Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

He got in the Citroen on route 64 and the woman asked him for gas money. The drifter explained that he had no money at the present time, but that he was owed a final paycheck from the management of the Cansino Drive-In Theatre, where he had been employed for the past week as a projectionist. He had even been allowed to live in the small projection booth. The woman agreed to drive the man to the theatre.

The drifter said he had been a salesman for a time, but he would not elaborate on what he sold. The woman said nothing of her former profession.

When the paycheck was retrieved, the drifter signed it over to the woman, scribbling only Jack on the rear endorsement line because he could no longer remember any more of his name.

In fact, he can no longer remember very much about himself beyond random flashes, dull images of what seem to be chronically fading memories: darkrooms, red lights, pieces of glass bent into odd shapes and sizes.

The woman accepted the paycheck and, as it was dusk, suggested they stay for the first feature of the evening. The drifter fetched a tub of popcorn.

The woman glanced into the rearview mirror of the Citroen, pulled her lips in, puckered them out.

And now the screen is alive with shadows and motion. Bodies float across the expanse of white matte. The woman, for some reason even she can’t fathom, trembles in her seat .

The drifter stares up through the windshield at the night sky, all this distant light, and says, “What’s wrong? It’s only a movie.”

Dissolve

The author is indebted to the following works and wishes to express his gratitude to the authors:

Raw Talent , by Jerry Butler; The Haunted Screen, by Lotte H. Eisner; The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History of The Wizard of Oz, by John Fricke, Jay Scarfone, & William Stillman; The Devil Thumbs a Ride , by Barry Gifford; From Reverence to Rape , by Molly Haskell; Film Noir, The Dark Side of the Screen , by Forester Hirsch; Signatures of the Visible, by Frederic Jameson; The Liveliest Art , by Arthur Knight; Worcester’s Best , edited by Elliott B. Knowlton; Women in Film, by Annette Kuhn with Susannah Radstone; Great American Movie Theatres , by David Naylor; The Nightmare of Reason , by Ernst Pawel; Cut: The Unseen Cinema , by Baxter Phillips; Preminger , by Otto Preminger; The Films of Rita Hayworth , by Gene Ringgold; Film Noir , edited by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward; Movie Palaces, by Ave Pildas & Lucinda Smith; Porn, by Robert Stoller, M.D.; Hard Core, by Linda Williams; Video Hound’s Golden Movie Retriever; and especially, The Phantom Empire , by Geoffrey O’Brian (from whom I have borrowed the term media overfarming).

The descriptions of the Chapter House and the Virgin and Child sculpture are taken from explicating plaques at the Worcester Art Museum.