Death of a Blue Movie Star

transvestites and the mostly black and Hispanic female hookers, who picked up twenty bucks for their halfhearted services, would usually take their clients up to the balcony, where even the vice cops didn’t like to go.
    Despite the unpleasant conditions the theater did make money. Rent was the highest expense. The owner and his wife (and an occasional cousin from the huge inventory of relatives overseas) took turns in the box office, thus keeping salary expenses down. And because of the video system they didn’t need a union projectionist.
    The owner also bypassed the largest expenses of movie theaters. Under the copyright laws he was supposed to pay license fees for each theatrical showing of a film—yes, even porn. This, however, he didn’t do. He would buy three VHS cassettes for $14.95 each from an adult bookstore on Eighth Avenue, show the films for one week, then return them. The owner of the store, who happened to be a Pakistani immigrant, gave him a five-dollar credit for each film and then resold them for the full $14.95.
    This was, of course, a violation of federal law, both civil and criminal, but neither the FBI nor the producers of the films had much inclination to go after a small business like his.
    When the man considered the type of films that his theater showed, he was not particularly proud, but he wasn’t much ashamed either. The
Kama Sutra
, after all, had been written in his native country. And personally he was no stranger to sex; he’d come from a family of twelve children and he and his wife had seven. No, his major embarrassment about the business was the low profit margin of the theater. He would have been much happier if his return on investment had been five or six percent higher.
    Today the owner was sitting in the ticket booth, smoking and thinking of the lamb kurma that his wife would be making in their Queens apartment for dinner. He heard angry words coming from the theater. That was one thing that scared him—his patrons. There were a lot of crack smokers, a lot of men working on their third or fourth Foster’s. These were big men and could have broken his neck before they even thought about it. He called the cops occasionally but he’d gotten their message: Unless somebody had a knife or a gun the police didn’t want to be bothered.
    Now, when the dispute didn’t seem to be vanishing, he rummaged under the ticket booth and found a foot-long pipe, capped at both ends and filled with BBs. A homemade cudgel. He walked into the theater.
    The blonde on the screen was saying something about there being one kind of love she hadn’t tried and would the actor please accommodate her. He seemed agreeable but no one could tell exactly what he was saying to the woman. The voices from the front row were louder.
    “The fuck you think you’re doing? S’mine, man.”
    “Fuck that shit. I lef’ it here.”
    “An’ fuck that! Wha’ you mean, you lef’ it, man? You sitting three seats over, maybe four, man. I seen it.”
    The owner said, “You must be quiet. What is it? I call police, you don’t sit down.”
    There were two of them, both black. One was homeless, wearing layers of tattered clothes, matted with dirt. The other was in a brown deliveryman’s uniform. He was holding a paper-wrapped box, about the size of a shoe box. They looked at the Indian—they both towered over him—and pled their cases as if he were a judge.
    The homeless man said, “He be stealing mah package. I lef’ it, I wenta take a leak, and—”
    “Fuck, man. He din’t leave no box. I seen some guy come in, watcha movie for ten minutes and leave. It was there when he left, man. I seen it. He left it and it’s mine. That’s the law.”
    The homeless man grabbed for the box, a shoe box. The deliveryman’s long arms kept it out of reach. “Get the fuck outa here.”
    The owner said, “Somebody leave it? He’ll be back. Give it to me. Who was it left it?”
    The deliveryman said, “How’m I supposed to know who the fuck he was? Some white guy. I found it. S’what the law say, man. I find it, I get to keep it.”
    The owner reached out. “No, no. Give it to me.”
    The homeless man said, “I said I lef’ it. Give it—”
    They were in that pose, all three sets of arms extended and gesturing angrily, when the fourteen ounces of C-3 plastic explosive inside the box detonated. Exploding outward at a speed of almost three thousand miles an hour, the bomb instantly turned the men into