At the refreshment stand, I nodded at the Coca-Cola toggle and the glassed-in popcorn popper next to it. Soon as I had my stuff, Jumbo marched me towards the screening room. The seats there’d begun to fill. Folks surged through the lobby and into the auditorium. We slipped in at the back, after two thirds of the crowd’d already gone in, and found seats against the rear wall, under the projection booth. Bodies crammed every nook, teenagers eeled up and down the aisles searching for friends or showing themselves off, and the hoots and cat-calls didn’t fade away until the house lights’d dimmed.
The curtains over the screen, the royal-purple one and the see-through job behind it, purred aside. Coming attractions, newsreels (mostly war stuff), and a Popeye cartoon that prodded the crowd to talk-back applause.
Then Frankenstein, with an opening scene-Latin mumblings, peasant faces in a cemetery-that really did slap a chill on everyone’s high spirits. Except for the projector purr and the film’s sound track, all you could hear now were creaking seats, nervous titters, and coughs. Bodies dug up, hanged murderers cut down, the theft of an ABNORMAL brain by the doctor’s stupid helper. Halfway along, the crowd’d really gotten into it. Squeals, shrieks, laughter. Some folks stood up to yell at or plead with the actors on screen.
“Come on now,” a man told the monster, “you don’t want to do that. Uh-uh. Gon bring you nuthin but misery.”
“Vile!” somebody else said. “He so vile!”
“Lawd, cain’t you see he didn’t mean it?”
“Naw, naw, naw. Go back! Go back!”
The longer I sat there the queerer I began to feel. I kept sneaking peaks at Jumbo, who sat rigor-mortis still. He didn’t much favor Karloff playing Dr Frankenstein’s critter, or else Karloff s goose-stepping monster didn’t exactly favor Jumbo, but you’d’ve had to be blind not to see a likeness-the lumpish blocks of their heads, the bearishness of their bodies. Still, Jumbo had a suppleness lacking in the other, a sad lopsided quirk of face that made Karloff s monster look regular, even handsome, by comparison. There was a mechanical, a robotlike, quality to the screen thing Jumbo didn’t have. He sometimes lumbered and wrenched, but when he did, it was more like a hurt beast than a broken robot. Anyway, Jumbo’s resemblance to the made-up Karloff didn’t scare me-it embarrassed me into a fever. Even the Roxy’s “iceberg air” didn’t help. How must Jumbo feel, towering there marble hard as the Lincoln memorial, hands clutched like gauntlets to his knees?
He must’ve had an inkling half the people there, including his own roomy, ’d already compared him in their minds to the bogeyman on screen. And the inkling could have come from a lifetime of overheard slurs and otherwise hard-to-account-for snubbings. I knew such stuff myself.
Three quarters or more through it, I dropped the thread of Frankenstein. It had no music score, and every little gasp or cushion creak-when folks weren’t sassing the Karloff monster or arguing amongst themselves-slammed me back to the iceberg there-and-then and the sting of my own embarrassment. Lots of scenes limped along on talk.
But near the end, when the villagers torched the old mill and the monster appeared to burn with it, I found the thread again. I forgot about Jumbo and watched. A respectfulness like awe fixed the audience in a hurricane light, centering us in the hush of its eye. Pity for the monster, and relief it wouldn’t rampage again in this picture, and dread in knowing that, like Christ in a bad suit, it would rise again. To take a wife. The sequel was already spooled.
“Let’s go.” For the first time since we’d claimed our seats, Jumbo tried to get up. I put both hands on his chest and held him in it. The clock on the square hadn’t chimed nine yet. Even Jumbo couldn’t be that keen on Life in a Putty-Knife Factory. Groaning, he sank back.
During intermission, folks headed for the lobby to stock up on jujube beads, soda, chewing gum. With the houselights on, they saw Jumbo’s head lolling against the back wall, his eyes squinting like a big iguana’s. They slowed to ogle him or sped up to get past quick.
Whispers and nudgings cycloned around us, and two or three more seats in our area wound up empty.
“S a publicity gimmick,” somebody said.
“S a wounded sojer, home from the war.”
“Naw, it’s that Hellbender first baseman who poked him a coupla long uns lass night.”
“Ugh. Somebody done beat him silly with a ugly stick.”
The houselights blinked, signaling the second show.
Fewer people came back in, and the empty seats around us multiplied. Jumbo slid down and down, like he hoped to disappear into the spilled Coke gleaming on the floor like gummy blood.
Bride of Frankenstein began with its loud rum-ta-ta-tum-tum score-music-box tinklings during the opening with Mary Shelley and the bozos made up like Byron and Percy, and mad flourishes every time the monster staggered on or Colin Clive as Dr F. had another headache. By the time Clive got Elsa Lanchester, with her Harpo Marx hairdo, jump-started, Jumbo’s head was no higher over his seat back than mine was over mine. His knees rose out of the chop of the Franz Waxman’s score like islands. It hurt to see him cramped, but with its cockeyed sets and its skinny Dr Praetorius, this movie had its points. How could I leave until the whole silly show’d unsprocketed?
Bride ended. The houselights came up again. A moviegoer on his way to the lobby stopped and pointed a shaky finger at Jumbo. “You don’t blong here. Yo’re a demon from the crypts and gallows.” The man reeked of a bad peach wine. “Begone, Satan, you damn viper!”
“Shhh,” somebody said.
“Don’t yall shush me. This man aint a man, he a debil, got him a snake for a tail.”
“Ol man, you drunk! Ol man, you a fool!”
“He’s a white debil. Don’t blong here, don’t blong noeres but hell,” He looked back at Jumbo. “Begone, you damn viper!”
Two white high school boys seized the man and frog-marched him out of the theater. Jumbo hugged himself and stared up at the star-sprinkled ceiling. One of the kid bouncers came back and peered down the row at him.
“Sorry bout that, sir. You awright?”
“Sticks and stones,” Jumbo said.
“We screen for carriers, but some of these jigs’re jes lousy boozehounds.” He saluted. “Enjoy the last show, sir.”
“What time is it?”
The bouncer shot his cuff to check his watch, an old one with a radium-painted dial.
“Ten-twenty,” he said. “Zat awright?” (Did he plan to have the Roxy dragged by tractor into another time zone if the hour didn’t suit us?)
“Thank you,” Jumbo said, and the kid left. “Daniel, Mister JayMac’s curfew-”
The houselights dimmed again. The opening credits for Son of Frankenstein began to roll. I put my hand on Jumbo’s arm-humor me a little longer, I was begging him.
Next to and in front of us, more empty seats. Only three other people still sat on our row.
Basil Rathbone played Wolfgang Frankenstein, son of the maker of the first picture’s monster. In one scene, Lugosi as Ygor took Rathbone to the monster’s sleeping body.
“Cannot be destroyed. Cannot die. Your father made him live for always,” Ygor said. “Now he’s sick…”
Jumbo moaned.
“You mean to imply that that is my brother?” Rathbone asked as they stood over Karloff in his sheepskin vest.
“But his mother was lightning,” Lugosi said.
Jumbo’s knees thumped the seat back in front of him. He struggled up like a gorilla trying to burst a steamer crate. “What’ve these celluloid nightmares to do with you?” he boomed at everyone who’d cranked around to look at him.
“Can that yammering!” somebody shouted back.
“One more damn drunk,” somebody else said. “A black un and a white un, bofe trouble.”