The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page B

what actually occurred within the secret brackets of that experience? What emotions lurk within that ludicrous temple of hours?
What the fuck was I thinking?
    Every one of those twenty-one viewings took place at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on Forty-fourth Street, just off Times Square. I’d never seen a movie there before (and unless you count
The Empire Strikes Back
, I didn’t again until 1999—
The Matrix
). And I’ve still never seen
Star Wars
anywhere else. The Astor Plaza was a low, deep-stretched hall with a massive screen and state-of-the-art sound, and newly enough renovated to be free of too much soda-rotted carpet, a plague among New York theaters those days. Though architecturally undistinguished, it was a superior place to see anything, I suppose. But for me it was a shrine meant for just one purpose—I took it as weirdly significant that “Astor” could be rearranged into “astro”—and in a very
New Yorker
–coverish way I believed it to be the only real and right place to see
Star Wars
, the very ground zero of the phenomenon. I felt a definite but not at all urgent pity for any benighted fools stuck watching it elsewhere. I think I associated the Astor Plaza with the Death Star, in a way. Getting in always felt like an accomplishment, both elevating and slightly dangerous.
    Along those lines I should say it was vaguely unnerving to be a white kid in spectacles routinely visiting Times Square by subway in the middle of the 1970s. Nobody ever said anything clearly about what was wrong or fascinating about that part of the city we lived in—the information was absorbed in hints and mutterings from a polyphony of sources. In fact, though I was conscious of a certain seamy energy in those acres of sex shows and drug dealers and their furtive sidewalk customers, I was never once hassled (and this was a time when my home neighborhood, in Brooklyn, was a minefield for me personally). But the zone’s reputation ensured I’d always plan my visits to fall wholly within summer’s long daylight hours.
    Problem: it doesn’t seem at all likely that I went to the movie alone the first time, but I can’t remember who I was with. I’ve polled a few of my likeliest friends from that period, but they’re unable to help. In truth I can’t recall a “first time” in any real sense, though I do retain a flash memory of the moment the prologue first began to crawl in tilted perspective up the screen, an Alice-in-Wonderland doorway to dream. I’d been so primed, so attuned and ready to love it (I remember mocking my friend Evan for his thinking that the title meant it was going to be some kind of all-star cavalcade of a comedy, like
It’s a Mad Mad Mad
Mad World
or
Smokey and the Bandit
) that my first time was gulped impatiently, then covered quickly in the memory of return visits. From the first I was “seeing it again.” I think this memory glitch is significant. I associate it with my practice of bluffing familiarity with various drug experiences, later (not much later). My refusal to recall or admit to a first time was an assertion of maturity: I was
always already
a
Star Wars
fanatic.
    I didn’t buy twenty-one tickets. My count was amassed by seeing the movie twice in a day over and over again. And one famous day (famous to myself) I sat through it three times. That practice of seeing a film twice through originated earlier. Somebody—my mother?—had floated the idea that it wasn’t important to be on time for a movie, or even to check the screening times before going. Instead, moviegoing in Brooklyn Heights or on Fulton Street with my brother or with friends, we’d pop in at any point in the story, watch to the end, then sit through the break and watch the beginning. Which led naturally, if the film was any good, to staying past the original point of entry to see the end twice. Which itself led to routinely twice-watching a movie we liked, even if we hadn’t been late. This was encouraged, partly