Change You Can Believe In

There’s no rhyme or reason as to why I do this: If I learn of a movie that’s in production and it’s based on a book, stipulating of course that the story or premise is up my alley, I’ll seek out the source material. It’s a habit I wish to curb because were I not to read the books movies are based on, I might enjoy the movies more. When I saw “Forrest Gump,” having read the book the week previous, I spent more time comparing the stories than I did enjoying the movie. I’ve done the same with “Munich,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Jackie Brown,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Cold Mountain,” “Mystic River,” etc., etc…

I’d recently learned about a movie in production called “Men Who Stare at Goats.” Nice title, I thought. So I looked into it. Sure enough, it’s based on a book by Jon Ronson. Looking further, I found out that it’s about the U.S. Army’s research into military applications of the paranormal… and it’s non-fiction. Whoa! Isn’t that, like, the basis of every single Indiana Jones movie (‘cept it’s the Nazis or Russians seeking out these mystical MacGuffins)? Sounding fairly badass, I decided I ought to check this book out.

I called Barnes & Noble and asked if they had a copy of it.

“Yes,” the rep replied. “We have one copy left. Would you like me to set it aside for you?”

“Absolutely!” I said. Hours later, I arrived at the bookstore.

The demure sales associate in charge of the set-aside tomes pulled the single copy of Ronson’s book off the shelf and handed it over.

The damn thing was WRECKED!

Several pages were dogeared and smudged. The front cover was bent and the top corner of the back cover was torn off. It looked like it had sat in a puddle in the middle of a busy street for a day or two.

I held it up parallel to my frowning mug for the sales associate to see. She made an “ew” face as she reexamined the book.

“You got any other copies of this laying around?” I asked.

She checked the system, came up with a big goose egg, but offered an alternative, “If you want I can order you another copy.”

This would mean days of waiting, which just wouldn’t do. In waiting days for this book, I probably would change my mind and not want the damn thing. I wanted it now.

Then I had a thought.

“How ’bout you sell it to me at a discount!” I said. This was a great idea. In this depressed economy I’m sure bookstores are feeling the effects of fewer and fewer purchases and to offload a crappy looking paperback at a discount was probably something they’d consider, right?

The sales associate hemmed and hawed and said, “I’ll have to ask my shift manager.” Shit, I thought, but I was convinced I could still snag this book at a miniscule fraction of the cover price.

“Then ask away!” I said.

Moments later the manager greeted me as she slunk around the register station. She was round, pleasant and dolled up in a way that made me guess she was going to enjoy her evening after her shift ended.

“Hi, what can I do for you today!” she said.

I held up the book and asked her if she could sell it to me at a discount, y’know, since it was in pretty bad shape.

She looked it over and said, “There’s nothing wrong with it?”

“Are you serious?” I asked. “Look at it again! It’s been through the ringer! Looks like a dozen four-year-olds with chocolate on their hands used it to play catch!”

“Sir, it’s a paperback and sometimes the cover can crease if people don’t put it back on the shelf properly,” she said defiantly.

“That’s your excuse?! Look at the thing! Were you a grocer and this book were an apple with bruises and bite marks all over it, you’d pitch it! If it were a dented can of peaches, you’d throw it in the clearance bin!”

“But this isn’t a grocery store, sir.”

“No kidding, but you’re the manager of a bookstore that sells NEW BOOKS! I’d expect this kind of quality from a used bookstore or even a garage sale.”

“Sir, if you’d like I can order you another copy.”

“No, I don’t want another copy. I want this one and I want to know why you won’t sell it to me at a discounted price.”

“Sir, all of the pages are intact. You can still read it.”

“Yes, I can still read it, but it’s WRECKED! I’m very particular about my books. I like the way they look on my shelf. Yeah, I’m THAT guy. So do you wanna sell this to me at a discount or should I just take my business elsewhere?”

She gave me a dirty little look as she searched around in her skull for a compromise.

“I can sell it to you for five percent off the cover price,” she said, smiling, obviously satisfied with her decision.

I was appalled.

“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” I said. “Put it back on the shelf.” And I walked out.

As I write this, it is a day later. I was right: I changed my mind. I don’t want to read Ronson’s book anymore. May that copy forever sit on the shelf of that B&N branch for an eternity (not like anyone’s gonna buy it in it’s current condition anyhow…).

Could You Be Any More Ecstatic?

Pursuing the bad guy is romantic. Entire books, movies and lives are dedicated to serving up justice to evildoers. Even as a young lad, I knew I lacked the courage to be a police officer, but I was always pulled toward the challenge of pursuit in the name of justice.

I was 17 and an usher for Ridge Cinemas, Marcus Corporation’s newest satellite theater in New Berlin, Wisconsin. It was the first cinema in the state to offer stadium seating – which guaranteed continuous patronage. In this theater’s infancy, lines typically snaked out the door and down the sidewalk, even for the late shows of some of the crappiest movies ever produced (“Eight Heads in a Duffelbag” anyone?).

My duties were to clean theaters after showings, help out with the snack stand or tear tickets whenever needed, clean the bathrooms every half hour, sweep up the hallway and kick people out of theaters in which they didn’t belong. I took a lot of pleasure in the latter. Usually I’d find kids sitting in an R-rated movie who entered with the false intentions of seeing “101 Dalmatians” and I’d kindly direct them to the movie they bought the tix for. Sure I was “that dick” who kicked them out, but I did it in the name of justice. Granted, I’ve snuck into plenty of movies in my time, but I’ve never been caught – they were, by me. Poor saps.

One night in particular, all of the screens had something on them and aside from a couple patrons scuttling to the restroom or getting a refill on their popcorn at the snack stand, there wasn’t much activity in the lobby. Blessed downtime was one of the few perks that made this gig tolerable; you could goof off with your fellow employees, get some homework done, take a break and eat a meal, call your girlfriend, or prepare for the next rush if you were so inclined.

I was milling around the snack stand sweeping up miniscule bits of refuse and chatting with my school buddy Justin. Justin feigned productivity, wiping the same area on the counter over and over again. He’d shown up late for his shift because he had (finally) broken up with his cheating girlfriend, and I had to cover for him. He was more brokenhearted than angry, but talking about the situation and tossing little bits of straw paper on the floor for me to sweep up seemed to calm him a little.

“I should have seen it coming,” he said.

“You’re better off, man,” I said. “Fuck it.”

Justin then looked up from the spot he was cleaning, stared down the corridor to the south half of the screens and said, “What th…”

Three girls, about our age, huddled closely together and visibly shaken speed-walked our way. Justin saw them dart out of the movie they were seeing and as soon as they saw Justin and I in our theater-issue tuxes, they bolted our way.

“Th-there’s a man in there and he’s staring at us a-an,” said the one in the middle.

“It looked like he was touching himself!” shrieked the one on the left.

Justin and I gave each other a knowing glance. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that he and I were thinking the same thing.

Could it be? Here in this theater? Could it be him?

Cut to six months previous: When I started training for my job, Marcus Corp. had me work out at West Point Theaters in Brookfield, since the Ridge was still under construction. West Point was full of “lifers” – people in their late teens and early-to-mid 20s who’d started working there and never left because they liked their hours, they could work whenever they wanted, they were all a tight-knit group of friends and/or they got promoted to junior management positions. They knew the ins and outs of the biz, they knew how to get around certain duties – hell, they even knew how to rob the place after hours and never get caught (in theory, to be fair). They also knew the histories of West Point and other Marcus theaters in the area through and through. They’d all, at one point in their careers, trained or worked at another Marcus satellite. Since the job was 20 percent actual work and 80 percent cush, and since I was a newbie, I spent a lot of downtime learning novel’s worth of area theater history and folklore.

One of the legends I’d heard was of the Brookfield Beater. The Brookfield Beater was a guy who would case the clientele for pretty girls, follow them into their theater, sit in the same row as them but a few seats away and stare. Then when the movie started, when the time was right for him, he’d unzip his fly and shake hands with beef – which prompted the girls to run away screaming, at which he’d put it away and make his escape out the fire door. Sometimes his staring was enough to prompt the girls to move away from him or cause complaint. According to legend, he’d been seen at Marcus’ West Point, Westown, and South Town theaters, as well as the Silver Spring AMC and a few of the budget joints that showed second-run flicks. Also according to legend, he’d been caught by police either at West Point or Westown (the legend changed depending on who told it), and was put away for a while. But who knew for how long?

A few weeks into my job at the Ridge, Adam, one of the fellas I trained with at West Point said, “Hey Ben, didja hear? They think the Brookfield Beater is at it again!”

“Really?” said I.

“Yeah, Jessie told me about a complaint back at West Point a couple days ago. Some dude was spankin’ it next to some girls,” said Adam. “Man, I hope he comes here. I’ll beat the shit out of him!”

Yeah, right, I thought. Probably just hearsay.

But rumor traveled like lightning throughout the entire Ridge staff, and even though we’d never had a formal meeting about the situation, assistant managers, like my good friend Mark, were stepping up and making sure the ushers remained vigilant.

Mark approached me a few nights before as I was making my rounds and said, “Ben, you see anything strange or out of the ordinary in the theaters, anything at all, come get me, deal?” He was serious…and Mark was never serious.

The pale trio withering before us and an earful of folklore was just enough for Justin to leap the counter and follow me down the corridor in a full-on sprint. We were gonna kick this guy out of here like never before.

There were two doors for every theater; I pounded through the door on the right, Justin on the left. Whatever happened with those girls left the theater in disarray and fear. People were standing and pointing. An elderly gentleman and his wife said in unison, “He left out the fire door!” At this point it had been no more than 20 seconds from the time Justin saw the girls until now – but 20 seconds was enough to give anyone a decent enough head start.

Justin loyally behind me, we breached the fire door and ran out into the crisp Autumn air. Behind the theater was a strip of asphalt that ran the length of the building, connecting one end of the parking lot with the other. It was access for dumptrucks to slide back there and pick up our overflowing dumpster. I looked left, and saw nothing. I looked right and saw a man in the distance dimly illuminated by the fluorescent lights in the parking lot.

He was running.

Justin took off ahead of me. I tried to keep up, but Justin was a better athlete than I. Given enough time and distance, Justin had the endurance to catch this guy. Justin would have tackled him and, with me close behind, we could have nabbed the Brookfield Beater.

But something about that just didn’t sound right to me.

He’s called the Brookfield Beater, I thought. That’s…

We reached the far edge of the theater when I yelled, “Justin, STOP!” Justin pulled up, “What! C’mon man! Let’s get him!”

“Dude,” I said, huffing and puffing. “If that’s the Brookfield Beater, do you really wanna touch him? I mean, what if he finished up in there…”

Justin got it, “Aw f… Gross! Yeah. You have a point…”

We walked around to the front of the theater slowly, catching our breath. Mark pounced on us the second we walked through the front door, “Did you see him? What’d he look like? Where’d he go?” Mark, flanked by the three girls who reported the guy, was already on the horn with the cops.

“I dunno,” I said. “We just saw him running. He took off past the parking lot. He’s still out there.”

Mark played relay man as the 911 operator had some questions for us. Which way was he headed? What was he wearing? How tall was he? What age did he look to be? All questions we didn’t know the answer to.

The police arrived and started taking statements. They spent over an hour with the girls as they tried to get the story straight. When they got to Justin and I, we explained that we gave chase, but realizing what this guy might have been doing in the theater, we pulled back. The police were already checking the theater out for any “evidence” the guy might have left behind, but they came back with nothing. The guy must have pulled up shop and darted out the back as soon as the girls left the theater looking for us.

We must have recited that story to every single staff member who was on that night. Pretty soon word got around the school that we’d scared off the Brookfield Beater. There were so many versions of the story by the time everyone heard it, and it was so tiring trying to correct it that we just decided to let people believe what they wanted.

A couple nights later, I was back at work. All of the excitement of the pursuit had died down. Business was the slowest I’d seen since the theater opened. Things had changed a little. Ushers gained a new duty: patrol the perimeter of the theater every once in a while each shift. It was arbitrary, but it staved off teens trying to sneak in the back door from time to time. We also had a full time rent-a-cop patrolling the parking lot, courtesy of the corporate offices. He was a nice guy. Gave Justin and I props for running after the guy, even if we didn’t really get a good look at him. Every once in a while when I took out the trash, he’d slide up in his rent-a-cop LeSabre and ask, “See anything tonight?” My answer was always, “No.”

The rent-a-cop stuck around for a few months until, rumor has it, the Brookfield Beater struck again, this time at South Town, Marcus’ dilapidated theater in West Allis.

From then on, it was business as usual. Except, years later, when the Ridge garnered its own “lifers,” Marcus theater legend included something to the effect of, “Right here at the Ridge, two of our own almost caught the Brookfield Beater. That’s the closest they ever came to nailing that bastard.”