying the upraised plane of light between my eyes and the gritty, glass-bead-surface of the movie screen.

Whatever else I have to say, short of relating all sorts of little anecdotes about my excursions into the dark – those soiled and seedy little places where we all stare straight ahead at the screen as if it is the window through which we will arrive at our destiny (and whatever “destiny” may be) – is perhaps better expressed in the story.

If you were born after the heyday of the “nabes,” I hope “Last One Close the Door” helps convey a little of their flavor.