#my friend said that the background looks like an 80s arcade carpet

[all-that-good-stuf]

This man has taken over my brain

[sending-the-message]

Reel to Real by Cymoril_Melnibone

Anyone who was a teenager in the 80s seems to have strong memories about it. It was a youthful age, a time full of flavor and color, when plastic pop fakery distracted us from the darker undercurrents of the adult world’s climate. Teased hair, big earrings, neon clothes and jelly shoes endure in the lighter recesses of my own memories. A ton of other stuff is more background focus for me; Transformers, side ponytails, and orange bubblegum that smelled like soda in the sun, but I guess certain imagery defines an age differently for different people. We’re transported back to slightly different worlds, whenever we remember. For someone else around my age, it might be a packed gaming arcade. Your lips are sticky with Fanta and the menthol burn of the stolen cigarette you just traded with someone, your mental soundtrack an out-of-synch chorus of PacMans burbling wakawaka in the background. Or maybe your memory-self is edgier; making out in your parent’s Pontiac Fiero, his denim jacket tucked into the window for a makeshift privacy curtain, and the heavy, sickly scent of strawberry lipgloss filling the tiny space. Whatever you remember, there’s often a curious innocence when people recall that era, right down to the music and the TV shows. Young people seemed less afraid to do new things, to express themselves in ways they couldn’t in the 60s and 70s, and less jaded than they seem now. But when I scrape away the brightly-lit, plastic surface of my own childish perceptions, there’s something much darker spliced into my memory reel. Whatever else it was, and whatever it was to you, it was a time of wonder and tragedy for me. I suppose that’s why I still linger there in my mind, wishing I could go back and set things right – to change history, and to bring back my friends.

    We weren’t exactly losers, but we sure weren’t part of the cool clique either. My mom was a teacher and my dad ran a furniture store with my uncle, selling ‘space-age’ mattresses and couches that tried to eat you if you sat in them too long. Chris and Toni’s dad worked at the local brewery as a foreman, and their mom sold makeup around the neighborhood. Jason was the odd one out, because he only had a mom. His dad died, working as a diver on an oil platform; but the insurance money meant that they’d be comfortable for the rest of their lives, if they were careful. Despite coming from what looked on the surface like pretty normal families, we never quite jelled with the popular kids. I was skinny and geeky, obsessed with Tolkien and everything fantasy. Jason’s love of video games also bordered on the obsessive, and Chris talked motorbikes 24/7, his room wallpapered with magazine pictures of red-and-white Japanese bikes that looked more spaceship than wheeled vehicle. He’d been saving every cent from his allowance since he was in kindergarten, in anticipation of the day he could buy his own. And Toni, who would punch anyone who called her by her full name, was far too much of a tomboy to ever fit in with all the fashion-obsessed girls at school. So we kept to ourselves, our own private little gang, and we were mostly ignored by everyone else. I suppose it was that isolation, but still being part of a group, that allowed us to just do our own thing, free from the worst social consequences of being considered weirdos. That was how we managed to start up our little film club.

  When sales of VCRs really started to boom, it had a big effect on one of the mainstay leisure activities in our small town: going to the movies. After the video store opened up, and you could rent out tapes for a fraction of the cost of a movie ticket, there was a sharp downturn in the number of folks who wanted to go out to the picture theater. At first not everyone owned a VCR. But people would crowd around a neighbor’s TV to maximize the number of viewers, stuffing their faces with home-made popcorn and drinking cheap beer. There were two cinemas in our town, and the larger one managed to keep going. But the smaller one slowly fell into disuse, eventually opening only on Friday and Saturday nights – when people were too drunk to care about the price. That meant that during the rest of the week, the theater was empty, and because his mom’s newest boyfriend owned the place, Jason was allowed the keys. The huge metal lockers in the projection room were filled with carefully labelled reels of film, which smelled of something faintly insectoid, like crushed ants. Jason had been taught the basics of how to use the projector, but as the resident smart kid in our group I quickly gained a knack for knowing how everything worked, so it mostly fell on me to sit in the booth and change the reels mid-film. We took turns picking the films. Jason nearly always wanted to watch The Last Starfighter; Chris was all about Knightriders and Savage Dawn. Toni usually went along with whatever her older brother picked, but once in a while she’d ask for Splash or Freaky Friday. As for me? You can probably guess; a steady diet of Labyrinth, The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal. There was a sort of unspoken pact in our group that we didn’t mock anyone else’s choice of film. But probably because he was a year older than the rest of us, Chris often felt he could break our unwritten rule. Most times he only did it to me, to make fun of me for my ‘girly’ choices. “Matt,” he would growl at me, crumbs of popcorn stuck to his nascent mustache, “Sometimes I swear your dick fell off when the doctor spanked you at birth.” Jason would laugh too loud, and Toni would just stare at me with those huge brown eyes of hers. But as time went on, and his hormones really ramped up, I wasn’t the only one that Chris clashed with. It was because of one of his testosterone-fueled teenage rages that we made the greatest – and worst – discovery of our lives.

  How the fight originally started, I don’t remember exactly. I think Chris complained that he didn’t want to sit through the 20th re-run of Return of the Jedi, then Jason got shitty because it was his turn, and the Rules were the Rules. I do remember that as the film started, Chris climbed up on the low stage under the big screen, and started reading out the opening scroll in a pompous, mocking voice, peppering it with foul language. Jason went red, and started pelting him with stolen popcorn, but Chris wouldn’t stop, he just got louder and more obnoxious. When Jason launched himself out of his front-row seat and shoved Chris against the screen, the rage at someone daring to retaliate was writ so large on the older boy’s face it was visible even from my spot in the projection booth. Chris vanished through the screen. I sat for a moment in shock as I realized he must have torn right through the shiny fabric. Jason’s “uncle” was going to kill us. But when Chris didn’t re-appear, and Jason’s yelling didn’t cause him to emerge, I got worried enough to leave the booth and run down the stairs to where the others were. “There’s no hole,” Jason babbled, pointing at the screen. “He just disappeared.” “Stay calm,” I told him, like my dad would say to my mom when she started freaking out about things, “there will be a good explanation for this.” We checked in the small room behind the stage, filled with coils of old rope and broken wooden pallets, but he wasn’t there either. “Ugh, he’s just messing with us,” Toni decided, “he wants us to freak out. Let’s just watch the film and forget about him.” That seemed logical, so we did. I enjoyed not having our pubescent friend ruining things for once. But as the film eventually ended, something strange and wonderful happened. Striped with the text of the end credits, Chris stumbled through the screen, and fell onto the sticky carpet at our feet, laughing hysterically. “Holy shit guys,” he yelled, ecstatic and wild, “I met Luke Skywalker!”

  It took Chris a while to tell us the story in its entirety, but the general gist of it was this: when he had been pushed through the screen, he had somehow gone inside the film. “I had different clothes and everything, like I was part of it,” he explained, pacing back and forth in front of the blank screen, more animated than I’d ever seen him, “and the whole gang was there, Chewie and Han and Leia and Luke.” “This isn’t funny,” Toni said, her mouth downturned, bordering on petulant. “I’m telling the truth, man! I was there,” he jabbed a finger at the screen, “In Jabba’s palace, even on the Death Star. Wait, look at this!” He rolled up his sleeve of his jacket, showing a fresh burn, the welt running from his wrist to his elbow, “Vader’s saber grazed me while me and Luke were fighting him.” His grin was enormous as he ran his hand through his thick curly hair, “Holy moly, this was the best night of my entire life.” “Prove it,” Jason said, arms folded, “do it again. Matt, set the film up.” “I have to rewind the reels. That’s gonna take a while,” I told him. “We need to get home,” Toni reminded us, “it’s getting late.” “Tomorrow, then,” said Jason, shouldering his schoolbag. He shook his head at Chris, eyeing the burn on his arm, skeptical and jealous all at once, “but if you’re lying, I swear I’m gonna tell your dad you’re making shit up. He’ll knock the snot outta ya again.” After locking up the projection room, I handed the keys back to Jason. “Do you think he’s for real?” “I dunno man. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”

    Everyone was early, already eagerly waiting by the side door to the old theater when Jason finally sauntered up with the keys. “This time I’m gonna go for the Emperor,” Chris was telling us, his eyes bright with barely contained excitement, “I reckon I can take him out while Luke and Vader are fighting.” “I reckon you’re so full of shit I can smell it on your breath,” Toni muttered. Once everything was set up and the film had started, I ran down to meet the others. We all stood in front of the screen, bathed in the yellow light of the text crawl, barely able to look at each other. “Do we go in now?” asked Jason. “Wait a sec.” As the words faded into infinity, Chris shoved Jason at the screen, then jumped into it himself. They both vanished instantly. Toni and I exchanged a long, terrified look, then she grabbed my hand and we both leaped after them, eyes shut tight and braced for the inevitable impact with the taut fabric. Instead, we found ourselves in another world. It’s hard to describe that first experience, on the other side. It was everything Chris had said – and more. Whatever we did, the story took our actions and wove them into the plot, inexorably guiding us towards some heroic conclusion. We felt different too. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of everything, and I felt bigger, stronger than I did in the real world. Ironically, I felt more real. Chris was like a young Han Solo, so full of confidence and bravado it was infectious, and we followed his lead. I never wanted it to end, and I knew the others felt the same way. But it did, and far too abruptly we found ourselves ejected from that world, just four ordinary kids again, lying face-down on the stained carpet of the theater. “What happened?” Toni asked, rubbing her hands, filthy with droid grease, on her dungarees. I blinked, staring up at the booth, “I wasn’t there to switch over the reels. We got kicked out early.” Chris swore as he stood and dusted himself off, his hands still shaking from adrenaline, “One of us has to stay in the booth.” “Only me and Matt know how to do it,” Jason groused. “Well, you two clowns will need to take turns then, wontcha?”

  I missed the next adventure on the other side of the silver screen, and the one after that, since Jason hurt his hand riding dirt bikes in Timerider, which was Chris’s next pick. By the time it was finally my turn to pick a film, I was fit to burst with excitement, and spent the whole day at school doing nothing but staring at the clock. Today I was going to ride Falcor and save the Childlike Empress. Once inside the theater, Chris rolled his eyes at my choice and asked me if I was in love with Bastian, because I was such a girl. But I knew that once he was riding Artax across the Grassy Plains and hunting purple buffalo, he’d shut the hell up. How could a motorbike compare with that? That night was so magical and wonderful, it left me gasping for air when we re-emerged. I’d been the hero, slaying Gmork and ending the Nothing before it could rip Fantasia apart. “Okay. I guess that was pretty fun,” Chris grudgingly admitted. We fell into a decent rhythm after that, even if Jason shirked his reel-wrangling duties more and more often, leaving me in the projection booth while my supposed friends experienced things most of us can only dream of. Still, I made the very most of my time in those places, exploring the Labyrinth with Sarah, Ludo, and Sir Didymus, or slaying winged terrors with Galen in Dragonslayer. The best night of all was one when Chris and Jason were both grounded. Toni and I went back to Fantasia, just the two of us, and it was so different without the others. Of course, it was cut rudely short, because there was no-one to change the reel. But for half an hour we had our heart’s desire; she was the Chosen One, and I was the Moon Child, and everything felt right as the Nothing was banished, along with all the Somethings we couldn’t express. We never talked about that night again. Because like all good things, our adventures had to come to an end.

  Chris turned up that Sunday in a foul mood, one eye suspiciously puffy, and both of them red. Toni wouldn’t say a word, even more mute than usual. “Just play the damn film,” Chris told Jason as we filed into the theater. It was my turn again – I wasn’t accepting any excuses from Jason this time, it had been too long since I’d been in. I’d picked Labyrinth again. There were still plenty of places I hadn’t yet gotten around to exploring in detail. I should have known from the beginning that Chris was going to be an asshole. I should have told him to wait outside, but I guess I thought that fighting Jareth might improve his mood. It didn’t, and the further inside we went, the worse things got. One moment we were walking through the maze, the castle shimmering in the heat-haze of the distance, then the next, Chris and the protagonist, Sarah, were gone. Toni and I searched to no avail, calling out their names, which echoed strangely off the stone walls. “What do you think happened?” she asked. “I’m not sure. But don’t worry, it’ll work out. Everything always works out in the films where the good guys win.” It was at that moment that I heard a muffled scream, not far away. I ran, faster than I could in the real world. Some instinct guided me round several corners, until I all but tripped over Chris, who was lying on top of Sarah. His hands were grinding hers into the flagstones and he forced his mouth over hers while she struggled and kicked underneath him. “GET OFF HER!” I howled, kicking him in the ribs as hard as I could. He rolled to one side, winded, letting go of Sarah’s hands. I turned my back on him, and helped Toni get the shaking Sarah onto her feet. Tears and dirt streaked her pale cheeks, and I reeled with emotions I couldn’t even name. “None of this is real,” Chris coughed, holding his bruised ribs, “none of this matters – she doesn’t matter. She’s not a real person!” “Why? Why do you have to ruin everything?!” I yelled, shoving him into the stone walls, “Why do you shit on everything I like? Why do you have to be such a fucking dickhead?” His sneer was ugly and adult as he spat on the cobbles at my feet. “You’re just jealous. You just wish you were her, dontcha Matt?* He pursed his lips at me obscenely, then turned and ran awkwardly into the depths of the maze, still half-winded and holding his side. There were no more adventures for the rest of that movie. We sat with Sarah, making soothing plans to get her baby brother back, until the film ejected us. Toni and I didn’t look at each other as we each wiped our own eyes, but we briefly touched hands in the dark of the theater before we both headed home. All we saw of Chris was his back, as he pushed through the fire exit and let the door bang closed.

  The next day, as we assembled outside the doors, Chris ambushed me from behind. He grabbed me by the collar and threw me into the brick wall of the theater, jerking me once to make my head smack painfully into the pocked surface. “You might be the hero in your faggot fantasy films,” he hissed, “but out here in the real world? I’m bigger and stronger than you, and I can kick your sorry ass any time I want.” He threw a significant look at Toni, and his breath was hot as he whispered two words in my ear before he let me go, shoving me toward the doors, “Now get up to that booth and put on Easy Rider, before I break your fucking nose.” The pain in my head was a sharp, fiery knot. It throbbed as I climbed the stairs up to the projection room, each pulse in time with those words I couldn’t unhear, those two beautiful, secret words made into something so ugly. Jason wasn’t a bad guy, but he would never do anything to gainsay Chris’s authority, so I knew I wouldn’t get any help there. He wanted me stuck on projector duty, so he never had to miss out on anything himself. I had thought that Toni wanted to help, but she had to live with Chris. And clearly he had so much power over her that she had told him the very thing I never dreamed she would share. As I got the canisters down from the shelves, an ugly, terrible idea flared in my head, replacing all the pain and betrayal. The moment the red, white and blue engine tank flashed up on the screen, the others jumped into the film, vanishing into a world of hippies and Harleys. But that world wouldn’t last, because the second reel, all set to go on the second projector, did not contain the second half of Easy Rider. By the time I started the motor on the second projector, my hands were sweating and shaking. In a few seconds, the gang would be hurled out of their drug-filled motorcycle adventure across America, and into far more a terrifying world, one of flayed faces and severed limbs, inspired by the real life serial killer, Ed Gein. I’ve often wondered exactly what happened during that transition. Sometimes, when Jason got his timing wrong on the reel switch, the movie world would flicker and ripple around us, like fluorescent lights dying, then righting themselves. I imagined this abrupt switch would be much more profound, and I half expected the poorly understood magic of this place to kick them out prematurely, with the thread of continuity lost. But nobody emerged as the second reel kicked in, and I sat back, smugly imagining the terrors that awaited them.

  When the film ended, only one figure emerged. Toni’s face was streaked with blood, and her clothes were torn, but she was otherwise unharmed. I ran down from the booth as she stumbled off the stage, her legs trembling so much she couldn’t hold herself up properly. As I reached out to steady her, she pushed me away, into the front row of seats. “You killed them!” she sobbed, her tears tracking furrows through the half-dried blood. “You changed the reels, didn’t you? And Leatherface murdered them.” “No,” I said, shaking my head, “they can’t be dead. They can’t be! I just wanted to scare them.” “You fucking idiot! Have you actually watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before?” “No! This was my first time. You know I don’t like horror.” Toni’s next words were heavy with meaning, layers of counter-betrayal and insult beyond anything I had even thought about. “The stupid girl is the only one who survives.” Slumping heavily into one of the seats, my mind raced as I tried to think of a solution. “We can go back in. Maybe they’re still in there. Maybe we can stop Leatherface.” “Matt. He will kill you if you go in there. Don’t you get it? He wins. The boys all die, and you can’t change who wins, you know that.” Her dark eyes were so bitter, so full of pain, fixed on me. “You can’t change who wins, and you can’t change who you really are.” “Then you need to go back in.” “There is no way I’m going back in there, do you hear me?” her lip was shaking as she spoke, and fresh tears dripped from her trembling chin, “you have no idea what they did to me in there.” I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t fix any of this. “What are we going to do?” “I don’t know,” she told me, picking up her backpack, “but I don’t want anything to do with you ever again, Matthew Lawson.”

    The boys were declared missing persons, and the whole town was turned upside-down to search for them. I told the cops the whole story, but they wouldn’t believe me. The police psychologist told my parents I’d suffered an acute nervous breakdown, and I was put on strong sedatives for the better part of a year. Chris and Toni’s Dad went on a huge bender, and crashed his car into the river. The rumor was that he used money he’d pilfered from Chris’s bike fund a few weeks before. Maybe that was Chris’s own final act of inadvertent revenge, his deadbeat dad freezing to death in the dark, icy water, too drunk to fight anything anymore. Neither Toni nor I ever went back to the theater, as far as I know, and six years later, two days after my twentieth birthday, it was torn down and turned into a parking lot. We met then, one last time, as we watched the last trailer of brick and rubble being hauled away. She didn’t even turn the engine of her bike off, and she didn’t say anything to me – she didn’t need to. Those huge, expressive brown eyes wordlessly informed me that she still didn’t forgive me, and that as far as she was concerned, I was still a murderer. As she rode away, her dark hair streamed behind her, and all I could think about was how it had whipped my face as I clung to her waist, her cries urging Artax into a full gallop across the Grassy Plains. I never watched The Neverending Story again. Or Labyrinth. These days, I can’t really watch any film for very long, because eventually I’ll glimpse their faces, and I’ll know they’re inside somewhere, reliving their horrible deaths over and over again. Even now, thirty years on from those events, I can still hear Chris’s words echoing in my head, a mantra that will haunt me for the rest of my life: None of this is real, none of this matters But it was real, and it did matter. In one petty act of revenge, I killed my best friends. And they were my friends, despite all their complexities and all their flaws, and all their unique pain concealed beneath the bright veneer of those times. I killed them as surely as if I’d done it with my own hand.

And I’m still trying to find a way to live with that, but I can’t seem to change the reel.