Mattering

I must have been no more than five years old because my legs didn’t reach the floor when I sat back in a large seat of the darkened Austin movie theater on a Saturday afternoon. Besides the double feature there was the March of Dimes collection box passed around, cartoons, a serial and RKO Pathe news. It was an immersive experience. In those days people entered at any time.

Now the place was pitch black. A large man groped his way along my aisle, his eyes still wide with the sun. He inched slowly, feeling for shoes anxious to find a seat with no legs in front of it. Stopping in front of mine he started to settle down on top of me.

What could I do to announce myself in this world, to avoid eradication? My defense to being crushed and erased was to make a joyful noise, to shake my Good & Plenty. A sound that I was good and there was plenty of me or at least enough to live another day.

It was like Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo yelling to the cars as he crossed a street in Manhattan, I’m walkin here, I’m walkin. It was my declaration of existence, I’m sitting here, I exist, I matter.

I've returned to this scene many times in my head but there is a missing person in the scenario I have never included before; my brother who, four years older, was my keeper. Many fleeting snapshots stay in the album of my memory in those early years, but I seem to have photo-shopped Arthur out of all of them.

In the solipsism of my childhood, he didn’t matter… but, of course, he did. Too late to make amends; he died 62 years ago yet that needs now to be at least stated. Arthur had a short and troubled life. I don’t think he ever knew he mattered. His death came on a mountain road with high alcohol content in his bloodstream.

One day as early teenagers we were left a couple of dollars to have dinner in a restaurant. Either my mother was in the hospital with a detached retina and my father was working or he was laid up with double pneumonia and she was working. I recall how uneasy my brother was as we sat at the local deli waiting to be served. He wasn’t sure anyone would see us and if they did would the waiter even take our order?

There were times along the way when mattering took the form of vanishing. One class in pharmacy college was taught by a Professor Aldstadt who tyrannized us with his Gestapo-like tactics. The subject was pharmaceutical chemistry. We had to memorize structural formulas of new products coming on the market. Typically, he would say, You, with the pimples on your face hiding behind Goldstein, get up to the blackboard and show us how stupid you are.  

My strategy was to disappear by wearing a beige shirt to class that I hoped would blend in with the seat. It worked but a far better way of mattering happened when a returning G.I. cornered the diminutive teacher, grabbed him by the collar and reminded him why we fought the war against fascism.

 

My friend likes to talk to people in restaurants....  waiters, busboys and parties at the next table. It's a way of breaking down barriers, of leveling. Here we are together in this absurdist tableau. Maybe the man clearing our table has a novel-in-progress under the seat of his car and the server is waiting for a call from a casting director. Everyone has a story to tell. We all matter.