Now that the movie theater in my hometown is closing forever, I can finally tell you all about the absolutely batshit job I had my freshman year of college.
I am 19 years old and apply to work at the local movie theater, which is owned/founded by a wannabe business tycoon baby boomer who was like a cross between Donald Trump, Danny DeVito, and Jay Gastby (the Gatsby parallel will make sense in a minute, I promise. But it’s very important to me that you know that this man looked like a Danny DeVito clone with Trump’s toupee.)
They are paying me minimum wage, which back then was about $6.50 an hour, to sweep popcorn off of the carpet with a tiny broom and occasionally hand out mints at the door at the end of movies. Our uniforms were unisex and consisted of a dark green tuxedo jacket and shirt with black bow-ties. There was also a stupid little hat but nobody actually wore them. This isn’t very important, except the uniform actually went with the interior ~design~ of the theater, which I think was supposed to look “fancy” but actually looked like the person who designs Cheesecake Factories dropped acid and got set loose in a Home Depot with an unlimited budget and no directions.
I do my job, sweeping popcorn off of the rugs, wandering the hallways, and occasionally handing out mints. We get free popcorn on break (with no butter) which at 19 I thought was the most amazing thing I ever experienced. Because I was poor, my diet probably consisted of about 80% movie theater popcorn by volume. We could also stand in the back of the theater and watch like 5 minutes of a movie if there was no popcorn left to sweep up with our little brooms.
For some reason Donald DeVito-Gatsby took a liking to me. Not in a creepy way–he just thought I was the shit for some reason. He called me “Tammy” once, which is not even close to my real name–doesn’t even have any of the actual letters of my name in it, which I think he eventually figured out was wrong, but still didn’t care enough to find out my actual name, so he just started calling me “sport” every time he saw me (which was almost daily).
He’d saunter up on his tiny legs while I was sweeping popcorn and say something like, “Doing great today, sport! Keep it up!” and clap me on my little epaulet-clad shoulder and leave. I could never figure out why I appeared to be his favorite popcorn-sweeper. It was baffling.
I have no idea what he actually did to run the theater except wander the halls, occasionally yell at the managers for letting the concession stand use too much butter, and talk about how much his tailored suits cost. Probably nothing.
He would also occasionally hire dance troops to perform Vegas-style routines at the front of the theater before big premiers. This was 1) very weird, and 2) somehow perfectly in-character with everything about this man’s personality and aesthetic.
He once had his high school reunion there, and made a mixtape of songs from the 1960s to play on a loop during the big event. They were all terrible songs, and the CD just played on a loop for years and years and years afterward because he liked it and no one could be bothered to turn it off, I guess. I think it was probably still playing on loop when the theater shut down. It is because of this that I now have a classically-trained rage response to the song “Aquarius” by the 5th Dimension.
Anyway, sometime while I was working there, he decided that what the theater really needed to keep up with the times was to knock out the end of one of the hallways and build an enormous IMAX theater with like 500 seats and it’s own dedicated concession stand that served more expensive food. We didn’t have anything like that in our town, so it was kind of a big deal.
The wall gets knocked out, and the concrete gets poured, and there is a crew working to put in all of the wiring needed for the giant speakers, etc. Donald DeVito-Gatsby is very distressed about this because he was super racist and literally scared of Mexicans, who made up most of the construction crew on-site.
Donald DeVito-Gatsby decides that I am the perfect person to “keep an eye on them” and “make sure they’re not planning anything” because somehow he thinks I speak Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. I attempted to correct him. He doesn’t believe me.
So he sets me up in the unfinished theater with my own little pink hardhat, and now my job is to sit there on an unattached memory foam IMAX seat all day and “watch them”. For what? I don’t know. I don’t think he knew, either.
The helmet is pink because, I don’t know, maybe he thought a girl would be offended by a normal hardhat? I’m not sure. Anyway, the best part of this was that he got some shiny stickers and put “IN CHARGE” on the hardhat when he sent me off into the construction zone. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything. I don’t know why he did this.
The foreman spoke English, but most of his crew didn’t, and we eventually figured out that Mr. DeVito-Gatsby had probably heard me speak Sicilian on the phone with my family and thought it was Spanish, but I still understood almost none of what was being said between the crew at the site. Over the course of about three months we developed this kind of pidgin language when he wasn’t there to translate. After figuring out that I had nothing to eat but popcorn during my shift, one of the guys started bringing me lunch, which was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me at 19.
I have no idea what Mr. DeVito-Gatsby thought these guys were going to do. He made some noise about how they were probably going to “steal something”, which would have been impossible because most of the audio equipment weighed hundreds of pounds. It apparently never occurred to him that the person most likely to steal anything would probably be the person who made the least money–which was me, making $6.50 an hour.
I didn’t actually steal anything, though. Occasionally I’d make off with an extra cup of popcorn on my break, and one time one of the concessions people felt bad for us and brought us the hotdogs they were going to throw out. Mr. DeVito-Gatsby yelled at them for it.
I literally did nothing for months. I just…sat there and took naps and played Pokemon on my Gameboy. There was literally no point in me being there at all, and I was probably in the way sometimes, but I was being paid $6.50 an hour with the owner’s approval to sit there and literally do nothing at all because he was racist.
Eventually, DeVito-Gatsby started adding stickers to my hardhat for some reason. He didn’t tell me why–I would just show up and there’d be more stickers. I would later find out that apparently he went into the equipment room and would just add a sticker whenever he felt I had done an “especially good job”, and I have no idea what that even means considering I was doing literally nothing. One day I came in and he had added “SPORT!!!” to the font in sharpie, so now my hardhat said “SPORT!!! IN CHARGE” with a bunch of random stickers. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything at all, and I don’t know what the exclamation points were for.
Months went by and the IMAX was basically finished, but neither Donald DeVito-Gatsby nor any of the managers ever showed up to reassign me, and I wasn’t going to ask about it because I Really Liked this gig where I was basically being paid to sit there and sleep and play video games all day.
One morning, I came in and the crew was finally packed up and gone, the theater was finished, and I had…nothing to do. At all. It was just… empty. When I went to find a manager to ask if I needed to go do something else, he waved me off and told me that my job was now to “babysit” the IMAX theater until they started selling tickets for the first show. Owner’s orders. OK, I said, and went to sit in the now finished IMAX theater by myself.
This went on for several weeks before my desire to see other humans finally outweighed my desire to be paid to do nothing. I asked again to be reassigned again, but nope, that was my job now. When the theater wasn’t going to be showing movies, my job was going to be to just…sit in the theater. For no reason, and just…I don’t know, stare at the blank screen.
I hung up my pink hardhat, put away my little green tuxedo jacket and went home, and never went back. No one ever called me about missing a shift. I’m not sure anyone even noticed I had left.
