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East is East
by
Harry Buschman
The Loewe’s Paradise Theater stood on the corner of Atlantic and Nostrand Avenue. Every Saturday afternoon it showed silent movies, and on Saturday night there was vaudeville. If you were light on your feet you could pay to see the last movie of the afternoon and then see the first vaudeville show of the evening. To do this you had to hide in the john after the last movie until the crowd was seated. then make a dash for a seat when the usher wasn’t looking.
On Saturdays the movies were silent Westerns or slapstick comedies, accompanied by an old man at the piano. After each round of feature films, followed by two short subjects, the piano player would have a beer or two in the lobby, then he’d go to the bathroom. He’d linger there as long as he could and then return in time for the new show. The projectionist would wait until he was seated at the piano before pulling the curtain back and turning on the projector. A music score of sorts 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 and every posse galloping through the vast wastelands of the west was all the inspiration he needed.
Silent movies were our ticket to a better world in the twenties. One that fulfilled the dreams of people looking for romance and adventure. There was no radio, TV, Stereo, DVD, Internet -- the tenements were dark and cold and only a kerosene stove and the closeness of the family kept them warm. The older folks got their kicks from Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino while the kids reveled in the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle.
But on the serious 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 -- a knight of the purple sage, who preferred a horse and six-guns to the chains of a wife and children. A quiet man, a man slow to anger but relentless 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 the old man was not up to it, he could not outdraw, outfight or outride anything; he was barely able to make a living in the depression years of the thirties.
Cowboys were the only Americans. Drifters, fancy free. They roamed the West, reading the trail as well as any Indian, but 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 seemed to need reloading, and almost never needed aiming.
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 was ankle deep in peanut shells and candy wrappers. The excitement stimulated a boy’s appetite and the more violent the action, the more he ate. The pictures were grainy, traced with dark 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 rampant 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 expenses and to 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 at 1 p.m. and the second at three. “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, but you can bet your bottom dollar if Rudolph Valentino was going to be there she would have camped out in the lobby for a week. I learned later there were some kids on line with us who came for the three 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 my friend 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 that didn’t involve “Dusty” at all. 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 bad 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 ravenously and waited for the final shoot out. It was a lengthy one punctuated by bass notes on the piano, and when it was over, the villain and his gang were stretched out in the dusty street. 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, had only borne the weight of the Pitkin Girls and the accordionist, Carlo Marone. 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.
When the hub-bub 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’d ever heard him speak. Then he walked over to a chair and a bridge table someone had set up 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 and sat down with one leg folded over the other -- the way girls sit. The buttons on his spangled shirt were under great strain and two rolls of fat could be seen bulging over the sides of his belt.
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 getta autographed pitcher and a little momentum from “Dusty” fer just you kids here at the Paradise.” He held both hands up high as though praising the Lord .... “But nobody’s gonna get nothin’ if y’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 boyish voices piped up from the children 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 life 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.” Well, maybe it was a question of 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 for certain, Ernie and I were fast losing our faith in “Dusty” Ryder and the authenticity of Hollywood Westerns in general. 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 wiser in the western ways of Hollywood.
The “Momentums?” One of them was a photograph of “Dusty” in a tall white hat with his signature on the bottom in a girlish hand, full of curlicues and a finishing squiggle, the other was a key ring with a tin medallion of “Dusty” sitting on his horse twirling a lariat. None of us had any use for the key ring and the picture quickly faded on my bedroom wall
©Harry Buschman 1998
(1800)
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