Chapter 9
The projection booth at The Revival House was barely large enough to fit two projectors, a long table stacked with film canisters, and a tattered and duct taped couch that consistently flouted the laws of physics by not collapsing when sat upon. The booth was where Jasper did his best thinking. There were too many distractions at his apartment, too many channels to surf, too many cockroaches to squash, but here, alone in the dark, a guy could really solve some life problems. He also found comfort in the steady flutter of the film as it sped through the projectors at twenty-four frames per second. The heat emitted by the projectors was the only downside. When the projectors were running, the temperature in the booth reached a level of discomfort that only an egg on a first date with a skillet could truly appreciate.
The trick was to adapt to the environment. A good fan was a must, as were shorts. If shorts weren’t available, he worked in his underwear. The lack of a dress code was one of the great benefits to working at The Revival House.
It was here, thirteen-years ago during his second week on the job, that he arrived at three conclusions: a) he was failing his community college courses and there was no way he was going to salvage his year; b) his decision to sell his textbooks to a Guatemalan student named Esteban and spend the money on DVD’s hadn’t been the most responsible decision he could’ve made; and c) he didn’t care.
Community college, in his opinion, was just like high school, only with more homework, so what the hell was he doing jumping back into that particular prison when he’d only just been released -- with a solid C- average, thank you very much.
He’d take a year, have some fun, and then go back. Or maybe two years: one year to have some fun, a second year to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Yes. Definitely two years. No more than three.
It was also here that he’d realized that thirteen years had passed, he’d never gone back to college, and maybe he’d better start thinking about his future. And then Hackford’s camera had entered his life, and it was here that he’d decided to go into the fate business.
Jasper stretched out on the couch and rehearsed his plea to Roy Harper. “Mr. Harper, I know this is going to be hard to believe, but at some point in the future, you’re going to try to kill Frank Sullivan. I was wondering if you could not do that.”
He shook his head; he could almost hear Roy Harper’s front door slamming in his face.
“Mr. Harper, don’t ask me how I know this, but…”
Slam!
“Hi, Roy…”
Slam!
“Mr. Harper, this is a picture of you holding an axe. I took it with this camera.”
Slam!
Jasper sat up, took a swig of Mountain Dew, and thought: Maybe I’ll just send him an email.
“Holy crap it’s hot in here. Please tell me that’s why you’re not wearing pants.”
Jasper jumped at the sound of Callie’s voice and added a splash of Mountain Dew to the couch’s impressive collection of stains -- an irregular pattern of blobs and blotches that, when viewed from a particular angle under the right lighting conditions, easily caused the couch to be mistaken for an overweight and deformed leopard.
“I didn’t hear you knock,” Jasper said, seeing Callie standing in the doorway.
“I didn’t. Pants?”
Jasper hurried to the swivel chair by the projectors. He whipped his jeans off the seat and thrust his legs into them. “The sign on the door says ‘Employees only’, not ‘Barge in and scare the shit out of the projectionist’”.
“I had permission.” She swayed slightly as she walked over to the couch and fell into it. The couch creaked under the sudden weight. Something cracked.
This is it, Jasper thought, the butt of doom, the one that would finally, mercifully put the wretched piece of upholstery out of its stubbornly persistent misery. Maybe then management would spring for a new couch.
“Your boss let me up,” Callie said.
The couch utterly and completely failed to die.
Amazing, Jasper thought. He wondered if the Army might be interested in it.
Callie snapped her fingers. “You listening?”
“Yeah. Doyle let you up. What did you tell him?”
“I said I needed to see you. And he said you were busy. So I said, ‘What do you like better? Whiskey or Rum? And he said, ‘Vodka’. So I gave him a couple of these.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of miniature liquor bottles.
“Are you drunk?” Jasper asked.
“Yes. Definitely,” she said, opening one of the bottles and downing it one gulp. She winced as the liquor seared her throat. “I want you to take my picture.”
“I thought you said it freaked you out?”
“I know, I know. Just take it, okay?” She guzzled a second bottle.
“Why?”
“Because I’m starting to feel like I’m going to end up alone and running that stupid diner, and I’d just rather know now so I can get used to the idea.”
“Why do you think you’re going to end--”
She held up a hand. “We’re still not sharing.”
“Sorry.”
“Take the picture.”
“I don’t think I should.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“Most of the time you can’t tell much from it.”
“But some of the time you can.”
“Yeah, but--”
She downed a third bottle and hiccupped. “Take it.”
Jasper shook his head. “I’ve already got enough problems with Roy Harper and his axe.”
Callie looked around the room. “Where’s your stupid camera? I’ll take the picture myself.”
“It’s not here.”
“Well that’s just great,” she said, throwing her hands up in defeat. She swung her legs onto the couch and curled up in the fetal position with her back to him.
“Do you want some water or something?”
“No.”
“A snack?”
“No.”
“Want me to go sit by the projectors and pretend you’re not here?”
“Yes.”
Jasper sat down in the swivel chair and rolled himself over to the projectors. The heat from the lamps baked the left the side of his face as he looked out the booth’s tiny window. Beyond it, James Dean pouted at an audience of ten. It had been a dismal few years for the Revival House, which might’ve explained why Doyle had been so quick to accept Callie’s bribe. Doyle had a mysterious second source of income that had enabled him to keep the theatre open, but if his mood was any indication, it wasn’t bringing in what it used to.
Jasper had once asked Lester, who worked the ticket booth and who looked old enough to have seen most of the films during their original runs, if he knew where the money was coming from. Lester had responded with: “Don’t know, but yesterday I pissed out a kidney stone the size of a Buick. Wanna see it?”
He reached under the counter and produced a pill bottle containing a rock that looked less like a Buick and more like tiny asteroid. Jasper didn’t know what caused kidney stones, but he was going to look it up the second he got home. He added DON’T GET ONE OF THOSE to the growing mental list he’d titled: THINGS THAT MAKE LIFE SUCK. He also made a note to stop talking to Lester.
“How did he take the news?” Callie asked.
“Huh?”
He spun the chair around. Callie was sitting up and sipping from bottle number four. She also seemed to have lost the ability to keep her eyelids from drooping.
“Roy the Head-Splitter,” she said. “I figured you’d have called him by now.”
“I’m still working on my sales pitch.”
“Oh.” She stared at him, and Jasper could see a thought forming in the alcoholic mist behind her half-lidded eyes. “How do you know he hasn’t done it, already?”
It was an excellent question, one he’d thought of roughly every half-hour since he’d humiliated himself in front of Ol’ Head Splitter earlier in the day. Jasper rolled the chair over to the long table near the door, picked up his cell phone, and dialed a number.
“Go away,” Frank barked after two rings.
“Just checking.”
“Seriously. Stop calling me.”
Jasper hung up. “Nope. Not dead.”
Callie stood, wobbled, and steadied herself by leaning on the arm of the couch. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Let’s go to Roy’s house.”
“Now?”
“You’re not really a take charge kind of guy, are you?”
“I have a hard and fast rule that I don’t make an idiot of myself more than once a day.”
Callie let go of the couch and took a tentative step toward him, like a person expecting the floor to give way at any moment. She looked surprised when she didn’t topple over. “Look, all I have to go home to is a mother and a game of Scrabble. My mom likes to give me dating advice using the Scrabble letters. I can’t go back to that right now.” She drained bottle number five and whipped it into a corner. “Let’s go be heroes.”
“Wow. Nice touch with the whole bottle throwing thing.”
She smiled, took a bow, and pitched forward. Jasper lunged and caught her.
“Your floor moved,” she said, righting herself.
“How many of those bottles have you had?”
She held her hands roughly a foot apart from each other. “This many.”
“Why didn’t you just get one big bottle?”
She suddenly planted her hands on his cheeks, mashing his face. She kissed him, and he’d only just begun to register the warmth of her lips against his when she pulled away and stared at him, their faces inches apart. “Let’s go be hero--”
A thick stream of vomit exploded from her mouth and coated Jasper’s face. Warm clumps slid down his cheeks and plopped on the floor. In a moment of stunned clarity, Jasper thought: Macaroni and cheese. Caesar salad. The reality of his situation slammed into him a moment later, and he returned the favor. He doubled over, his body shuddering as the pizza he’d eaten two hours earlier rocketed up his throat and splashed against Callie’s sandaled feet.
She leaped backward, tripped, and fell into the couch. A loud crack filled the room, and Callie yelped in surprise as the couch’s wooden frame snapped in two, dropping her five inches.
Jasper stood still. His simultaneous desires to run, apologize, swear, and leap out of his skin cancelled each other out and rooted him to the spot. He felt like Sissy Spacek in that movie based on the Stephen King novel, the one where the bucket of pig’s blood is dumped on her at the prom. In place of the laughter she’d had to endure, there was only the constant flicker of the projector.
Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka…
Callie stared at him. Her eyelids had regained their ability to stay open and were making up for lost time by opening so wide that her eyes seemed to bulge out of her head. Her hands covered her mouth, as though she suddenly realized that she’d said something inappropriate, which, Jasper thought, wasn’t far from the truth. BLARRRGGGHHH!, in his opinion, had been a lousy way to end what was rapidly becoming the high point of his day.
“If it makes you feel any better,” Jasper said, “that’s the second worst kiss I’ve ever had.”
“I’m soooo sorry.” Callie’s voice sounded hoarse. She pushed herself up out of the upholstered sinkhole that had once been the couch, shook the remnants of Jasper’s dinner off her sandals, and took a set of keys out of her purse. She dropped them on the long table as she walked to the door. “My car’s in the alley next to the Grill.” She opened the door and stepped into the hall. “I’m going to bed for a month. Let me know how things turn out with the axe murderer.”
She closed the door, only to open it a moment later. “Again, really, really sorry about…” She wiggled a finger in the direction of Jasper’s face. “Sorry.”
The door clicked shut.
#
Jasper ducked his head inside Doyle Deacon’s office. “Hey, I’ve just been puked on. Can Lester handle the nine-thirty show?”
Doyle, a pot-bellied man of fifty-five, sat behind his desk, his back to the door, a dark brown fedora -- a replica of the one Humphrey Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon -- pulled low over his eyes. The entire office was a shrine to classic Hollywood, his desk a tiny particle board island in a sea of movie memorabilia.
Doyle stared at a poster of The African Queen. “I sent Lester home,” he said, sounding distracted, as if one half of his brain were chewing on a problem. “He kept farting in the ticket booth. The clients were complaining.” He swiveled his chair around. His eyes -- narrow, mistrustful slits above a nose that had clearly done very little damage to the fist that had flattened it -- widened slightly. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I got kissed by a depressed investment banker.”
Doyle opened a desk drawer and pulled out a clean black T-shirt that had THE REVIVAL HOUSE printed in white art deco lettering on the front. He tossed it to Jasper. “I need you to lock up. I also need you to hang this sign in the door after the last show.” He held up a sign that read: CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.
“What renovations?”
“Financial renovations, kid.”
Doyle stood up, rounded the desk, and handed the sign to Jasper, who took it reluctantly, as though Doyle had said, “Here. Be a pal and hang this dead raccoon in the window when you lock up.”
Jasper held the sign between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.
“It’s not going to bite you,” Doyle said.
“How long are we closing for?” There was fear in his voice, fear of losing his only source of income, fear of being thrust into a world he’d never prepared for, fear of having to take a job at the multiplex, where they wore uniforms and sold tickets to Michael Bay movies.
Doyle reached into his pocket and pulled out a check. “This is two months pay. With any luck, we’ll be back open in a month.” He clapped Jasper on the shoulder. “Thanks for being lazy and having no ambition, kid. I’ve liked having you around. I just wanted to say that in case I don’t come back.”
He removed the fedora, flicked his wrist, and sent it spinning three feet to the left of a hat stand. It thumped against the wall and fell to the floor. He sighed. “You’d think I’d be able to nail it just once.” He walked past Jasper and exited the office. “Don’t forget the sign.”
Jasper listened to Doyle’s receding footsteps and reflected on the night’s events. So far he’d been puked on and laid off. And then he remembered something he’d heard. Or had he read it? Everything happens in threes.
He had a feeling this was going to be a long night.