The Americana Bang

It’s about noon when Cody texts me. “Wanna leave early and get good seats?” I tell him sure, and we’re out the door in another 30 minutes. Of course my MoviePass isn’t working again and Cody starts in on me.

“You NEED to update your app.”

“I’m deleting it and redownloading it. But I don’t have good service in here. Do you have good service?”

“Yeah but you need to update your MoviePass app, is what I’m saying.”

He says all this while aggressively smiling in the way that Cody and I always fight, like we’re kidding because it doesn’t really matter and we’re obviously not those friends who fight in public and treat each other like shit, but also like seriously, you need to update your app. He does this head tilt, hands-on-his-hips pose, like he’s having fun playing a character who’s angry with me.

“It won’t let me do that until I get the iPhone software update and I can’t do that til I’ve downloaded the new iTunes and it’s really slow on my computer.”

“Is it working.”

I keep clicking around and then show him that it’s not identifying the theater we’re at. He calmly takes the phone out of my hands and hits the correct buttons, purchasing my ticket for me. Of course he makes a face like “are you kidding me.”

“Oh, thank you.”

By this time it’s still only 12:45. We didn’t even get that good of seats and we have an hour to kill at the Glendale Americana, a high-end outdoor mall with a Disneyland-style train running through it and a gaudy statue in the middle of the enormous water fountain, which does a water show synced to songs like “I Get A Kick Out of You.” It’s kind of like Vegas, but cleaner and less drunk.

We wander into the Tesla store (yes this mall has a TESLA STORE) and Cody sits in one of the sedans, trying on a new life. I get in the backseat, and it’s pretty comfortable until he puts his seat all the way back and smushes me.

“If you had to choose, would you get the sedan, or the larger one?”

I think for too long as I weigh the pros and cons of each choice.

“In this scenario, can I be married?”

“Cause you want both?”

“One for camping or trips and one for zipping around town.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too.”

We make our way over to The Cheesecake Factory and sit at the bar. A few weeks prior, I’d won a Standing Ovation at work, which is my company’s way of patting you on the back and sending you off with a few gift cards instead of that raise and title change you’ve been requesting for nearly a year. They also gave me a $20 gift card to Coldstone, which I promise you I will never use.

I order a Mai Tai because it’s the middle of the day on a Saturday and I’m not insane. I’m so pleased with my choice that I don’t commit Cody’s order to memory. They offer us bread and we say no, we’re just having drinks. They say you can still have the bread — they’re young and just being nice to us cause we’re young too — but Cody declines it. I notice everyone else at the bar has little bread baskets with maroon napkins in front of them, and I wonder why we started eating dense loaves of bread before our full meals anyway. Not that I don’t love it, but I have to sour-grapes my way out of regretting our lack of free food.

Golf is on, and our bartender is performing this great bit where he overreacts to the game the way some people watch magic tricks. It’s this big, performative “OOOHHHH!” and “NOOOOO!” after each putt, no matter the outcome. He loves that we’re watching him. Ricky Fowler comes on the screen and I say “I know him,” to the bartender. I guess he thinks I’m making a bad joke or something because he cracks back, “yeah, me too.” I do happen to know Ricky because he was best friends with my oldest brother growing up. He was closer to my age than my brother’s and was my fiercest competition in every way. We used to have foot races in our backyard until my brothers got tired of watching us. One time, we set up a camera at the finish line to determine who the winner was. It was always Ricky.

My gift card is for $20, and I still have to put $8ish dollars on my debit card to cover two drinks at the bar. As much as I love The Cheesecake Factory, they need to get their shit together with those prices. Now we’re two loose gooses buzzed on sugar, so we head over to the theater and skip the popcorn, which we usually always get. We’re seeing Thoroughbreds and I’ve been looking forward to it but Cody’s downright giddy. I secretly wish it was a movie about horses but think rich teenage girls trying to murder an evil stepdad sounds cool too.

It’s a great movie with a tense mood and weird pop music that I’ve never heard before. It’s funny in all the right ways. There are a bunch of awesome shots of people from behind as they’re walking through different environments and I don’t understand how they filmed them. I try not to distract myself with theories and just stay focused on the story. It’s sad when Anton Yelchin comes on the screen — everyone sighs a little but it’s enough people to where you hear it as one big groan. Another thing I’m feeling is guilt that I’m not watching Black Panther. Thoroughbreds takes place in a rich suburb of Connecticut and I almost can’t think of a whiter movie. The two main characters go underwater and have a breath-holding competition til one of the girls nearly passes out and her friend has to rescue her. I think of Ricky and I in the backyard with our camera.

Then it starts to happen and it’s faster and slower than I could ever describe.

Someone behind us gets up and rushes out the emergency exit, which is sort of a normal thing in a movie — people coming and going — but I notice it and feel alert. It’s calm for nearly 30 seconds until two other girls behind us get up and leave, but they go out the normal exit which leads down a hallway and into the main lobby of the theater. In the film itself, it’s the night of the plotted murder, and you don’t yet know whether these young girls are actually going to go through with it. 30 more seconds and the fire alarm sounds, the lights come up, the film continues playing. Cody and I look around and nobody’s doing anything real. I halfway stand up and look to him.

“Should we go see what’s up?”

I know exactly what he’s thinking: I love this movie and want to keep watching it. It’s all about to happen. I used to work at a movie theater and I know that this sort of thing happens: a faulty alarm or someone exiting where they shouldn’t. It’ll stop, it’s a nonevent, and we won’t miss what is perhaps the most pivotal moment in this movie. He doesn’t speak but I get what he’s saying so I sit back down, looking backward to the exit every 4 or 5 seconds. I’m over the damn moon when the alarm just stops and the movie keeps going. One of the girls places a gun in the BBQ, their agreed upon location for the murder weapon. I think about how we need to clean our grill at home. I’m fine.

But I keep noticing people filtering in and out of the exit — the same girls who’d left before the alarm even sounded, and I wonder what they know. I know I don’t have service and I don’t want Cody to judge me for looking at my phone, so I just kinda stay still and my eyes dart around. Finally, one of the girls speaks up.

“Just so everyone knows, there’s a shooting happening at the Americana. I saw on Twitter and I just….just so you know.”

I feel a ton of things in this moment but surprise is not one of them.

One thing I haven’t considered in all of my reading about mass shootings — which is a lot more in depth than it should be because I read the newspaper regularly — is about all the confusion for those in the immediate vicinity, those who don’t really know what’s going on yet. Nobody in the theater bolts out the door, we don’t duck for cover, nobody cries or screams. Cody says that we we’re probably safer staying still than leaving, and I think about how my mom always told us that as kids: if you’re lost, just stay still and I will find you.

I don’t know how much time passes, but the film keeps playing and now I hate it — I hate this dumb movie about over-privileged girls with no real problems more than anything in the entire world. Eventually all of us in the theater make our way out the exit and circle around in the hall. A family with two small children keep almost leaving out the emergency exit and then coming back in and I see the wheels turning: our shooter could be anywhere, and there’s no logic to where you should go or how you can best protect your two small daughters who just wanted to see Peter Rabbit with their parents on a Saturday.

Leaders emerge naturally and they’re the types of personalities that are always a little vocal, one’s I’d usually roll my eyes at, but now I’m extremely grateful for them. They’re reading tweets from the Glendale PD that are vague and unhelpful and are probably 5 minutes behind real time — 5 minutes that we all know could cost lives, but nobody says that. We just keep waiting for new tweets.

Eventually a helpful one comes through and some (for sure) PTA mom reads it to us all: Glendale Police have detained a robber with a gun at the Glendale Galleria (the mall next door to us). The mall’s security guard fired at the robber. No injuries reported.

Robbery is the key here: a robber’s motives are different than a a random shooter’s. Knowing this, we all start hugging each other, relaxing, recommitting our lives to Jesus. I feel like I should kiss Cody but I don’t.

Another thing I’d never thought about is what you do when it’s over. We don’t know, so we just keep standing there and watching people. Most go to leave the theater, but it’s on lock down still and all of the employees are tucked away in some room, so we’re just kind of stuck milling about. Cody asks me if I want to keep watching the movie and I guess I do, so we go back in.

The lights are still on and we’ve missed a lot. Suddenly Anton Yelchin’s in the girl’s house and his head is all wrapped up and bloody. What happened to the gun in the BBQ?

We can’t keep watching this movie because our bodies are too tense and we need to just talk to each other forever — or at least that’s what I need. I feel grateful for Cody’s calm spirit but I’m personally jumpy and reconsidering my whole life and I can’t watch this movie anymore.

When we leave they’re just opening the lobby doors again, letting people leave. It’s safe. It’s all just fine out there, there’s probably a fountain show happening and everything.

People are returning their tickets and it’s crowded, a total scene. All of the Glendale Pacifica Movie Theater’s employees are high school kids, who were just locked in a room due to a potential mass shooter, and now they’re forced to give Rain Check tickets to people who are equally tense.

When Cody and I get home it’s raining and his roommates are gone. We fetch my dog from the back house and I settle into the worn leather chair in his living room. We watch another white-person movie about Americans in Barcelona during the revolution and drink some wine. My dog barks at the screen and I don’t get mad, I am just so happy to see him.

I don’t ever want to die. I want to go to the movies every single day forever. I love being alive, drinking stupid drinks, and pretending that one day I’ll be married and own two Teslas. I love my school loans even. I love Cody and I want him to get mad at me again, all of the time, for things that don’t matter. I love that America has places as grossly indulgent as the Americana, The Cheesecake Factory, the movies.

We go back to the Americana the next day, before either of us have proper time to really process the experience. This time, I love the movie all the way through, and I love the stupid taco salad I eat at Foxy’s Diner when it’s over. A couple near us loudly argues. “You can’t just say the British guy and expect me to know who that is!” She yells. “You have to at least tell me what show he’s in!”

I haven’t been to the movies since. I haven’t updated my MoviePass, which now won’t even work until I update my software or whatever.

The Thoroughbreds girl does go through with the murder, but she frames her co-conspirator and friend as the perpetrator. It’s something neither of us saw coming, and we couldn’t think of a more perfect ending. I listened to an interview with the writer/director afterwards, but I still don’t know how they got those shots from behind as the girls travel from a basement up a narrow, darkly-lit staircase and into their Connecticut mansion, the American dream home.