The theater is filled with black people, hippies, senior citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the innocent people who talk to the movies because the movies are just as real as anything else that has ever happened to them.
"No! No! Get back in the car, Clyde. Oh, God, they're killing Bonnie!"
I am the poet-in-residence at these theaters but I don't plan on getting a Guggenheim for it.
Once I went into the theater at six o'clock in the evening and got out at one o'clock in the morning. At seven I crossed my legs and they stayed that way until ten and I never did stand up.
In other words, I am not an art film fan. I do not care to be esthetically tickled in a fancy theater surrounded by an audience drenched in the confident perfume of culture. I can't afford it.
I was sitting in a two-pictures-for-seventy-five-cents theater called the Times in North Beach last month and there was a cartoon about a chicken and a dog.
The dog was trying to get some sleep and the chicken was keeping him awake and what followed was a series of adventures that always ended up in cartoon mayhem.
There was a man sitting next to me.
He was WHITEWHITEWHITE: fat, about fifty years old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity.
His baggy no-style clothes covered him like the banner of a defeated country and he looked as if the only mail he had ever gotten in his life were bills.
Just then the dog in the cartoon let go with a huge yawn because the chicken was still keeping him awake and before the dog had finished yawning, the man next to me started yawning, so that the dog in the cartoon and the man, this living human being, were yawning together, partners in America.
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