24 - Eleven
Eleven years is ten years too young to buy a drink in a bar, seven
years too young to sign up for the draft.
But Dave can't get into the U.S. Theater unless he pays full price,
because they say anybody 11 or older has to pay as an adult.
“If I had a driver's license proving how old I am then I'd be too old
to pay as a kid,” Dave tells the red-haired old lady inside the glass booth who
flatly refuses to believe at 6 feet tall Dave is still only 10 and a half.
This is a Saturday routine. We come downtown to see a movie. She gives
us a hard time. We go someplace else
even though the movie really want to see is only playing at this theater.
Dave has the money to pay full price and I'd give it to him if he
didn't.
“It's the principle of the thing,” he tells me. “If you pay an adult
price at 11, I shouldn't have to pay if I’m only 10 and a half.”
Since I'm older than he is by more than a year, I have a hard time
sympathizing since I've always had to pay full price.
Each time I suggest we go to the Montauk in Passaic, since they play
the same movies as the US does. But Dave won't pay for bus far just because the
red-haired witch from The Wizard of Oz won't let us in here.
I want to tell Dave he can't have everything he wants. He'll only get
angry storm off and we won't get to see any movie at all.
It’s his height that makes him stand out at school, and keeps him out
of the theater, but it’s his height lets him get onto rides at the church fair
each year when the operator won’t let me on them because I’m too small.
Dave doesn't know how to get even when people like the red-haired old
lady get in the way of what he needs or wants or maybe he won't and won't let
me do it when I suggest we follow her to her car and give her four flat tires.
“She won’t know who did it,” I say.
“Then what’s the point of doing it?” Dave asks.
“Revenge,” I say, though I know what Dave means. It is no fun getting
even if the person I'm getting even with doesn't know it's me who is doing it.
“And she'd call the cops if she knew,” Dave says as -- with every other
Saturday -- we walk over to the Fabian where they let anybody in and believe
almost anything, we say so we both get in at half price even though we hate the
movie.
We never go to the plaza up on Union Ave, needing to walk past the
Christopher Columbus Projects, more violent now than when my mother dragged me
there when I was Dave's age -- and we came to see a movie not to get into a
fight even though that could be fun to if I'm in the mood and if I'm with
anyone other than Dave since he almost never fights and I'm not sure he can.
When Dave suggest we go to the Garden, a small theater on Market Street,
I refuse I won't tell him why.
I don't like to think about why, about when my mother used to take me
there. I still wake up in a sweat remembering to movies we saw, when I was
three one about some Korean war helicopter pilots who die at the end and the
other about a kid about my age who found Christ in the attic and died in his
arms.
I live in the Attic of my grandfather's house now and I am constantly
checking the closets for Christ on his cross, hoping I can avoid his embrace
long enough to grow up.
This whole age thing bugs me. Dave wants and does not want to be as old
as I am. He seems to think that because I am a year-and-a-half older than he is
I know or have something he doesn't. If I do, I can't tell him what it is and
no matter what either of us do he can't possibly catch up and I'll always be
ahead of him.
In some ways, he's ahead of me. He gets on looks when we pass the Fine
Arts Theater in Passaic, a theater my mother says it's sinful and which has the
pictures of near naked women posted on the outside the way the Montauk and us
have pictures of James Bond. This is the same look Dave gets when he looks at
the girl living next door to me and with whom he goes to school, a look she
says she doesn't like and orders him to stop.
Dave's hurry to get old and not get old scares me and makes me think of
Uncle Ed who is 9 years older than I am and the person I most think of as an
elder brother, who I want to be like the way Dave wants to be like me, dress
like him, waiting at home for him to come home from school, then from work, he
greeting me like a father or brother or maybe a best friend, sometimes bringing
me home some gift he picked up after school or at his job at Pep Boys or later
on his way home from college until my grandmother told him to stop, thinking I
might get too attached, thinking I might get spoiled, though now I wait for him
again to come home not from school or work but from Vietnam.
Maybe this is why I don't like war movies nearly as much as I like
westerns and why. Dave loves James Bond so much since his life is so drenched
in espionage, pretending he's not hurt each time his father goes back to the
Veterans Hospital, pretending like he doesn't hate his mother for taking the
man away.
Sometimes we don't go to a movie and all after the red hair lady
rejects us, we just wander around the streets, seeing what's there and what's
gone away, the icons of our early childhood slipping away and we do not want to
miss seeing them go even though we know we will miss them when they are
gone.