The Orpheum Miracle Read online

  The Orpheum Miracle

  By Pat Henshaw

  Christmas joy is a matter of perspective. For some, it’s the happiest time of the year. For others, not so much.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Mick, the son of crack addicts, isn’t exactly a dyed-in-the-wool Scrooge. Mick’s been on his own from childhood. As a teen, he lived in a shelter, where for a short time he had a boyfriend. After the boyfriend left, Mick moved to the Orpheum Theater. While squatting there and taking care of the grand old building, Mick watched others celebrate the holidays from a distance, never able to share in their merriment.

  Only his Technicolor dreams liven his dull, mechanical life until one day the world around him begins to change. Mick is surprised when a man named Jim buys the vintage Orpheum and plans to restore it. Something about Jim makes Mick think they’ve met before. In fact, Jim rekindles Mick’s longing for a better life and a little holiday magic for himself.

  IN EARLY November, a new banner across the Orpheum Theater went up saying: Welcome to Christmas, the happiest time of the year. Coming soon.

  Far as I could tell, Christmas was when children danced around like clowns on crack. Besotted parents cavorted around them like ninnies in the stupid race. And the rest of us stood back waiting for the inevitable explosion.

  Despite how it started, Christmas had been morphed by the rich into a season of greed. It had nothing to do with whether a kid was good or bad, but how much money his folks had. Take the kids I knew down at the shelter. Shit, they could be as good as little angels, and the best they’d ever get was someone’s cast-off pity, which wasn’t going to do them a damned bit of good when the holiday parade of who-got-what started at school.

  All Christmas did, as far as I was concerned, was make poor kids feel worse and rich kids feel more powerful and more ready to rub everyone else’s nose in their misfortune. And we all knew, where you started was pretty much where you ended up in life. The Christmas miracle was a lie that should have been shot in the head and buried eons ago.

  Fortunately, here in the bowels of the old Orpheum Theater, the only Christmas merry-makers left were ghosts of vaudevillians, chorus girls, and corrupt managers, and the live help. Those of us who weren’t going from office party to cocktail land were left here to sweep the floors, squeegee jizz off bathroom walls, pry gum from under seats, and oust anything that moved after the doors were closed and locked.

  I’ve been called cynical, a Scrooge, a vulture perched and ready to rip the eyes out of the season. It wasn’t true. I was as big a sap as the next guy.

  I was working here at the Orpheum, wasn’t I?

  Even after the hotshot investor type bought the building and threatened to give the Orpheum the Wonderful Life makeover, I was still here. The stately Orpheum might be closed to the public for renovation, but as the longest-paid employee, I was one of the lucky bastards kept on during the project.

  I’d had a ringside seat to the transformation of the rock-solid bastion of the Orpheum into the three-ring extravaganza embodying the holiday season. The old and tired would magically become the happy, jolly, sugar-cloying cotton candy dream of eternal riches and pleasure. We were erecting a new face for the dismal truth.

  I was the child of a crack-house mother and a drugged-out absentee father. No Christmas ever invented could make me like, much less enjoy, the happiest time of the year.

  But that didn’t mean the world around me wasn’t trying. The Orpheum was being pushed and forced into the mold. The façade was sandblasted on Monday, and an industrial cleaning crew landed today.

  “Hey, you!” the new general manager, a dumpy troll of a guy who showed up in a three-piece wool suit, yelled at me.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t offer any more. I’ve had a lifetime of twenty-nine years to learn that doing anything other than acknowledging when kahunas yell at you was trouble that you asked for.

  “I’m Mr. Mason. What’s your name, kid?” Kahunas liked to know everybody’s name but never remembered them.

  “Mick.” See? Nice, short, simple. And still, sometimes you got cuffed for speaking up. Not this time, thanks.

  “How long you worked here, Mick?” Kahunas also like to “get to know” their minions by asking shit they could easily look up if they really cared about the answer.

  “Seven years.” Ever since five managers ago, when someone came down to the shelter and asked for a half-dozen guys to staff the place. That manager had been a product of the shelters too and said he was trying to give back. Nice enough guy, just had no clue how to manage a theater, especially a movie theater where the film offerings went from art house one year to porn the next couple and then back again to art. He had lasted through the porn dip but was fired because he liked to jack off more than he liked to manage.

  “I need somebody who knows this building to make sure the cleaners I’ve hired do a good job and get at all the hidden places. The new owner says we’re going to have kids and parents in here, so I don’t want them finding any unwelcome surprises.” This new manager, Mr. Mason, sounded okay. Not quite friendly, but a boss just the same.

  Someone younger than me and round-eyed naïve would have thought we could have been buddies, all in the spirit of the season, right? I knew through experience Christmas cheer didn’t extend that far. I knew not to engage. He was the boss, and we both knew it.

  Still, I could get along with him, so Tiny Tim would be appeased. All I know is I hate bullshit, and he didn’t seem to be slinging any. So peace would exist. You know what I mean?

  “Yeah, okay. Sure. I can supervise the cleaners.” I didn’t call him Mason, but it was a temptation. No sense pushing the holiday envelope with winter on us, and me not wanting to go back to the shelter unless I really had to.

  “Thanks, Mick.” He had no qualms about using my first name. We’d see if he remembered it the next time he saw me.

  He didn’t slap me on the back or act like he needed to shake my hand. He just nodded and walked away, carrying a shitload of papers.

  So I found the head cleaner and filled him in about the ugly space between the blackout curtain in the corners of the main theater and the wall, the blind seats where some yo-yo decided to put extra dado embellishments in the wings of the balcony, and other cum-filled spots, some where abandoned needles might be lost in nooks and crannies on the floor.

  Yeah, I tried to keep that shit picked up and thrown out, but sometimes when it was too cold or too hot, the clientele using those places came and went like cockroaches, a thousand times more prevalent than the number of cleaners at minimum wage to pick up their refuse. You did what you could at seven twenty-five an hour.

  That night, after we piloted the last cleaner on his way out the door and I lagged behind the rest of the regular staff as they got out of there, I sat in the dark, the theater locked, the alarm on, and the heat turned down to its slumber setting.

  For the past few years now, I’d sit like this, middle of the center row, shoes off, three pairs of socks, blanket bundled around me, feet and legs over the seatback in front of me. Sometimes I ate the leftover popcorn, sometimes not. I didn’t ever steal, so no candy, hot dogs, chips, or anything I wasn’t entitled to.

  I’d sit, relax, and run my own movie, my mind movie. Sometimes it was a romance, with me meeting the perfect guy. Usually, he was walking by the Orpheum and a heavy rainstorm or windstorm blew in and he had to get out of the elements. Sometimes he’d run into me as I was cleaning up the lobby, maybe spilling some popcorn he’d just bought.

  “Damn. Sorry,” he’d say.

  Our eyes would meet, and that’s all she wrote.

  I knew about this kind of soul-to-soul meeting firsthand. There’d been this kid, Randy, in the shelter a year after I first lande
d there. We were sixteen and stupid as rocks. One glance and we connected on all levels. I couldn’t look him in the eyes most of the time, or I would forget what I was doing. Shit, I’d even forget my name.

  We were together for what felt like a long time, but it was probably less than a year. Then, wham, bam, Randy was gone. Booked out of the place like he’d heard his ultimate booty call or found an actual Christmas somewhere else. I was fucking heartbroken and grieving.

  Some of the other guys at the shelter said an old lady adopted him and called him her grandson. Pipe dream, but we all had them. Another group said he’d been picked up for soliciting, but I knew that one wasn’t true. He and I had been virgins. Easier to believe he was adopted, right? And the final group buried him. I cried myself to sleep many a night, praying that one wasn’t real.

  So back in the Orpheum at bedtime, romances were my all-time favorite dream fare. My second favorites were homemade domestic comedies. Me, the dad of a brood of spritely boys, and husband to a goofy, well-meaning guy, whose day job working in an office was driving him nuts. We’d take the boys on camping trips and tell stories around the fire. We’d teach them all the stuff we’d learned as we grew up.

  My husband, who grew up in a white-picket-fence-type family, would give them tips about being good, upright citizens. I’d pass along all my street lore. Where to find food that isn’t too tainted, where to find shelter, who to trust—no one—who to stay away from—everyone. My husband would tell them about fairy-tale hopes and dreams, about Christmas. I’d ground them with a reality where hopes and dreams only happened on film. Our lives would be paradise.

  I liked watching my homemade DIY romances and domestic comedies. I could fall sound asleep, only getting up a couple of times to stretch my legs and take a piss. On those nights, I’d wake up rested, ready to meet the day, hardly missing breakfast or a real meal. Over the years, Randy, like some of my wilder hopes and dreams, faded. I wished I could remember what his face looked like, but after all this time, it was just a hazy blur, never coming into focus. No matter. My hero wasn’t so much a face as the feeling of being protected and happy.

  The nights that the adventures and murder mysteries snuck up on me were a little more lively. At least I could sleep through them, though I tossed and turned and more often than not ended up in a tangle on the floor. Usually, it was the sound of gunfire from outside that triggered these films. I was never a player in them, more a voyeur watching the action from the safety of the projection booth or the john. The next day I’d always wake up tired, hungry, jumpy, and unhappy, so I tried to get rid of those dreams if I could or change the reel if I saw them coming.

  The worst nights were the ones for sci-fi and horror when I knew something bad and ugly was shadowing me and chasing me down. I was convinced for a while there was something living in the theater basement until I made myself go down there one bright, sunny, bird-warbling day. All I found were cobweb-covered movie signs and actor standups. For a second, Luke, Han Solo, and I challenged the evils of the galaxy together before I walked away to go upstairs.

  Happily, I closed the basement knowing the Force was protecting me downstairs, but still the specters and wraiths from my childhood rose out of my memories and fears. I couldn’t hide from those nights. I tried and tried to substitute them, change them, get rid of them, but too often they hounded me and tortured me. Then I’d wake slobbering and cringing, thinking I was living in a crack house with a ghost of a woman and passed around to her dealer friends for another fix. I’d be curled around the pipes in the restroom or the corner of the back balcony, hearing Christmas songs and fearing more pain.

  The worst morning of my life, Old George had found me cowering in the projection booth, hands over my head, crouched under the antique splicing table. George looked like all the pictures of St. Nick. He had a white beard, ruddy face, and constant smile. If you wanted to believe in Santa, until you got to know him, George egged you on to buy into the myth.

  “Hey, young Mick. What’s the matter?” He’d sort of squatted and laid his gnarled hand on me.

  I was shaking so bad, his hand slid off. He grunted as he rose from his bent position.

  “Them heebie-jeebs got you?” he asked.

  I must have been about fifteen then, sporadically going to school, tired to death of living on my own with no friends, no family, no warmth. It was about this time of year too, as I recall. I hadn’t started working full-time—or even part-time—at the Orpheum, but snuck in and slept here when the shelter got too full or I was too scared to sleep there. It was way before I met Randy.

  Anyway, I’d explained to George about the fantasy film, and about how lonely I was. Old George had laughed and told me to buck up.

  “Somewhere I read that loneliness is how we come into the world, how we live, and how we leave. Don’t remember who wrote it, but it’s always been the case for me. Well, except the leaving part. That’s still up for grabs.” A barrel of laughs George was around the holidays.

  After that, Old George tried to be my friend. I think he thought of me as a grandson or something. Whatever. I never took to him because he was basically nasty. He’d steal my odd-jobs money, a pathetic stack of coins and bills that I was saving to buy myself a new life. He spent my money on donuts for himself. Oh, sure, he always said he’d pay me back, but I never saw a penny in return—and he wouldn’t even share the donuts, which I thought was a real pisser.

  I know, I could have bought my own treats after I got paid if I was going to be so jealous of George. But I always felt like getting myself some good food was better for me. Of course, I had my own teeth and could chew something harder than donuts. Also, I’d always been into saving. I had dreams and knew that only money could make my dreams real.

  So now I’ve lived and worked here at the O for a while. I was the most reliable one on the cleaning crew, which was made up of a lot of guys I knew from the shelter.

  One day in mid-November, the new owner showed up, and after a quick look at what the crews had accomplished, he praised us for a doing such a good job and paid us our daily wage in cash.

  I was impressed. A lot of owners would have given us paychecks. Then we’d have to turn them into cash at some fly-by-night check cashing joint, which would mean we’d get a lot less hard, cold cash than we’d earned.

  I might not believe in Christmas, but I did believe in cash.

  After staring at me and hesitating, the owner had introduced himself to me as R. James Wentworth—“Call me Jim”—before we’d taken a stroll around the building for him to see what had been done. My first impression was I’d met him somewhere before, but I couldn’t imagine where. His circles weren’t my circles. So why did he feel familiar?

  He was taller than me with sandy blond hair and dark blue eagle eyes that kept stealing glances at me like I was supposed to do something. I couldn’t figure out what. Like with all bosses, I didn’t look directly at him but peeked up every once in a while. I still had the itchy feeling I knew him from somewhere until it hit me. He was exactly my type. I’d been fantasizing about him for years. Cool. I’d gotten a Christmas present this year. I’d unwrapped an image I could perv on for the rest of my life. Nice.

  At the end of the day, after everyone left, my new friend and idol Jim said to me, “I’m hungry. How about you, Mick?”

  I almost didn’t answer until I heard him say my name. What? He remembered my name? Well, blow me. I tried looking at him full in the face but couldn’t. The world, my world, didn’t work that way. Shit, his image was filling out, giving me more material to dream about.

  He stopped walking, which pulled me out of my head. What was I missing? Oh, yeah. When someone wants to know something personal, even slightly personal like if I’m hungry, well, maybe you should look him in the eyes and answer.

  “Uh, yeah, sure.” I shrugged mostly because I figured this was his way of having a “conversation” with one of his workers to prove to himself that he was an all right guy. I was a
bout to move away to pick up my coat, a stray ski jacket that had been hanging out in the lost-and-found for the last year or so.

  “How about pancakes?”

  I made it halfway to the coat when the question registered. He was still talking to me?

  I turned.

  “What? You want to go out to eat with me?”

  His blue, blue eyes widened at my return question. Watching me closely, like I might do something weird, he nodded.

  He looked so fucking familiar, like I’d seen him in a film maybe.

  I could feel my forehead scrunch up, and I tilted my head to take another peek at him. What was his game?

  Before I could bury myself too far into coming up with an answer, he said, “Yeah, I’d really like to get to know you.” He sounded tentative, but for real.

  Well, now, he could have punched me in the gut. I was surprised. My instant reaction was to ask why. Fortunately, employer/employee manners caught up with my mouth and closed it before I squeaked.

  I looked around the empty theater lobby, searching for I didn’t know what. Answers? I’d suddenly become alive, a person who somebody else saw, and I didn’t know what to do. Since it was only him and me in the whole building, I got no help in untangling why he wanted to go to dinner with me.

  Luckily, I had my fifty-eight dollars in my pocket from today’s work. Why not? It couldn’t be much different than sitting down at one of the trencher tables at the shelter and eating with whoever was sitting across from me, could it? It was time I started practicing for when I made the break from this life and slithered into a better one.

  “Sure. Where are you thinking of going?”

  When I peeped up at him, he was smiling like he was happy, so I figured I must have sounded like all the other guys who went to dinner with him at the end of the day. I also figured we wouldn’t be going anywhere fancy since we were both in jeans and sweats, not exactly like the guys in the magazines and movies who went out to eat.

  “Pancake Circus,” he answered, but there was kind of a question mark at the end.