My mother teaches me a lesson

My mother worked at the corner of Sixth Street and Penn Avenue in downtown Pittsburgh. A waitress. If you visit there today, you are most likely on the way to a performance of the Pittsburgh Symphony or some other event of high and cultural significance. Visits in my younger days were more practical, less high brow. The Mayflower Coffee Shop, tucked into the lower corner of the Loew’s Penn Theater, where statues stood in shining mail on the cold marble of the antechamber to the Men’s Room. Although the cold and the marble still grace the Heinz Hall rest rooms today, Galahad and his kin have long been banished to either some gilded Camelot or a tacky steak house. The theater balcony, up the silent red carpet, now abuzz with intermission patrons swarming a pay bar on performance eve, was most always dark, cold and closed for the afternoon showing of the latest film.

1960 was the year. Ninth grade. It had to be very early in the school year. My brother and I climbed the wet leaf laden street to the bus stop at top of the Maple Avenue. After an air brake whoosh and two short steep steps into the oily warm air and a tumble of change into an aquarium of coins, we rode the Harmony Short Line into downtown Pittsburgh. The Eastwood Theater, Father Blacks Church, The bar at Hamilton and Penn, the Liberty, Cameraphone, Sheridan Square, Regent and Enright Theaters, the teeth of Dr. Baum, the rotating Duquesne Beer Bottle at the intersection of Oakland and East Liberty, the dark iron picket fence of Bigelow Boulevard overlooking the heart of the Strip and the Allegheny River Valley, the sprawling post office and then the city itself.

We would meet my mother a couple times a year after her work shift ended. Christmas shopping was always one trip, but I’m guessing that the journey that I have in mind was for new school clothing. Another new beginning in the guise of the school year. And after that a movie.

My mother, always on the look to further the education and the moral position of her children, often embraced the catechism of Hollywood. A couple years earlier she had taken us to see High School Confidential to show us the evils of the inhalation of marijuana. To show her offspring what desperate and wanton dope fiends that they could become if involved with the “wrong” friends. My recollection of the movie revolves around Russ Tamblyn’s aunt, played by Mamie Van Doren. She wore a bullet bra covered by an incredibly tight white sweater. I still am moved by the memory. My mother’s heart, and possibly her head, was in the right place. Unfortunately that was not the part of my anatomy that was paying attention. Although I have to admit that my encounters with grass and sundry psychedelics at a later time remained experimental and slight. Perhaps a direct result of this film.

This early autumn day seemed no different than many of our earlier excursions. I purchased a couple shirts from Rosenbaum’s after an argument of color, material and style – the ever unending clash of my achromatic youth and my more variegated mother. Pants, all dark, with a tuck here and a dart there to fit my chubby frame. Some shoes – black loafers. Socks white. We were ready for a drink, buttered pop corn and the movie. The latest Alfred Hitchcock.

North by Northwest? Still my favorite. But no! Not this day. To Catch a Thief? Nope. Perhaps Vertigo, no, but a little closer. Rear Window? Do I really seem that old? Not bad Hitch, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak and twice Grace Kelly, not bad at all. This day it was to be, all too briefly, the lovely, the lonely Janet Leigh.

Lambs we were to the slaughter. Our sensibilities forever trounced. This is the day Hitchcock cleared the way for the Hollywood carnage that followed in an all American downward spiral that celebrates violence and gore because it cannot deal with sexuality and living – bad taste, loss of intellect. Psycho and The Music Man both. The only trouble in River City was Harold Hill and his disdain for Flaubert. Marian Crane. Marian the Librarian. Don’t dismiss the connections.

We walked, tub of popcorn tight against our chests, cold drinks clutched in hands, right into the Bates Motel.

I revere and appreciate the music of Bernard Hermann, although it forever creased some portion of my brain that afternoon. Forget the shower scene, shrieking violins are all it takes to send me into fits of fear.

Phoenix, wasn’t it. Moving Modrian lines in the title sequence forming the buildings. Am I remembering correctly? Marian takes some money. Makes an assignation with her lover. Then a ride east on the highway and a really bad place to stop for the night. Mild mannered Norman and his extremely temperamental mother. Wrong night wrong place wrong room.

The next day, I was as gory and unforgiving as anyone explaining the movie to my classmates, because something in me changed. I was a lot less sure of my place in the world. A lot of the innocence of my thinking left me to mingle with the dark smoke of the universe. This was not the catharsis of a scary story around a campfire. I like a good horror story as much as the next person. This was a warped vision of the world. A stamp of fear and caution crippled my flights of imagination.

Similar tales of unfounded fears are used continuously and effectively to control rather than to lead the exploration of our essential natures. We are forced to live in the world of the psycho and sociopath in the news that we ingest, in the entertainment that we choose, even in the warnings and labels of food that we eat.

It may be a dangerous, bad, uncompromising world, but I can and do choose not to live in the fear and ignorance that is spewed daily by others who are twisted and caught up in the unthinking mush that more and more seems the stuff of American dreams. My mother wanted to take us to a movie. A movie to feed our minds. Wrong day, wrong place, wrong world.