The City Lights and El Paseo

After about a half-year of working 10½-hour shifts five or six nights a week for supervisors who were (with only the rarest exception) masters of turning employees into nervous wrecks, after about a half-year of working with grownup babies, some of whom were downright sadists (one of the most stunningly gorgeous gals on our crew had a hobby of purchasing and killing frogs for amusement), surrounded by nastiness nearly every minute of every night, and working those horrid machines that the supervisors always overspeeded, I couldn’t take anymore. I transferred to the PO in Santa Fé, which mercifully did not use those horrid machines. Santa Fé was a much prettier place, and the people seemed to be friendly. Wrong! Santa Fé’s dark side was even darker. As I would slowly come to experience, Santa Fé was a tinderbox. The rich whites hated the not-rich whites, both hated nonwhites, the Chicanos hated the Méxicans, the Méxicans hated the Chicanos, both hated the whites. The Tewa and other natives sensibly kept to themselves and had a wonderful aura of serenity and seriousness and determination about them. They had no use for any sort of nonsense. I liked that. I was not a member of any group and so I tried to get along with everybody. In the end, nearly everybody wanted me dead.

Like a bunch of projectionists, some of the USPS employees were vandals who deliberately damaged mail. For instance, they would literally fold cardboard-wrapped 12" LP’s to force them into small PO Boxes. Yes, I witnessed that, more than once. It was common for some of them to grab any random pile of mail and toss it all into any random PO Box just to get the mail “delivered” more quickly. When they did that, I got the blame. The ones who did that were the ones who pinned it on me and snitched. Very clever. So I got into trouble. So I kept taking the shuttle to Albuquerque to work the Sunset whenever I could.

You see, to this day, the USPS ranks as the most abusive place I have ever worked. The endless put-downs, the endless threats, the endless harassment, the endless faked evidence, the total, vehement visceral hatred that the supervisors ceaselessly, day and night, vomited upon us employees was more than some of us could take. Literacy in the USPS was almost nonexistent. Suicide was high. Soon mass murder would become a postal pastime, and, yes, I understood, perfectly. That job to this day gives me recurring nightmares. Why? Here is a passage from Maureen Duffy and Len Sperry’s Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions (NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 220–221:

For the first year or so, I tried, oh how I tried, to be warm and friendly and upbeat. Then, after that year or so, I stopped trying. I became mean and foul-mouthed and I hated nearly everybody. I was childish, unstable, angry, and totally miserable. I was a total wreck — and totally arrogant. I was a wreck everywhere, all the time, but arrogant only at work. Almost everybody hated my guts, and for good reason. My mere presence made their skin crawl, and vice versa. It didn’t help that the supervisors were extremely abusive, and one even punched a mail handler’s teeth out (I did not witness that). The APWU sided with the supervisors almost every last time. My obnoxious and forever-fuming supervisor, who ceaselessly boasted about his deep Evangelical Christian faith, after some months, decided that he wanted me gone, and so from the beginning of my shift to the end, he never stopped harassing me and breathing down my neck, griping about every little thing I did, whether it was my posture or the way I positioned my thumb when sorting the mail or telling me off because someone else crammed a PO Box too tightly. I mentioned this to John Servizio, who said, “The first thing ya gotta do is join that union.” I agreed. So, I joined the union. I attended my first union meeting, and it was oddly pleasant that my coworkers, who wanted to beat me to a bloody pulp before burning me at the stake, were nice to me for that hour or two. They had to be nice to me; those were the rules. And I was nice to them, too.

On my rare free afternoons or evenings, I saw a couple of movies in Santa Fé. El Paseo had booked the Giorgio Moroder edition of Metropolis for one week beginning Friday, 18 January 1985, and I was curious to see it, but only if it were not cropped. I walked up to the booth and chatted with the very young, very energetic, very amiable, very intelligent projectionist, who said that, yes, “they” had supplied El Paseo with a different lens for Metropolis, and he showed it to me, but he didn’t know what it was for. I explained it to him, and at first he was cautious. “But they don’t make that kind of lens anymore!” he blurted out, thinking that older films required a different “kind” of lens. I explained that a spherical lens is a spherical lens. There are longer ones and shorter ones, available in multiple lengths, which were still being manufactured, still, to this day. This was a longer one. This is what he needed. He believed me. Amazing. We both got courageous. In the middle of the movie, he shut the dowser, pulled out the regular lens, plopped the other one in, opened the dowser, and on screen was just a gigantic blur. Why? Because nobody had reset the focus ring! The lens needed to be pushed in a lot further, but the focus ring locked it out. It was locked in the wrong position, presumably set for the previous cinema that had played that print. He immediately gave up and put the regular lens back in. I left, totally dejected. Yes, I could have stuck around and, before the next show, set the focus ring for him, but, no, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had by then become quite the defeatist.

A year later, when I was feeling much worse, I decided to get away from the poison for a few hours. In January or February 1986 I went to the closet-sized City Lights Cinema to see the wonderful Animals Are Beautiful People, which was unfortunately paired with a hideous work of self-absorption called A Bigger Splash. My heavens, if people like that were to knock at my door, I’d beat them away with a broom. I returned in March to see Hail Mary, which was shown in 16mm, and which, at the time, I rather liked. I don’t know what I’d think of it now. (Only just this moment did I discover that the City Lights had opened in August 1970 as the Mini Vue, owned by the same folks who ran the Albuquerque Mini Vue. This was probably the second cinema in their chain. No wonder it looked like such a sleazy dump!) I got to know the couple who owned the place, who also leased the larger El Paseo downtown. Not long afterwards, they were in trouble. They told me that they had recently joined forces with my old boss, and now, suddenly, they were bankrupt. I told them that I wished I had known ahead of time. I would have warned them away. In no time at all, the City Lights Cinema was gutted and transformed into a Domino’s Pizza, and a different group was running El Paseo and keeping all the mail that was addressed to my friends. Anyway, the couple told me that my old boss’s ex-wife now owned a clothing shop in downtown Santa Fé, not far from where I lived, and just a few short blocks from where I worked. My vague memory was that it was on West San Francisco Street near Galisteo Street. Though they had no love for my old boss, they really liked his ex-wife and said I should pay her a visit, because she was very sweet. Every time I went past her shop, I considered walking in and introducing myself, but, no, I always decided against opening a can of worms.

Then, hey, what the heck, for the record, before I forget forever. I had almost completely forgotten all of this, and it has only been during these past few weeks, as I was scribbling the rest of this essay, that the memories came back, slowly, one by one. I saw three other commercial movies in Santa Fé. In about September 1985, I went to the Jean Cocteau, formerly the Collective Fantasy, to see The Coca-Cola Kid, because it was by Dušan Makavejev. Cute movie. Besides, I had just lived through the opening scene on my brief trip to Australia. It seemed to work at 1:1.85, but I doubt the cinema had any other setups, though I really don’t know. I wanted to ask, but I just KNEW that nobody there would know what on earth I was talking about. If memory serves, it was on a platter. The Cocteau was an interesting space, very small, more like a lounge rather than an auditorium. It was comfortable and attractive. A year later, in about November or December 1986, a friend, Alan Mazza (stage name: Alan Masters), who quite liked Bob Hoskins, drove me out to the Grand Illusion cinema because he wanted to see Mona Lisa. I was dreading it, because I knew it would be cropped. It was run on a platter and at 1:1.85, but it worked that way. The print was in fairly good condition, and if you didn’t know there was more height on the frame, you would never have guessed. Perhaps it was deliberately framed for a 1:1.85 crop. I really don’t know. The light was even, the image was centered, the audio was okay, and I wondered how that could possibly be. The Grand Illusion had been built as the Jerry Lewis but it opened as the St. Michael’s Village; later it was renamed the Pickford (an homage to Mary) and then the Capital (because Santa Fé is the capital city); and, just before I attended, it was renamed the Grand Illusion, an homage to the film that it certainly would not have been able to project properly. I can remember nothing else about the cinema, except that there was nothing impressive about it. The movie itself, well, I couldn’t remember it the next day, but I do remember that I quite liked Bob Hoskins. Also in the autumn of 1986, at the urging of a friend, I saw Crocodile Dundee, a silly, forgettable story, at the Lensic. That was my only time in that theatre, and it was a rather nice theatre. My memory is that the balcony was closed, but that I asked the candy kids if I could go up and see the booth. Sure. No prob. So I visited the booth only for a minute, and I have a vague impression that the equipment was all relatively new, maybe from the 1960’s, but I can’t remember anything except large reels and lots of modern electronics with lit red diodes everywhere, presumably for Dolby stereo and automation. I don’t remember the projectionist, but I do remember that he was laid back, friendly, and perfectly okay with having a stranger wander in. That was the entire extent of my commercial movie-going in Santa Fé.

I also saw some 16mm anthropological documentaries at the Museum of International Folk Art. They were great. Waiting for Harry is one title I can recall. There was another about the Indians of Guatemala, filled with interviews or ordinary folk, showing their customs, their ideas, their costumes, their dances, their festivals. They were entirely lovable people, and drop-dead gorgeous, too. It ended with a caption noting that nearly everyone who had appeared on camera had recently been massacred in the civil war. There were a whole bunch of other films in that series. Wish I could remember them and find copies. I’d love to see them all again. Oh. Wait. Why not check Newspapers.com? There we go! Small Happiness and A Wife among Wives on Friday, 11 January 1985. Mountain Music of Peru (here’s an excerpt) and Todos Santos Cuchumatan (that was the one!) on Friday and Saturday, 18 and 19 January 1985. Waiting for Harry and Lousy Little Six Pence on Friday and Saturday, 25 and 26 January 1985. The Way of Dead Indians on Friday and Saturday, 1 and 2 February 1985. Of course, it comes back to me. Actually, now that I see these titles, I did remember the title Small Happiness, a movie that made me sad. I have thought about it fairly often in the years since, because in a single hour, with its single example of a tradition that is actually dogmatic groupthink, it illustrates, in a nutshell, everything that is wrong with civilization. Civilization gets everything backwards. The movie, actually, illustrates, with its single example, everything that is wrong with human thinking.

MEANWHILE, BACK AGAIN AT THE SUNSET: What was the pay at the Sunset? Whenever and whatever John was in the mood to pay. It was never more than a few dollars cash under the table, taken from the concessions register, or sometimes from his wallet. It was usually less than minimum wage. No worries, though, as there were better prospects ahead. John and Louie asked if I wanted to join their promoting business. Maybe I’d enjoy it. They said their current promotion was a series of wrestling matches in some stadium. After all, John’s daddy-in-law (as I learn only just now from newspaper searches) was well known locally as a wrestling promoter. I assume it was daddy-in-law who brought John into the fold, and John who brought in Louie. John told me about one of the wrestlers the night previous. Oddly, for some reason I had heard the radio commercial about this – twice. I listened only to KUNM (rarely) and KHFM (a lot), which would not have aired such a commercial. I don’t know where I heard that commercial. Maybe in a waiting room somewhere? Maybe at a bus station? John told me the highlight, I think about a guy named Cordova, stress on the middle syllable: “He came out and shouted, ‘I’m mean. I’m so mean that I killed my dog. Here he is!” as he waved his dog’s severed head at the audience. Why did I not find this appealing? Nonetheless, at their urging, I did attend one day, and that was one of my least-favorite experiences ever. The guy, ugly as all sin, did a round, and he did not look healthy. He did not repeat the performance with the severed head. He just beat somebody up, or got beaten up, I don’t remember which. I cannot remember where the event was, when it was, or what the place looked like. All I can now remember is a profound sense of disgust. When the show was over, John and Louie enthusiastically greeted me. Said Louie: “You wanna promote with us?” (I can find nothing about this on Newspapers.com or NewspaperArchive.com. Perhaps I’m just not plugging in the correct search terms. It would have been no earlier than the summer of 1984 and no later than the autumn of 1985.)

Oh! Another memory! Yes! John said he was buddies with Lou Avolio, the Albuquerque branch manager of Commonwealth Amusements. Whether they really were buddies or not, I do not know. Perhaps they just knew each other socially. Oh! Wait! They were buddies! Take a look at this! Anyway, for a movie promotion, Commonwealth helped arrange to fly in some movie star, and no, I cannot remember who. It was a name I recognized, a matinée idol. Maybe the name will come back to me someday. John said that this movie star was quite the ladies’ man, and so, with Lou’s help (I don’t remember if it was witting or unwitting help), John decided to prank the guy. He hired a series of hookers to seduce the guy, one by one, everywhere he went in Albuquerque. In each place, John arranged to spy on the goings on. John laughed as he told me that, after an entire day of one tryst after another, the poor guy was totally exhausted and just wanted to go to sleep. So, late at night, the guy finally returned to his hotel to crash. He walked into his room, and there was a hooker undressing by his bed. The movie star just walked out of the room and closed the door, without saying a word. If any details ever come back to me, I’ll record them here.

It had probably been a decade or more since the machines had had a proper cleaning. I decided to remove some parts and to wash them off with carburetor cleaner. John came by and decided to help. The smell of that ether was really getting obnoxious, and so John asked me to turn on the exhaust fan. I went to the breaker box and flipped the switch, but I wasn’t thinking, because the exhaust was on the same circuit as the cooling fans in the projector heads. I flipped the breaker exactly when John had his nose right up into the machine. When I turned around, I saw that he was frozen stiff. His eyes were bugging out, he looked to be in shock. I thought he might die right in front of me. The cooling fan had blown all that ether right into his face. He slowly tried to pull himself together, and he was as high as a kite. Then, with all the ether blowing around, within moments I was high as a kite, too. We both began giggling uncontrollably. And we kept on giggling, for hours. Despite the giggles, it was an entirely unpleasant sensation, my emotions were unstable, and I had one of the most horrible headaches I had ever experienced. Headache or no headache, though, and mood swings every few seconds from ultrahigh to ultralow, I could not stop giggling. It was a few hours before that garbage got out of my system. I learned the lesson: Keep the windows and the door open, and DO NOT turn on the cooling fan!

Another episode: Both reflectors cracked more and more each night. Each night, after the show, I would glue them back together (I can’t remember which glue I used, some sort of silicon, but I do remember that it was the only glue on the planet that worked with dichroic reflectors). One particular night, someone had knocked the narrow exhaust tube in both lamps out of position. The arcs in both machines were going wild, and I could not immediately understand why. I thought that maybe the stabilizing magnets were out of position. I was terribly puzzled, and the screen was flickering. John walked in with a beaming smile. In his hands was a box with a new $1,200 dichroic reflector. “Brand-spanking-new!” he exclaimed, as he opened a lamp to make the replacement. “Don’t do that!” I exclaimed. “It will break! First let me get the arc stabilized, or else it will break as soon as you put it in!” With his wide smile plastered to his face, he ignored me, plopped in the new reflector, struck the arc, and the brand-new $1,200 dichroic reflector shattered right in front of his eyes. He sulked. He stood on the little porch outside the booth, looking down at the ground. I gave him a minute or two to stew, and I approached him, gently, “I’m really sorry, but I said it would break. I told you to wait.” Without saying a word, he walked down the stairs and he was gone.

Then one day (late autumn 1985?), I got a call from the phone company. The guy on the line was furious. He said that phone company was ready to take me to court for overdue bills. What? What are you talking about? He told me that my phone number had thousands of dollars long overdue. What? I pay my bills all the time. What are you talking about? He gave me the number, and it was the Sunset’s phone number. John had put the Sunset’s phone number in my name. How could he do that? The phone company’s guy explained that the account was verified by my Social Security Number, which proved I had authorized it, which proved it was my phone. What? It took me days to get the business papers and deed and various other filings from Bernalillo County Hall to prove that I did not own the cinema, and I forwarded that evidence to a Joyce Hooper, who then realized that the phone company had made a big boo-boo. She apologized profusely. She promised to go after John and Louie. Then the phone company started calling my father, repeatedly, every day, demanding that I pay the thousands of dollars in past-due bills. My father, perpetually angry, was not pleased about getting those calls.

On my next nonwork day, I made a trip to the cinema to gather up my equipment — splicer, splicing tape, carbon brushes, replacement lamphouse negative-drive motor, asbestos gloves, and maybe some other things, too. Then I saw the pile of previews that had never been returned. Hmmmmm. Why not? I plopped them all into a box, walked a few blocks to the bus stop on Isleta by Arenál, sat down on the bench, and, by dumbest luck, the Isleta bus arrived that very minute. Now, that bus ran only three or four times a day. I was expecting to wait for hours. I lucked out. It drove to the southern end of the route, just a few blocks down, and then I paid again to ride back the other way so that I could switch lines, get to the airport, and then take the shuttle back to Santa Fé. Maybe five minutes later, just after the bus turned around to loop back, before it could deposit me anywhere, I saw that the marquee was lit (why????) and that several cop cars with flashing lights were at the entrance. Phew! Had the bus arrived just a few seconds later, I would likely have been in jail. What had happened? I am CERTAIN that Mario’s wife saw me enter and then leave with a box, and, unable to reach John about the prowler, called the cops. Wow.

As soon as I got back home to Santa Fé, I hired a lawyer, who said I probably didn’t stand a chance. A judge would simply rule, “You knew they were crooks. What did you expect? Case dismissed.” Amazingly, my case was assigned to a unique judge, the only judge on the circuit who would likely rule in my favor. That is probably why John, just a day or two before the hearing, sent my lawyer a small payment, $1,200, a mere portion of back salary owed and a return on a loan, as an out-of-court settlement. I agreed, instantly, and accepted the puny payment as a satisfactory settlement. My lawyer kept his one-third and I never contacted John or Louie again, nor did they ever attempt to contact me again.

If you want to know what John was like, what he looked like, what he sounded like, the way he talked, his mannerisms, his facial expressions, he had an almost exact doppelganger in a movie called Is There Sex after Death? (in which, by sheerest coincidence, my late friend James Randi appears, as well as my late distant acquaintance Buck Henry). Now, this is not my retrospective memory. I saw this movie in 1985 while I was working for John, and I marveled at the striking similarities. I was tempted to tell John, “Hey, I saw you in a movie,” but I decided not to go there. If you can find the uncensored DVD of that movie, watch for a character named Vince Domino, portrayed by Marshall Efron, and then you will know what John was like. In your imagination, just add a heavy Boston accent. And there ya go! (Regardless of what IMDb says, Randi stood 5'1", not 5'6". IMDb routinely exaggerates the heights of performers. No idea why. And, sigh, so many people I knew have died. Horrifying. I miss some of them. I certainly miss Randi, who was the funniest person I ever met. I planned to visit him a couple of years ago, but when my cat had to have surgery, that depleted all my money. I never even got to say goodbye.)

To my exasperated surprise, I then received yet another phone call, this time from an extremely aggressive phone-company guy who enjoyed shouting. I finally asked, “You’re at the phone company, and so I don’t know what buttons you have on your phone, but can you turn this into a three-way call?” “Why?” he screamed. “Put Joyce Hooper on the line, and she’ll explain everything.” He put me on hold, and after a wait of maybe five minutes, he picked up the line again, humbled and deeply apologetic. At more or less that time, I visited the gas company in person, and I phoned the electric company, and asked them both, “If someone were to order a service and supply my Social Security Number, would I get billed?” Answer: “Yes!” I asked both to put a note in my account that under no circumstances were they to add any services without my in-person authorization, not even if someone were to verify my authorization with my Social Security Number. They did so, or, at least, they said they did so.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE USPS: At the PO, one of my jobs was to return badly addressed mail that had no forwarding addresses on file, and to send mail with forwarding orders to CFS (Computer Forwarding Service, sometimes called CMU, Central Mark-Ups) to be stickered with the new addresses. Each month (or was it each week?), CFS generated an automatic computer report, on tractor-feed paper, which indicated how many of the pieces I submitted had forwarding addresses on file, and how many did not. My score, as usual, was 100% had forwarding addresses on file, and 0% did not. I came in to work one night and saw that my report was gone. In its place was a handwritten report, saying the reverse: 0% accuracy. That’s why I desperately took a job in Buffalo, for less than a third of the USPS salary, and resigned from the USPS. As soon as I submitted my resignation, the supervisors stopped harassing me. They pretended I didn’t exist. My coworkers pretended I didn’t exist. In return, I pretended that they didn’t exist. The Buffalo job eventually proved to be even worse, by the way, entirely different, but far worse.