Doc here with a terrific report from Johnny Paradise. Johnny has had this report in the works for awhile, and it's an excellent read. He focuses on Toledo's Westwood Art Theatre, both past and present.
Enjoy!
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SATURDAY NIGHT IN TOLEDO OHIO
It was a random aimless nothing-else-to-do drive down Interstate 75 that first brought me to the Westwood Art Theatre. It was one of those cool nearly perfect nights in early spring when the sun is gentle in the tangerine twilight and the world seems filled with endless possibilities and I selected the exit to Toledo for no greater reason than the sudden vague desire for a Hungarian hot dog and a certain nostalgic affection for the Glass City, that most unassuming of the midwest's minor metropolises that is at once so square so hip so old-school 1950s so small town pleasant so ghetto so post-atomic dilapidation, so beautiful and ruined, so eternally hopeful and resilient.
Boom. What grabbed me was the sign - the old fashioned marquee. I have a special affection for the old movie houses, those half-remembered ruins of our cinematic past and I pulled over and into the deep parking lot and went inside with no real expectations, just a desire to check out another architectural artifact, but there were cars and people going in and I realized that it was open and I did not imagine that there was really a viable theatre inside - just the standard adult video store and an anachronistic marquee.
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| The Westwood Art Theatre April 2011 |
It felt old inside; OLD. You could feel it from the second you walked in; for anyone who was there and who remembers, this makes sense. It just FELT old, this sense of living history clung to the air like stale incense, and while I was filled with a sense of the past I felt this sudden quiet shock, this vibe that somehow informed me that this was not just a video store. I saw the black doors, and men going in and coming out.....
The gentleman who ran the joint seemed suspicious at first as I most likely look more narc-ish than most of the raincoat crowd, but when he saw that my interest in his establishment was genuine he entertained me (in gruff fashion) with tales of the theatre's history. Built for vaudeville, it was almost immediately converted into a movie theatre, which explains some of the structural peculiarities of the place. In the 1960s it became a place to see "art house" movies - the foreign movies that were starting to show some flesh and the American nudies and roughies that were fashioned to follow suit, to sop up box office cash with exploitation and sexpolitation. In the 70s it followed the next trend and became a venue for X-rated films, which was actually less of a cultural taboo in the 70s then it is now - you can still see ads for adult films in old newspapers of the times, and as most students of cinema will tell you, it was "tres chic" to catch an adult film with your girlfriend, though most men were still solitary visitors in figurative or literal raincoats.
I went inside. A more beautiful interior you will rarely see, though it was incredibly dirty - the walls were covered with decades of neglect and the floor - no joke would be extreme enough to talk about what this floor had seen. I was astonished at the size of it and marveled at the classic beauty of the architecture. On that night it was just me and about ten other men, all older. I sat and basked in the glory of something that I had thought was extinct. The biggest drawback was the movie - not projected on film, but a DVD projected onto the screen. Alas. Nothing is perfect. A few men took special interest and starting edging closer to me than I felt really OK about and so I left, vowing to return. I did, and summer became fall and winter and spring and my crush on this charming sleazy dilapidated theatre (with the most awesome poster collection I have ever seen!) continued unabated.
When the theatre sighed it's last, I drive down to pay my respects and to watch the carnival. There was something wonderful and horrible about the spectacular meat parade that final Saturday night - the full panoply of human behavior, variety, depravity, insanity, and something profoundly bittersweet. A man videotaping his wife taking on all comers, several other couples who were sharing the female half, - where else can you hear a line like "Doesn't anyone else want to cum on me?" and have it taken seriously? - A young gay man orally pleasuring a woman in a fashion so complete that it left many of the straight men visibly uncomfortable; an older black man who apparently had never worn a condom in his life; watching him unroll it prior to an ill-fated attempt to wrap it around his organ was mortifying. A zaftig redhead in the couples section who, by the sound of it in the darkness, had a definite gift for squirting. The throng of men walking around, genitals exposed, hanging there as they moved from spot to spot going from couple to couple from the promise of a handjob to the promise of a handjob. It was an incredible night, like being present at one of the orgies of Messalina, and, when the lights went on, and a hundred vampires scurried for the exit, for the night, for the anonymity of their "regular" lives, I took a few moments to look at the theatre itself and to reflect wistfully on the passions and dramas and farces and satyr plays it had known on the screen and in the seats - the living cinemascope pageant of the lives it had touched.
So, here and now everyone knows that it has reopened under new ownership, and I was actually there on the first night (the ill-conceived and ill-fated "all gay feature" night). I have read the reports of others and what has been reported is true - it is cleaner, the projection is superior (though still not film quality, alas) and the ownership is clearly going to great lengths to make couples feel welcome.
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| The Westwood Theatre of the Arts 2012 |
But is it the same? It felt different tonight, subtly so, and for most people this will be a good thing. I felt tonight, just slightly, that some quality was missing, some sleazy charm that the old place had that now belongs to history. It was exceedingly subtle. For all intents and purposes it is either the same or improved.
Anyway, two couples came in this evening while I was there. One was an older pair - I would place them in their very early sixties or late fifties. She had short cropped gray hair and tomboy-ish good looks, and they sat on a couch int eh couples section and seemed to share touches but nothing scandalous and nothing to excite the interests of the hyper-aware men who sat on either side of the corral, watching, leering, staring so intensely that one can only imagine how scrutinized those two felt.
The other couple generated a small buzz from the moment they walked in the door. Both were in their forties. He was tall, well-built, a solid face with a grayish beard, baseball cap, casual working class vibe, and she was very attractive with long dark hair and a touch of some other color I could not place in the imperfect splashes of light that illuminated them both. She had a very sensual manner about her, a confident way of walking, and he kept her incredibly close. It seemed obvious to me at least that he would not be sharing her with the throng tonight. It was actually sweet how close they stood when they walked. She was, it seemed, dressed to impress in heels and black pantyhose.
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| The Westwood Theatre of the Arts 2012 |
They spent some time in the arcade area and it was not long after they entered the theatre that the crowd seemed to double in size...someone on the inside was clearly sending messages to people on the outside, and apparently many of the guys who had been sitting out the film in their autos found their way into the theatre.
Watching their tenderness with each other was more shocking than anything they might have done; it was clear that this couple really liked each other, a lot. There was a quiet intensity to their whispered intimacies that made one feel more like a voyeur than the fact that you were watching a man fucking his wife from behind as she leaned over theatre seats...or the way he played with her hair, oblivious to the crowd of men gathering at the rail. The men in the seats had resisted thronging about the rail during the early part of their stay, but once she got on her knees and starting performing oral sex, it was like a crowd of cannibal ghouls smelling flesh, they slowly ambled to the rail, most of them half-heartedly rubbing their crotches, waiting perhaps for the offer to participate that clearly was never going to come.
The woman, in the wan light of the movie house, had a very nice shape, and they went at each other pretty intensely, which made me wonder about the pressures involved with public sex. They were patient with each other. At one point she stood in front of him and he reached over and inside of her and the sound of the wetness as he furiously motioned made one feel certain she was about the explode and gush all over the floor.
When they were done he kissed her on the head and they left. The throng of men disassembled. The real intimacy of this pair may have been too off-putting to men who have intentionally come either for the ersatz intimacies of theatre women, or for pure voyeurism and the singular pleasure of, well, singular pleasure.
I thought about the men there, about their habits and expectations and would have loved to have talked to that couple about why they had come.
In a mood of introspection I left. Dinner at the White Tower. Long cool ride up 75 back to Detroit.
Johnny Paradise
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Doc here again... Many thanks to this great report from Johnny Paradise. Keep them coming, sir.
Thanks,
Doc
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