boy overboard

For over two months, Sal hadn’t said anything about going to the Saturday matinees much less news of the latest monster movie coming to the theaters. This was the same Sal who went bug-eyed in anticipation of every new scary movie that came down the pike. In the telling of the latest, his eyes would flash excitement and he’d tell me what his brother or neighborhood friends had to say about it.

Was the mid-fifties. We were in the same 4th grade class at St. Anthony’s School in downtown Hartford, built of brownstone and brick decades ago. We’d always eat lunch together, unpacking our tin lunch boxes – his emblazoned with a picture of Flash Gordon and mine of Roy Rogers – while waiting for the cartons of milk to be passed to us along the long heavy oak tables with equally long benches beside them. The lunch room was small and confining, with barely enough space to occupy two shifts of 160 students grades one to six. The smell of lunch meat and peanut butter permeated the plaster-walled room no matter the time of day.

Biting into my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I asked through a sticky mouth half-full, “Hey, Sal, any good movies coming up? I hear It Came from Beneath the Sea is enough to scare the most cool-headed kid to death”. Sal’s face didn’t light up as usual.

We used to meet up in front of Woolworth’s some Saturday afternoons to catch the latest horror film at one of the lush-carpeted, chandeliered movie palaces nearby in the city – the Loew’s Poli Palace, the Allyn, E. M. Loew’s and others.

Sal’s family of four lived in an apartment close to downtown. I’d meet him every two or three weeks on Saturdays. I’d take a bus from my family’s place on the west side to meet up with him. My mother and father said they didn’t mind as long as I had enough money from my paper route for bus fare, movie admission and refreshments. Once in a while, I’d pay for Sal’s movie ticket when his pocket money wasn’t enough to cover. He’d get an allowance for helping his dad with cleanup at the restaurant the family owned.

Before all of this baffling change in Sal, we’d decided to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon. “It’s the scariest of the scary,” said buddy Sal, “my cousin told me he almost had a heart attack. We’ve gotta see this one, gotta,” he raved.

I couldn’t tell him that I was too frightened by these movies and had nightmares after seeing them. Sal liked to rib me for covering my eyes when watching the worst parts (with fingers spread a sliver apart for slivered vision). He’d seen so many of these flicks that the shock amused more than frightened him.

And so that Saturday we’d met at Woolworth’s by the bus stop at 1 o’clock as usual. We went to Walgreen’s next door for candy, always going for the 5-cent candy with the greatest volume, like Necco Wafers and Good N Plenty, enough to last throughout the movie. We would have gone to Woolworth’s for a long tube of fresh popcorn to take with us inside the theater, but had been stopped once by a manager in blue uniform who yelled at us and took the popcorn away, warning if we did it again we’d be banned from the theater forever. We had to admit it was a bad idea to try to conceal the popcorn under our jackets. Sometimes we’d go to the Planter’s Peanut Store for a small bag of fresh, hot Spanish nuts or peanuts, which we could hide in our pockets before being admitted to the theater – albeit a little nervous about the smell giving us away. The Saturdays we’d go to Planter’s was when we were flush with money. The smallest bags cost ten cents.

We walked three blocks to the Loew’s Poli Palace and hung around the lobby for a few minutes to take in the wall posters of movies to come, showcased in glass windows. The She Creature and It Came from Beneath the Sea were the two upcoming features for the following weeks. We both agreed that The She Creature would be the scarier one of the two. Looking up at the marquis out front, Sal noticed there was another movie title there and not “Black Lagoon”.

“Maybe they didn’t have time to put up the new title for today,” he said, hopefully.

“Hey, Mike,” he yelled, “we’ll have to ask if our flick is really showing today – or if it’s this other one.”

“Let’s go ask the lady in the admission booth,” I suggested.

The young lady behind the slotted glass, lipstick bright red and hair puffed up, apologized, saying, “Oh, sorry boys, we had a problem getting today’s film delivered on time, so we’re substituting it for this one, Lifeboat (Hitchcock film, to discover eons later).

“Is this an action-adventure movie or something?” Sal asked.

“Yeah, it’s about a group of people lost at sea on a lifeboat after their ship sunk.”

“Can kids like us watch it?” he further inquired.

“Yup, it’s not listed for adults only,” she answered, snapping her gum.

Sal and I hashed it over. It was six blocks to the other movie theater and we didn’t know what was showing there. Without much discussion, we agreed to see this one.

Inside, we didn’t see many kids our age and there were lots of adults. We took out our candy right after sitting down and started munching slowly as the black-and-white movie reeled out. It started with a brief naval battle between a ship and a submarine, both destroyed, and the rest of it was about survivors in a lifeboat. The whole movie was mostly about these people in this big rubber raft. I didn’t understand most of what was going on and why they were arguing and fighting and some parts made my stomach churn. I couldn’t eat the rest of my Necco Wafers and stuffed them back in my pocket. Sal was quiet, very quiet. He didn’t say anything at all – until, while getting up from his seat, he told me he’d meet me in the lobby after it was over. It was during the scene when this guy Gus was thrown overboard. I left a few minutes later.

We started walking back to my bus stop. Sal looked kind of glum. It took a while before he mentioned anything about the movie we’d just seen.

“What a dumb movie, it was supposed to be an adventure flick,” he blurted, sulking.

We parted ways at my bus stop downtown. His family’s apartment was six blocks away. He always walked. This time he didn’t want to get an ice cream cone before going home – something we always did.

Two months or so later, after no mention of movies much less movies about monsters or dark horrors or creepy creatures, I caught up with him in recess, just before we started playing marbles in the dirt lot at the edge of the paved schoolyard. I asked about going to the movies again, anything he’d like to see.

“No, I’d rather watch the Dodgers on Saturday afternoons on our neighbor’s new TV set.”

To this day I don’t really know or have clear recollection of why I asked or how I drew a line back to Lifeboat.

“Was there something too creepy about that adventure movie we saw, Sal?”

He gave me a funny look. “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but I gotta admit it scared me bad. I couldn’t sleep a wink for nights after that, and when I did, I woke up from nightmares.”

“You’re kidding, Sal, I thought you were the super-cool guy, nothing scared you, nothing, and you made fun of me because I covered my eyes.”

“OK, OK, buddy, I’m sorry ‘bout that – razzing you. I don’t know why that one hit me so hard.”

“What about all those horror flicks like House of Wax and all the others? How come they didn’t hit you hard?”

“Can’t explain,” Mike, “Lifeboat was too real, not like a fake monster you know is fake and could never exist, not like it could ever happen, besides it’s a movie, not anything that could happen in real life with real people – but those men and women trying to stay alive, all bunched together on a small boat during the war, I mean, it could happen, maybe it did.”

Sal pulled out his bag of marbles and started carving out holes in the dirt with a stick, holes to deposit the rolling cat’s-eyes and steelies.

After pocketing two of Sal’s cat’s-eyes I won, William O’Rourke, the brown-nose bellringer, hand-tolled the brass bell to signal five minutes till the end of recess and he’d ring again for return to classes.

We’re heading across the schoolyard pavement toward the back door when Sal started talking about the movie again, stating, “I couldn’t get over the mother with the dead baby and then finally drowning herself, the man having to let them cut his arm off to save his life, and the enemy German on board as prisoner but not really a prisoner, and all of them dying of hunger and thirst, and to watch them dying, it did something to me I can’t explain. It was hard to watch, was weird, seeing them in pain, fighting over drops of water.”

“Hey, Mike,” he added, “What I’m saying is this was so different than Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back. That was war and lots of soldiers died. He killed all those Germans. He was a hero. But in Lifeboat, well, that’s another story. It was crazy-scary. Maybe I just didn’t understand it, what they were doing, why they did what they did.”

“Sal, I hated it, too. Too hard to understand why they said some things they were saying and why they were arguing and fighting against each other.”

“Mike, I hope if we’re ever in a lifeboat like that and we’re dying of thirst and you have some water in a hidden bottle, like that German guy, you’d save some for me, and you’d never turn against me no matter what.”

You bet I’d do it, Sal, and though I know I’ll never be a hero like Davy Crockett or Audie Murphy, I’d save some water for you even though you never share your candy,” I joked.

He didn’t laugh.

“What gets me, Mike, my mom always says she’d drown herself in the park pond down the street if anything happened to any one of us. She wouldn’t really do it, I know. But that Mrs. Higby, the one with the dead baby, she had to be tied down and all so she wouldn’t drown herself – and she ended up doing it anyway. That’s what really got to me.”

“Okay, Sal, no more action-adventure movies for us, okay?”

We shook on it.

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