Comment from Rebus:
The little painting to the right was the third in a series Rea did in 1983, ostensibly to amuse his mischievous girlfriend, Tana. In each of them I was killed me off in a different way. She told Rea I was a chump, so I deserved it.
Fourteen years later, feeling challenged by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up," Rea first attempted to write an account of his departure from the Biograph. Since it required revealing some of his troubles with what he called "melancholia," it wasn't such an easy project to execute. Eventually, this version of the story was assembled in 2007 and then edited in 2023.
When one senses the presence of a specific person in association with some unexplained occurrence, without any tangible evidence of their involvement, what real trust should one put in such raw instinct?
How much of a hunch is a flash of extraordinary perception? How much is imagination?
There was no reply.
My wise grandmother had told me a thousand times to never go against a hunch. Had I have discussed it with her I'm pretty sure she'd have said a clear message from what she would have called my “inner voice” should always override all else.
Instead of seeking her counsel I asked only myself: “Why would that person call me, to hang on the line and say nothing?” It made no sense. So, I opted to study the hunch ... to examine it.
As I walked toward the closest bar, the Village, I didn't suspect that I was already caught in an undertow that would eventually carry my spirit far away from so much of what had mattered to me for 10 years.
Now I understand that my grandmother knew something about hunches that I was yet to learn, the hard way. She knew a true hunch is a bolt from the blue that cannot be gathered and investigated. It can’t be revisited like a conclusion. No, a true hunch can only be felt once. Yet, for some reason it was easier for me to view my inconvenient hunch as counterfeit.
After a haphazard year-and-a-half of one-night stands and such, following the break-up of my marriage, had a new girlfriend. Tana was long-legged and sarcastic; she could be very distracting. She was a fine art major who waitressed part-time at one of the strip’s busiest saloons, the Jade Elephant. My apartment was just two blocks from there.
A few months later my nose was broken during a basketball game, and by pure coincidence I saw my grandmother on a stretcher at the hospital, while I was there. Feeling weak, she said she had checked herself in.
Later that morning, when I went to her apartment to see after her affairs, she had already packed everything up. She left notes on pieces of cardboard taped to furniture about her important papers and what to do with everything.
Unmercifully, the stalking telephone calls became more frequent. Anxiety became my all-too-familiar companion, although I didn’t know then to call it by that name -- anxiety. While I surely needed to do something decisive about the telephone problem, for some reason the energy just couldn’t be mustered.
If someone had told me I was sinking deeper and deeper into a major depression, well, I would have laughed it off -- I was too cocky to be depressed. In my view, then, depression was an affliction for people who were bored.
Part
of the persona I had created and projected in my role as the
Biograph’s manager was that everything came easily to me. I frequently hid any hard work or struggle from the public, even the staff at
times. So, while I might have wrestled with the artwork for a midnight show
handbill for days, I would act as if it had been dashed off in an
hour. Looking back on it now, I’d say that pose was part of a cool image I wanted to project for the theater, itself, too.
Living
inside such a pretend world -- within a pretend world -- rather than
seeing the debilitating effect the telephone monster was having on me, I
saw only clues. My strategy was to outlast the caller, to close in
like a hard-boiled movie sleuth without ever letting anyone know it was
getting to me.
Since the calls started around the
time I began seeing Tana, it seemed plausible it could have to do with
her. Maybe an old boyfriend? Also, there was my own ex -- maybe one of
her new squeezes? Maybe my rather eccentric brother (who died in 2005)?
Beyond those obvious possibilities, I poured over the smallest details
of each and every personal relationship.
As a theater
manager, my movie detective training told me it had to be someone with
a powerful grudge, so I created a list of prime suspects. Misunderstandings
with disgruntled former employees were combed through, rivals from
various battles I’d fought over the years were considered. And, there
were people I had hurt, out of just being careless.
It became my habit to question the motives of those around me at every turn. In sly ways, they were all tested.
As I examined my history,
searching through any details that could have set a grudge in motion, a
new picture of Terry Rea began to emerge. I found reasons for guilt
that had never occurred to me before. When I looked in the mirror, I
began to see a different man, a self-centered phony.
It
was as if I had discovered a secret, grotesque portrait of what was
left of my soul, hanging in the attic, like Oscar Wilde’s character --
Dorian Gray.
Then my yellow Volvo wagon was
rifled. A few personal things were taken, but the culprit didn’t touch the
stereo. When my office at the theater was burglarized, my glasses and a
photograph of me were stolen. Of course, I saw those crimes as
connected to the phone calls.
Tired of the ordeal and
frustrated with me, Tana had been imploring me to have the calls traced.
In late September, I finally agreed to do it. A woman who worked for
the telephone company told me I had to keep a precise record of the
times of all the calls, and I had to agree to prosecute the guilty party
if he, or she, was discovered.
Although it had been nearly a year, I was still holding the mystery close to me and hadn’t mentioned it to anyone at the theater. As the telephone company’s pin register gadgetry soon confirmed, there was a damn good reason for that. One way or another, I managed to get revealing information out of the telephone company lady without actually getting on board with the police part of it.
The bottom line was this -- there were two numbers on the list of traced calls that coincided with nearly all the calls on my record. One was a pay phone in Goochland County, the other was the Biograph’s number. Several of those calls were placed from the theater, after it had closed.
Upon looking at the record of the
work schedule from the previous weeks, one particular employee had worked the late
shift on each night a call came from the building,. Not
coincidentally, this same man was the only person who lived in
Goochland, twenty miles away.
Most importantly, it was
the same man revealed by my original hunch -- he was the projectionist
at the Biograph. Now I refer to the culprit only as the “jellypig.”
Why jellypig?
Let’s
just say he had a porcine, yet gelatinous way about him. I prefer to
avoid using his real name because it suits me. People who are familiar
with the cast of characters in this tangled story probably still know his name.
That’s enough for me.
Nonetheless, while all the
circumstantial evidence pointed at only one man, the thought of
wrongfully accusing a person of such a terrible thing was still
unbearable to me.
So, I continued to stew in my own juices. Waiting for something...
In November, I decided to move, to flee Grace Street
for a new pad further downtown on Franklin Street. At a staff meeting,
I revealed aspects of the stalking I had been enduring for a year. I explained
that for a while, I would not get a new home telephone. They were also
told I had proof of who was actually behind the calls, but I said
nothing about any of the calls having been made from the theater. Most
importantly, I left them to guess at the villain’s identity.
Why?
Truth is, I don’t remember. Perhaps I was hoping to scare the jellypig and make him slink away.
Although
the calls at my home ceased to be a problem, a week or so later a
weird note was left in my car. Why that became the last straw I don’t
know ... but it was.
The following afternoon, when no
one else was in the building, I called the jellypig into my office.
Sitting at my desk, I looked him in the eye and calmly lowered the
boom. It was like living in a black and white "B" movie.
None of it seemed real. He looked scared and flatly denied it.
So, I told him about the traced phone calls. That news deflated him; he collapsed into himself. The jellypig stared blankly at the floor. Then he insisted that someone ... somebody had to be framing him.
I was flabbergasted! It hadn’t even occurred to me that he would simply lie in the face of such a strong case.
To get him out of my sight I told him he had one day to come up with a better story, or the owners of the theater would be told and he’d be turned over to the cops. I can’t remember what I said would happen if he came clean.
Most likely, I was still hoping he’d just go
away.
Maybe I didn’t have a plan.
The
problem with just firing the jellypig right on the spot was that
replacing him wouldn’t be so easy. Since late-1980, the Biograph had
been operating as a non-union house. Because of an ongoing dispute with
the local operators union, I was hiring our projectionists directly
off the street.
As it happened, our original
projectionist developed a problem with the local union over some
internal politics. Later, his rivals took over. They fought. He got
steamed and walked out. Which prompted the union to tell me to bar him
from the booth. Although I was uncomfortable going against the union,
politically, I felt standing by the individual I had worked with the entire time the theater had been open was the right thing to do.
The union’s
reaction was to pull its men off the job. This eventually led to me
hiring the man who became the jellypig to be a back-up projectionist.
For reasons I can’t recall, he was then at odds with the union, too, so
he was willing to work at the Biograph in spite of the official
boycott.
Subsequently, our full-time projectionist --
whose squabble had created the problem -- left to take a job with
another theater that had also broken with the union. Which made it look
like the whole town might follow our example and go non-union.
Naturally, that put me in an even worse light with the union brass, who
blamed me personally for the conflict.
The jellypig seemed qualified to
run the booth, so the easiest thing to do was promote him to full-time
when the opening came about. Although I’d never really checked up on
him, like I usually did when I hired people, I put him in charge of the Biograph's two projection booths.
So, if I fired the jellypig --
summarily -- the Biograph didn’t have as many options
as it should have, owing to the fact there was a very limited pool of
qualified projectionists readily available to a non-union house. We had
trained an usher to be backup, but he wasn’t ready to run the whole projection booth operation.
It seemed I had little choice but to get in
touch with the union for a replacement. Since the theater was in a
slump, it was a bad time for operating expenses to go up, and I
expected the union bosses would go for some payback with a new
contract.
The jellypig rushed into my office the next
day with the big news -- he had solved the mystery! In a flurry, he
claimed the person responsible for the calls was an old nemesis of his, an evil genius who was an electronics expert. He could fool the
phone company’s machinery.
It seemed the jellypig's
comic book villain had a long history of playing terrible dirty tricks
on him, going back to their childhood days at the orphanage in
Pittsburgh.
Oh brother!
Then, if that
wasn’t bad enough, the jellypig told me the guilty one was doing it all
for two reasons: One was simply to heap trouble onto the house of the
jellypig, who had a wife and kids to support. The other was to hurt
your narrator, directly ... since the evil genius knew all.
At
this point the jellypig coughed up the breaking news that he had long
been harboring a powerful carnal lust for me. Caught up in the moment,
the jellypig began to sob, admitting it was all his fault -- he had
foolishly shared the vital particulars of his secret craving with the
evil one, himself.
OK. I know it makes no sense now,
but as I listened to jellypig, along with disgust I began to feel
something akin to pity. The crybaby assured me that he would
do whatever it took to stop the evil genius from bothering me ever
again. He begged me, literally on his knees, not to tell his wife or
the theater’s owners about any of it.
My mind was reeling and my stomach had turned.
As
I told the jellypig to leave the office and let me think, there's no
doubt that I should have wondered which one of us was the craziest.
During the spring, the two managing partners frequently brought up the subject of selling the Richmond Biograph, which scared me to no end.
In the meantime, the owners told me expenses had to be slashed drastically, meaning I had to let some people go. Who and how many was up to me, but salaries had to come in under a certain figure. So I was given a few days to come up with a new plan that had to eliminate at least one of the two guys who had been there the longest.
Shortly thereafter, I was at my desk talking on the phone to a close friend about how I was putting out feelers for another job, because the Biograph was for sale. Without thinking, I gave him my new, unlisted home phone number, which had been put in Tana’s name. When I hung up, it struck me the damned jellypig might have heard me, if his ear had been up to the common drywall between the booth and my office.
My home telephone rang several times that night.
That very night! It was pure hell. Mustering the coldblooded attitude to fire friends to cut costs wasn't within me.
Then there was this -- if I bowed out of the picture it would eliminate the biggest salary burden the theater had. By this point I had developed a couple of mysterious health problems. I had literally lost my voice, due to a vocal cord problem.
Plus, the Biograph’s ability to negotiate with the local union would be less encumbered without me around. Good reasons for me to run away from 814 West Grace Street seemed everywhere I looked. With no plan of where I would end up, I suddenly decided to walk away from what I had once seen as the best job in the Fan District.
So I called the owners to tell them of my decision to leave; they also heard about the jellypig business for the first time. The boys in DeeCee were shocked and urged me to reconsider, to take a month off. They had hired me to manage the theater four months before it opened it opened in 1972. We’d been through a lot together.
However, I’m sure they were actually quite torn with what to do with their floundering employee/friend. Clearly, at that time I was not the resourceful problem solver I had been for many years. Beyond that, we could all see fashion was turning sharply against what had been a darling of the ‘70s popular culture -- repertory cinemas.
The future for the Biograph looked dicey no matter what I did. The owners agreed with me that the jellypig had to go ... as soon as possible. I remember mentioning that I had gotten him to promise to get psychiatric help in exchange for me not calling the police.
Without much of an explanation to anyone else, I announced to whoever cared that I was moving on and looking forward to a life of new adventures. Movie critic Carole Kass wrote a small article for the Richmond Times-Dispatch noting that I had “retired.”
Over lunch at Stella’s on Harrison St., soon after my barely explained departure from the Biograph, I told a former Biograph co-worker that maybe I had it all coming to me. Maybe the jellypig had just been an agent of karma. I speculated that perhaps my hubris and nonchalance had all but invited ruin.
She got so angry she walked out of the restaurant. At the time I couldn’t grasp what her reaction meant.
What I couldn’t explain to anyone, because I didn’t understand it myself, was that I just had no confidence. I didn’t know what to do next at any given moment. My gift of gab, such as it had been, was kaput. I stammered. In the middle of a sentence, I would lose my place ... questioning how to end it.
As the summer wore on it turned out the jellypig wasn’t quickly replaced in the Biograph’s booth, which galled me to no end. Apparently the owners were struggling with the union over a new contract.
That’s when I came up with the name “jellypig.” A few weeks after dropping my job like a hot potato I went by the theater to leave off a little drawing for him on the staff message board. It featured a cartoon character I created for the occasion -- the jellypig.
The character was a simple line drawing of a pig-like creature. He was depicted in a scene under a water line, chained to an anchor. He had little x’s for eyes. There were small bubbles coming from his head and drifting toward the water’s surface. The jellypig character was almost smiling, he seemed unconcerned with his fate.
The caption read something like, “The jellypig takes a swim,” or “The jellypig’s day at the beach.” That began a short series of similar cartoons, all left off at the Biograph. The others portrayed a suffering jellypig in that same droll tone.
Yes, I did it to get into his head -- let him be scared, for a change.
Although I was no longer in charge of the theater, it was habit for me to have a say in it’s affairs. Which made for some awkward moments, because the jellypig cartoons weren’t funny to anybody but me. It put the new manager, Mike, who had been my assistant manager for five years, in an awkward position.
For about a year I had been doing a Thursday afternoon show on a semi-underground radio station called Color Radio. As a record played, from the studio I spoke on the phone with the jellypig. He was at work. I don’t recall what precipitated the conversation. Anyway, he told me he had blown off the notion of professional counseling. I warned him that he was breaking his bargain. He went on to say that he didn’t need any help, but that maybe I did.
The jellypig revealed to me that he resented the way I had treated him for a long time -- deliberately excluding him from much of the social scene at the theater. He complained bitterly, saying I had stood in the way of his advancement. But in spite of the way I had tried to poison the owners’ minds against him ... eventually, he would convince them to let him manage the Biograph to save money.
For the first time it hit me -- the scheming jellypig’s entire effort had been a “Gaslight” treatment. All that time I’d been playing Ingrid Bergman to his Charles Boyer.
The anger from what I had allowed to happen welled up in that moment. I told the jellypig that after my radio shift ended, I was coming directly to the theater. If he was still there, I’d break both of his legs with a softball bat.
On my way to the Biograph I wondered again who, if anyone, on the staff might have known more about the jellypig's game than they had let on. When I got to the theater the jellypig had called in a replacement and vamoosed. We'll never know what would have happened had he been there.
Maybe I would have broken only one leg.
The terrified jellypig worked a couple more shifts in the booth after that day. Taking no chances, he brought in his children to be there with him, as human shields. Then, wisely, he split ... for good.
Which meant no more jellypig cartoons.
It took my run for a seat on City Council in the spring of 1984 to wrench loose from that unprecedented spell of melancholia. Blowing off my hunch on that first call probably bought me more trouble than any other single mistake I’ve ever made.
All these years later, I wonder if I heard something in that first call. Maybe it was a sound so faint I didn’t know I heard it; almost like subliminal suggestion. Perhaps it was the churning sound of the projection equipment. Although I don’t remember hearing it, it’s the best explanation -- short of parapsychology -- that makes any sense.
My dear grandmother’s advice to trust six-sense hunches now seems like good medicine. Put another way, it simply meant -- trust your own judgment. Believe in yourself. Which might be the best advice I could ever give my own grandchildren.
Comment from Rebus: By the time the Biograph's pair of screens went dark in December of 1987, many art houses had already closed all over the country.
The golden age for repertory cinemas was a fading memory.
Months behind
on the rent, Richmond's Biograph was seized by its landlord and closed
down forever. It was two months shy of its 16th
anniversary. The building that housed it is still there; now it's the
oldest building on the block.
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