Night at the Spectacular
Shea Herlihy-Abba
There was a particular feeling to the way they moved when they went there. Who knows
why they came back, to that particular place over and over, moaning lowly like waves washing
ashore.
I think it was the lights that attracted them. Some of the only lights left in a dark town.
Their blinking erratic and comforting, like a train that doesn't come on time but stills everything
around it with its rumbling when it comes. THE SPECTACULAR, the sign said in looping
sardonic curls. The highlight of the low-lit Houston neighborhood with its hip cafes shining red
and intriguing, and now the highlight still, but for a humbler crowd.
With no gaudy clothes or thin hip cigarettes, with no fashion sense at all, the new patrons
of the Spectacular crowded in grunting droves nightly under the lights of the dying sign and
shuffled inside where old movies popped slightly and flickered, too, on a yellowing screen
against scarlet curtains worn and cushioned with dust.
There they stood, the hushed crowd, not a thing said amongst them as their eyes stared
congealed at the black-and-whites with their organ music and their intermissions. If you stood
there with them as I did once with Terry by my side our breathing even scantier than theirs you
might begin to imagine they were watching, silently, trying to remember what it was like to be
alive. What it was like to let their eyes shine out with feeling like the people on the screen. To
have voices that leapt acrobatically and bodies that kicked about. To have legs like go-go
dancers, heels like mafiosos, chins like protagonists and necks slender like femme fatales’.
And of course he kept them playing. The owner of that place. Bigs Hoffman, a large man
with delicate eyes that shone timidly and a pale voice that went out of him like piano music,
tickling your ears. Bigs had run the theater since forever, since before the lights went out. Me
and Terry we went up to see him maybe every other week, to ask about how he was doing.
Did he have enough food, were his routes clean. Me and Terry we're going to see if we
can break in the old Krogers down near the highway, I hear it still has running refrigerators,
would you like anything if we make it inside.
He never seemed to eat much. Had a lot of booze at his place. Me and Terry always
wondered how he kept it cold but never asked because we suspected he just didn't.
Terry with her red hair. She was a quiet, together type. Sometimes I thought what
happened to the town, to the whole world hadn't phased her. She just carried on, made a change
of plans, made a few tics in her calendar to adjust her schedule; note to self: World gone to hell.
Need to: forget plans once made, batten down the hatches, go into survival mode.
She always wore that one white sweater. And we kept in touch with walkie-talkies, from
two blocks away, talking sometimes far into the night, the sound of our voices slow and filled
with the silence of the lightless city that breathed beneath us and the calm desperation that
scraped up against the belly of the sky as though trying to claw its way away from Houston.
We met up always for food runs, and to visit Mr. Hoffman, and for walks, which we took
briefly on rooftops and inside buildings where they wouldn't see us.
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