Up On The Bedsheet

I think it would have been the summer of ‘84 that I lived in Wimberley, Texas.

Wimberley’s a little tiny town nestled in the Texas hill country, but still within easy driving distance of where I was going to college. It’s not too terribly far from Austin. And back then, it really was a tiny little community.

There were these three little houses in a cleared area of the woods, and my two chums and I shared one of them. We could walk less than a hundred yards down the street and fling ourselves in the river, and sometimes did.

Across the street from our little clearing was the town’s sole burger joint (there were a couple of trendy restaurants, but you wanted a cheap burger and fries, you went to Fatso’s.) On Wednesday nights, the old couple who owned the joint would hang a bedsheet on the back of the place, and set up a projector, and show an old movie. They literally rented old films from an outfit that serviced art theaters and suchlike, and the lady who ran Fatso’s would set up a card table with a cigar box of cash, and that was the Box Office, and for two bucks, you could walk into their back yard and watch whatever they were showing that week. Since we lived across the street, we brought our own lawnchairs and sodas and often popcorn.

Saw Psycho there, and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and True Grit, among others. The back of the burger joint was a wide, grassy area, and the whole community would show up, to some extent. Or at least, all the locals.

It wasn’t a place for film buffs. Kids ran riot, for one thing, and there were often side conversations going on here and there on picnic blankets and clusters of lawn chairs. More than anything, it was a little like watching TV with your entire neighborhood in the living room with you. And no commercials.

But it wasn’t crowded, nor was it squalid. Plenty of private space, clusters of lawn chairs and camp stools, blankets spread out, and occasional air mattresses with clusters of people on them.

I still remember how, before True Grit started, some guy dragged a little portable barbecue out to the back of the field and roasted up about ten bucks worth of hot dogs and put them on slices of bread and gave them to anyone who asked (a pack of cheap hot dogs was about eighty cents back then, and a loaf of Wonder Bread was a little more than half that, and apparently, he was feeling generous.) Even brought a bottle of French’s mustard. For no reason at all.

Tourists didn’t know about this. It was a thing the locals did for the other locals. We wouldn’t have known about it, except we lived right across the street, and even then, two dollars for a night’s entertainment was a good deal.

At summer’s end, we all packed up and moved back to San Marcos for the fall semester, and I never lived in Wimberley again. It’s a very different town, now, where real estate goes for insane money, and the locals have mostly sold out and moved on, and it’s a burgeoning little town that sort of SELLS itself as a bucolic small hill community... but it’s not... full of big new houses with tiny little yards, and very little forest is left. Fatso’s closed down years ago, and even the building is gone now.

And I write this now with wistful feelings, because I wish I could go back and pony up a couple of bucks and watch an old movie in black and white or Technicolor, projected on a bedsheet in the gloaming of the evening, with smoke pots keeping the mosquitoes away and someone’s kids running back and forth before the movie starts.

And I know I will never be able to do that again.