Ticket Stubs

He knew his childhood was over when he took the ticket stubs out of his wallet and buried them in a drawer underneath love letters and birthday and baseball cards and all the other artifacts of youth. The stubs represented a little under a decade of movie going experience, from Toy Story 2 to Superbad. He'd even transferred them with all his other important pieces of identification from the orange velcro wallet he bought at the Grand Canyon when he was ten to the leather one he got his junior year of high school. Now he needed room for condoms, so the stubs had to go...

Whenever he was bored at work or waiting at the bus stop with nothing to read he would take them out and look through them. He had shuffled them all out of chronological order, but they were conveniently dated and priced and titled and would bring him back instantly to the night (or sometimes afternoon) he saw the movie. He couldn't believe how cheap the movies used to be, or how expensive they'd become. There were tickets that he only bought so he could sneak into other films, R rated films that he and his 12 year old friends had to be protected from. There were movies he saw with girls whose bobby pins were lost under the table next to his bed, musicals and fairy tales. Movies he saw with friends he'd lost touch with, movies about war and loneliness and guys trying to get laid. In high school he and some of those friends had a contest to find out who could be first to see a movie in each of the 24 theaters at the local multiplex. He'd bought tickets to some really awful movies but Charlie Larson still beat him. There were stubs for independent films, for retrospectives, for blockbusters and flops. Stubs from the dollar movies, the drive-in, the multiplex, the drafthouse, the art house and the grand old vaudeville house downtown.

The ticket is a beautiful thing, a symbol of a journey, of transportation emotional and physical. You buy a ticket for a concert, a game, a train ride. You go up to the guy in the glass booth with the microphone and he talks to you through a little speaker. Even though he's two feet away he sounds like he's Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, or maybe, more appropriately, Darth Vader. You slip him the money and he slips you the ticket. You take it 100 feet or so and the usher tears it and puts half in a little box. You keep half and they keep half. You share. They tell you were to go and you walk past all the posters, considering them, checking them for the faces or names of actors or directors or writers you trust, who have proved themselves to you, who have given you some feeling that you wanted. They all live in the same place. Los Angeles: The Angels. There is something angelic about the people up there, the way they drift over your head in that dusty beam of light and pour all over the screen, giant and incandescent. People like Brando and Bogart and Hepburn (both of them). Stars. That's really what they are. We all want to laugh and cry and be scared and thrilled and believe in triumph and accept suffering and they teach us how to do this.

After he found a seat he always was careful to put the stub in his wallet. He didn't know why anyone would throw them away. Once you threw them away, the memory would start to vanish. To him the stubs were a catalog of mythic and emotional experience. One reminded him of the time he sat next to two old people who made out all the way from coming attractions to end credits. Another the time an usher caught him and his friends in The Hills Have Eyes when they'd bought tickets to A Prairie Home Companion.

They give the stubs back for a reason.

But it wasn't practical for him to keep them anymore so he put them in his dresser drawer and when he left home for college he dumped the drawer into a box and put it in his parent's attic with the rest of the archive of his youth. He might come back when he bought a house of his own or when his parents died and find the stubs next to the golden souvenir box he got at his senior prom. He might open the box and find his date's corsage, rotten but still fragrant. He might sift through the ticket stubs and remember the movies and the girls and the friends of his adolescence and feel the nostalgia blow through his soul like an autumn breeze.