In 1982 I got a job as a projectionist at Mexia Theater, which served as the town’s only movie venue and the main nightly hangout for the local dropouts, burnouts and mildly retardeds.

We had only one screen of course, and it was cracked, torn and badly stained from flung snack bar food and God knows what else. There were two ancient projectors that were literally manufactured in the mid thirties, and looked like something out of an early Nine Inch Nails video. You threaded the reels from top to bottom through rusting gears that tended to pinch and cut into the fingers, so you made sure your tetanus shots were updated. For illumination the projectors used carbon rods that burned when touched together. Yes, the movies were lit by actual FIRE! You had to make sure to lower the heavy iron hood down before you struck the carbon rods or it would burn your eyes out. You had to monitor the burning of the rods by turning these little wheels as the film played. A typical 90-minute feature generally took around two hours to show because of the numerous times the fucking prints would break. I’d have to take the sumbitches off the projector and splice them together, then re-thread the cock-knockers. See, by the time we’d get a typical first-run film, about six months would have gone by. So the prints were worn to shit and brittle as hell. Often there were several breaks in the reels, because the last asshole to show it didn’t have the decency to splice them back together.

The theater itself was just short of condemned, and was a fire hazard. The fire exit door stuck badly and didn’t open unless you shoved your whole body against it. The floor was always sticky no matter how often you swept and mopped it, and the whole place reeked of stale fake popcorn “butter” and semen. I put “butter” in quotations because what was poured over the corn was a congealed orange-yellow glop that looked like greasy pus and came in giant plastic buckets. I think it’s the same stuff that used to be inside the old Stretch Armstrong dolls.

Saturday nights were the worst, because that’s when the local yokels would decide to go to the “pitcher show”, and when you have a dingy theater full of Skoll dippers and 16 year-old dudes full of MD 20/20 and bad pot, it’s not a good mix. A fight would break out most every weekend, and one night the manager got his nose broken trying to evict the troublemakers. I watched all of this from the projection booth, and it was usually far more entertaining than the movie playing that night.

The manager built a rickety wooden stage in front of the screen, and we’d have band nights with horribly off-key garage groups warbling painful versions of “Freebird” and…well “Freebird”. I think that’s all that was ever attempted. One night on the same stage we had a break dancing contest after a showing of Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo. Try to imagine it, if you can. A bunch of pizza-faced, VERY white hick-assed inbred kids flinging themselves around on the stage in what looks like epileptic seizures while RUN DMC blared on an old cassette player. If it was filmed, it would rival Tod Browning’s FREAKS in shock value.

The manager owned two movies. One was a seventies era titty flick called THE SEXY DOZEN and the other was an old horror flick called THE FOREST. We’d have midnight shows once a month with one of those movies. That was some scary shit let me tell you. Anyone that would come to a midnight show in Mexia Texas on a Saturday night were there only get high, dry hump each other, jack off or all three. I locked the door my projection booth and huddled up there praying no one would try to come up to the balcony area, which was shut down years earlier because of fire code violations.

One night I showed up to work drunk on cherry vodka daiquiris and showed an entire reel of RETURN OF THE JEDI upside down. The manager bitched me out, but didn’t fire me because he couldn’t find anyone else to work the projectors on a weekend. I stole the leader of the first reel of ROTJ as a memento of that night

Sundays I had to show double features of old Spanish flicks. I had to get to work on a Sunday morning by 10 AM which was an ungodly hour if I was hung over, which I almost always was. Old Spanish movies would crumble to dust if you just looked at them wrong, and I spent four hours every Sunday making splices and trying to control the dry heaves while the audience cursed me in the Mexican language to get the movie started.

The last movie to show at the Mexia Theater was Eddie Murphy’s THE GOLDEN CHILD. It sat unused for years before finally being renovated as a Mexican Church. The old marquee still stands though as a reminder of the old days.

I miss that old shit hole.