Introduction to My Miserable Jobs: Job #2, Usher
I am always saying I had 50 or more jobs, but I am not sure. I want to see if I can remember all the worthless, God-awful pursuits of mine in the name of keeping body and soul together. Here is my real resume. I hesitate to call it a “Vita” lest it comes to define my life. I still have some hope that my life is more than the sum of my crummy jobs.
Job Number 2, Usher. I believe the first employment I had was at as an usher (remember them?) at a rat’s ass motion picture theater in Lake Worth, Fla. It was the Lake Theater or the Worth, I can’t remember which. The pay? I believe it was $1.10 an hour, maybe less, and all the popcorn you could eat. Of course, the ushers could also see the movies for free, once their shift was over. Unfortunately, this rotting old failure of a cinema house showed only films which nobody wanted to see. It hadn’t yet fallen to the state of having to become a porn palace, but that happened next, a few years later. We ushers wore funny little uniforms, black I think, and really cheap. Why is it that the worst of jobs come with uniforms?
I was just at the legal age to work, I suppose 14. This would have been 1963 or 1964. At that time, each little town had at least one theater that would have Saturday morning features. These were a cultural phenomenon few remember, for good reason. Basically, the Saturday morning session catered to a clientele of twelve to fifteen year olds, wild, uncivilized, and set loose in the dark. Younger ones were attracted to a cartoons, but the real free-for-all was the horror shows, two for a dollar. Of course, like today, the money was in the candy, pop, and popcorn sales. After selling vast quantities of these vile concoctions and sticky substances to the wild herd, the lights were dimmed and the show began. A tumultuous riot always ensued. Nickel pickles were hurled at the screen, gooey candy dropped or flung, most of the popcorn and soda spilled on the floor. In fact, the floor was the expected repository of all refuse as well as all manner disgusting substances. There were no trash cans as no one would use them anyway. The screaming, fighting, crowd of horrid adolescents were free, free at last to throw anything anywhere.
The usher’s duty was to maintain order. Imagine! There in the dark, six tiny ushers teamed against a mob of hundreds with all the hormones of their age coursing through them, fueled with sugar and driven with the smell of utter license and a total absence of law, parents, or any thought of decent behavior. The only rules enforced were the fire regulations limiting the size of the crowd, a law always violated to great extent. The ushers had to hold the mob at bay by guarding the entrances until the appointed hour, then only to sell a limited amount of tickets. On one Saturday, a particularly outrageous crowd pushed on the double doors to get in. The ushers pushed back. At one point, a snot-nosed villain, smelling of cola and sweat, inserted an arm and a foot and tried to unloose the locking mechanism. I shoved my body against the doors and smashed his hand quite well. In another day and age, the theater and I would have been sued from here to hell, but in 1964 the little creep just settled the score by stalking me after the show. I ran, of course, and luckily never saw him again.
My flight from him, and his accomplice, who was a freckled girl with few teeth, took place after the clean up, a task of several hours that only a Hercules shoveling out the stable could have accomplished any earlier. Gigantic mounds of refuse where pushed and shoved into the aisles from the rows. Feed lot scoops were used to shovel the junk into containers which were trucked away. It was awful. All the while, the little weasel manager, Mr. T. I think, stayed closeted in his smelly office making phone calls.
A short while after I quit this little prison, I heard what may well have been a scandalized lie, that T. was arrested in Ft. Lauderdale for exposing himself to little boys.
Two Strikes 