Chapter 3: Inside, Outside

Chapter 3: Inside, Outside

I don’t know what’s inside, my masters, listeners, people who holler from the back of the darkened bar for their favorite cover song. I don’t know what’s inside The Magic Lantern, so let’s open the door together. This is real time; my mind is running just a few paces ahead of you (or maybe you’re already here), looking to the right and seeing a cooler stocked with glass Coke bottles and Orange Crush bottles and even some RC Cola and (oh joy) chilled Moon Pies. Looking to the left and seeing a high stool where a bouncer might sit, a big blurry mirror behind the stool, and beyond that a doorway covered by a black velvet curtain and beyond that an old-school record-player jukebox. And then the room opens out and there’s a big wooden floor, some boards rotted right away but mostly solid enough, that extends the entire width of the block to a wall of curtains around which daylight filters; behind the curtains, Gospel figures, is a wall of plate-glass windows fronting on the sidewalk and street. The old “front” to SPOT venue, though it’s nailed up now.

Pastor Bea (who does know what’s in The Magic Lantern) reaches first into the cooler and takes a bottle and opens it with the bottle-opener nailed to the wall and hands it to Gospel. They walk further in. The space might be set up for dance classes or a burlesque show. There are mis-matched chairs scattered around half the room. A mirrored wall. A couple of tables; on one is a game of Axis and Allies, half-played.

Pastor Bea lets Gospel pass her, drinking the Coke.

Gospel crosses the room and opens the curtains and the Gospel sees that the window sills are filled with pots and in the pots are plants, ferns and palms and acanthus and jade, growing riot, filling the space as high as the glass extends. The plants reflect back on the mirrored wall.

“What is this, a club?” Gospel asks. It smells dusty and melancholy, like a club abandoned in daylight.

“It’s a refuge,” Pastor Bea says. “No one comes here unless they’re invited.” She smiles at Gospel. “And I’ve invited you.”

Gospel smiles back. “Like a youth center?”

“Sort of.”

Gospel looks around and does see bookshelves, an old Space Invaders game standing against the wall. Nothing as classy as the cocktail sign on the door, but then, these places change hands all the time. Business start and fold almost before anyone knows they’re there.

“I’m going on to get some work done,” Pastor Bea says — clearly a good bye.

“Well,” says Gospel, “thank you.” She lifts the bottle. Pastor Bea is already moving around the room, sweeping, moving a few papers off a table. “Tootle-oo,” she says over her shoulder.

Gospel lets herself out the door and it closes and locks behind her.

Gospel heads off at a run and leaps up to the next tiered parking lot, matter of three feet, a two-legged jump straight up. Bounces, sprints, takes a long leap to the highest tier. She plunges on, across crumbling blacktop, across a grass lot, squelching mud in the dark. Under a veil of hanging kudzu, into an alley, swing around a corner with a hand on a fire escape, down the alley as it narrows, chimney up between two close-set buildings as far as the top of the divider partition. Balance on the partition, feel it sway (it’s just plywood) and leap down, hitting and rolling to absorb the distance. Grit and mud stick to her shoulders and splatter down the inside of her overalls. There are very few lights — it’s a race in the dark, a cat’s journey. She crosses another road, climbing ever higher on the Ridge, travelling south and up. She comes to an old Craftsman style house, crumbling down and reassembled from plywood and nasty paste-on exterior wallpaper. She leaps the forsythia, balances on the porch railing, clambers up a column and chins-up onto the sloping first-floor roof. Stands, leaps, grabs the balcony railing and hoists herself over.

She stands there warm, gasping, lungs filling deliciously with spring damp.

She’s done this all her life.

She’s home.