The Periodical Cicada

My first job was at a movie theatre near my house. I began working there in the spring of 1986, during my senior year of high school. We were paid minimum wage, which at that time was well below $5.00 per hour. A small bucket of popcorn cost more than that. I started out as a concessionist, working on weekends. There usually would be two concessionists as well as a ticket seller and two ushers. We sold buckets of popcorn, drinks, and candy, all grossly overpriced, before each show. We always asked people if they wanted butter.  Inevitably they would ask if it was real butter. We’d say no, of course not, but they’d ask for it anyway. At the end of the night we would clean up. We were supposed to thoroughly clean the popcorn maker, but we never did. It was too greasy and disgusting. Only my friend and coworker, Jen, ever cleaned the machine. We could take home leftover popcorn, sometimes enough to fill a garbage bag. After only a few shifts working the concessions, I could not even consider eating popcorn, but I still brought it back for my family.

There was a terrible process in place to match up the cash taken in to what concessions had been sold. As part of opening concessions we wrote down how many popcorn tubs, drink cups, and pieces of candy we had. We usually relied on the count from the night before, rather than re-counting everything. So right off the bat, these numbers were most likely wrong. At the end of the night we would count again and subtract those numbers from the starting totals. Then we calculated how much money we should have in the drawer based on the price of the different categories of items and how many of each were sold based on the tubs, cups, et cetera, that were missing. Then we counted the money, and that number was supposed to match up with the value of what was sold. It never did.  For these numbers to match, we would have to have counted everything correctly, twice, charged every customer the right amount, given them the right amount of change, and done all our math correctly. It seems astronomically unlikely we’d ever get this right, that we would ever be “even” at the end of the night. Still, I yearned to be even every time, never realizing it was impossible, never realizing that it didn’t even matter. The margins on concessions were huge, nearly double what the theatre brought in on ticket sales. However, in my mind, the balancing of the cash drawer at the end of the night was a huge deal. Our manager, who never came out of his office until it was time to close, always looked so disapproving when we explained we were short again.  We never had to pay the difference, usually somewhere between $20 and $80 a night, but the threat was always there, hanging over our heads as a ghastly possibility. Or worse, perhaps we would be fired. I thought that if I was fired from my first job, that would set the tone for the rest of my working life. I would never be able to hold down a steady job and would probably end up on the streets, or living with my parents forever.

When I first started working, the manager was named Kabir. He seemed quite old to me, but he was probably only 30 or 35. He came from another country, perhaps Bangladesh or Pakistan, I never knew.  He didn’t talk much and stayed in the office most of the time.  When he did interact with us, it was abrupt and gruff. Sometimes a bunch of other men, managers from other theaters, we assumed, would show up and they would all go into his office and shut the door. They spoke in another language, fast and unintelligible to us. Why did they need to meet at our theater so often? We had no idea. We were under the impression that there were cameras in the lobby and that Kabir had a monitor in the office and could see us downstairs in the concession booth, but we never really knew for sure.  Our interaction with Kabir was minimal. I was afraid of him.  My friend Paul, who was an usher, despised him. On the plus side, Kabir left without a word on many occasions when the theater was slow, not returning until closing time.

Eventually Kabir and all the other guys he hung out with, who actually were managers at different movie theaters in the chain, were fired as a group. We heard a rumor they were stealing from the company. Of course we all said we knew it all along. I was angry that Kabir had given us a hard time for being short, due to honest mistakes, when he was stealing on purpose. Paul had already been fired for sleeping in the back of the theatre in between shows, but he was glad to hear that Kabir was gone. He worked at the video store across the street now (consider the irony), but he later came back to the theater under the new management to work as a projectionist. Projectionists were truly a different breed from the rest of us. They did not technically work for the manager, but for the theater chain, and they had their own rules. When I moved up from concessions to ticket seller, or “booth” as we called it, I was a little more daring. Sometimes I let family and friends in to the movie without paying if Kabir had left on one of his long, unexplained absences. Sometimes a handful of people would be sitting in the theater, waiting for the move to start, but in fact no tickets had been sold. The projectionist would complain a little, but would show the movie anyway.

The new manager was Kamal.  He was a student at American University, young, good looking, no foreign accent. He told us he was from Kuwait. He was fun and charming. He had a sports car. One of the girls from my high school who worked at the theater, a sophomore, started dating him.  He had parties at his apartment near the university and invited all of us to all of them. One night, when we were inevitably short at the end of our shift, he pulled a couple of empty jumbo popcorn buckets out of the trash and put them back on the stack of unused ones. “Now you’re even” he said. That was probably the coolest thing I had seen anyone do, ever, up to that point. Would I ever be that clever, to instantly solve a problem so elegantly and with total confidence? I didn’t think so. Math was not my strong suit, let alone economics, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to contemplate an end-run around the rules. It was what I would call a “man behind the curtain” moment, when Dorothy realizes that the Wizard of Oz is just a regular man, creating the illusion of the Great and Powerful Oz with smoke and mirrors. I realized that reconciling the numbers at the end of night, the moment I dreaded from the start of every shift, was meaningless and not even necessary. I had seen what was behind the curtain at the theater and could never unsee it.

An artist’s drawing of the theatre.  It is now a CVS.