Literary Imagination

When I saw your obit in the Times-Argus, saw your glasses and sad side-parted hair, I did a double-take—you’re that weirdo from the movie theater! At 5-foot-2, you were just my height, but I’m shocked to read that you were also exactly my age, though I never would have guessed it from your grouchy, old-man baby face. You “died at home on Loomis Street, survived by a sister and a brother-in-law, nieces, nephews,” and no wife—that’s 100% more than I knew about you, other than when you herded us to the lobby or let us shiver outside in the cold until the box office opened and tickets sold. No amount of begging could persuade you to unhook the stanchioned velvet rope that divided your twilight world from ours. Taking my ticket, you never met my eye. Even when you handed me my stub, I swear that—for over thirty years, seven presidents, and four James Bonds— I never saw you smile. Or wear anything but maroon polyester trousers and a limp white shirt, your uniform throughout the swinging seventies’, eighties’, nineties’, during which my hemlines rose and fell like the elevators in The Towering Inferno. When I bypassed the concession stand, you eyed me suspiciously, as if you could see— like Ray Milland in The Man with X-Ray Eyes— my forbidden, store-bought Almond Joys. Elsworth E. Berno, what else did you see in the five tiny theaters of the ‘multiplex,’ after lights dimmed and whispers turned to heavy breathing? Like the Phantom, you climbed past the balcony to your lair above gropers, neckers, petters, perverts, who did their dirty business in the dark, after which, you morphed into a one-man clean-up crew, sweeping snowdrifts of popcorn from the sticky floor, prying up buttons of dried gum and squashed Milk Duds. Odd, how I never once bumped into you buying bread and milk at Price Chopper, I never saw you outdoors, outside that hothouse of a theater, breathing fresh air. The Capitol closed for the Friday matinee so the staff could attend your funeral. No Chicken Run, no Patriot, no Perfect Storm. When I joined the line for the 6:30 show, the manager sent us home because nobody knew how to operate the projector. Your obituary said you “took great pride running and repairing the intricate machines”— spools, spindles, take-up reels—killing time with those clock gears though which hours sprocketed by at twenty-four frames per second; or when the film broke and you spliced it, oh, how many times? Cooped up behind your projection window gushing smoky rainbow beams of light, you fiddled with the nuts-and-bolts while Gladiator burned, you ferried a wounded Russell Crowe across the murky river of celluloid— he’ll stay young while you and I grow old. But now, Berno, you’ve made your cameo. When you closed your eyes that final time, what afterimage burned inside your brain? A white shimmering rectangle? All those years that you had to stay alert for the white dot flashing in the corner of the frame—signal to change the reel— which you did until The End, when credits rolled, dawn flared up, the blinking herd of movie-goers stepped into the aisle, forded the Lethe and waded upstream; a few forgetting an umbrella, hat, or glove. Yawning past your enormous garbage can on wheels, rubbing our eyes, we blindly passed you, Elsworth, if I may, just this once, address you, as a good friend might— writing this elegy to someone I never knew.