Passages: Harlan Ellison

Okay, kiddo, so you went to see Grindhouse (which I’ll comment upon later this weekend) and now you think you know something about The Authentic Grindhouse Experience? If you want to know what the real sticky-wall grindhouses in and around Times Square were like, try this excerpt from Harlan Ellison’s essay “The Three Most Important Things in Life.” It’s one of his best:

New York. Early Seventies, maybe ‘73 or ‘74. I was in the city on business. Business taken care of, I got together with a friend, a writer from Texas who loves movies as much and as indiscriminately as I do. The ritual: the movie crawl. Load up on junk food, start at the first movie theater on the downtown side of 42nd Street, and just work our way from Times Square to 8th Avenue, cross the street, and work our way back to Times Square. Days. Endless days. Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight time in the dark. We eat in there, sleep in there, piss and daydream in there. Hot dogs, popcorn, slabs of cheese, munchies, French bread, anydamnthing. And we see them all: the good flicks, the bad flicks, the kung-fu operas, the porn jobs, the superfly stomp the paddy flicks . . . all of them. One after another, till our eyes turn to poached eggs, staggering from theater to theater like refugees from a Macao opium den.

I don’t remember the name of the particular theater, but it was on the uptown side of 42nd Street, close to Broadway. It was something like four in the morning. My buddy and I were almost totally cacked-out. I remember the double-bill, however. The lower half, the B feature, was Fear is the Key, a really dreadful action-adventure turkey based on a crummy Alistair Maclean novel. The main feature was Save the Tiger, a contemporary drama starring Jack Lemmon. He won the Oscar for the role in that film.

And there we slumped, way the hell up in the balcony, our knees jammed under our chins, best seats in an almost empty house. Four ayem. Two rows below us — and it was steep up there, what I’m talking here is damned near per-pen-dic-u-lar — some black dude was juiced out asleep, lying across three or four seats, snoring.

My buddy the Texas writer is dead asleep, having polished off a recent meal of three boxes Good’n'Plenty and a frozen chocolate covered banana on a stick. And, blessedly, Fear is the Key ends, and Save the Tiger begins.

About ten minutes into this serious, sensitive study of a garment center guy who is killing himself with floating ethics, and from the very first row of the balcony, below and to the right of us, but still very high above the floor of the theater, I hear a shrieky black voice start mouthing off. Dialogue straight out of ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING.

“Muh-fugguh! Gahdamn muh-fugn stupid piece’a shit. Dumb sunbish cah-suckin’ piece’a shit garbage . . . Leroy! Hey, you sumbish niggah prick Leroy! Le’s get th’ fuggoutta here, Leeeeeroy!”

Clearly, the critic in the first row of the balcony found this deeply penetrating study of middle class morality as seen through the dissolution of Jack Lemmon’s knock-off sweat shop less than relevant to his existence as a mid-Twentieth Century denizen of the shitty slum to whence he would wend his way once this stupid kike film about muh-fuggin’ honk paddy bastids ended. Which wasn’t soon enough for him. “Leeeee-ROY!”

I had the feeling that Leeee-ROY was the terminal case lying over the seats two rows below us. Out of it.

Well, I peer through the gloom and see the dude down there in the front row of the balcony, his feet up on the brass rail, his partner beside him, silently watching the film but not stopping the noise. And I watch the two of them for a little while, hoping the third member of the group, good ole Leeee-ROY, will bestir his ass and go rejoin them there sepia Athos and Porthos, and maybe just maybe vacate the site quietly so I can watch the goddam muhfuggin’ movie.

But no such luck. The critic only gets wonkyer, yelling at the top of his lungs. Leeee-ROY don’t twitch a bun.

And just as the critic is reaching a pitch that will cause sonic tremors, squealing sunbish and muh-fugguh at the top of his lungs, from behind me I hear The Voice of Doom . . .

You’ll have to read the rest of the essay to find out what happens next, but something tells me Quentin Tarantino wouldn’t have lasted long in one of those places.