Regal American Gods

As soon as we entered the spacious vestibule of that temple, with its warmth, its gold and pastel rococo decor, its soft carpet, there flooded through me a sense of its opulence and comfort and security. How reassuring was its guardian, the commissionaire in his Regal maroon-and-gold. How voluptuous was its fragrance, that of the perfumed air freshener drifting into the foyer from the auditorium, fragrance that long before we had risen to cinema heaven already carried me up towards it. With each stage of our progress my contentment increased watching the narrow perforated tongue of costly printed pink (stirringly differentiated from cheaper-seats green and blue) jerkily emerge from the brass ticket counter, our passes to pleasure, official, conclusive; stopping at the display of cigarettes and boxed confectionery, their cellophaned rectilinear packaging not only a guarantee of quality but the symbol somehow of something more, of the civilised, the agreeable, the secure;ascending, the wide curving staircase whose milky-green-and white-marbled rubbery treads exuded a de luxe rubbery odour, a faint secondary fragrance that mingled with the first and that seemed to me then the very meaning of luxury; gazing at the large framed photographs of the star lining the wall - David Niven, Maureen O'H ara, William Holden, Doris Day - all with such pleasing, perfect faces (smiling perhaps from breathing in constantly the mingled incenses), remote from the mere mortals we all were (I could never have believed they had to pee and shit like us, had nightmares, got flu); and excitedly wondering, as we neared the Circle usherettes, what the mysteriousiy titled film, the usually, glamorously American film, held in store.

Entry at last into the inner temple. Buoyant interval music, all's-right-with-the-world music - resembling that which, less memorably tuneful perhaps but just as carefree (like that of the children's radio serials), you heard on the soundtrack of some films: all abounce and abubble, this would accompany some good-news-happy hero as he breezed from one scene to the next along a Manhattan thoroughfare of genially honking traffic, sparky newsboys and trouble-free passers-by, tipping his hat to some, who would exchange with cach other smiles of delighted amazement. As well as the music, a third incense, the richest yet, that of cigarette smoke, headily aromatic (How, in the same way as the most intoxicant of all those boyhood incenses, petrol exhaust, its visible form, soft hazy blue, scemed the perfect embodiment for it as in cinema or trolleybus, at snooker hall or dog track, it hung sweetly on the air.) Then the lights going down. In the blackness the rustle all around of silver paper, the swirl up above, in the projection beams, of a filmy blue, and the glow down below, on a luminous digitless cock, of wedges of fruity green and, after a while, appearing up there before us vast, supramundane (even more so if in rarefying black-and- white), the Olympians themselves. How commandingly nonchalant, how American, the gods, with their tilted-back hats and loosened ties! How disturbingly vampish (early erotic stirrings'), how American, the goddesses outits figure-moulding, sidelong glances inviting! How winningly casual, how American, the voices! But after a time, when the 'So you´re telling us your proxy had already given Anderson's attorney a duplicate of the conveyance?" plot had passed my understanding and when characters lowering themselves into chairs around a table warned of further fistless, gunless, Anderson's-attorney's-duplicate stuff to come, the initial thrill would wear off. Then my gaze would be drawn back to the clock, Reinforced in my subconscious by similar emeralds on a backing of black velvet - signals glowing in the night - the phosphorescent hours and hands would seem, like those lights, to be trying to convey something more than their ostensible meaning, But, as ever, trying in vain.