Second-Person Narration

Charles Johnson, "Moving Pictures"

You sit in the Neptune Theater waiting for the thin, overhead lights to dim with a sense

of respect,perhaps even reverence, for American movies houses are, as everyone knows,

the new cathedrals, their stories better remembered than legends, totems, or mythologies,

their directors more popular than novelists, more influential than saints--enough people,

you've been told, have see the James Bond adventures to fill the entire country of

Argentina. Perhaps you have written this movie. Perhaps not. Regardless, you come

to it as everyone does, as a seeker groping in the darkness for light, hoping something

magical will be beamed from above, and no matter how bad this matinee is, or silly,

something deep and maybe even too dangerous to talk loudly about will indeed happen

to you and the others, before this drama reels to its last transparent frame.

Naturally, you have left your life outside the door. Like any life, it's a messy thing,

hardly as orderly as art is, what some call life in the fast lane: the Sanka and

sugar-doughnut breakfasts, bumper-to-bumper traffic downtown, the business lunches,

and a breakneck schedule not to get ahead but simply to stay in one place, which is

peculiar, because you grew up in the sixties speeding on methadone and despising all this,

knowing your Age (Aquarian) was made for finer stuff. But no matter. Outside, across town,

you have put away for ninety minutes the tedious repetitive job that is, obviously, beneath

your talents, sensitivity, education (a degree in English), the once beautiful woman--or

wife--a former model (local),college dancer, or semiprofessional actress named Megan

or Daphne, who has grown tired of you, or you of her, and talks now of

legal separation and finding herself, the children from a former, frighteningly brief

marriage whom you don't want to lose, the mortgage, alimony, IRS audit, the aging

gin-fattened face that once favored a rock star's but now frowns back at you in the

bathroom mirror . . . .