The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2011

Another Good Pour

Robert McGowan

Bob had just walked out of the latest Harry Potter. The Half-Blood Prince one. He’d sat through an hour and forty minutes of the film in an excruciating state of commingled boredom and exasperation until finally, unable to endure any more of it, he decided to vacate the theater and let the remaining fifty-three minutes of that muddled extravagance plod forth without him.

Bob had not seen any of the previous Harry Potter movies, because, he would eagerly have explained, he’d outgrown the children’s fantasy genre over a half-century earlier. And it’s true that his having seen none of the others might have been at least part of the reason that, from the very first moments of this one, he’d had not the faintest inkling what was going on. Story wise. But Bob’s wife Julie, more in touch with her inner child than Bob was with his, had long been a Potter fan, had read all the books and seen all the movies thus far, and, hoping she could hoist Bob up on board with her, had taken him to see this latest installment. And she had tried before it began to bring him up to date on the essentials of the overall Harry Potter chronicle so to ease him into the Half-Blood Prince episode and enhance prospects of his responding favorably. But she had easily sensed as they sat there together watching the movie that Bob was not enthralled. The reason he gave for getting up to leave was that he had to go pee.

But, as had been so on another such occasion, he didn’t return to his seat. Which didn’t surprise her. She wasn’t worried. He wouldn’t leave her stranded but would, as before, wait for her in the lobby.

Which had a wine bar.

Wherein he struck up a conversation with a young theater employee who was momentarily idle because all of the movies playing there in the multiplex were currently in midstream so that no crowds were either arriving or departing, no one therefore lining up to buy popcorn or Jujubes or Milk Duds or Goobers or Raisinets. Or wine. Except for Bob, who right away looked over their selection and asked for a good pour of their New Zealand Sauvignon blanc. It was set before him in a clear plastic cup, not a stemmed glass, but the pour was indeed generous and the wine quite a good deal better than he’d anticipated from a movie-house snack bar. He nodded genially to the kid to make his pleasure apparent.

And then, leaning across the counter, and in a manner comically conspiratorial, looking around first as though fearful of being overheard, in near-whisper: “Tell me, am I the only person in this fair city who finds Harry Potter insufferably irksome?”

The kid hadn’t at first been certain how to respond, so serious had Bob initially seemed, but on its becoming clear he was only being facetious, the kid laughed and then abruptly adopted Bob’s clandestine demeanor, looked around as Bob had done to be sure no one was listening, and then confessed to him that, “Actually, sir, you might be the one and only. The only person I’ve heard say so anyway. Around here.”

“Only one other time in my life have I walked out of a movie,” Bob told him. “The Phantom of the Opera. 2004. Remember that one? Revolting beyond all measure. A preposterously florid sound-and-light-show melodrama. I would have thrown up on the theater floor or maybe even had a stroke—I might not be here talking with you today—had I not left when I did. The Phantom of the Opera and now this Harry Potter thing. Plain bad taste, both of them. Or especially Phantom. Half-blood is really more a matter of artistic ineptitude than of bad taste, though of course that as well. How cliché-riddled can a single film be? How predictable its little jokes? How utterly inane overall? Half-Blood indeed. Half-baked is more like it. I’m old. Sixty-six. My heart, my gut, my very hold on sanity will not survive another Phantom or another Harry Potter. A third cinematic torture of this sort would surely be the end of me.”

The kid’s smile, generous as Bob had begun speaking, appeared somewhat uncertain now, not because of what Bob had said but because of the way he’d said it, the fluidity of his language, his dramatic intensity, the adroitness of his impromptu criticisms. But Bob was accustomed to affecting people this way. And he was accustomed also to taking measures so to be thought a regular guy after all. He always pulled up short of descending into the How ‘bout dem [insert name of sports team]? territory, but Bob knew well enough, by long experience, how to change course by setting off down other conversational avenues. “How long have you worked here?” he asked, turning the focus to the other person’s own life and concerns, a strategy that nearly always worked. “Full-time?”

As of just recently, it turned out, a couple of weeks ago, the kid told him, and yes, full-time, but for the summer only. The kid said he was an art student, third year, at the local art college. A five-year program.

“Art. Marvelous. Then tell me, hip young artist, you must have an opinion about the films I’ve just been lambasting. Prithee, say.”

“Confidentially?” The kid wanted assurance. “They don’t like us spouting off about the films showing here, you know.”

Bob lifted his right hand. “May I be struck down . . .”

“Do I know you?” the kid asked him. “Are you a critic or something? You sound like one, or something like one.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. However, no, I’m not a critic. I was a teacher. English. I know how to string words together so that I sound smart, and I have my well-formed opinions, which I enjoy stating persuasively, and which I suppose means that perhaps I should have been a critic after all. But what do you think of my noncritic critical remarks? The two films I’ve been so hard on. Are we by chance in agreement?”

“They both suck.”

“Ah. What more need be said of them, eh? They do indeed suck, young sir.”

“So you left the movie. Good idea. Are you waiting for someone, though?”

“Oh yes, I am. My wife. She’s still in there. A Potter fan.”

“I see. One of many.”

“She’s been a Potter fan forever. A very smart woman otherwise, though. Very. It’s puzzling.”

“And Phantom?”

“That one she liked too. Shocking really.”

“Interesting dinner conversation at your house, I bet.”

“Not really, not about movies. We’ve been married going on forty-three years, and, believe me, some things it’s better not to get into. You’re not married or anything, are you? You’re very young.”

“God no.”

“For both Phantom and now this one, I’ve said I had to go pee, which I really did have to do, so I wasn’t lying, you see. A bit of a prostate problem. Sorry to be so forthcoming about such a thing, but you’ll be old one day. You’ll see. Prostate. Frequent peeing. A real thing. In marriage it’s not good to lie when you can avoid it. And with Phantom my excuse for not returning to the theater was that I ran into someone I knew in the lobby. Which wasn’t true, but what the heck. It worked. This evening, with Potter, I think I’ll just say I stayed in the lobby because I kept having to pee. The prostate thing. Perfectly plausible. Pretty close to true even. Bottom line: some things—insulting films such as these, for example—you just can’t put yourself through no matter what. So you come up with ways not to. You’ll see.”

“Another good pour?”

“Please.”◊