The Gold Rush

How a Saturday afternoon trip to the movies became a very different kind of matinee.

He had had a fight with her, over the way she looked. She was big boned and fresh-faced, and liked to dress in jeans and matching jacket. But here she was, at his place for the weekend, in a black dress, stockings, and full make-up, amateurishly applied. "You look like a five dollar hooker!," he pronounced. Tears streamed down her freckled cheeks, leaving trails of mascara that weaved like a disoriented waif.

The elevator doors opened and I came face to sullied face with her. "What's happened?," I asked. She fell into my arms and sobbed some more. I led the both of us back into the elevator, and, after its door cut us off from the tenth floor of the downtown Y, we simply stood there. At last she separated her face from my shoulder and spoke.

She told me the whole thing: how she had lied to her religious mother, telling her she'd be staying at a girlfriend's, but the plan, of course, was to stay with him, my best friend, the one I had dropped by to see on my way to a revival of Chaplin's The Gold Rush. Her attempt to make herself look sexy for him was such a failure, though, that after his hooker comment, he had tossed her out. "I can't go back to my parents' place now," she wailed, "Can you help me find a place to stay?"

The film was slated to begin in an hour. All morning I had been anticipating it, like a kid awaiting Christmas. Could we get this done in under an hour? Find her an affordable motel room, determine the status of her and my best friend's relationship, and say our diplomatic goodbyes?

We did it, astonishingly, in half the time. Before I knew it, there she sat before me, on the bed of a barely respectable downtown hotel, complacent as could be. "You deserve a reward for this," she laughed. "Where did you say you were going?"

With that, she took my hand, and led me gently to the bed.

An hour before I had set foot on the main lobby of the Y, there I was, in the dark, a virgin no longer, sitting through The Gold Rush.

I left the screening sober faced. The whole film struck me as childish.