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Smoker Patrol at the Studio
Posted on July 27, 2003 in Adolescence Book of Days Pulmonary
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: You’re in a movie theater.
I actually worked in a movie theater, the Studio on Baseline in San Bernardino, during the summer of 1976 — the interval between my graduation from high school and my matriculation at Claremont Men’s College (now Clarence McKenna College).
Being an usher in that theater let me play fascist cop against a ubiquitous criminal class: smokers. I live in California, a land whose interior air quality has been improved markedly by laws that prohibit smoking in restaurants, bars, etc. I support these laws passionately. There’s nothing more obnoxious than someone piping away like a steel mill at the next table while you are trying to make out the subtle flavors of your salad greens.
Smokers strike me as arrogant and uncompromising: they’ve dared to class their filthy, lung-killing habit with expressions of freedom, poetry recitals, concerts in the park, and the sound of people having a good conversation on the issues of the day. No court — except one run by a wacko in Fullerton (it’s Orange County and that explains a lot) — has bought into the argument that silent smoke is freedom of speech. It’s desecration of the American air, an attack on its citizens, a mugging of the bronchial tubes.
I am not for abolishing smoking, but I am for keeping it out of certain places. No restaurant with smoking and nonsmoking sections that I have been served in has ever completely protected its nonsmoking patrons from the whiff and the sting of untied tobacco vapor. I like living in California. I like that I can taste my food when I dine here.
In the summer of 1976, however, we didn’t have these laws. There were laws on the books against smoking in theaters, though, prompted by the mass slaughter at Chicago’s Iroquois Theater in 1903. Though smoking hadn’t caused that conflagration, fire officials and politicians saw the danger of any kind of spark in a crowded theater. One of my jobs as usher was to stop people from lighting up during performances. It was a matter of life and death.
The Studio was built in the old style: you entered and exited from the back. Smokers knew to watch the exits for our entrance and keep their habit in check while we attendants stood there. It could be quite comic to watch as they worked a team, one of them watching the movie (which was mostly Midway in Sensurround that summer) while the other kept checking the aisles. I had a trick, however, to thwart such schemes.
The screen in the Studio had thousands of holes, slightly larger than a pinprick. I don’t know what the purpose of this was — perhaps a reader can explain the physics. When you sat in the theater, you couldn’t see them or see through them. But from the space behind the screen, you could clearly see the antics of the audience. I would march down the aisles and disappear in the back. The smokers, who had been squatting in anxious torment for their moment to light up (was it because of all the fires in the movie?), would conclude that I was “out of commission”, just scrubbing the dumpster in the back. In the meantime, I’d be in the Black Hole, swaying my head slightly to catch all the details. A red to yellow flash, an orange glow illuminating the broken features of some biker or the pencil thin moustache of a lounge lizard — I sprang into action. I’d stride out, my head erect, and I’d beam my flashlight on the offending butt. “Excuse me sir, but that’s against the law. Put it out now.”
And they obeyed me because I could have them arrested. In the Studio Theater, I was the Law. I had power over them. I could put a stop to their attempted murder via sparks introduced into the atmosphere. I was eighteen years old. It made me feel like a man.
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