WHEN HE WAS ABOUT to be taken to his first movie he asked his mother what movies were like. “They’re dark in one place and light in another,” she said. The movie, with Jack Oakie, concerned sailors. Soon after, he was taken to see The Bat Whispers, in which a man in a cloak turned into a bat. That night he dreamed he was lying awake in his bed in his room, and into the doorway came an upright figure in a black cloak and slouch hat, with a wolf’s face. He spent the rest of the night in his parents’ bed. His mother took him to the movies every Friday evening; they went to the same theater, no matter what was playing. On the way home they bought a box of wheat biscuits he especially liked and always arrived in time to hear “The Witch’s Tale,” the scariest program on radio. While he listened his mother had to stay in sight and he ate a wheat biscuit covered with butter. On Saturday afternoons when he was older he went to a poor, nearby neighborhood where there was a theater named the Hub, which showed three features, serials, cartoons, and newsreels, and charged ten cents. The program started at noon and let out between five and six. He and his friends brought their cap pistols to shoot during the Westerns, cut leather from the seats to use in slingshots, and pissed on the floor of the men’s room. On the way home they roamed the streets and went into stores, the braver boys shoplifting in the five-and-ten. One spring dusk they plucked rolls of toilet paper from a display in front of a grocery, undid them, and let them unroll side by side down a hill past the store to see whose would reach the bottom first. In his summer community there was one movie house, with a tin roof, and on rainy days no one could hear the sound track. The bill changed Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and not a week went by that he did not feel he had to see at least two of the shows, particularly anything with Edmund Lowe, Jack Holt, or Laurel and Hardy. His mother tried to restrict him to one show a week, but by wheedling or deceit he had his way. During his last year in grammar school a local theater named the Casino got a reputation as a place to neck in on Saturday afternoons; he and his friends tried it occasionally, realizing finally that you had to bring your own girl. Word of the Casino reached the pastor of the local Catholic church, who complained to the manager, who hired a matron to walk the aisles of the balcony with a flashlight. In high school he and his first serious girl friend discovered foreign films; even those they didn’t enjoy were superior to American films, they maintained. He went one day with his friend Alec to see Daybreak, with Jean Gabin; midway the actress Arletty stepped from the shower for an instant of frontal nudity. It was so quick and they were so surprised neither knew he had not imagined it until they checked with one another; they stayed to see the picture again, but the frame or frames were missing the second time. In movie houses on army posts WACs and male officers sat together in sections barred to enlisted men. One evening while he was waiting for the lights to go out and the movie to start an enlisted man inflated a condom and sent it up like a balloon; other soldiers did the same, and soon the house was filled with bobbing condoms. One by one the WACs and male officers left, the enlisted men cheering as they went. One night after seeing a Mickey Spillane movie he and his wife were waiting for the train on a subway platform. What he took for a single car collecting the day’s receipts pulled slowly into the station. Suddenly he was sure there would be a robbery: he remembered having noticed men carefully spaced waiting on the stairs near the change booth and along the platform. Instead of stopping, the train speeded up. He thought he heard shots, pushed his wife against the wall, and covered her with his body. When he pulled away he saw that no one was disturbed, and if they had noticed probably thought he and his wife were necking. At a drunken party he was introduced to a well-known woman film critic. He said he wanted to test her taste and put to her pairs for preference. He agreed with all her choices and finally said, “Ritz Brothers, Marx Brothers.” “Ritz,” she shouted; they embraced and pledged friendship for life. She invited him soon after to see Deep Throat, giggled throughout, and was shushed by men in the audience. As they were leaving the theater they walked through a narrow passage by the men’s room; a burly, pimpled boy emerged and rubbed himself against her. She elbowed the boy in the chest and giggled. This was the first pornographic film he had seen, and later at dinner she said he was lucky to have lost his cherry with one of the best. Now only at the invitation of others does he go to a movie. Occasionally he watches movies on television; sometimes, if he is drinking, one after the other till dawn. The older he gets the more difficult it will become to be drawn into a movie’s fiction: either he has seen similar movies before or the movie maker seems to know less about life than he.