Issue 50. Knight of the hobby horse
Mufflers, Mixtapes, and the Meaning of Life
Hello and welcome to Issue 50. Here’s a newly drafted section in the Kinderszenen autofiction series. Only four more sections to go! I’ve added a voice over narration, and since this story includes a lot of pop music references, there’s embedded music you can listen to as well. I hope you enjoy the read.
Part 9. Knight of the hobby horse
I didn’t want a second job in the summer of 85, but I couldn’t refuse when my high school buddy Dan solicited me to work for him at the Budco 202 Drive-In Movie Theater. I work 3 or 4 nights a week, especially weekends, the busiest nights.
I arrive at dusk and sweep through the parking lot picking up trash. With a putty knife, I scrape off used condoms baked into the asphalt like fossils. Then I enter the snack bar and help prep the popcorn. We don’t make it ourselves. It comes in giant plastic sacks, coated in fake butter. We dump them into the glass bin warmed by a heat lamp.
When night falls, I go to the dimly lit ticket booth at the gateway to the parking lot. You never know who’s going to drive up out of the dark. Teenagers on dates or in rowdy bunches. Creepy old dudes all alone. Families in station wagons. Salt and pepper couples, gay dates, lesbian dates, which makes perfect sense, I realize. Little chance of catching flak from bigots here in the dark.
They drive up and pay with cash. I make change in my head (no cash register) and hand them the ticket stubs—easy work but lonely and slow, after the showtime rush runs its course.
It’s a hot August night, humid and swampy. The crickets are chirping. Mosquitoes are everywhere. Moths dance around the light bulb. I pass the long night reading a book, Selections from Kierkegaard, a paperback I picked up from the college library book sale for a dollar last semester.
Dan drops in about halfway through the film and puts most of the large bills from the cash drawer in a zipper bag, which he’ll store in the safe in his office until closing time. If robbers come to the booth now, they won’t get away with much. I place Kierkegaard on the sweaty countertop.
“Philosophy?”
“Yeah, I’m kinda into existentialism.” I’m afraid it looks pretentious. Heaven forbid I come off as a poseur. Dan looks a little bemused.
He goes to Temple. He’s been reading Kant for a summer Intro Philosophy course. He riffs awhile about the Kantian categories of thought: quantity, quality, relation, modality—the pure concepts of understanding, the condition of the possibility of objects in general. I nod, pretending I get it. Listen, I want to tell him, we’re just suburban kids. We’re not equipped to really understand any of this.
He asks what I think of the categorical imperative, the steadfast adherence to an ethical rule, regardless of circumstances.
“Act only according to the maxim whereby you can will that it should become a universal law.”
“Like what if everybody did this?”
He nods. We kick that one around a bit.
Then two drunk guys arrive at the booth in a pickup truck. They ask for a discount because they’re late to the film. I look at my friend. He’s the manager. What would Kant have you do? He strikes a deal, four cans of Miller beer for admittance. He offers me a can and points to the Kierkegaard book.
“What are you getting out of that?”
I tell him I’m grappling with Fear and Trembling, how Kierkegaard is analyzing the Old Testament story. God tests Abraham, tells him to march to Mount Moriah and kill his only son Isaac, and he goes ahead and aims to do it, in spite of the absurdity of the request, with absolute faith, and then an angel stays his hand as he’s about to slit his son’s throat.
He sips the beer. “That’s fucked up. Why the fuck would he fucking do that?”
I shrug. “He’s really into explaining all the ins and outs of it. It’s so hard to follow.”
“Sometimes I wonder, why bother?”
I look at him. Philosophy’s like a hobby horse for the brain. The painted ponies go up, and must come down.
