Going to the movies

It was the 70s, middle or late, I can't quite recall.  I was a teenager, all hormones - and limbs and clothes that I seemed constantly to grow out of.  I also can't remember the film or how we got to the theatre, but I do recall I went with Tim.  He was a school friend who lived down the other fork, on Hamstead Acres.  I have to say that he wasn't always there for me, or my best interests.  I would get into trouble with him, or be the one holding the bag after being swept into one of his social experiments.  I was pretty much the Holly Martins to his Harry Lime.  And maybe simply too stupid to know it at the time.  I was, and am, perpetually naive.

He would grow up to become a handsome and hairy-chested athlete, boxing and catch (whether a football or baseball) were his favourites.  Later after high school I saw him in the neighbourhood (summer, beach) and marvelled at his absolutely chiselled physique.  He was then in his prime, all stubble and curly chest hair.  He told me he was about to get married.  That was the last time I laid eyes upon him, probably 40 years ago.

As kids going to the same school and living close to each other, we often palled around.  Once during a very cold winter when we were younger, we found a large culvert with an enticing sheet of glass-like ice covering a swift current.  We decided to each take turns as curling rocks and push each other across the diamond-clear surface from one open end of the culvert to the other.  We were both in snow suits, those one-piece hooded outfits used by snowmobilers up my Ontario way.  The day was so cold, the ice so flat, that with a good push and spin we slipped across the length of the culvert as star-shaped tops.  We giggled at the perfect physics of it all.  I recall the dull curved concrete ceiling of the culvert looping 3 metres above my head.

Then in the middle of it all I started hearing maniacal giggling and turned my head during one of my drunken spins to see Tim hammering the ice with both of his fists.  Like something out of Bugs Bunny, white cracks spread from his closed fingers and the ice gave way to a freezing churning shock of fresh water.  All I could hear was his laughter in that echo chamber, aside from the gurgling rush of death.  I was able to grab a crumbling edge before being swept under - and pulled myself up and out, now a sopping and dejected guinea pig for yet another of his experiments.  I can't remember what I said to my mother to explain away my completely frozen suit when I got home.

This is just one example of Tim's anti-social episodes.  The more I think about him the more I think he was very nearly insane.  He later made Derek a friend and they paired themselves into short-lived petty criminals.  Some time later Derek ended up using a belt to take his life in a local jail cell, knowing his juvie days were over.  He was set to go to the big boys' slammer this time - but having no taste for it, opted for a quick exit.  He was just 18 years old.  Whether enabled by Tim, or on a path to his own signature destruction, I'll never know.

So this was Tim.  I wanted to frame the way his mind worked for you, Reader.  Yes, the theatre, back to that.  The movie was, as I said, a title I can't recall.  One of the Planet of the Apes franchise, The Daring Dobermans, The Hindenberg?  It's a blur.  We got our seats.  I remember pop corn and drinks.  It was an afternoon matinee, I think we had skipped school.

Like any well-trained male he had decided to take a quick slash before the movie started.  He liked the trailers and the cartoon.  As I sat, absorbed in fantastic martial arts imports and grindhouse blaxploitation, I wondered where he had gotten to.  In a quick flurry, a rushed plop beside me in the half empty theatre, he turned to me, agitated.

"You have to go to the bathroom, right now quickly!"  I said, 'What?" holding some popcorn in one hand and my drink in another. "Go for a pee right now before it's too late."  "What do you mean, why?  I went before we left."

"There's a guy in there with the biggest dick I've ever seen," he said.  Tim wasn't gay.  We were both at that age where secrets shared by boys were as simple as trading cards, and as valuable for their class of experience, the thrill or dare of the pack you could muster, so to speak.  Gender and sexual identity didn't enter into it.  "Get up and go!"  He was practically pushing me out of my seat.

I went, but again it felt like nothing of my doing.  This was of course him flexing the stack he had, enticing me to join him in another life experiment.  I strode up the slanted aisle, taking his cue to make my way quickly, before missing the thrill.  The theatre was a relic of the 1930s.  Art Deco details had been painted over numerous times, but a faded depression era glamour in Mayan-styled flourishes survived.  It was later renovated in the 80s and became something of a gem, a building lost in time.

The men's room was a dank and dripping line of cubicles to the right and white-tiled urinals to the left.  Black tiles outlined the walls at a wainscoting height.  The urinals sweated and the pucks in them gave off a pungency that hit the nose as soon as you entered the place.  I stood at the edge of this line of soldiers like a gunfighter.  Halfway down the bank of creamy pissoirs a tall dark-haired man was standing facing the wall with his hand on his member.  He and I were the only fellows in the place.

I walked down to the end, past him and his storied piece that I had not yet gotten a look at.  I stood there, unzipped, and then turned.  To my astonishment I was able to muster a bit of pee to at least grant me the license of presence. I saw his hand move, a downward stroke on the biggest uncut chunk of meat I had ever seen.  He never looked at me, but kept on with long strokes.  I couldn't take my eyes off his dangling masculinity.

I suppose he had gotten his pee out of way, if there had ever even been the need.  And then in contemplation, as natural as Adam, decided to get some quick action in before departing, or later slipping into one of the two screens available in the place.  Whichever, I never witnessed.  I had finished up and felt an imperative need to make as natural an exit as possible due to my guilty stares.  When I walked by he kept his eyes front at the moist tiles and loosened his grip to shake his fat swaying meat, like a man waiting for the last few drops before zipping up.  But he and I both knew it was a fake out.  He was turgid - and he hadn't chosen me.  I left him, still at his urinal, after slowly washing my hands.

I can't remember what transpired when I returned to my seat.  There must have been exclamations and shared adjectives, the general filth of coarse boy talk.  The movie had just started, and like a checked box, Tim dismissed the whole thing.  I think for him it was like a library book that was slipped into its correct spot.  Meanwhile I was in knots, having witnessed, in all its primacy, the virtual centre of male power and dominance.  The next time I went to the theatre I got a corn dog.