Small Towns and Last Picture Shows
The sordid affairs that I can’t forget
I’ve never gotten over that last scene in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic, The Last Picture Show, a movie I love and show in my Southern Film Experience class every year, because nothing to me says the South quite like its dying small towns and the people who often die with them.
In this final scene, Sonny is consoled by the coach’s wife, Ruth Popper, after she’s berated him for leaving her to marry Jacy. All done in drab black and white, the show fades from one-eyed Sonny’s despairing face, Ruth’s worn hands covering his, to a shot of the dried up town itself, ending on the now closed-forever picture show.
I love a good ending, even if it kills me and makes me think of its similarities to places I’ve been, people I’ve known. My college town out in dead center rural Alabama had a picture show like this one. It was still showing movies in 1979, the year I graduated, and for all I know, it’s maintained screenings since then. But even in the years I sat there watching whatever the college or someone who actually owned the theater chose to program, I felt sad and sometimes desperate for a larger life.
If you don’t know the movie, Ruth Popper is the high school football coach’s wife. The coach is the sort of man who can’t possibly whip the boys into shape to have a winning team. He inspires nothing more than a desire to stay out of his sight and hearing. I seem to recall that his favorite endearment for the boys is “piss ant.” And I also remember, or think I do, his taunting them about sex and other assorted yearnings. Larry McMurtry’s novel has him engaging in some other, more sordid business with the boys, making me remember my old high school’s head coach and the rapport he had with his team.
Coach Webb [not his real name] and his family lived about six blocks from mine. He had a wife, and two children who were popular in school and in the recreational co-curricular pastimes the school encouraged. Once, a friend of mine on the football team reported that while the guys were showering one day, and naturally relieving themselves either before, during, or after, Coach Webb walked in on them, stood there for a few moments, and then offered this profundity:
“Hey boys, shake it more than three times and you’re just playing with it.”
When adult males offer such pearls to the boys who are supposed to look up to and follow them, you have to consider which trails are about to be blazed and with what wonder these boys are supposed to look at this mentor again.
I wondered as much then, and sometimes I think I’m still wondering: if this happened, what else? Did the coach ever say this to his own boy? Is it natural, commonplace, for grown men to remark on adolescent boys’ pissing habits — how much they do or do not touch themselves?
What would it have been like to live with Coach Webb? I must have seen the coach’s wife, but I don’t remember her face or even her name. I remember her son and daughter’s name, but who was this woman who bore his children? When I see their former home in my mind, it is only slightly more comfortable, more polished, than Coach Popper and Ruth’s house. And so I wonder what went on there when my coach’s wife was alone — what did she think? Whom did she entertain? Did she love Coach Webb, truly?
In many respects Coach Webb seemed like a good enough old guy, but my other memory of him is on the football field, in action, turning beet red and bobbing his head at the referees when they dared call one of his boys for holding or for jumping offsides. People in the stands would start snickering and sometimes cheering him on:
“There goes old Webb, carrying on for all he’s worth.”
But I have no idea what he was worth to the school, to his followers, or to his wife. By the time I was a junior, he had been relieved of his duties, for like Coach Popper, he had lost his ability to motivate.
When I think again about Sonny and Ruth, the affair they’d had right there in the house, in the Coach’s own bed, I wonder why I’ve never seen it as particularly strange or wrong? Sonny never set out to seduce this older woman. In fact, it was the Coach who sent him to do the chore of driving Mrs. Popper to the doctor’s, something Coach was most reluctant to do himself. Ruth was having “female troubles” and after leaving the doctor’s office and getting back into the car or truck where Sonny was waiting on her, she begins sobbing.
When they return to her house, Ruth invites Sonny in, gives him a bottle of pop, and explains that she doesn’t know why she cried.
Seventeen year-old boys don’t know much abut what a woman in her late 30s or mid-40s feels and experiences. I’m sure that up until the moment Coach asks Sonny to do this errand, Sonny had never noticed or thought one second about Ruth.
He soon thinks about her all the time, as she does him.
Wisdom and insights find us through movies, sometimes, and many of us can’t escape the nagging memories of things we saw, shapes that formed in our minds and then our imaginations of people we knew — the things they did, or the things we think they did.
That we’re pretty damn sure they did.
By the time I was a high school junior, our venerated math and homeroom teacher had retired, replaced by a woman fresh out of college.
I don’t know. You can’t legislate against it, but is it a good idea, hormonally-speaking, to throw 22 year-old teachers into classrooms full of 16- and 17-year-old students?
As we gathered one morning in our class, one of the guys sitting behind me called a couple of us to come closer:
“Last night I dreamed I fucked Miss Brown [not her real name].”
I don’t remember what any of us said, but I’m pretty certain I know what we all thought and felt. The other thing I know was that when Miss Brown walked into our homeroom that morning, I couldn’t look at her. As she looked out at us, could she have sensed anything different, anything wrong? I don’t know, but soon it was time for algebra to begin, and nothing can puncture erotic thoughts like trying to solve equations with more than one variable.
That might be a good metaphor for what I saw and remember about a scene the next summer. Our church youth directors lived in an apartment complex just three blocks from my house, and sometimes they’d invite a few of us over to swim in the complex pool. One evening when my friends Jim and Susan and I were there, we discovered that Miss Brown had moved in there, too, and was in the pool, wearing her red bikini.
The other thing I noticed was that one of my other classmates was in the pool, too, near her. He was said to be well-endowed. He had a girlfriend in high school, too, and another thing I know without really knowing it: As winter turned to spring in our junior year, 1972, that girl kept on wearing her winter coat. One week, she missed three days of school. While they continued to date until the end of school, they broke up the summer after we graduated. I don’t know why, what they said to each other, found out about each other. What they lost in those spring days that they couldn’t get over.
When I discovered this classmate in the same pool with Miss Brown, he was still dating that high school sweetheart. I wondered since that time what he might have told her about that night and why he couldn’t see her. Miss Brown clearly was not married, and of course, I don’t know for sure what was going on that evening or any other evening that summer. But I also don’t believe in coincidences — didn’t then, still don’t now.
Miss Brown taught for another year at our school, my senior year and then I lost track of her. I’ve imagined that what I saw the previous summer was just a glimpse into what else was playing there in the larger picture show of my small town.
Such glimpses into the moving and still frames of these pictures of life make me feel like I’m standing outside the Coach’s house, knowing that the windows are shut, the blinds drawn for a reason, even though it’s spring and the season’s heat hasn’t come yet. So much could be going on inside there, but what do I know about their life? Can I believe what I see? We think we all know small-town secrets, though how much of what we know comes from our own imagination, our desire to believe scandal?
Thanks to The Memoirist for publishing