Possibility

possibility
n 1: a future prospect or potential; "this room has great possibilities" 2: capability of existing or happening or being true; "there is a possibility that his sense of smell has been impaired" [syn: possibleness] [ant: impossibility] 3: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted in chemical practices" [syn: hypothesis, theory] 4: a possible alternative; "bankruptcy is always a possibility" [syn: possible action, opening]

I did something unusual today. Or strange. Alone, as I often am, I hopped in my car and drove to the movie house. I just got paid, still had the payday 50 sizzling in the wallet I got two Christmases ago. I dropped twenty on three tickets, tucked them in the change pocket of my jeans and proceeded on a 7-hour cinema bender. I didn't really tell anyone where I was going, I realized that it didn't matter to me if anyone knew. It was exactly where the day took me, like a jellyfish on a current, I was there to absorb, consume what came along, drift - a weightless day.

It's amazing how invisible spending a day along can make you feel. It's not necessarily a bad feeling either. I have been lower than snail testicles these weeks. I was in need of the heady adrenaline being a stranger for a few hours can provide. I needed the movies - mainline (wide open and stat)- the wicked exaggerated pageantry, the sex appeal that explodes all over you like safety-glass, giving the impression of danger in harmless shards. I needed the impossibly pretty people in improbable, life-affirming scenarios. I needed the trailers that crackle and tease and give away the good parts like a bad/sleazy stripper. I needed a $7 dollar hot dog. It was serious.

I needed a triple dose.

I am not sure when I realized that I was addicted to flicks. Whenever I got high as a teen, it never seemed as real to me as the bleary, wandering cameras of drug-cinema, the focus-deficient vicarious highs of my Trainspottings, Pulp Fictions and Basketball Diaries. When I had sex for the first time it was ugly and crude, like tying your shores in a mudslide. It was meat and potatoes biology with a zest of slapstick comedy. It was not Rebbecca DeMornay against the wall in Risky Business, sexy silhouettes, arched and singing, sleek and in tune like pairs figure-skaters. It was drunken bull riding at 3 AM and somewhere there is a car alarm protesting the silence of the night. That's hot.

Movies are a drug - Hollywood cooks up a freewheeling image like methamphedamine, mixing life's everyday over-the-counter ingredients to form something dangerous and stupid that we addicts can't seem to get enough of. Not that the movies will kill you - but, they can kill your reality - for a while.
I saw the underwater treasure hunting opus Into the Blue (5:00). Personally I hope that Jessica Alba's ass is nominated for a Golden Globe. Also I saw The Fog (7:20), starring Tom "Smallville" Welling in a watery tale of lepers, revenge, and Selma Blair's eyeliner. And finally I took in a screening of Tony Scott's Domino, a confusing hyper-stylized tele-opera ricocheting through the changes like a hummingbird on mescaline. None of them were all that good, but it didn't really matter.

By the end of the run I was more convinced than ever that I should attempt another all-day cinema "walkabout" or vision quest, because when I walked out of The Fog (7:20), I felt like a new man, I felt lethal and fresh like every inch of me was icy breath on a fresh scrape. I walked with my shoulders back and my hat tucked low over my eyes. As I tossed my dog wrapper in the trash I watched it leave my hand like my eyes were lenses capturing a detail of immense significance. I was a stranger in my own life, newly returned to it from the distant thunderheads of possibility. In a movie (a good one) everything that is said, every movement that we watch is significant. The smallest mundane detail is fussed over in slow artful strokes like a hot girl with a missing contact lens. I had a layover in reality after The Fog (7:20) and I wandered over to the book store for a coffee and a browse.

There were two women working the counter at the bookstore. There was the serene hippy chick with a perfect, easy smile that made her seem like she was a lure, too perfect to have anything but a fishhook at the end of her kiss. And the bitter disciplinarian, frumpy and all too aware she was drowning in hippy-chick's effortless allure. I, of course, followed my dick up to hippy chick's register, only to find that she was like a human away message. I wish people were not so quick to confirm their own stereotypes. The frumpy disciplinarian knew exactly where to find my book. Typical.

That's the problem with the movie-house high. It doesn't last. As I sat drinking my coffee and reading about Nick and Jessica (Sigh.) I could feel the coolness cooling, hardening and cracking at my joints like an exoskeleton ripe for a good molt. I used the last bit of my cool to wink suggestively at the shy coffee girl. It was her first night working the closing shift. I could tell by the way she nervously and unnecessarily shifted her weight from heel to toe when she had nothing left to do. She came out to organize the stack of magazines at my table, but I was not nearly cool enough to talk to her at that point so I packed up the chai and the pick-up lines and retreated. I stopped to ask her the time, 10:13.
I realized then I had asked six different people for the time during the course of the day and resolved to buy myself a watch and get my hair cut the following morning. Which, I suppose, has nothing to do with what happened next.

As I was wandering in for the third show, Domino (10:30), I spied an unusual sight considering my day's activities. A woman 20-24, blue jeans and off-white knit sweater, wandering into the same movie as I - alone. Conspicuously alone, I might add, curvy and ring-less like a girl I might have plucked from the catalog of my schoolboy imagination - but real.

She had incredibly thick hair held in a tight pony by the Hercules of rubber bands. The half-light of the trailers gave her locks the color of watermelon jolly ranchers. She had freckles on the bridge of her nose and she was leaning her chin on her hand in a musing, serious posture. She seemed more to observe the trailers than to watch them. I was floored.

I could have:
1.) Sat down right beside her.
2.) Struck up a conversation with a card from my Rolodex of witty banter.
3.) Exchanged quizzical and humorous looks with her during what turned out to be an odd, pseudo-lesbian biopic road-movie.
4.) Asked for her number on the way out.

Instead, I sat in the row behind her and willed her to glance back at me so I could smile at her. (She did, once, and I froze and sat there like a decoration in a fishbowl until she turned back to the trailers.) She unleashed her hair as the movie started and it fell about her shoulders like a waterfall of strawberry Quick. I focused on the movie from that point on.

An interesting note: As I was leaving the girl got into a silver Mustang. What an interesting character she was, an untapped vein of juicy details that made my head spin.

I got in my car still buzzing. It will take me many hours to come down so I can sleep. I thought I would spend this time putting the day down. I still feel the rush of possibility, the intense out-of-body sensation that only a day of total anonymity can provide. Night.

PS. I want to thank you Blakesmom and everyone for your comments on my weepy post last time. Hip-deep in pity is so last season. "No sympathy for the Devil, buy the ticket, take the ride." - Hunter S. Thompson