24 Frames Per Second

Dear Morris,

Apologies for not writing sooner. Lately, the days have been a haze of ceiling fans and thunderstorms. Cigar smoke and afternoon naps. I haven’t been sleeping much lately, choosing instead to while away the hours watching television and trying to remember to eat once in a while. Mental masturbation, all of it. I should be working. We’ve been on leave for the last three weeks, not that there’s anything to do around that dirty, old warehouse anyway. I suppose sitting around at home is better than hanging around the loading bays, waiting for something to happen.

I remember when I was 15, working at the movie theatre we used to have in town. Do you remember it? It used to be the place to go for a while, before all the high school kids lost interest and they opened that giant multiplex the next town over. Sometimes I miss working there. Well, I wouldn’t really want to be there now, at the age of 22, but I miss the mentality we all had.

It was a bunch of high school kids working there, for the most part. Bored, stupid, immature high school kids with nothing else to do. We didn’t have much in the way of responsibility, but nobody really paid much attention to us anyway. We’d hang out and talk about things like school and girls. We’d watch free movies and eat all the popcorn we could handle. When one round of shows finished, we’d quickly sweep up any obvious garbage, run the next group of customers through, and get back to being as unproductive as possible. The owner, an old guy with a disfigured right hand and missing a toe on his left foot, rarely left his office upstairs.

I learned how to work the projectors, the result of many a late night spent watching Paul, the projectionist, ply his craft with precision and skill. It’s a dying art form, movie projection. With the move to automated, self-threading machines, Paul was one of the few unionized projectionists left working in the country. By the time I left the theatre, at 16, he was long gone, replaced by fellow high school students. I miss the sound of the projectors at night, the machine-gun sound of 24 frames a second being beamed to the masses below. Upstairs in the darkness, surrounded by film, you could find peace.