It would not be W.C. Fields and Me, as the bio title had it, for a thirteen year old movie lover
A dozen pairs of eyes were upon me, each with that same cynical expression.
They remained me as I shuffled humbly about the room, doing my best to look impoverished, desperate, in dire need.
They continued to look on as a dialogue developed between myself and the grey haired man in the non descript suit, just off of the noisy concession stand from which the smell of melted butter wafted.
"No," he explained in a tone kind but firm, "those have to go back to the distributor."
The "distributor"- whatever that was. I tried again, a little less quietly this time, working in my all-consuming passion for the movies.
When I got a small smile out of him, I thought perhaps that that was it: the turning point. What would surely follow would be a, "Welllll...if it means that much to you.":
But it was not to be. He stood fast to his professional obligations, and no movie-crazy 13 year old was going to change his mind, no matter how sweet, sincere or obsessed tat greasy-haired adolescent appeared to be.
The expressions of the members of the army that he kept behind him - in their regulation uniforms of suit, cigar and walking stick - remained unchanged...and yet, their sneers seemed to have intensified. I would not be taking them home after all, these photos of W.C. Fields which just last week graced the theatre while it played W.C. Fields and Me , and they, to a one-dimensional man, were reveling in the pain of my failure, happy, in the manner of the toddler-hating fusspot in whose image they had been created, that a child of need had had an adult back turned on him.
I considered trying yet again, but by the time my eyes fell from the silent sneer of the endless Fields' to the off-white head of the theater manager, he, like Scrooge confronted by Cratchit, was bidding his goodbye through a devotion to the matter of making money.
I left, realizing that no matter what argument I presented, I had no right to those photographs - not because they had to go back to some "distributor," but because that it was he who belonged in Fields'company and not I.
He was not the kind to give a sucker an even break.
