The Last Screening at the Playwood © Christian A. Larsen
The stone façade of the Playwood Theater stretched 100 feet into the air, terraced like an Aztec temple with room enough for 1400 worshipers of stage and screen—at least during its heyday. Now, with a brand-new megaplex drawing crowds to the outskirts of Brickton, it stood as a cold, quiet monument to an antiquated era, which was probably why neighborhood kids stole the ‘A' off the marquee and no one bothered to replace it. What had once been a movie palace was now literally a plywood fortress waiting to be razed.
“No one's gonna catch us, I swear, Tom,” said Mark, peeling one corner of the plywood board off the door. “Get inside.”
Tom didn ' t think he could wiggle out of the honors citing ‘ ladies first ' precedent, so he got down on his hands and knees to climb through. The nails were poking out of the plywood like teeth, and just inside, the worn-out carpeting looked like a tongue. He was about to crawl in when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey dingus, take a flashlight, huh?” Mark asked, handing him a Mag-Lite the size of a baseball bat.
The girls giggled, a nervous laughter.
Tom poked the flashlight in the ribs, panned the light around, and squirmed through the door as fast as possible. If Mark ' s fingers slipped, he might have to get tetanus shots. Not a great date, even if breaking into a condemned theater wasn ' t his first choice, either.
It smelled musty, forgotten, what a newly discovered corpse might smell like in a ditch after a two-week stay. At least that ' s how Tom imagined it. He half expected Vincent Price to emerge from the gloom.
“Gonna help me up?” asked Beverly, coming through the hole.
Tom took her hand. “ Sorry, Bev. ” He handed her the flashlight and helped Linnea up, too. Then he held the plywood flap open for Mark. Maybe it was the awkward leverage, but it seemed to Tom like it was trying to close on him. Mark just made it through before it snapped shut like a bear trap.
“Geez, that could've been me,” said Mark. “And to think I was worried about snagging a nail on my jacket.”
Linnea laughed. “ Yeah, is that real pleather, Mark? ”
“Shut up.”
They all did, and the silence was palpable, crowding them together in anticipation and fear. It was a rush breaking into a condemned building, but there was something more to it. Bev waved the flashlight toward the ceiling half-expecting to see a roost of bats or a church bell. Instead, she saw the faint fingers of dusky light coming in from the boarded-up skylights.
“This place is cool,” said Linnea. “Why would they close it down?”
“More screens across town,” answered Tom. “And it got too expensive to keep up. That's what my mom says, anyway. She was on the board of directors for the charity that ran the place before it closed.”
“You see that statue, the mermaid?” he asked, pointing to the end of the hall under the ‘lavatory' sign. He was asking Bev, but presented it like it was for the group, in case she wasn't interested. “That was designed by, what's his name? Aw, it's on the tip of my tongue.”
“Great story, Tom,” Mark said, grabbing Linnea around the waist. “But the tip of your tongue's not what I'm worried about.” He kissed Linnea with an open mouth, sloppily, and she reciprocated.
“Gross,” Bev said, yanking the light off of them. “You sure know a lot about this place, Tom. Is that ‘cause of your mom?”
“I guess so. She was always bringing me to fundraisers as a kid.” He pointed into the auditorium. “I spent a lot of time in there, watching retro film festivals and stuff, but it was sorta fun, I guess.”
There was a suctioned pop as Mark pulled his face from Linnea. “Did you get to see Plan 9 from Outer Space?”
“Not in there, no. But I saw a lot of really cool stuff. Duel with the added swearword scenes, the first Planet of the Apes, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.”
“Never heard of them, except for the Mark Wahlberg movie. That was disgusting when he kissed that gorilla.”
“Wrong version, Mark,” said Linnea, adjusting her bra in the gloom. Mark hadn't quite succeeded in unhooking it, but the night was young. “And if anyone knows how disgusting it is to kiss a gorilla, I should. Ever hear of mints, dogbreath?”
“Yeah? Well, you're the one that tastes like hotdogs.”
“I just had one, idiot.”
“Hey, Romeo? Juliet? Fight on your own time,” said Tom.
“I thought this was my time,” Mark replied, sounding a little bit like Spiccoli from Fast Times. The line wasn't exactly right, though.
Bev was annoyed and decided to bring the conversation back on point, which is to say she wanted to talk about what she wanted to talk about and not the inane patter of her boyfriend's friends. “Tom, tell me more about the theater. I think it's really cool.”
“Well, let's see. Didja know that it wasn't the first theater to be built here? The first one burned down in 1903.”
“No lyin'?” asked Linnea. “To the ground?”
“No, the outside is the same, mostly, but the first gutted the theater so bad that it had to be rebuilt. It was called the Algonquin Theater before the fire, mostly a vaudeville venue, but they did show some movies—one of the first places in the Chicago area. The last movie ever shown at the Algonquin was The Great Train Robbery, but when it was rebuilt, it became known as “The Playwood” and it got a reputation as being more of a moviehouse, though a lot of stage acts still came through.”
“So how did the fire start?” asked Mark, sliding his right hand into Linnea's back pocket.
“I don't know,” Tom answered. “I don't think they ever figured it out. The whole thing was weird. I think the official explanation was that a light shorted out and started a curtain on fire backstage, but that was probably a guess so they could close the book. The bigger mystery was that they never found any bodies. There were something like 600 people in the building at the time, and none of them got out.”
“So what, they burned up, right?” mused Mark.
“There were bodies in Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center, and those buildings were destroyed,” said Bev. “There would be some bodies, even if they couldn't account for all of them. Maybe they just carried them out in the rubble to rebuild on the cheap or something.”
“It's possible,” Tom admitted, leading them into the auditorium. “Let me show you something.” He took them down the aisle into the side stage area. There was a set of stairs leading up to a concrete ceiling—stairs to nowhere. “Legend has it the performer on stage when the fire broke out, his name was Fredo Fini, led the audience up the stairs to safety.”
“But the stairs don't go anywhere,” said Linnea.
“Actually, they do. It's some closed off box seat or something. You can still get to it through a vent in the balcony, but Fini didn't lead them up these stairs, at least, because they weren't there. Remember, it's the Algonquin that burned out, not the Playwood.”
“Can we see it?” asked Mark.
The teenagers had to go back out into the lobby to reach the stairs that lead to the balcony because the way the Playwood had been remodeled in the 1940s. The velvet seats in on the main floor were covered in a patina of dust, but the seats in the balcony, unused by patrons for 30 years or more, were covered in chunks of fallen plaster and insulation and racks of unused klieg lights. The stairs were precipitous leading down to the access point to the “ Fini Room, ” but no one was in any particular hurry.
“There's nothing here but a few porno mags and a broken bong,” said Mark, his butt poking out of the square hole in the base of the wall.
“What were you expecting?” asked Beverly. “A few hundred Victorian movie-goers?”
“They weren't watching a movie, Bev,” said Mark, his voice muffled. “They were watching the Great Linguine.”
“Fredo Fini,” corrected Tom. He was starting to feel like a geek on the subject, but if facts were out there they might as well be right. “The Great Fini. He was this short little Italian guy known for his disappearing acts.”
“You mean like
running out on a bill?” Mark asked, brushing plaster dust off his jeans.
“Maybe he did that, too, but I'm talking about David Copperfield stuff, like literally making things disappear.”
Mark was unimpressed. “ Sounds pretty lame. ”
“It was over a hundred years ago,” Bev said. Everything about the Playwood was interesting to her, and she didn't need Mark shitting all over it. Besides, he was just doing it to be mean to Tom.
“Hey, whatever,” Mark said, pulling Linnea close to him. “I wonder how many cigarette girls lost their cherries up here.”
“I'm not going to lose mine,” Linnea protested.
Mark laughed. “ Can ' t lose what you don ' t still have, baby. ” He sat down in one of the chairs and pulled her down on top of him, where they made their own entertainment.
Tom wanted to do the same with Bev, but was too much of a gentlemen (or too afraid of rejection) to make a move, so he pointed the Mag-Lite up at the ceiling and started pointing out curiosities in the fresco, like the biplane and the comedy and tragedy masks. The two walked (arms around each other) to the middle of the balcony so they could see better. It was a work of art in its own right, under which Tom's grandparents had made out during a screening of Fantasia . It would be rubble soon, and so would everything that didn't go in the demolition auction.
Tom and Bev sat down, side by side, slouched low in the seats studying the ceiling the way some teenagers watched stars as a prelude to kissing and heavy petting. With anxious nerves, he kept talking, but his voice was faint and faraway in his ears. He did notice, though, that he and Bev were looking at each other instead of the ceiling, and their faces were getting closer and closer together. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his lips. A kiss was coming!
The screen, ripped and water stained, came to life. It was so sudden that Tom actually bumped into Bev. She grabbed her nose and leaned into her knees. Instinctively, Tom apologized, rubbed her back and started to ask her if she was alright.
“I'm fine,” said Bev. “It's okay. My fault.”
He was glad she wasn ' t blaming him, but he wanted some insurance. He turned to face the projector room behind them. “ Mark, you asshole. How did you get up there without a flashlight? ”
“I'm … over here, dude. Linnea's with me.”
“Yep, right here,” she added.
The voices were coming from the balcony near the Fini hole, right where Tom and Bev had left them. Tom picked up the flashlight and started swinging it back and forth between the projector window and the balcony. His friends hadn ' t turned on the projector, but how could they? There wasn ' t any power in the building. What was all the weirder was the mote-filled cone of flickering light that should have been spraying out of the projection booth wasn ' t. It was as dark up there as it should be, but the screen was showing a peculiar scene at 16 frames per second.
Tom couldn ' t be sure, but it looked like a shot of the Algonquin. All the seats in the frame were filled with delighted theater-goers all dressed to the nines, watching a performer who ' s back was to the camera. He was moving with the slight rapidity common to films at the time, but it was surprisingly lifelike to Tom ' s eyes.
“What are we watching, Tom?” asked Bev, still holding her nose. It looked like she was bleeding a little.
“I'm not sure, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who's seeing it,” Tom admitted. “I'm not even sure how we're watching it. There's nothing coming out of the projector booth.”
“That's weird.”
“Maybe it's some sort of rear projection,” suggested Tom. “Let's go check it out. Maybe we can find something to clean up your nose with. Maybe in the bathrooms.”
It was easy to convince Mark and Linnea to go with them, not because they were interested in figuring out how the movie was projecting or who had started it, but because Tom and Bev had the only flashlight, and negotiating an abandoned balcony in a dilapidated theater was none too appealing, even if there was enough light to see by with the movie playing for one simple reason: you never knew when it would go dark again.
There were a few squares left on a role of toilet paper in the men ' s restroom, left over from the last workmen that had been there to board up the place. Fortunately, Bev ' s nose had stopped bleeding, so she didn ' t need to sop up much blood. Tom offered to help her and look at her nose, implying he would look up her nose, but she was too modest to let him. Tom backed off quickly. It was an awkwardness he wanted to let pass.
Having been that way earlier that night, the teens quickly found their way backstage, passing the stairs to nowhere and entering the land of circuit breakers and curtain pulls. The light was shining through the screen, giving them enough light to see by even without the flashlight, but none of them saw anything even remotely resembling a projection system. Mark looked up at the screen and the huge figure of the magician on stage.
“That's funny,”
he said. “It's turned around now.” And it was. The magician, clearly The Great Fini, was performing some sort of magic trick. The concern in his face was evident, but only Tom, Bev, Mark and Linnea could see him, because his back was to the audience—the other audience, anyway. There was no soundtrack to go with it, not even the clack and whir of a projector.
“Tom, let's get out of here,” said Beverly.
“Yeah,” agreed Mark slowly. “I think you're right.”
The Mag-Lite cut a clear path through the darkness, but nothing looked quite the same as it did just a minute or two before. Tom couldn't put his finger on it, but it had that night-terror quality with which toddlers could easily identify — the space between things looked out of whack, normal objects looked horrifying because of their normalcy, not in spite of it, and on top of it all, Tom could still smell smoke, even though nothing was burning.
Tom held tightly to Beverly's hand. Mark and Linnea were close behind, but he decided he wasn't going to wait for them if anything happened. He had Bev to think about. And himself. And besides, it wasn't his bright idea to break into the Playwood, anyway. It was Mark's. And Linnea? She could fend for herself. A modern Joan of Arc, that one. Or Joan Jett. But a tiny part of Tom's subconscious whispered that toughness couldn't protect them from any trouble they might find at the condemned theater.
The lobby was as quiet as a submarine avoiding sonar detection, but in the distance, Tom thought he could hear somebody talking through a megaphone, and what that voice was saying made Tom remember another movie— Star Trek III . In it, the Klingons boarded the Enterprise with the intent to capture it, but Captain Kirk had begun the self-destruct sequence before beaming away. Like the Klingons, Tom heard a countdown to demolition.
“Oh. Shit,” he breathed. “How long have we been in here?”
“Seven … six … five … ”
Tom dove for the door, but the plywood sheeting held fast, like it had a new row of nails sunk into it, just for fun. He banged on it, screamed and pleaded to be let out.
“Four … three … two … ”
“Let us out!” he shouted so loud his voice cracked.
The countdown stopped.
“Someone heard you, Tom!” said Beverly, and she actually clapped.
Mark pulled him up with one hand and hugged him like he just threw the winning touchdown pass in the Super Bowl. “Way to go, Tommy boy!”
But things had changed again. The lobby was lit, the décor was new, and there were people—ushers, concessionaires, and cigarette girls with their cherries intact. “Welcome to the Algonquin,” smiled the ticket taker as the teens huddled in confusion. “We've been saving four seats just for you. You don't want to miss a minute of tonight's show.”
“What's the show?” asked Mark.
“The Great Fini, and he's only doing this one performance.”
“How long does it last?” asked Tom.
The ticket-taker smiled. “ It goes on forever. ” |