In the last year of the Nixon administration, I tried to go to an R-rated movie.
Temperatures had fallen below zero overnight, and a burst pipe had flooded our school. Administrators phoned with news of an emergency closure. We were on our own. Just weeks before, my mother had joined the headlong rush of American women back into the workplace occasioned by the Arab oil embargo. My sisters went to the houses of friends who had mothers who could still afford to stay home. I went to my friend Mike’s. In our neighborhood, there were still Irish families of epic dimensions, more like villages or associations. Mike had eight older siblings. We were still in grade school, but Mike had sisters in their 30s, brothers in mid-career, and nephews who were older than he was. Mary Ellen, his oldest sister, had the idea of taking us to the movies. She drove us to an old movie theater off Route 128, where two Walt Disney movies were on: Superdad and Robin Hood. We told her we’d call when the movie was through. At the door of the theater I asked Mike which of the two he wanted to see.
“Neither of them,” Mike said. “Let’s go see Dirty Harry.” These Clint Eastwood movies, about a heavily armed policeman unhinged (but in a good way) by the violence around him, were rated R. That was what you called movies that had naked ladies in them. The Dirty Harry sequel Magnum Force was playing at a new multiplex theater off the highway a mile-and-a-half down Elm Street, which meant a half-hour’s trudge through the five-degree cold. It wasn’t until we saw Clint Eastwood’s picture on the poster that we remembered our practical problem: We needed an adult to get in.
Mike was savvier than I was. There was a young couple walking down the sidewalk, hand in mittened hand, leaning their three-pointed ski hats against one another. The guy was about 20 with a scraggly beard. The girl had big, round reflective sunglasses.
“You going to Magnum Force?” Mike asked. “My mom said it was all right if we got someone to take us.”
“What?”
“We need to go in with an adult. Here, you buy our tickets.” We each gave him two dollars. They walked us into the theater. Once through the doors, they peeled off. We’d done it! Mike and I bought a box of Milk Duds and took a seat halfway down the right-hand aisle. We were giggling, talking about how great this was, speculating about how soon into the movie the first naked ladies would appear, when a man in a green usher’s vest walked up. “All right,” he said. “You kids get out of here.”
“Whatta you mean?” I asked.
“Just what I said. You’re too young.”
“But we came with our guardian,” I said, using the word for the first time, “our, ah, . . . uncle.”
“I don’t see no uncle.”
“He’s back there.”
“Well you gotta sit with him or it’s out into the cold with you.” Child abuse did not, at the time, have the bad reputation it has since acquired.
How were we going to find the guy who brought us in? The movie was coming on and the lights were dimming. We walked up our aisle with the crappy jazz of the title credits playing, the patrons shushing us, and the usher muttering behind us. Then down another aisle. None of the couples resembled the one we came in with, unless . . . there was some kind of writhing mass towards the end of one row. I could see, dimly, the outline of a man’s back with a woman’s arms and hands moving on it. What I was making out was making out.
“Uncle . . . ?” I mumbled. “Uncle . . . ?” I sounded like one of the cockney orphans in Oliver. In 20th-century America, uncles had names. “Uncle Bill!” I shouted. I sidled down the row and, recognizing our bearded friend, tapped him on shoulder and said, “Hey, Uncle Bill, this man says we have to sit with you!”
They turned to us. I saw the woman’s eyes for the first time—they were bleary and embarrassed. “Bill” looked angry enough to disinherit, or perhaps pummel, his “nephew,” but how could he?
For two hours we looked up into the glare of San Francisco and listened to the rattle and boom of small-arms fire. When it was over, we thankpologized to our bearded friend and walked back down the highway to where Robin Hood and Superdad were playing. “How was it?” Mary Ellen asked when she arrived.
“Great!” Mike said. “You know . . . rob from the rich, give to the poor.”