The Happy Hour

The Happy Hour Theater was on Magazine Street, about two blocks from Jackson Avenue.
It's amazing what five nickles would buy when I was a kid.
The Mummy, The Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein....
Fifteen cents to get into a movie house crammed full of anxious eyes...and two nickle bags of popcorn.
Life was sweet...at least for a little while.
My cousin Mibby and I taking in the show...watching, daring one another not to hide our eyes.
Mibby would scream. Girls did that.
The boys would throw things at the screen...at the monsters and the bad guys.
And sometimes the ushers would come with their flashlights and threaten the really rowdy ones.
It was easy to be brave in a whole crowd of kids, but on the way home, we ran...
I was so afraid that something would grab at us from a dark alley, some doorway, in the midnght that stretched between each lamp post.
But there were other movies, movies where people burst into song.
Mibby was never the same after she saw Elvis sing "Love Me Tender" at the Happy Hour. She went to see that same movie over and over.... Her mother Roberta spent a lot of change on Mibby's Elvis phase.
She would get mad, and sometimes hit me when I made fun of Elvis....
"Elvis the Pelvis!" I came up with that, not even knowing what a pelvis was...
"Love me tender, love me sweet. Take off my shoes and kiss my feet..."
Pat Boone got my attention.
I wanted to transmorgrify into Pat Boone...like a werewolf under a full moon.
Pat Boone had it all.
He would sing "April Love" or "Love Letters in the Sand" and the softest, most dreamy girls would sigh.
I don't know what I would have done if one of those girls would have come close to me and sighed, but it looked like something important to achieve.
White buckskin shoes, that perfect hair and smile, and that Thunderbird.
Mibby never understood Pat Boone, but I did.
I would never have the perfect hair and smile. And even if I did, my glasses would ruin the whole effect.
The T-Bird was out of the question too.
But I learned his songs. They were a part of me. I owned them like I eventually, miraculously talked my mother into a pair of white buckskin shoes.
But the transmorgrification never took place, no matter what phase the moon was in.
In the mirror, I was still a chubby, little boy with thick glasses.
But on the weekends, I could go to the Happy Hour and be brave in the face of horror, defeat evil, and sometimes even be Pat Boone.
I would later move on to the Beatles, but for Mibby, it would always be Elvis.
Decades later, after Mibby died, I went back to Magazine Street to get another look at the Happy Hour.
It had been gutted by a fire, and I can't describe the sadness I felt.
Gone.
Gone like the Woolworth's across the street from it, gone like the po-boy stand down the block, gone
like Mibby and Elvis...
Gone like a lot of things that helped me get through...and become a man.