“Hey,” someone yelled, following it with a prodding kick to my ribs. A large guy with mountainous shoulders loomed above me.

“What da fuck you doin?”

A gang of teenagers behind him were looking down at me grimly. They knew when a good beating would be therapeutic As I scrambled to unsteady feet, I realized there was no chance of running away.

“Well, I was just eating, you know, a meatball hero, and I look at my hand here, and my high school graduation ring is gone, so I … uh, upchuck here, and I was just looking for it, you know, it had a diamond stone.”

“Diamond?” the most brilliant of them queried. “What public school has a diamond for a graduation stone?”

“Who said public?” I countered. “It was parochial.”

“Which one?” asked the guy with the twin tower shoulders.

“Maternal Lamentations. Over in Sheepshead Bay.”

“We just beat them in basketball,” one of the morons said, to my relief.

“Fuck it,” I said, looking wistfully at the vomit. I slowly walked away. After I had staggered away half a block, I looked back and saw the bastards kicking through my poor puddle of barf. As I turned away, I heard one of them yell to another, “Gypsies steal gems that way.”

Late afternoon the next day, I awoke with a punishing hangover. I arose slowly and remembered the previous night with disbelief. I peeked into the slightly opened door of Helmsley’s bedroom to see if he was sleeping alone. The room was empty and nothing had been altered since yesterday. He had been out all night. I went back to my couch and retreated back into sleep. When I awoke again, it was dark out and I was starving. I recalled the barf episode of the night before, and quickly brushed my teeth. It was only six PM. I took a shower and a couple of Tylenol and called Miguel to ask him when I could come in to start training. He instructed me to come in as soon as the energy was right. I dressed and got the F, then changed for the L to Third Avenue where I walked south to the theater. Upon my arrival, Miguel asked me, “Are you sure you’re in the right energy so soon?”

“I stopped in a nearby Radio Shack and checked on the meter. I’m ready.”

“All right,” he said, and we began with a tour of the theater.

“This is your theater,” he explained as we walked to the stage. “You must look at it as if it’s a part of your own body.” Sex was lurking all around us. It was crouched low in the darkened seats and projected high on the stage.

“This way” He led me to a staircase behind the stage and to a downstairs room. The place looked and sounded like a medieval dungeon, with dark stone walls, puddles of water, virtually no lighting, and the moans. There was constant moaning all around. A hand out of the darkness groped my thigh.

“Fuck off!” I yelled.

“Shhhh,” Miguel whispered back. “Occasionally someone might reach out; all you do is simply take their hand and push it away. Not rudely or quickly, everyone here is as human as you are.”

We went back up a staircase to the front of the theater. “Now look here.” He pointed to a burnt-out bulb. “Ow, see that? Ow ow, you should smart when you see that. A bulb is burnt-out and now the theater is in pain. Say ow.”

“Ow. Why?”

“You should be in pain until you replace the bulb. You’re both the nerve system and the lymph node system of the theater.”

“You mean the white blood cells,” I corrected his little metaphor.

“Why not the lymph node?”

“Well, isn’t the lymph node just sweat and pimple pus?”

“So?”

“Well, the white blood cells destroy foreign objects that enter the body Didn’t you see the movie Fantastic Voyage?”

“I thought the spleen does that.”

“No, the spleen stores blood, and I think the liver cleans it.”

“All right, enough. You’re the spleen, the liver, the white blood cells, the lymph nodes. You’re all of that and anything else you can think of.”

He gave other pointers as we walked back through the dark theater. Looking up at the beam of projected light, I saw something strange. As I walked down the aisle, I noticed the ray from the projection booth was parallel to the seats. Out of an architectural interest, I squatted to inspect the incline of the floor.

“You wouldn’t have a level, would you?”

“Very good,” he replied, and yanking me up to my feet, he quickly put his finger over my lips and murmured, “I’ll explain later.”

“Explain what?” I asked as soon as he closed the office door behind us.

“Did you notice the angle of the screen?”

“No, what’s wrong with it?”

“It’s slanted backward at the top. And all the seats are anchored at such an angle that everyone sitting has to apply a soft but constant thrust to sit back in the seat.

“Doesn’t anyone complain?”

“No”—he grinned—“they just leave. No one can bear it for more than a couple of hours.”

“You can probably get a team of carpenters to fix it,” I replied. “Who fucked up?”

“Fix it? That’s like fixing the Mona Lisa! It’s brilliant.”

“Brilliant?”

“Look, porn theaters aren’t like other theaters. People come to a porn theater and they stay forever. This way they either leave or they suffer.” It was an interesting theory, but who could guess how many patrons never returned because they didn’t care for the back strain?

“Who thought of it?”

“Only one man could come up with something so ingenious, Otto Waldet. Did you ever see the last scene of Lady from Shanghai? I Otto built that set for Welles. He was a set designer up until the early fifties, when he was blacklisted. By the early sixties, he started one of the first chains of gayporn theaters. He just died last year.”

“Is that why the projection booth is at that strange angle?”

“Oh no, that’s something entirely different. This theater was initially a nursery school. The projection booth was built between the second and the third floor.”

I was introduced to my staff: a middle-aged box office lady named Rosa and a Cambodian porter named Thi. Miguel finally led me back into his office and had me fill out a W-4 form and then we agreed on a mutually accommodating schedule.

“Why don’t you work with me the rest of this evening so we can get to know each other?”

The evening was almost over anyway, so I decided to stay for the remainder. Opening up a compact refrigerator hidden under the desk, Miguel took out a couple beers and a bag of banana chips. Then he pulled out a small television and we decided on a football game. It was a remarkably American evening for a neo-hippie in a gay porn theater.

As we watched the Forty-Niners beating the Jets, I remembered how in the past working had meant something far more physical, under the constant supervision of usually someone conspicuously dumber. I sputtered through a mouthful of chips, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.”

“This is really a pretty smooth operation and if nothings broken …”

“Sounds comfy.”

“It’s boring, that’s the real job.” And we didn’t talk much more until the end of the game. By the time the Jets had won, we were both pretty tired from the beer and the little room had gotten pretty humid, so we stepped out front and watched guys stray in and cars cruise by for corner whores. Miguel took out a cigarette.

“Aren’t those bad for your health?”

“They’re organic,” he replied, and lit up.

Suddenly when a long American car turned up Third toward us, Miguel snuffed his cigarette and spoke under his breath, “Quick, get into the theater.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Ox is here. He’s the district manager. I didn’t tell him I hired you yet, and he lives to yell. I’m sure he won’t pass up this opportunity. Just make like a patron until he passes.”

Out of a purple Cadillac that pulled up in front plopped a pudgy middle-aged man with a curly beard. He was wearing such a distinctly tasteless suit that it seemed to make a kind of agonizing fashion statement. His upper torso rocked solidly as if he were entering a boxing ring.