Death of a Blue Movie Star (Rune 2)

"Tomorrow night?" he said. "And the next day?"

"Well, sure. As long as it's at night. I'm shooting in the day. Where's your studio?"

"I don't rent studios. It's all location. We can do it right here. You've got a great kitchen." He looked at Rune. "Come on, can't we talk you into it?"

"Some other time."

"All right ... See you then," he said to Nicole and kissed her on the cheek. He waved to Rune and let himself out.

Rune said, "He's cute. He's available. He cooks. That's a combination you can't beat."

But Nicole was looking off.

Rune said, "What's the matter?"

"Nothing."

"What?"

She hesitated. Then said, "This job. The one Tommy's doing?"

"Yeah?"

"I hope it works out. I hope I don't blow it."

"You'll do fine."

"I'd give anything to get out of the business."

"I thought you liked it."

Nicole walked to the couch and sat down. "Did you watch Current Events last night? That TV program? There were these women protesting porn theaters, picketing some of the theaters. They said some terrible things. My name was on the marquee. I mean, they didn't say anything about me specifically but you

could see my name. And this lady is like, all this porn makes women get raped and children get molested. And this other woman goes, 'They've set back the women's movement twenty years.' Yada, yada, yada ... I felt so guilty."

Suddenly she was crying.

Rune debated for a second or two. Her hand slipped to the trigger of the video camera. The lens was pointed directly at Nicole.

Looking off, Nicole said, "I don't mean to do anything bad. I don't want to hurt people. But, I mean, people came to see me and got killed in that theater. And maybe after one of my films some guy goes out and picks up a hooker and gets AIDS. That's terrible."

She looked at Rune, and the tears were coming steadily now. "These movies, the thing is, it's all I can do. I make love good. But I'm such a failure at anything else. I've tried. It doesn't work.... It's such a hard feeling, to hate the one thing you're good at."

Rune touched Nicole's arm, but she did so carefully. She wanted to make sure her own hand didn't slip into the field of view of the whirring Sony.

The owner of the theater on Forty-seventh Street between Broadway and Eighth was a fifty-two-year-old Indian immigrant from Bombay who had come to this country twelve years earlier.

He and his wife and children had worked hard at the small businesses he'd owned--first a newsstand, then a fast-food stand, then a shoe store in Queens. He'd made a bad investment, an electronics store in Brooklyn, and had lost most of the family nest egg. A year ago a friend had told him about a movie theater that was for sale. After some introductions and cumbersome negotiations and paying amazing sums to an attorney and an accountant, he'd bought out the lease and acquired the fixtures and what the lawyer called the theater's "goodwill," an asset he was completely unable to comprehend.

The diminutive man became the owner of the Pink Pussycat--an eight-hundred-seat movie theater in Times Square. Although at one time the theater used typical industry-standard 35mm dual projectors, all the movies were presently shown via a video projector, which was never quite in focus and gave the actors and actresses auras like fuzzy rainbows.

He had experimented with pricing, finding that the most he could charge during the day was $2.99, although after ten p.m. the price went up to $4.99. Since the theater, which was open twenty-four hours, doubled as an impromptu hotel for the homeless, he found that men were willing to cough up the extra two dollars so they could sleep to the earthy lullaby of Sex Kittens or Lust at First Bite.

There were no tickets. Patrons paid their money, refused the offered penny change and were clicked through a turnstile. They walked into the theater proper past a soda machine that had stopped working in 1978.

There was some cruising, despite warning signs about illegality and AIDS, but liaisons were discreet and the transvestites and the mostly black and Hispanic female hookers, who picked up twenty bucks for their halfhearted services, would usually take their clients up to the balcony, where even the vice cops didn't like to go.

Despite the unpleasant conditions the theater did make money. Rent was the highest expense. The owner and his wife (and an occasional cousin from the huge inventory of relatives overseas) took turns in the box office, thus keeping salary expenses down. And because of the video system they didn't need a union projectionist.