East is East

East is East

by Harry Buschman

The Loewe’s Paradise Theater stood proudly on the corner of Atlantic and Nostrand Avenue in the heart of Brooklyn. Every Saturday afternoon it showed silent movies. On Saturday night it switched to vaudeville. If you were fast on your feet you could pay to see the last movie of the afternoon and see the first vaudeville show of the evening for free. To do this you had to hide in the john after the last movie until the vaudeville crowd was seated. then mingle with them when the usher wasn’t looking.

On Saturdays the movies were silent Westerns or slapstick comedies, accompanied by a piano player, (also a heavy drinker). When the movies were over, he would cross the street and play in the barroom all night. After each round of feature films, followed by two short subjects, the piano player would skip out for a beer or two, then come back and go to the bathroom, where he had a bottle stashed away in the paper dispenser. In warm weather he’d keep it in the flush tank above the toilet. He’d linger in the john as long as he could, then find his way to the piano in time for the next show. The projectionist always waited until he was at the piano before pulling the curtain back and turning on the projector.

A musical score for the piano came with the reels of film but the old man couldn’t read music, so he improvised his way through the movie. Every pie in the face, every gunshot, every posse chasing the black hats through the wastelands of the west were all the inspiration he needed.

Silent movies were our ticket to a fantasy world in the twenties, a world that fulfilled our dreams of romance and adventure. There was no radio, TV, Stereo, DVD, Internet––the tenements we lived in were dark and cold and only a kerosene stove and the relentless, inescapable closeness of the family kept us warm. The older folks got their kicks from Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino but the kids reveled in westerns or the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle.

On the romantic side of every boy’s mind he held a vision of the old west. He nurtured a secret ambition to be a range rider––a cowboy of unshakable honesty and quiet bravery––a knight of the purple sage, who preferred his horse and six-guns to the shackles of a wife and children. A private man, a man slow to anger but deadly once provoked. Boys looked at their fathers critically and vainly tried to find in them some of the grandeur of William S. Hart or Dustin Farnum. They reluctantly reached the conclusion that his old man was not up to the competition. He could not outdraw, outfight or outride anybody; as a matter of fact he was barely able to earn a living in the depression years of the thirties.

Cowboys were the only Americans kids respected. Drifters. Fancy free. They roamed the West, reading the trail as well as any Indian could, yet forever circling aimlessly in the trackless waste. Each victory was short lived and only promised an issue of greater danger just around the bend in the trail. Their possessions were limited to a horse, a magnificent jewel encrusted saddle and two enormous nickel plated six-guns that never needed reloading––or aiming for that matter.

The Paradise Theater was “Dusty” Ryder territory. All his films were shown there on Saturday afternoons and by the time the vaudeville acts began in the evening the floor of the theater was ankle deep in peanut shells and candy wrappers. The excitement stimulated a boy’s hunger and the more violent the action, the more he ate. The pictures were grainy, traced with a web of vertical scratches and jerked wildly from frequent splices. Nevertheless, we watched them spellbound and quietly fed ourselves peanut after peanut, as clean shaven “Dusty,” in his tall white hat, had it out in the saloon with the bearded gamblers and rustlers.

You can imagine the rapture that ran through Crown Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant and Park Slope when the kids got the news that “Dusty” Ryder would appear in person at the Paradise Theater! It was a bombshell that reverberated through every tenement in Brooklyn. The price of admission was raised to 15 cents to cover Dusty’s traveling expenses and defray the cost of the lavish presents every boy would receive. This meant each of us had to work overtime collecting newspapers and bottles and running errands for old ladies.

Ernie and I decided to get to the Paradise early. There would be two shows, the first one at 1 p.m. and the second at 3 p.m. “Dusty” would appear between the shows so that the one o’clock kids could stay and meet him as they left, and the three o’clock kids could meet him as they came in. Being early was essential. We got there at nine o’clock in the morning and there was already a line of kids ahead of us. I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t take my mother’s advice and get there at noon––she had no idea what “Dusty” meant to me. You can bet your bottom dollar if Rudolph Valentino was going to be at the Paradise she would have camped out in the lobby a week early. Some kids on line with us came for the 3 o’clock show.

The only problem was the weather. It was one of those gray October days that promised an afternoon of rain and maybe a touch of snow by nightfall. A good day for a movie, but not a good day for riding the range. It occurred to Ernie and me that we had never seen “Dusty” Ryder in the rain.

The movie itself was not one of his best. The cast was too big and there were scenes without “Dusty” in them. Furthermore, he was involved with a girl whose father had an incurable heart condition and was about to lose the family ranch to a man with a beard and crooked teeth––that’s as much as we got out of it. From experience we learned that the mere presence of a woman in a Western was bad news. You could be sure the hero would get soft and mushy. Our attention wandered and we slumped in our seats, ate peanuts to compensate for the dull movie and waited for the final shoot out. It was a lengthy affair punctuated by bass notes on the piano, and when it was over, the villain and his gang lay stretched out in the street in front of the saloon. Then the screen went dark and the house lights came on!

Suddenly there HE was, blinking in the footlights! “Dusty” Ryder himself––“The Smiling Whirlwind!” He jingled as he strode across the stage––his spurs raising tufts of dust as they scraped the ancient carpeting that, on vaudeville nights, was limited to the erotic dancing of the Pitkin Girls. He wore a tall, dove gray ten-gallon hat, and to see us better he pushed it slightly back on his head with the index finger of his right hand. He never did that in the movies.

When the hubbub died down, he smiled and said, “Howdy, kids,” in a disappointingly high-pitched voice, quite out of character with his manly reputation. It was, of course, the first time we ever heard him speak. Then he walked over to a chair and a bridge table someone brought in to center stage––he took his hat off and looked for a place to put it. The table was covered with small boxes and stacks of paper, so he put his hat back on his head, sat down,and folded one leg over the other––the way girls sit. The buttons on the belly of his spangled shirt were under great strain and a roll of fat could be seen bulging over the belt of designer jeans.

The manager, Mr. Benjamin had been checking his pocket watch all the while and he was anxious to begin ...

“Line up to the right ... take it easy we gotta whole hour before “Dusty” has to move on,” It had no effect, we pushed, punched and shoved our way to the front. We somehow felt “Dusty” would get up and walk out even if there were kids waiting on line when the hour was up. When a cowpoke has gotta move on, he gets up and moves on.

“Each of ya’s gonna get a autographed pitcher and a little ‘momentum’ from “Dusty” fer just you kids bein’ here at the Paradise.” He held both hands up high like a preacher praising the Lord ... “But nobody’s gonna get nothin’ if yez don’t quiet down!”

Mr. Benjamin went on to explain that we were to climb the stairs at the right of the stage and walk up and shake hands with “Dusty” ... “But don’t crowd him. One at a time, one at a time. Then pick up y’pitcher and your ‘momentum’.”

Small voices piped up from the kids waiting at the bottom of the stairs, “Can we talk t’him? Can we ask him questions?”

Mr. Benjamin looked over to “Dusty” for a sign––“Dusty” shrugged his shoulders and scratched his armpit. Taking that to be a sign of acceptance, he answered, “One question per kid––that’s all. We ain’t got all day.”

There’s a lot of questions I can think of today that I might have asked “Dusty” back then, his early years in the rodeo, his experiences in World War I, his marital problems out in Hollywood ... but I was young and I could only think of one thing to ask him when my turn came.

“Mr. “Dusty,”––I began, “why don’t it ever rain out west?” His eyes narrowed in concentration as he replied, “We don’t shoot pitchers in the rain, kid.” Maybe it was a problem in semantics––we were talking at cross purposes and our points of view were miles apart.

My friend Ernie, being of the Jewish persuasion was of a more practical state of mind, he asked “Dusty” if he cooked his own meals while he was on the trail. “No,” he answered, “production sends out a chuck wagon.”

One thing was certain, Ernie and I were quickly losing our faith in “Dusty” Ryder. Other kids we spoke to felt the same––some of them asked “Dusty” how he could plug a rustler between the eyes without aiming, why the six guns made so much smoke and how come he never ran out of ammunition, and where did he go to the bathroom. I think we all came away sadder and wiser in the ways of Hollywood make-believe.

The ‘Momentums’? Well, one of them was a photograph of “Dusty” in a tall white hat with his signature on the bottom in a flowery hand, full of curlicues and a finishing squiggle, the other was a key ring with a tin medallion of “Dusty” sitting on a horse twirling a lariat. None of us had any use for the key ring and his picture quickly faded on my bedroom wall