The Truant

A short scene from my novel

On 138W 42nd St, was a cinema called The Truant. Vincent stuffed his glove into his front jean pocket and pulled out seven quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and seven pennies. Under the spinning lights, dirty papers, popcorn buckets, soda cups and cigarette butts decorating the entrance, he paid admission, and tried not to track anything with him inside.

He was wearing his best suit and tie in the theater by accident. Behind the doors, the screening room looked like an alley. Everyone else was dressed in the type of clothing you would see hanging on tenement clotheslines. The men and women laughed like cats, chickens, and naughty children. The imitation velvet seats were torn, colored brown but that might not have been the original color because the tone like all else was wildly uneven. He fidgeted with his watch, then tried blending in with the smoke in the room, sitting in the back, and lighting his own quiet cigarette. He breathed in the smoke hard, hoping to muddle another smell that had newly touched his nose and threatened to enter. A smell that he tried to avoid realizing might be piss. The darkened room fell into deeper darkness, then, a flash of gritty white numbers on the screen counted backwards. 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1. Butt. 

Sea foam pounced on a woman’s half moons. They were tight. Then the camera cut to her soft, filtered expressionless face, then it switched to her head from behind with the ocean rising towards the audience, to get a full look at her flowing dirty blonde beach waves. The tide washed just above her head. Shark braving heart and body sank into the inertia of watery gravity.

Emerging from the surface of the sea, a dark narrow faced man decorated with a seaweed mask leered into the darkened water beneath him. As quickly as he appeared above, he raced to the bottom of the ocean. The audience looked into a strange acropolis of underwater caves, framing the two bodies who pretended to float. A hair stylist must have drenched them in hairspray to make their hairs coil mid air. The man was dressed as Poseidon the sea god, and the woman was naked. He wrapped her in his kelp and attached himself to her and they began. He kissed her bosom, her moons, her starry eye lids. She kissed his shell encrusted beard and the conch shell between his legs. The cave grew dark so a deep vignette framed the woman’s 20 foot tall head as she blew a 30 foot long conch. Some of the audience members yipped, hooted, and made other weird noises with their o-shaped mouths. Vincent watched this with the same level of emotion as the actors. What was it about beauty within the obscenely graphic? His eyes switched like the camera between the people kissing on the ground and the people kissing in the air. Snap. Sizzling old rags steaming rotten breath in sighs. Their voices like gravel from chain smoking. Snap. Aquamarine fantasy between Neptune and his nymph. Then, that fake underwater cave became so dark there wasn’t a difference between the worlds divided by the thin veil of film.

 Vincent felt a heavy breath fill his chest. The charm revealed itself. His life was a movie. Everyone felt so fake. The audience were equally talented actors. Silhouettes of arms and legs waved before him like black sea grass. He exhaled and his muscles went limp under a cloud of smoke. The last that he saw was another strange sight. The director had decided to blow up these miniature white balloons on thin white strings, dozens of them, and let them float upward in front of the camera.

A smile flickered on the curl of his lip.