Grindhouse

Back in the day, the Paradise Theater was a neighborhood theater where folks went to see the latest Hollywood musical or Cary Grant comedy. Grown folks came out to see the latest Gangster flick or Film Noir make the second rounds after they played downtown. Kids lined up on Saturday afternoons in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s for quarter matinees.

By the 70’s the neighborhood had changed and folks began to move away; away to shopping malls and the suburbs. The old neighborhood was abandoned, the stores got boarded up and closed. The Paradise tried to keep going with exploitation films and Grindhouse flicks. By the 80’s the theater switched to porn, but VHS put an end to that business, too.

J.D. remembers how the place changed. J.D. came up in the neighborhood about the time the white folks moved away. He got shot up in Vietnam and he’s never been the same. J.D. lives in a wheelchair now, at the Paradise Theater. He rolls inside every night through a door in the alley and stays there, out of the weather.

J.D. likes to talk about how as a kid they used to sneak in that back door. After Vietnam he came to see the Grindhouse and the porn too. He experienced this stuff the sights and smells of the Paradise first hand. J.D. is a never ending rerun of information about the days of the matinees and the heyday of the Grindhouse and porn movies that used to play at the Paradise.

These days the Paradise is his shelter from the rain, and the crack-fiends outside the door, back in that alley.

Sometimes I like to come by the Paradise and hear J.D.’s stories, the ones about the matinees and the Grindhouse and the porn. Sometimes I like to roll his wheelchair up on the stage and give J.D. some head, until he busts off on my face.

We put on an old fashioned porn show for the audience of ghosts at the Paradise Theater.