In the Dhahran of the 50s there were many rites of passage. The involuntary type like when you are perfectly content riding your bicycle down the street and a fly shoots into your open mouth and down your throat. You crash your bike to the asphalt, coughing and choking, certain that you are about to die. There are the voluntary kind such as the first time you jump off the end of the salt water injection pier at Abqaiq beach or when you slip out of camp at night, head for the jebal and climb to the top of the radio tower. Spread out below you is all of Dhahran, bathed in the flickering glow of the flares at the Stabilizer, the night sky littered with stars like so many rhinestones strewn on black velvet. What a view.
Billy James lived across the street from me. He was four years older and a ninth grader but sometimes he'd let me hang around. One day he told me there was a labyrinth of tunnels that stretched endlessly beneath the movie theater. They were dark and pitiless, teeming with fanged albino rats, venomous snakes and tarantulas as big as your fist. You had to be careful as one wrong turn and you'd be lost, doomed to die of hunger beneath the movies. How could I resist.
The next week the strike team assembled for Pepsi at the Fiesta Room, me and Maco and a guy I'll call Scott Miller to mask his identity. We reviewed our equipment: Maco had a flashlight, Scott had one of those aluminum Army style canteens and I had a ball of red yarn so we wouldn't get lost, we also had three Mars bars just in case. All checked off, we nonchalantly strolled out the door turned left, past the recreation office, past the theater and then turned around the corner where we instantly became furtive even though there wasn't a soul to see us. About halfway down the length of the theater there was a square concrete block well, eight feet down were the grates for the ventilation system.
We crawled down to the grating, lifted one up and dropped in. Before us built into the wall was the yawning maw of the main AC duct. I tied off the yarn and we climbed in. The cross section of the sheet metal ducting was maybe three feet high and four feet high, I don't really know exactly but it wasn't too roomy. The first thing we noticed once we were in, the ducting flexed back and forth making a helluva sound. So we tried to creep slowly without setting it off.
After about fifteen feet we ran out of yarn. Oh well. We pressed on through a thick layer of lint, dust, stray asbestos insulation and god knows what else. The theater was built in 1947, so at least ten years of filmy debris was stirred up into the air. After another few feet Maco dropped the flashlight with a loud bang that echoed up and down the duct. It didn't work anymore unless you hit it and then it would flicker a bit and go off. There was still some light from the opening so we kept on - still no fanged rats, until the ducting turned 90 degrees. We looked around the corner and could see some light and hear a little noise. Hungry by then, we ate the Mars bars. We continued on for a bit when Scott opened the canteen for a drink and dropped it. It clunked against the sheet metal reverberating like a sonic boom, then gurgled in the dark. Now we were mucking through a linty mud but the sound got louder.
Finally we wiggled forward and before us was the wide grating that sucked the air in from the theater. If you're in the movies, it's right beneath the front of the stage. We made our way up to the grill work and before us were the people raptly watching the movie. All the front row seats occupied by kids we knew, the light from the screen flickering across them in different colors and shades, the soundtrack blaring and they didn't know that we were there, just ten feet away. Cheryl DiGiacomo, Diane Sherman and Gayle Miller sitting quietly together, Tom Moss and Ron Poole sprawled out like pashas, Twila Jones and Mary Lynn Colgan eating popcorn, Tommy Williams, Doug Tedsen and Hammond jabbing each other in the ribs, Donna Gibson and Mary Catherine Teal sharing some smuggled in French fries, Ralph Wells twitching in the end seat. We were mesmerized. As stupid and as insensitive as we were, we knew that this was a magic moment, the shifting light across their faces, the disembodied sound booming away, the cool air blowing past us.
The spell was broken by a voice booming through the ducting, "You boys, come out of there, right now." Busted. "You're in big trouble. Right now." Resigned to our fate we crawled back out, through the mud of the spilled canteen, past the Mars bar wrappers, to the end of the red yarn and out to the opening where Desaa, the Goanese lifeguard scowled at us. Behind his game face his was probably howling with laughter at the sight of us covered with mud our hair powdered with lint and dust. He took us to the Rec office where some American dressed us down and sent us home. The next day our parents received notices that we were banned from the entire recreation block for a week.
Four days later - it seemed like a month to us, we sneaked through the bowling alley door into the kids’ side of the Fiesta Room where we regaled a rapt audience about our adventure: the albino rats with bloody fangs, the viper that Scott crushed with his canteen, the enormous scorpion that struck at my sneaker and left his stinger attached, the huge cobweb like cotton candy that nearly suffocated Maco. Swear to God. It was terrible, we don't know how we made it out alive.
And undoubtedly someone in the audience began making his plans to enter the labyrinth of certain death.
Billy James lived across the street from me. He was four years older and a ninth grader but sometimes he'd let me hang around. One day he told me there was a labyrinth of tunnels that stretched endlessly beneath the movie theater. They were dark and pitiless, teeming with fanged albino rats, venomous snakes and tarantulas as big as your fist. You had to be careful as one wrong turn and you'd be lost, doomed to die of hunger beneath the movies. How could I resist.
The next week the strike team assembled for Pepsi at the Fiesta Room, me and Maco and a guy I'll call Scott Miller to mask his identity. We reviewed our equipment: Maco had a flashlight, Scott had one of those aluminum Army style canteens and I had a ball of red yarn so we wouldn't get lost, we also had three Mars bars just in case. All checked off, we nonchalantly strolled out the door turned left, past the recreation office, past the theater and then turned around the corner where we instantly became furtive even though there wasn't a soul to see us. About halfway down the length of the theater there was a square concrete block well, eight feet down were the grates for the ventilation system.
We crawled down to the grating, lifted one up and dropped in. Before us built into the wall was the yawning maw of the main AC duct. I tied off the yarn and we climbed in. The cross section of the sheet metal ducting was maybe three feet high and four feet high, I don't really know exactly but it wasn't too roomy. The first thing we noticed once we were in, the ducting flexed back and forth making a helluva sound. So we tried to creep slowly without setting it off.
After about fifteen feet we ran out of yarn. Oh well. We pressed on through a thick layer of lint, dust, stray asbestos insulation and god knows what else. The theater was built in 1947, so at least ten years of filmy debris was stirred up into the air. After another few feet Maco dropped the flashlight with a loud bang that echoed up and down the duct. It didn't work anymore unless you hit it and then it would flicker a bit and go off. There was still some light from the opening so we kept on - still no fanged rats, until the ducting turned 90 degrees. We looked around the corner and could see some light and hear a little noise. Hungry by then, we ate the Mars bars. We continued on for a bit when Scott opened the canteen for a drink and dropped it. It clunked against the sheet metal reverberating like a sonic boom, then gurgled in the dark. Now we were mucking through a linty mud but the sound got louder.
Finally we wiggled forward and before us was the wide grating that sucked the air in from the theater. If you're in the movies, it's right beneath the front of the stage. We made our way up to the grill work and before us were the people raptly watching the movie. All the front row seats occupied by kids we knew, the light from the screen flickering across them in different colors and shades, the soundtrack blaring and they didn't know that we were there, just ten feet away. Cheryl DiGiacomo, Diane Sherman and Gayle Miller sitting quietly together, Tom Moss and Ron Poole sprawled out like pashas, Twila Jones and Mary Lynn Colgan eating popcorn, Tommy Williams, Doug Tedsen and Hammond jabbing each other in the ribs, Donna Gibson and Mary Catherine Teal sharing some smuggled in French fries, Ralph Wells twitching in the end seat. We were mesmerized. As stupid and as insensitive as we were, we knew that this was a magic moment, the shifting light across their faces, the disembodied sound booming away, the cool air blowing past us.
The spell was broken by a voice booming through the ducting, "You boys, come out of there, right now." Busted. "You're in big trouble. Right now." Resigned to our fate we crawled back out, through the mud of the spilled canteen, past the Mars bar wrappers, to the end of the red yarn and out to the opening where Desaa, the Goanese lifeguard scowled at us. Behind his game face his was probably howling with laughter at the sight of us covered with mud our hair powdered with lint and dust. He took us to the Rec office where some American dressed us down and sent us home. The next day our parents received notices that we were banned from the entire recreation block for a week.
Four days later - it seemed like a month to us, we sneaked through the bowling alley door into the kids’ side of the Fiesta Room where we regaled a rapt audience about our adventure: the albino rats with bloody fangs, the viper that Scott crushed with his canteen, the enormous scorpion that struck at my sneaker and left his stinger attached, the huge cobweb like cotton candy that nearly suffocated Maco. Swear to God. It was terrible, we don't know how we made it out alive.
And undoubtedly someone in the audience began making his plans to enter the labyrinth of certain death.
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