Dinner and a Movie

It looked abandoned from the outside. The marquee was wordless, ripped apart, with the exception of one word above where the titles would be—Cinema, with a king’s crown dotting the I. Neither of us had ever been to Gravesend, Brooklyn before and deemed it ostensibly nice, reminiscent of Astoria, Queens. But the anomaly under investigation, New York's last porn theatre, did not fit in with its surroundings. The ticket office below the shattered marquee was shut off by tightly closed window blinds. A small, barely noticeable sign read, TICKET ADMISSION INSIDE. I told Laura, “I have that feeling you get just before the big drop on the roller coaster.”

Upon walking through the glass entrance to the real admission booth, we both noticed a dirty finger poking through the blinds. Visible through the glass entrance were mounted posters on the wall for Scary Movie 2 and Freddy Got Fingered, two reasonably old movies released years apart. For this theater to be legal, at least 60% of floor space must be dedicated to content that is not sexually explicit. We would discover George Lucas’ 1988 classic, Willow, playing in the larger, nearly empty theater.

“You know we show dirty movies here,” he told us with not a trace of humor in his voice. He sounded like he was warning us, though who could’ve innocently wandered into a theater that by all appearances was closed? I cordially affirmed the Indian man’s warning, and he led us inside.

We entered the straight porn room first. There were only four
rows of seats. Most of the men were standing in the aisle, in the
darkness of the entrance. The screen, approximately 5” by 7”,
displayed a montage of hairless female orifices, swollen and wounded
looking, being pummeled by an anonymous retinue of oversized phalli. A
phone number flashed on the screen while a coy female voice moaned
lewdnesses over the montage.

The man in front row was moaning in response to the female voice,
his hand vigorously at work underneath a beige trench coat. The
only other seated man looked younger than the clientele we could make out.
He drank out of a paper bag and appeared at home in the shadowy den.

Laura:
Instantly, I was noticed. The only female in the only living porn
theater in New York. The man in the front row
didn’t notice (thank God) but all of the others did. Two
grandpa-esque men were particularly attentive to our
presence. I could barely last through the anal advertisement. I quietly begged for
Matt to leave with me, legitimately fearing a solo exit. We were met
again by Middle-Eastern managerial staff. We started heading toward
the next door, any door, and he stopped us. “That’s just the real
movie…”

Matt:
He told me about the booths, that no one would see us there, that he
would show us. I cordially declined, and the two of us took the stairs
to the real movie. We were greeted by the farty funk of weed as we came
up the stairs. There were enough seats for at least two hundred people. There
was one other patron sitting in the bottom farthest corner as the two
of us sat down. Laura and I took a minute to figure out
our next move. Meanwhile, fat old men proceeded to walk in and out of
Willow, staring at us, and then, coming to some conclusion, returned
downstairs.

Laura:
One of the grandpas stood behind us. I realized that I was not going to be ignored.
No amount of passivity could make me blend in to the jacketed, baseball
capped, grey haired entourage of erotic elderly. And not that I

was trying, but I couldn’t have been paid to feel horny in that place.
I apologized to Matt for having to leave, but I couldn’t handle the
looks. I pretended I was on the phone and basically ran out of the
grimy glass doorway. I let him tackle the gay-porn room alone.

Matt:
I, of course, had to stay and stake out for a minute the gay room,
which was the same size of the straight room, and about three times as
crowded. On screen, a pale college-age male moaned while being rimmed
by a pale, dark haired male. The footage was scratchy, lost in time, a
moment of a moment, whereas the hairstyles appeared current. As in the
straight room, most of the patrons stood in the aisle.
I leaned against the wall, thinking nothing, waiting for my signal to
leave. A man of indiscernible age rose from his seat and walked in a
slow, deliberate manner towards the exit. He bumped into me lightly as
he passed, a gesture I seemed to understand from a memory, an image, a
movie that eluded capture. The man gave me a nod. He was waiting
for me to reply, to follow him to a booth or bathroom stall. I just
stood there contemplating the gesture, the soft texture of its
violence, the implications of its ambivalence, its anonymity. Strange,
I thought, as I walked through the troop of shoulders, into the lobby,
passing a man yanking on the bathroom door, locked for reasons begging
infinite suspicion.

Laura:
Waiting outside, attempting to reassemble my self-respect, one
of the pairs of eyes I had recognized from inside came toward me.
“Pretty,” he grumbled at me as he paused, looked me up and down, and
kept walking. Goddammit.

Later, in the safety of KFC, "Some things are just exactly how you
imagine them to be,” said Matt.

I agreed.