John Allman
from Loew’s Triboro (New
Directions)
Children Playing at Wading Pool, John Murray Playground,
Queens, July 3, 1942.
Loew's Triboro
It was easy as lying to our mothers. As living
in Queens
across from Manhattan, walking over
the bridge connecting three boroughs, looking
down on the nut house on Ward’s island, one of us
dribbling a basketball. Eggs in our
pockets, we sneaked into the Loew’s theater
through
the back door. The old vaudeville stage
behind the movie screen moving with the shadow of
Bogart and his lisp. One of us just out of jail for sticking
up a drugstore. His father leaving him
there two extra days to teach him a lesson. We
climbed
up the ladder along the side of the
screen, behind a fake Renaissance curtain, looked out at
the audience in the dark, the glowing cigarettes, Hank,
whose father ran a dry-goods store
on Steinway Street, slipping his hand under a
girl’s skirt.
Checking the material. A script
flickering at our loins. The newsreel releasing survivors
into sunlight, arms thin as the stripes on their pajamas.
Eleanor’s father on the corner of Broadway
waving pamphlets for the Labor Party. Eleanor
not yet
in her marine boyfriend’s room getting
shot to death. We reached the little balcony, the Wurlitzer
organ draped with an old carpet, the bad smell of Father
Flaherty’s breath. We kept going.
At the top of the screen, from behind a
decorative
molding, we saw our neighbors sucking
Black Cows, rolling darkness in their mouths. And
we started. The eggs cool from Sonny’s aunt’s
refrigerator flew across
the night sky blinking down from light-bulb
space. They
landed like doves breaking apart on Hank’s
chest, a gooey wound on the girl’s skirt. They slid out of our
hands like ghosts, uncle’s loud jokes descending at his
sister’s second wedding, groans
splurting in the night, a rifled mischief
rotating in the air,
concussed, spun by history’s grooves,
while Jerry down there with his polio leg in a brace
raised himself on the splattered yolky arms of his seat
and roared, shaking his fist.
Eleanor
She lit a cigarette up there in the balcony,
her lipstick
imprinting the smoke before it even
reached her lungs, her hand itching for a reason, an automatic,
something she could snap a clip into. Boys showing up,
one by one sitting next to her, slipping
a hand under her sweater, while she rubbed the
bulges in their
pants and puffed smoke into the shaft
of light from the projector, laughing when they sidled out of the
aisle in their sticky underwear. There wasn’t anyone didn’t know
her name in the halls of the high school.
Or in the front seat of cars where they dreamt
of the blow jobs
they’d never get and waited for her to walk
home from her job in the dry-goods store. Maybe it was her father’s
Labor Party pamphlets, the beating he took on Broadway, next to
Woolworth’s, or the way she breathed so
heavily through a deviated septum, as if she
always had a cold. Or
blame her sister’s weight. Mother’s long blood-
hound face. Maybe it was the way a woman walked on screen, how
she leaned against a wall, waiting for a light, every guy in a dark
suit
coming up to her with his hand cupping fire.
More recollections
of Loew's Triboro—once a crown jewel of Queens, New York—from
John Allman and others who attended movies there in the 40s and
50s.
John Allman’s previous books of poetry
and fiction from New Directions are Curve Away from Stillness:
Science Poems (1989), Scenarios for a Mixed Landscape
(1986), Clio’s Children (1985), and Descending Fire &
Other Stories (1994). His poems have appeared in The Yale
Review, 5 AM, Crazyhorse, North Dakota
Quarterly, Kestrel, Michigan Quarterly Review, and
Full Circle. He has twice been awarded a National Endowment
of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. His forthcoming
collection of poems, also from New Directions, is called
Lowcountry.
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