Photo by John Gevers
For nothing is hidden, except to be made manifest;
nor is anything secret except to come to light.
Mark 4:22
Exposure
by Michelle Shappell Harris
The North African couple sits on the other side of my desk, the wife beautiful with her eyes lined in kohl. We chat in French about their adjustment to this Midwestern city as morning light floods through the plate glass windows, reflecting off the sequins lining the edge of her black headscarf. I commiserate about the challenges here–I’ve been back in the US for almost three years after living overseas–and I pass on some free tickets to a local event, “C’est a voir,” I say. It’s something to see.
The clients leave with an “Au revoir,” and I pack up the laptop, turn off the lights and the heat (the days are still cold this spring), and lock the old heavy green door behind us. My daughter, Anna, holds my hand as we walk down the sidewalk, and we chat about our plans for the day, lunch and Half Price Books, then Grandma and Grandpa’s house to color eggs. As we get into the car and I glance down the street, I don’t tell her that last week a decomposing body was found in an upstairs closet in a house within sight of our car. I’m generally not one for hiding the facts, for keeping secrets, but my twelve-year-old doesn’t need to know this one.
Three mornings a week my eyes graze the row of tired two-story houses just before I make a right turn and park on the street. I read in the paper that three people shared the house–the homeowner and two renters–and that a neighbor hadn’t seen the homeowner for weeks. This house is nondescript, white with two stories and a covered porch. The roof over the porch seems to sag a little. I think it looks tired. The neighborhood is about a century old, with two-story houses constructed on small lots back when a trolley carried the population up and down the busy business corridor. These days, their condition and price vary wildly from street to street—you could find a fixer-upper for $20,000 or spend $80,000 on one that has been updated—the kitchen remodeled, walls painted in subdued hues, the wooden floors revealed and shined.
I wonder if the renters with the secret walked by my office or waited by the bus stop across the street. I would have seen them if they did. My old wood desk faces the windows, and people often peer in as they walk by. Sometimes our eyes meet.
My daughter knows that this neighborhood is different from ours, which is twenty minutes away in a leafy suburb; it’s why she holds my hand when we walk on the sidewalk here. I can’t imagine a dead body being hidden in our suburban neighborhood, but, of course, it could happen. A meth house was raided just a few streets from our street not long ago.
All manner of people have their secrets. And buildings, for that matter.
#
Photo by John Gevers
I coordinate a translation program for a nonprofit organization, and though the office is officially closed on Fridays, sometimes paperwork can’t wait. I had dropped by to print and stamp and hand off the French translation that I finished the night before, my daughter tagging along so we could get started our girl’s day out.
The office is the only renovated section of an old theater. A nonprofit bought the building years ago. Programming—projects for economic development of our corridor, sewing classes down at the welfare office, training of English teachers, and my translation program—have all run out of this space. One wall is brickwork, laid by a master mason, Harvey, who restored and rebuilt, weekend after weekend. The other walls are painted in rich burgundy with rotating pictures and artwork–photographs and paintings of the building, people working the community garden, high school artwork. The front is windowed storefront and the heavy green door that clients push hard to open.
The furniture is a mix of old and new–a stiff-backed salmon colored brocade couch and wooden credenza, comfy sage couches, a black table and chairs from Value City Furniture, three desks, mine plain wood with drawers that mysteriously lock me out sometimes. It’s an eclectically lovely place to work. When people come in, they sometimes exclaim, “What a great place!”
Midmornings, I often walk down the street to the Marathon gas station convenience store. In the winter and fall I buy a $1.59 French vanilla cappuccino, in spring and summer, a cold soda. As I wait my turn in line, my gaze turns to the television monitor in the corner above the Burmese cashier who passes change or lottery tickets or cigarettes to customers through the bottom of a Plexiglas barrier.
There is no video or sound coming from the monitor, only still images of men and women with a sign, “Shoplifters of the Week,” taped across the bottom of the monitor. Many of the images are old, from at least six months ago, when I first started walking down to stretch my legs.
The people and the captions have become familiar to me:
“Grandpa stealing hat.”
“Grandma stealing Slim Jims.”
“Stole two cans of Red Bull.”
“Wanted for stealing.”
In some frames the caption writer got personal, “I am a loser. I stole a bag of chips,” or even a little sarcastic, “Reese’s King. I stole Reese’s Candy.” The Reese’s King is young and dark-skinned and wears a T-shirt and baseball cap instead of a crown.
The alleged shoplifters captured onscreen are old and young, black and white. There’s a lot of foot traffic here, so most are from the neighborhood. Some are caught in the act, faces furtive and anxious, but many are without sign of stolen chips or candy, worry or shame.
Posting pictures with accusations like this must be illegal. The photographed and displayed could probably file suit. But their guilt must keep them quiet, and the monitor has been there as long as I’ve been walking over.
The image that always gets to me is the heavyset woman shown entering the store with the caption, “Slick Grandma.” She looks solid, formidable even, in her no-nonsense white T-shirt and sunglasses. I wonder if it was a hot and humid Midwestern summer day and she was coming in for refreshment, if stealing was her plan from the start. For me, sarcasm attached to her age and the probability that she is a grandmother feels cruel.
#
Photo by John Gevers
The Rialto theater opened in 1924 with seven hundred seats. At the center of the neighborhood, just south of downtown, it sat along the business corridor, surrounded by street after street of those new two-story houses.
A spate of Rialto theaters was built across the US in the teens and twenties. The architecture was grand: Art Deco in Arkansas, Classical Revival in Tacoma, Beaux Arts in Deer Lodge, Montana, and Renaissance Revival here in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Our Rialto thrived through the Great Depression and World War II. The owner added three hundred balcony seats in the forties and replaced the outdated vertical sign in the fifties with a flashy new marquee with plenty of space to list movie showings. People from all over town gathered here, generations of them.
Gradually though, families left their now too-small lots and aging houses for fresh suburban houses and lawns, and multiplexes replaced dusty old neighborhood theaters. Some theaters closed and some turned to porn, like the one on Times Square that showed porn downstairs while the upstairs housed a studio, filming shows like Romper Room, a daily show for children.
“Romper, bomper, stomper boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me do. Magic Mirror, tell me today, have all my friends had fun at play?”
Romper Room began each show with the Pledge of Allegiance. A hostess led a group of six to ten preschoolers in games, songs, and moral lessons. Mr. Do Bee, a large bumblebee, began each sentence with, “Do bee,” as in, “Do bee kind to others.” Each episode ended with the hostess holding up her magic mirror, a large hoop with a handle, and looking out into television land, “I can see Timmy, and Michelle, and…”
Kids were encouraged to mail in their names to be read on the air. First names only, of course.
The Fort Wayne Rialto showed Spanish language and martial arts films for a while before turning to porn in the eighties. Those three hundred seats in the balcony were torn out and small rooms constructed for customers paying for prostitution. Each room had its own theme; one, called the dungeon, had mirrors and a cross and a wooden beam and torture. Windows were covered with dark paper and X-rated movies were filmed. The place was dark.
In the winter our office space is cold. It costs more than the nonprofit has to keep it warm enough, so we use space heaters to fill the heat gap. Sometimes the pipes freeze. The theater itself, separated from the office by a gray metal door, becomes bitter cold. I figure customers in the theater must have kept on their coats.
What would it be like to have a porn theater smack dab in the middle of your neighborhood, next to the furniture store, a block down from the pool, a couple more from the high school? I wonder if the clientele entered by the front doors on the busy business corridor, unashamed, or darted in the small back door by the alley, the one that still has a small white painted wooden sign above it, The Rialto Theater, spelled out in black?
#
Neighbors and churchgoers decided to fight back and marched around the square block of the theater. When it was very cold and the snow was blinding, they marched in shifts. They chanted and sang and prayed as months turned to years. The owner of the building, John, fought back, posting phone numbers of the picketers on the marquee, often targeting the women who received nasty phone calls in their homes. I’ve been told that one woman’s hair turned white. Eventually, a local attorney took up the cause, using existing racketeering and prostitution laws. The activity up in the balcony had stretched the limits of the law.
The Rialto closed its doors and sat empty for ten years. The roof deteriorated. Water seeped in, curling the paint on the ceiling and walls. Mold spread. The exterior of the building looked worn and tired.
#
Photo by John Gevers
One day last winter a contractor came by to check out the insulation for an estimate. I showed him the basement, cluttered with English teaching and office supplies, the artificial trees we put in the windows over Christmas, all manner of sewing supplies and old donated laptops, and forgotten leftovers of open houses and events. We felt the cold draft flowing from the space below the upstairs windows. Back upstairs, in the light of day, I put on my coat and opened the gray metal door to the rest of the theater. We walked through the darkness, the expanse of peeling ceiling and walls, over the safety tape.
When we headed back towards the relative warmth of my office, we found that the door was locked. The contractor had pulled it shut behind us as we entered the theater, not knowing that it locked automatically. We spent nervous minutes, making our way through the space, our voices low in the darkness. We tried the front theater doors, dark green like my office door and firmly locked. I made my way to a side door, pleased when it yielded and opened into the light, only to find a courtyard, entirely surrounded by the building, with no other door for escape. We used the contractor’s phone as a flashlight towards the former stage, where a door led outside to the relief of sidewalk and houses and light.
#
Photo by John Gevers
Some names conjure images, feelings of shame and smut, sleaze and raunch. Names like Gomer and Jezebel. Words that bring to mind acts that shame us.
I’ve seen a raised eyebrow, a smirk at the mention of the Rialto. The reaction confused me until I realized the source. I was in high school when the Rialto began showing porn, was aware of it in the distracted way of a self-absorbed teenager. Though my family lived just a few miles away in a small ranch with plastic for storm windows, I knew that the neighborhood around the Rialto was best avoided.
I think the Rialto is still seedy and stained for some, the building too dirtied by the past and too broken for fixing.
#
Sometimes I’m ashamed that I don’t live here, that I live in a leafy suburb on the edge of the city and commute twenty minutes to work.
It’s a curious thing that I work in a place surrounded by such darkness and draft. I like light and heat. You may roll your eyes. Who likes dark and cold? But it’s true. I need light and warmth for my wellbeing; I crave them. I have a condition, Reynaud’s disease: if I allow myself contact with too much cold, the blood vessels in my hands and feet constrict and close, and my skin dies, leaving my digits swollen and sore until they heal, weeks later. I have burned my toes by holding my socked feet too close to the heater in a car and will hog any fireplace, sitting until my back is red and hot under my sweater.
And I have always been one to seek out a sliver of sun. Before moving to Fort Wayne, we lived in the southeast corner of France in a region artists and the unwell have come to for centuries to seek out the mild climate and particular light. Before that we lived on the equator, where I was never cold. In the Midwest winters, which have seemed particularly long and dark since our move here, I am thankful for the light streaming in through the four skylights in the living room. For twenty minutes on winter mornings, I sit before a light box, bathing in bright light to ward off the darkness of depression.
Back in the eighties, even if I had been aware of the picketing and demonstrations, it’s unlikely that I would have joined in, even if I had been a decade or two older. I’m not one to raise a fuss. But I can inhabit this small office with light coming in through the plate glass windows.
#
Photo by John Gevers
Over a decade ago, the Rialto was purchased with vision for a fresh start. People say that back then the darkness was so deep in the theater that your skin could feel it, that your eyes struggled just to ease into it. They say there was a corner of the auditorium where, near the tattered old screen and remnants of a curtain, through a ragged hole in the wall, light pierced through the darkness, a blinding relief to eyes hungry for light.
One Saturday morning, a group of people stood upstairs in the room behind the balcony. It had stayed dark, windows covered, for fourteen years. They had been coming, for weeks, dust masks on, men and women, young and old, from the churches, from the neighborhood. They had donned hard hats and tool belts, had sawn hot tubs in two, demolished dividing walls and mirrors, had taken away that wooden torture beam. I’ve been told that on that Saturday morning in the upstairs room, when the first corner of a window covering was torn off, that light streamed in and reached into every corner, cutting through the dark and dust. I’ve been told that the moment felt holy and new, as though the apostle John’s words, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” were coming to life in an old broken down porn theater.
A picture taken around that time, maybe a couple of weeks later, shows four figures–two men and two women–gazing up to the ceiling while another is poking at it. They wear all manner of work gear—overalls, jeans and T-shirts, baseball caps or hardhats, a plain ponytail. Caught in a moment of expectation, perhaps just before a piece of plywood or a moldy ceiling tile falls to the floor, one leans on a shovel while another is mid-gesture, her work-gloved hands held out. They are silhouettes against the morning light streaming in from the windows.
Nowadays, the upstairs room is clear and bare and open, and still unfinished. I like to take people up there and show them around, talk about the possibilities. Bathed in light and heat, it’s my favorite part of the building.
#
Photo by John Gevers
1 comment
Jeff Bleijerveld says:
Sep 12, 2016
I love your writing style and could read it all day. There was a story to be told about the Rialto, but you took your time about it and the “rabbit trails” we’re worth exploring. Thanks for sharing this tremendous essay. I have a new appreciation for that area of the city and greater insight into you as a writer and fellow sojourner.