Maybe the movie wasn’t like this at all, maybe I’ve completely invented it. But this is how I remember it: the Lyric Theater, on the edge of the barrio in downtown Tucson, and I’m somewhere between second and third grade, somewhere between seven and eight. In those days, 1960 or so, the Lyric isn’t the derelict place it’ll soon become, the last of the moviehouses still unrazed. A decade later, I’ll get beaten up here, in this same cool darkness, in the front row, kicked in the head by a gang of black kids who smash my glasses and knock my friend’s tooth out, but that’s another world from this Lyric. Though it’s already down-at-the-heels enough to be showing a movie like this on a Saturday afternoon, is it? Must be, since my father can take me during the daytime. What does he do while I’m studying monsters? I’m going to read my book, he says, I’m going to run some errands, or, I’ll just nap in the shade. I am to go to the glass-and-chrome box of the ticket booth and ask what time the movie is over. The cashier answers through the round hole beside her mouth; I run back and tell my father, then he’s gone, and I buy my ticket and make my way into the cool lobby, to the candy counter, and then through the theater’s padded double doors.

I like this privacy, like to be alone in the silvered and variable dark, the velvet curtain billowing down from the elaborate plaster arch of the proscenium, even the little patch on the screen, white on white, where someone’s thrown something up there that broke the stretched emulsion of illusion. I like having a full box of something in my lap—Jujubes (the fruit flavors on the edge of bitter, and they stick to your teeth annoyingly, but they last a long time). Hard dollops of Milk Duds, only glancingly chocolate. It doesn’t matter; what one wants is the satisfaction of something to suck until absorption in the film takes over. Sometimes, even often, this never takes place, since I will see any movie, even boring ones: dull John Wayne in Donovan’s Reef, wide-eyed Debbie Reynolds as Tammy singing that awful syrupy song in a swamp, even Snow White and the Three Stooges, which I confess I enjoy a little—some skating star smiling in her short fur-trimmed skirt and spinning on a studio pond in drifts of cottony snow—despite the three tiresome clowns.