Goat Tales: Horrible things behind the scenes at the movie theater

I’ve always had a bad habit of getting comfortable at jobs and stacking up bad decisions like Jenga blocks until the whole thing falls down around me. When I was sixteen I worked at a clothing store as a stock boy, where I would put boxes out back during my shift and pick them up after work. I made a pretty good living selling Airwalks and Levis out of the trunk of my car at school. They caught on to me but never caught me so they just took me off the schedule until I quit. After that, I worked at a movie theater. The manager was a crazy old alcoholic lady who had all the dress and mannerisms of a washed up Liza Minnelli. I tried to be a model employee, and I was for like a year, but working part time at $4.25 an hour while Liza Minnelli shaved hours off of everyone’s paychecks there was more than one occasion where I had to choose between putting gas in my car and buying cigarettes.

The first block on the tower got set when I found some money on the floor while cleaning. You would be amazed how much money falls out of people’s pockets when they’ve been sitting in a dark room for two hours. Between poverty, drug abuse, and general greed among the employees; if you dropped anything of value at any of the screens in the spring of 97’ there was a 0.09% chance you were ever getting it back. We turned in jewelry and stuff that wouldn’t fit in our pockets, but people rarely ever came looking for it and Liza Minnelli would empty the valuables in the safe into her purse after it’d been there for a month.

One day I was hanging out by the ticket booth talking to this obese tub of lard named Zack when some guy comes up and says he’ll pay twenty bucks for a Men in Black movie poster. I’ve never seen a fat man run up some stairs so fast. Zack’s logic was they were going to throw them away eventually anyway, so who cares? I couldn’t argue with that logic. I made a pretty penny punting off X Files memorabilia to the nerds at school. I still have a stack of posters in my mom’s attic that I’m waiting to become collectible.

Things started to get a little out of hand when my friend Jody came to visit me at work and asked me if I knew anyone who wanted to buy some LSD. As we were talking people we knew kept coming through. Jody made so much money that day that he started hanging around the loading dock on my shifts. Anytime I saw someone we knew I’d send them his way. I had a bigger line going out the back door than at the box office. Sadly, Jody would end up getting arrested for breaking into a veterinary clinic and becoming a tattoo artist for the Aryan Nation while he was in prison.

There was this fine ass preppy girl from a good family whose appetite for expensive shoes was bigger than her moral compass. I noticed every time she worked the box office, people never had their tickets because the ticket machine was broken. Eventually, I figured out she wasn’t ringing up the tickets and pocketing the money. I called her out on it so she started giving me a portion of her take every night. All reward with no risk…shit.

By this point, corruption had spread through the Movie Theater like stage four dick cancer. They counted the cups, but at $6 a pop, it didn’t take long for profits to add up. Concession workers were digging cups out of the garbage and reselling them.

One day someone was taking out boxes and accidentally threw a whole box of concession candy away. Liza Minelli asked for volunteers to climb into the trash compactor to retrieve it. I volunteered because I wanted to go outside and smoke a cigarette so she gave me employee of the month.

There was this meth head named Jason who ran the projection booth. He and one of the other projectionist used to roll joints and do lines on the movie platters. We got a complaint that some guy in a trench coat was jerking off during a matinee showing of Bridges of Madison County so Jason ran in and sat next to the dude and asked if he could hang out. The guy ran away. One night Jason and I were working the late shift. This consisted of us waiting until the last movies finished running so we could clean while the manager slept in the office. Jason had a couple of 40’s of Old English Malt Liquor in his car so we decided to have a little nip out in the parking lot. One thing led to another and about a month later everyone had a bottle of something in their locker and we’d walk around with cups full of booze after the last movies of the night started.

One night everybody chipped in and we got a bunch of alcohol. The plan was to drink after work but one sip led to two and two led to too many. It was the day before “The Negotiator” with Samuel L. Jackson came out so Jason decided to thread it up and watch it in one of the empty theatres. Everyone working that night and a few employees that weren’t had a party in theater #4. Where was the night manager, you might ask? She was sitting next to me with a bottle of Boones Farm and making some very inappropriate advances on my under age ass. I could have got molested that night but I was trying to hit on one of the concession girls.

Soooooooo, yeah, we all got fired. This ugly ass Donald Southerland looking piece of shit ratted us out because we left him in the ticket booth and didn’t offer him any booze. But he got convicted of child molestation a year later, so fuck that guy. Ironically, Liza Minnelli got canned by corporate a few years later for drinking on the job.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6