The Last Projectionist Summer

• Chapter 1 The Flickering Beam
• Chapter 2 Dusk at the Starlight
• Chapter 3 Thirty-Five Millimeter
• Chapter 4 Halfway Out the Door
• Chapter 5 Splice and Solder
• Chapter 6 Neon Hum
• Chapter 7 Double Feature Blues
• Chapter 8 Soundtracks Through the Static
• Chapter 9 Missing Frames
• Chapter 10 Concession Stand Confessions
• Chapter 11 A House Divided by Highway 9
• Chapter 12 Summer Heat and Xenon Lamps
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Reel
• Chapter 14 Ghost Audiences
• Chapter 15 Intermission
• Chapter 16 Fading Marquee
• Chapter 17 Rewind and Repair
• Chapter 18 Burn Marks on the Celluloid
• Chapter 19 The Changeover Cue
• Chapter 20 Shadows on the Gravel
• Chapter 21 The Final Inventory
• Chapter 22 Out of Focus
• Chapter 23 The Thunderstorm Matinee
• Chapter 24 Carbon Arcs and Cold Coffee
• Chapter 25 One Last Showtime
• Chapter 26 Fade to Black

The smell of a projection booth is something you never quite wash out of your skin. It is a mix of hot ozone, lubricating oil, vinegar-scented acetate, and fifty years of accumulated dust cooking against metal housings. By the time I was seventeen, I smelled like it constantly. My friends at school wore body sprays that smelled like synthetic vanilla or artificial sea breeze, but I walked through the hallways smelling like an industrial radiator and the friction of plastic film spinning at twenty-four frames per second.

That Friday in late June was the official kickoff of the summer season at the Starlight Drive-In, though calling it a season implied an organized schedule that we simply didn't have. What we had was an eighty-foot plywood screen that leaned two degrees toward the east, six gravel tiers lined with cast-iron speaker poles that mostly spat white noise, and two Century model 35mm projectors that my grandfather had purchased used from a bankrupt theater in Omaha back in 1968.

I stood on the worn linoleum of the booth, three stories above the gravel lot, looking through the narrow glass port. Down below, the asphalt apron in front of the box office was still empty. The heat had baked the flatlands of eastern Nebraska all afternoon, pushing ninety-five degrees by three o'clock, and the air had the heavy, suspended feel of grease sitting in a skillet. Out along Highway 9, cars blurred past occasionally, their drivers heading toward the lake or the air-conditioned multiplex twenty miles south in Lincoln, where you could sit in stadium-seating recliners and drink thirty-two-ounce sodas without a single moth diving into your popcorn.

Behind me, the exhaust blower on projector number one let out a high-pitched rattle, like a tin can full of nails.

"Give the casing a kick, Julie," my dad said, without looking up from the rewind bench. He had a magnifying loupe wedged into his right eye socket, his graying hair matted with sweat where his forehead met his temples. "The fan bearing is sticking again. Don't hit the housing near the intermittent sprocket, just the base."

I walked over in my beat-up canvas sneakers and gave the lower iron pedestal a practiced thud with the toe of my shoe. The rattle subsided into a steady, vibrating drone.

"Good," Dad muttered. He held a strip of trailer film up to the bare hanging bulb over the bench, squinting through the loupe. "Looks like distributor cut us short on the lead-in for the cartoon. We’ll have to splice four feet of black leader on before the title card, or the soundhead won't catch the optical track before the duck starts singing."

"Is Mom coming up tonight?" I asked. I asked it casually, the way you ask about the weather when you already see dark clouds rolling over the tree line.

Dad’s fingers paused on the hand crank of the rewind reel for half a second. It was barely perceptible, but when you spend your life watching machinery that measures time in twenty-fourth-of-a-second increments, you notice half-second hesitations.

"She’s finishing the inventory down in the concession stand," he said, winding the crank again. The steel reel whirred, slapping the edges of the film against the flanges. "Delivery truck shorted us three cases of hot dog buns. She’s trying to call the distributor before the weekend dispatch closes."

"The phone in the concession stand has been dead since Tuesday," I pointed out.

"Then she’s probably using the payphone out by the restrooms."

"The payphone took a kid's quarter on Memorial Day and hasn't had a dial tone since."

Dad stopped cranking completely and lowered the loupe. His left eye stayed squinted for a moment, adjusted to the magnifying glass. He looked tired in a way that sleep wouldn't fix. The blue collar of his Starlight work shirt was frayed, the embroidered Tom above the pocket missing the top loop of the T.

"Julie, we have thirty cars expected at minimum tonight if we want to cover the electric bill for the lamp houses

The sun was sinking into the western fields like an overripe peach, bleeding orange and dull magenta across the flat horizon. Down in the lot, the shadows of the speaker poles grew long and skinny, stretching across the white gravel until they looked like the bars of a gigantic cage. The heat didn’t break with the sunset; it just thickened, turning soupy with the humidity that drifted off the cornfields bordering the theater’s perimeter fence.

I left Dad in the booth and walked down the rickety wooden staircase that hugged the side of the projection tower. Every third step had a wobble that had been there since I was nine years old, and the handrail was rough, seasoned cedar that would bury a splinter in your palm if you didn't keep your hand flat. At the bottom, the gravel crunched under my sneakers with that distinct, dry pop you only ever hear in drive-in parking lots.

The concession building sat in the center of the tiered field, a low, flat-roofed cinderblock bunker painted a faded shade of seafoam green. The screen loomed over it from two hundred yards away, tall and silent, its white surface chipped in places to reveal the dark plywood underneath. If you stood directly between the concession stand and the screen, you could hear the electrical hum from the neon tubing over the snack bar door. The sign read REFRESHMENTS, but the R and the E had burned out during a thunderstorm two summers back, so it just buzzed a pale red FRESHMENTS into the twilight.

Inside, the air smelled like rancid coconut oil, warm cardboard, and the cheap cherry syrup we used for the slush machine. My mother was standing behind the stainless steel counter, wiping down the glass of the popcorn warmer with a rag that had seen better decades. She wore her faded Starlight apron over a plain yellow blouse, her brown hair pulled back in a loose clip that let stray wisps stick to the damp skin of her neck.

"Did your dad fix the blower fan?" she asked without looking up. The squeak of her rag against the glass was rhythmic and sharp.

"Temporary kick," I said, leaning against the counter. "He wants to know about the hot dog buns."

Mom stopped wiping. She dropped the rag onto the counter with a heavy, wet slap and rested both hands on the rim of the stainless tray. Her knuckles were red from washing utensils in the three-compartment sink out back.

"The distributor didn't short us, Julie," she said quietly. Her voice was flat, carrying that particular Nebraska evenness that made bad news sound like a weather report. "I didn't order them."

"We're doing opening weekend without hot dogs?"

"We don't have the credit line with Sysco anymore. Cash on delivery only, and your father spent what was left in the operating account on the insurance binder for the screen tower." She looked at me then, her eyes small and tired in the yellow fluorescent light of the kitchen. "I told him three weeks ago we couldn't run both projectors and keep the pantry stocked. He insisted we had to have the double feature."

"People come for the double feature, Mom. If we just show one movie, they'll go to the mall in Lincoln."

"People come for the air conditioning, Julie. Nobody wants to sit in an idling Buick with mosquitoes chewing on their ankles just to watch a print of a movie that came out in March." She picked up the rag again, but she didn't wipe anything; she just folded it into neat, tight quarters. "We have twenty bags of stale corn kernels, three canisters of cheese powder, and twenty-four cans of generic cola. When that's gone tonight, the kitchen is closed."

Before I could answer, the gravel outside crunched with the slow, heavy roll of tires. Through the wide plate-glass window of the snack bar, we saw headlights turn off Highway 9 and swing into the ticket lane. It was an old blue Chevy Impala with rust along the rocker panels, the muffler dragging low enough to scrape the dirt rise by the ticket shack.

"First customer," I said, pointing a thumb over my shoulder. "Who's on the box office?"

"Nobody," Mom said, untying her apron. "Your father said he'd take it until showtime, but he’s probably still squinting at that cartoon leader. I’ll go out there. You get the popper heating up. Don't turn the warmer element on until you actually have corn to put in it; the coils draw too much power and we'll trip the breaker for the beverage cooler again."

She walked past me, the screen door banging shut behind her with a sharp clatter of loose aluminum. I stood in the quiet of the concession stand, listening to the hum of the freezer compressors and the distant sound of Mom’s voice through the ticket window, greeting the people in the Chevy.

The popcorn machine was a 1974 Cretors Diplomat, a stainless-steel monster with an electric kettle suspended by twin brass arms. It took twenty minutes to reach popping temperature, and the thermostat was so finicky that if the ambient room temperature climbed over eighty degrees, it would burn the oil before the kernels popped. I measured out half a cup of orange, solid-state coconut fat, dropped it into the kettle, and watched it melt into a shimmering, pungent puddle. I tossed in three test kernels, pulled the lid down, and waited.

Outside, dusk was settling in earnest now. The sky had shifted from dusty orange to a deep, bruised violet. Down the highway, the distant headlights of evening traffic looked like fireflies crawling along the edge of the world. Two more cars pulled into the Starlight’s lane—a station wagon with wood-grain side panels and a beat-up pickup truck carrying three teenagers in the bed.

The gravel lot was slowly coming alive, though it was a sad kind of life. The Starlight was built to hold four hundred cars, arranged in wide concentric arcs facing the massive plywood face of the screen. Tonight, the three cars looked tiny and abandoned, parked tiers apart from each other like strangers sitting in the back row of an empty church.

A shadow darkened the doorway, and Luke stepped in. He was nineteen, lived two farms over, and worked our lot for minimum wage and all the stale soda he could drink. He was wearing a grease-stained T-shirt from an auto shop that went out of business when we were in middle school, his hands shoved deep into his jeans pockets.

"Hey, Julie," he said, nodding toward the popping machine. "Smells like grease."

"It's coconut oil," I said, not looking up. "Did you sweep the gravel around the back row?"

"Swept the gravel? Julie, it’s rocks. You don’t sweep rocks. I picked up the beer cans the high school kids threw over the chain-link on Wednesday, if that's what you mean." He leaned against the counter, tapping a rhythm against the metal frame with his dirty fingernails. "Your mom looks like she's ready to murder someone out there. Guy in the station wagon tried to pay for four adults with a twenty and asked for two five-dollar bills back. She almost took his head off."

"She’s stressed about the stock," I said. The three test kernels went off inside the kettle with sharp, muffled thuds. I dumped the measuring cup of raw corn into the oil, followed by a heavy shake of yellow seasoned salt, and pulled the lever to close the lid. The kettle began to agitate, the little motor inside grinding with an uneven, wet churn. "Dad’s still upstairs."

"He told me to tell you he needs you back up in the booth by quarter till," Luke said, wandering over to the soda fountain and pulling a paper cup from the plastic sleeve. "Said the tension spring on the upper feed reel of projector two is slipping. He wants you to ride the brake during the first reel change."

"Why doesn't he just replace the spring? We have three spares in the metal cabinet."

"He looked," Luke said, filling the cup with cloudy ice and dark cola. "Cabinet was empty. He thinks he used the last one during the late show of The Goonies last September."

I wiped my hands on a paper towel and looked out the front window. The light was dying fast now. In the projection booth, high above the lot, the small, square porthole glowed with a faint, greenish yellow light—the work lamps. Dad was up there alone, wrestling with fifty-year-old steel and dried-out rubber belts, trying to hold together an evening of entertainment for fifteen people who had each paid four dollars to sit in the dirt.

A moth landed on the warm glass of the concession counter, its wings fluttering against the smooth surface before crawling toward the heat of the popcorn kettle. I watched it for a second, then picked up my flashlight and headed for the door.

"Keep an eye on the popper, Luke," I called over my shoulder. "If the kettle stops turning, hit the red switch, not the black one. The black one turns off the exhaust fan, and you’ll choke the place in five minutes."

"Yeah, yeah," Luke muttered, his mouth already full of crushed ice.

The climb back up the booth stairs in the dark was familiar enough that I didn't need the flashlight, but I kept my thumb near the switch anyway. With every step, the wooden frame groaned against the dry air, and the smell of the booth drifted down—that hot, electrical tang that always meant work was about to begin.

When I opened the booth door, Dad was bent double behind projector number one, his face illuminated by a small clip-on mechanic's light. The room was hot enough to make your lungs ache. The dual 2,000-watt xenon lamps hadn't even been struck yet, but the ambient heat from the roof, combined with the tube amplifiers that had been idling since five o'clock, made the small room feel like the inside of a woodstove.

"You smell that?" Dad asked without turning around.

"The popper's going," I said.

"No, not that. The smell from the field. It's coming up out of the creek bed behind the screen."

I walked over to the open porthole and leaned out into the evening breeze. The smell was subtle, but distinct beneath the dust: wet weeds, rotting timber, and the damp, cool mud of the irrigation ditch that ran along the property line. It meant the dew point was rising.

"The lens is going to fog," I said.

"First reel change, guaranteed," Dad agreed, finally standing up and wiping his forehead with the back of his greasy forearm. He looked at the old electric wall clock above the rewind table. It read 8:42. "Sunset was twelve minutes ago. We strike the arc at eight-fifty, run the trailers, then go straight into the feature. No cartoon tonight."

"Mom said no hot dogs either."

Dad’s jaw worked for a moment, a small muscle twitching near the base of his ear. He didn't look at me. He picked up a can of dry film lubricant and sprayed a short, hissing burst into the upper spindle of projector two.

"We don't need hot dogs to show a movie," he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, stubborn register he used whenever the bank called or the roof leaked. "We need light, we need sound, and we need forty-five feet of film moving past that aperture plate every single minute. The rest of it is just window dressing."

He reached for the heavy breaker switch on the wall, the big gray box that controlled the rectifiers in the corner. The metal lever was cold, its paint flaked away from thirty years of his hand pulling it down at dusk.

"Stand by projector two, Julie," he said, settling his hand on the switch. "Let's see if the old girl still remembers how to breathe."

He slammed the lever down. The rectifiers roared to life with a deep, bone-rattling hum that vibrated through the soles of my shoes, and through the narrow port glass, the great, empty screen in the dark field suddenly turned brilliant, blinding white.