USPS/APWU + Sunset

As I rode the Louisiana-Central bus over the next few days, I seriously considered alighting at Central and Bryn Mawr to drop by and say Hi to Gary and maybe, just maybe, inquire about a job. Yes? I wish I had done that. Oh, how I wish I had done that. Heck, I may still do that yet! Instead, I received a notice from the USPS to begin work on, I think, on Friday, 27 April. That was almost certainly the date. I reasoned to myself: “Good pay. Government job. Security. Stop looking elsewhere! Take this one!” That was one of the worst decisions of my entire life.

At the USPS, I found myself represented by the APWU. The APWU, in case you don’t know, is the American Postal Workers Union. Oh, my heavens, I remember, though I don’t want to. In the midst of a full night of orientation, our grimly humorless supervisor for the night (whom we would never see again) told us to step outside into the hall, just outside his door, within his earshot, to get a union orientation. Our union orientation was all of, oh, maybe ninety seconds. Our union steward, who did not look evil but did not look appealing either, encouraged us to join, because, he said, we need to fight management, we need to fight management every step of the way. That’s not the sort of message I want to hear. It was a huge turn-off. Within days, I discovered that the guy was right. We did need to fight management every step of the way. Never in all my days, before or since, have I encountered an entire management team that was so dedicated to the sole purpose of fighting its employees, haranguing them, making false accusations against them, belittling them, humiliating them, threatening them. I was naïve to have imagined that management was in the business of delivering mail. Heck no. Management had no interest in mail at all. Mail delivery was just an excuse to lord it over those below them, harass them, make them feel worthless, drive them to tears, drive them to violence, drive them to suicide.

Nonetheless, all us worker bees at the USPS just loved those paychecks. As one gal told me, on my first or second day on the job, “When you get your first paycheck, it’ll knock your socks off!” That was our only conversation. I never saw her again. For 100 hours of work over two weeks, the take-home pay was about $600. Not one of us had ever before seen such riches. This was almost triple what an average job would pay. Our heads were spinning. We could hardly believe we were earning such vast wealth. I did not yet have a bank account, and so I remember I would take each check to a bank to cash it, and I wanted hundred-dollar bills. As soon as I got that first paycheck, the very first thing I purchased was an 8-perf Ciro adjustable-pitch guillotine splicer, along with a good supply of tape rolls. I think I ordered them from a supply place in Chicago. My next purchases were vegetables and fruits and whole-wheat flour and yeast so that I could prepare my own meals and no longer have to suffer the junk food that my father preferred. That pretty much exhausted my first paycheck. Then, after about six weeks, and after grocery expenses, I had over a thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. When I got home, I held them in my hands. I put them up to my nose and riffled through them so that I could smell the sweet breeze emanating from them. This was beyond belief, truly, because I knew it would not last. Now, after years of salivating, I could finally make a purchase at the antique bookshop on Central Avenue SW, just west of 2nd Street. I walked in, only to see that the owner was packing everything up, in utter disgust. He had sold his entire stock and was quitting the business. I was disheartened, and said that I had never had money until that week, and had never been able to buy anything. He scolded me, saying that, if I had really wanted something, he would have accepted a layaway plan. He just didn’t get it, did he?

The Sunset was run by dangerous crooks. The USPS was run by dangerous sadists. What was I to do? I had a government job that paid $600 take-home every other week, and I had an under-the-table job that paid maybe $90 take-home every other week. The USPS job could not last long. Even minus the harassment, the USPS job would have been deadening. Management had no concept of how to make things pleasant for the employees. I needed to keep an option open. I dared not resign from the Sunset. As crooked as the Sunset was, I thought it might serve me well — eventually, somehow. Maybe I could use it to catapult to something better. In Albuquerque? Yeah, maybe even in Albuquerque, as unlikely as that seemed.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SUNSET: John housed his insane brother-in-law in the office next to the booth. The guy had lost his mind in Vietnam. He smoked like a chimney without using ashtrays, stacked the room with Playboy and Penthouse magazines, and all the while I could hear him screaming, “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! Hup two three four! Hup two three four! About face! Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! At your orders sir!” as he loudly marched his feet back and forth in that little room. A few months later, brother-in-law was moved out, and so, on a few late nights, I used it as a hotel room. It was not the most comfortable hotel room I ever inhabited. In that room, I found old pressbooks, including one for Performance, which John allowed me to keep. Right after I took it home, it completely vanished. Darn!

The once-beautiful Strong lamphouses were driving me nuts. I couldn’t figure out how on earth to get the carbons to burn evenly, and I had to adjust the arc every minute or two. Several union projectionists warned me that the adjustment was made with the “ballast tube,” and that you just had to try again and again and again forever until you rotated it just the right way. I phoned a supply house, I think in Boston, and asked if there was an instruction manual for this particular model. Yes, indeed! And they could send me a photocopy! I sent the money, and a week or two later I was the proud owner of the photocopy. I read it intently, and discovered that it is not a “ballast tube”; it is a bi-metal tube, and the adjustment is extremely easy to make. Zo, I made the adjustment, which took maybe two minutes for each lamphouse, and the arcs held steady. Yay.

Also residing on the property was an Italian technician, Mario (I can’t remember his surname), who lived in a mobile home. He worked, I think, for Commonwealth, and he made his living by visiting union booths to make repairs. By union contract, he was not permitted to help us out, but he did once or twice anyway. Oddly, one day, while walking through the lot, I saw a Century aperture on the ground, 1:1.375. It was an older one, black rather than shiny brass, with the fancy Century roundhand logo etched in. It had been run over by countless cars, and so it was dented and scratched and muddy. What on earth was that doing there? Had Mario dropped it on his way to or from a projection booth he was servicing? No, because no cinema in his circuit used 1:1.375. I wiped it off and, after the show that night, I told the other projectionist to hang around for a few minutes. “Remember when I said we’re cropping all the films?” I slipped that Century aperture into the Simplex XL head and ran a little bit of a film, and as the film was running, I cranked the base up so that the top of the image was on the top of the screen. The bottom of the image was on the poles that held up the screen and it was lower than that, on quite a bit of the ground in front of the screen. “Whoah!” he laughed, “that’s baaaaaaaaad!!!!!” I might still have that aperture somewhere.

Mario’s wife had prosopagnosia (πρόσωπον ἀγνώσια), an inability to recognize anybody’s face. Every time I entered the cinema, she phoned John in a panic to tell him that there was a prowler on the property. Every time. Every bloody last time. If I worked five nights a week, then she phoned him in a panic five evenings that week. I knew, I just knew that this was going to cause great trouble, sooner rather than later.

A thought just now occurs to me. Commonwealth did not renew its lease with the Sunset, and so it seems to me that the drive-in closed sometime around September 1981. The problem with the Sunset being closed was that Mario and his wife’s mobile home was now at risk, and they probably did not want to move. John seemed to be friendly with the couple. After all, they had Italian names in common. I wonder if Mario phoned up John and said, “Hey, how would you like to be my landlord? Just buy this dumpy drive-in for cheap and you’ll earn my rent.”

John would occasionally give me lifts here and there, and during those rides, he would regale me with his adventures. He laughingly told me about the time he started his van in his driveway one morning. He had been having some trouble with some mobsters, but he wasn’t predicting what would happen next. He got in his van, and, before putting on his seatbelt and closing the driver door, he turned on the ignition and the vehicle exploded. He was blown off to the side maybe some twenty feet, but he emerged essentially unscathed. He got a call from a friend a little while later, “John, what happened?” He spoke back into the phone, “Well, them m-----f------s almost got me,” not realizing that this was not a private call, but was on live radio. Oh how he laughed when recalling that.

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Now that I look at the above article for the umpteenth time, another memory comes back, but it is not a clear memory. I think it was when he was driving us someplace, he mentioned how frustrating it had been to run a topless bar, because the topless performers were always calling in sick and going home sick. That drove him crazy. I kept my mouth shut, because I knew that he would not understand my comment: If you hire people to do sickening work at a sickening job, you should expect them to call in sick and you should expect them to go home sick. He would never have understood that. It was the only time he ever brought it up. I vaguely remember that I kept my mouth shut, or maybe I just said “Yeah” or “Uh-huh” or “Um-hmm,” and nothing more. I did not ask him which topless bar he had run or when. Then I forgot all about it, right away. I never once thought about it again until just now, as I look at the above article yet again. Now, thanks to that article, I know which one he ran and where it was. I used to pass by it all the time, and it gave me the creeps. I had no recollection of any of this until just now, only because that article unloosed a faint memory of something I originally thought entirely unimportant.

Ach, Mein Gott in Himmel! What do I find now? After La Anita was bombed, it was repaired and became the Pleasure Palace, a porn shop operated by Holan, Inc., a corporation registered in Kansas City on 20 March 1975. The president of Holan was listed as R. Ronald Rennock of Kansas City (maybe this guy? who was also maybe this guy?), and the agent was listed as the completely mysterious Chuck Bengson, who supplied his address as 4217 Central Ave SE, which was the same address as another porn shop in the chain, Madame Lovejoy’s. The lawyers were Richard T. Bryant and Paul J. Kennedy. We discover that the owner of the real estate was an Anita S. Le Blonde, who had earned an income by reselling liquor licenses. We learn that Holan, Inc., was a part of the Larry Minkoff business empire. What agreement did Holan have with Pat Baca, if any? Did John have a business relationship with Holan? It is impossible to tell from the published record.

Anyway, back to the story. During one of those lifts, John’s eight-year-old son was in the car. John decided to go grocery shopping with me, but he left his son alone in the car!!!!!!!!! And he left his keys in the ignition!!!!!!!!!! I was worried sick. But he was my boss. I did what my boss said. My prediction was that when we got back out to the lot, there would be no car and no son. As we were shopping, his son decided to join us. John was exasperated: “Where are the keys?” What keys? “You locked the keys in the car? Why did you lock the keys in the car? Don’t you know better than that?” He found a pay phone, called his wife, told her what happened, and asked if she could drive over with the spare key. His wife hit the ceiling. John listened to her scream for minutes on end, and he couldn’t understand why. After the verbal lashing, he looked down at his son and said, “Mommy’s mad at me because you locked the keys in the car.” I could hardly believe what I was witnessing. That, I guess, was a “guy thing.” I have never known of a gal to do that. I’ve seen plenty of gals do plenty of horrid things, but not that. That is a uniquely “guy thing.”

He also told me about a restaurant that a Chinese friend had been running, which was having some troubles and was facing deficit. He needed to help his buddy recover his losses and dump the joint. So, with his buddy’s nervous permission, he planted explosives around the place and blew it up. The adventure did not go as planned, as the explosion did not completely destroy the edifice. So he planted more explosives a few days later and blew it up again, sky high. His buddy put in an insurance claim, which was denied, as the blasts were too suspicious. This ended up in court, and my boss told his nervous buddy, “Look, don’t worry about it. Just testify. With your accent, nobody will understand a word you’re saying, and you’ll get off.” That’s exactly what happened. His buddy won the legal proceeding, collected the insurance, and the two of them bought a new restaurant together, Chinese/Italian.

Back to the Sunset. Since all the machines in the booth were so terribly battered, we both thought it might be a good idea to look for replacements. John at that time lived in a new housing development in Montgomery Heights, within sight of the Linda Vista Drive-In (formerly the Star Drive-In), and he gloated when a windstorm knocked down the right half of the screen. (I do not remember John’s address at the time. It was most definitely not 11637 Grand Avenue NE, the address supplied by the newspaper articles. I’m looking at Google Maps, but, yet again, my memory is playing tricks on me. My memory tells me that his house was atop a slope that looked down on the Linda Vista, which was maybe half a mile to the west. I am not seeing it on the map. I’m checking all his known addresses, but not a single one is a match.) We paid a visit to the owner of the Linda Vista, who told me he had continued running movies by using the backup prime of the anamorphic lens, to reduce the image size. He took us to the booth, and I was stunned. The machines were immaculate, as though they had just come out of the factory! He had his projectionists wrap them with snug custom-made covers whenever they were not in use. I can’t remember the makes or models, maybe Simplex XL picture and sound, Strong Futura II lamps (scroll to the bottom of this link to see an illustration), and I really don’t remember the monaural sound system. Nonetheless, I do remember that it was like being in heaven. I would have loved to work in that booth. Anyway, since half the screen had blown down, the owner now wanted to give up the business, and he said he’d be happy to sell all the projection equipment for $35,000. John was outraged. “Thirty-five thousand? Thirty-five hundred maybe!” and that was the end of that deal. A few days later, I mentioned that to Rudy, and as soon as I reported the price, I had to laugh when Rudy blurted out: “Thirty-five thousand? Thirty-five hundred maybe!”

Since we were not going to purchase better equipment, I decided to visit the Sunshine and ask if I could chat with the projectionist there. No prob! They walked me up, and there I was again, in that dilapidated but majestic balcony. The guy in the booth was not someone I had met or heard of before. He was maybe in his late 20’s or early 30’s and I can’t remember his name. As with the previous time I had visited, under the Francis A. Peloso régime, the booth was stacked with multiple piles of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. He volunteered how much he hated Penthouse magazine: “Who wants to look at a blurry picture?” I had come by to ask if he had any leads on where to get replacement parts for the Strong lamphouses. After all, the Sunset’s Excelite 135’s and the Sunshine’s Strong Futura’s were almost identical. Nope, sorry. He didn’t have a clue. He was totally despondent about the whole situation and said he couldn’t get replacement parts either. He explained a phenomenon I had noticed as soon as I climbed my way up to the booth: exposed live copper bars. The lamphouse wiring was crumbling, and so he asked the new owner to buy replacements. The new owner, Hectór, didn’t understand the problem and said No, that was too much money. I felt the exasperation. Same old story, everywhere we go. Same old story. So this guy, unable to run the shows any other way, found some spare copper bars and bolted them together, completely exposed, running them from the motor-generator set to both lamps. I was worried. If I were to slip, I would fry. He told me that Rudy had recently visited and asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?” Reply: “I never touch it to find out.” But no, he didn’t have any leads on any parts or on any replacements or on anyone who could help. Sorry. First, though, he gave me a warning about the Sunset. He had worked there in the past, prior to the days of John and Louie, and he told me that one day a scorpion got into the booth and ran up his leg. Be careful, he said.

I mentioned to him how much I loved the balcony and how much I wish it would be opened. Oh no, he said, you don’t want the balcony opened. He said that, for a few large audiences, the balcony had indeed been opened, but that it was a bad experience. “There was a gal just outside the door who kept shouting rape, and I rushed to help her, but someone was blocking the door and I couldn’t get it to budge. I kept pushing against it and pounding against it, but it wouldn’t budge at all. Strange thing is she seemed to be enjoying it. I couldn’t understand what was going on. I don’t know what rocks these people crawl out from under, but no, the balcony should not be opened, ever.” Bizarre.

The Sunshine under the Hectór régime was running exclusively Méxican movies, most of which were 1:1.66, some of which were 1:1.375, and only a very few of which were 1:1.85. The films were all run at a severely undersized 1:2.00, and the cropping was egregious. That’s where we go into the story I placed far above, in which the projectionist didn’t know how to fix the problem and didn’t believe me when I explained to him what the other lenses and apertures were for.

ANOTHER MEMORY. Ah. Today is Sunday, 30 May 2021, and another memory just came back. Right after visiting the Sunshine, I was desperate enough to visit Los Altos as well. That had to have been mid-April 1984. I did not make an appointment. I just barged in, walked through the manager’s office, and made my way up to the booth. Inside was a guy I had never seen before, and oh how I wish I could remember his name. Older guy, as nice as could be. I remember that This Is Spinal Tap was playing on Screen #1, and I just had to ask, “How is it?” “It’s just a rock movie.” “I hear it’s really funny.” “It’s just a rock movie.” I think Where the Boys Are ’84 was on Screen #2. Anyway, this really nice older guy whose name I do not remember said, basically, Sorry, no idea how to help, no idea where you can go. Sorry. You know, the more I think about it, the more surprised I am that managers and staff granted me such access and let me get away with so much. Totally amazing. I didn’t realize how phenomenally lucky I was.

For my first few weeks, the Sunset played tenth-run Hollywood garbage that brought us only a couple of cars a night. One Dark Night had a problem: No image. Large parts of those five reels were entirely blank, there were only occasional flashes of an image. The rest was entirely black. Louie kept telling me to make it brighter, and I kept inviting him to look at the film, which was entirely black. He never accepted my invitation. The claxons blared madly into the night. For no reason, I labeled each reel, ONE DARK KNIGHT, TWO DARK KNIGHTS, THREE DARK KNIGHTS, FOUR DARK KNIGHTS, FIVE AND NO MORE DARK KNIGHTS. I remember we also got some instalment of the Dirty Harry franchise (as I check the Internet, I conclude it must have been Sudden Impact), as well as Never Say Never Again and Angel and Risky Business and some of those ugly slice-em-dice-em horror flicks that almost nobody ever liked. I can’t remember what else. The lot was nearly empty for all those shows.

Then John and his partner, Louie G. Roybal, performed an experiment: What would happen if they booked a Méxican double feature? There was a line of cars stretching forever down Arenál Road. The lot was full. To my surprise, I enjoyed those Méxican films, every last one of them. They were not good. Oh no, they were not good at all. What I liked was their directness, their raw emotions. There was nothing distanced about them. After running a couple of Méxican double features, John remarked that they’re all the same: “It’s just two guys fighting over a woman or a horse or a rooster.” That was witty. I had to grant him that. That was very witty, indeed.

Well, I shouldn’t say that all the Méxican movies were inferior. One of the Méxican movies was marvelous. It was black and white and it was brittle. It broke every two minutes or so, as the film literally shattered into multiple pieces as it traveled through the upper loop. The claxons blared madly into the night. There was no way to repair the print. I packed it up after the first show. I do not remember the title of the film, but it was wonderful, about a motorcyclist priest who ministered to gangs. It was hilarious. Here are a few frames:

If you can identify this, please let me know. Thanks!
I checked every title listed in Wikipedia’s incomplete list of Méxican films from 1960 through 1971, and, yup, it sure is incomplete. There was nothing in that list that even resembled the film I attempted to project that Friday night.
I would guess that this movie was made sometime from 1962 to 1966.
There’s no point in checking the newspaper ads, because John and Louie didn’t advertise in the newspapers.
Well, they did a few times in 1983, but not in 1984 or 1985.