FRESH YARN presents: Just a Fall ... by Marcia Wilkie

FRESH YARN presents:

Just a Fall
By Marcia Wilkie

Two months after I graduated from college with my degree in theater, I was held up at gunpoint. The guy only got 50 bucks, and it wasn't even my money. I was at work. There was no one to scream "help" to because I was the only employee in the store. Only one employee could fit in the store because it was a Fotomat, one of those freestanding film-developing booths with a drive-up window. This one was in a 7-Eleven parking lot in Kansas City, Missouri.

I guess I was an easy target. The guy drove up, pointed a gun, took the money and drove off.

I spent my working hours chain-smoking cigarettes and looking through the packs of developed photographs before the customers returned for them. It gave me a keen eye. Very few people pay attention to what's in the background when they take a picture. For example, here's a common mistake:

Someone would take a photo of a baby with a cute, mischievous look on his face pulling open a kitchen cabinet. But the photographer has not taken that extra moment to move the bottle of Clorox, the drain opener or the bug spray out of the shot. They could have hung a small wreath on the U-pipe under the sink and, presto! a Christmas card photo.

But, that takes an artist's touch. Right?

Until the robbery, my friends counted on my evening shifts in the photo booth as a kind of therapy session or a bar stool experience, depending on the point of view of the one visiting. They could always tell from blocks away if I was working. The booth was fluorescently lit and with my continuous cigarette smoke, it became a huge lava lamp, a beacon, welcoming all other misguided thespians that held a B.F.A in Acting.

Not one of us had left for New York City as we so boldly planned just months before in the broad kingdom of the student lounge, sprawled on vinyl couches, our ashtrays spilling over on the yellow laminated end tables.

Through posture alone, we asserted our statement as a group: "We're the theater majors, capable of all things unpredictable, daring, outrageous." At the tone, your eight semesters of delusional thinking will be up. Bllleeeeep.

In the graduation photos we stand, diplomas in hand, each face a look of complete terror. I can tell you why I was afraid. Because, to be honest, I knew that my college acting resume, which included my researched portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ("Three votes, Mr. McMurphy. Just three. Not sufficient to change ward policy") would be laughable outside of Kansas City, or even off-campus.

So I hid in the Fotomat, employed in the tiniest possible world I could find: four glass walls, arms-length apart, my timid terrarium.

My friends would drive up and idle at the little sliding window and we reaffirmed all of our weak-kneed reasons for not pursuing a life on stage. We would smoke and laugh at pictures of other people's lives because we had no idea what to do with our own. The only acting I did was when a customer would flip through their photos in the drive-thru and show me their favorite shot. I would have to act like I hadn't seen it already.

I wish the phrase "wasting your life" could be dropped from our vocabulary. The people who really do "waste their lives" obviously never think about it, and the rest of us who probably don't waste our lives spend hours concerned about whether or not we do. And in all the hours we spend feeling panicked about it, we are indeed "wasting our lives."

There were a couple of memorable things about being held up at gunpoint. One is that the guy was pretty good looking, except that he had a dead eye. It might have been a poorly fitted glass eye that didn't roll right, but I'm pretty sure that it was his real one, only dead. I may not have noticed the dead eye if he was just driving through to pick up his photos. But when he pulled out a gun and said, "Give me all the money in the drawer," his right eye had a very menacing "I mean business" intensity to it, whereas the left eye had a more lackadaisical "Oh, you know, when you get a chance" expression.

As I was emptying the drawer into a plastic bag, he hissed, "Throw that good film in, too," motioning with his gun to the boxed film display next to the register. Due to the lack of focus in his dead eye, I wasn't sure which film he thought was the good stuff, so I asked, "Is your camera 35 millimeter or a Polaroid?" As if he would tell me. As if I could use it later in the police report. "Yeah, good looking guy, dead eye, probably has a Fun Flash Instamatic camera."

He moved the gun an inch closer, to the lid of the little window. And even though his left eye was saying, "Oh, I don't know, what would you recommend?" his right eye was shouting at me, "ALL the film, you stupid bitch."

To add insult to the incident, every person I recounted the robbery to laughed when I confessed the guy never got out of the car, or even rolled his window down all the way. Even the cops said, "Now wait. You gave him all the money and all the inventory in the store and the guy never got out of his car?"

Here's why. There's no place to run and hide inside a Fotomat booth. I mean, there's a wall two feet in any direction and he was on the side with the door. I could have ducked in a corner, but my mind calculated that no matter where he fired the gun into the booth, the bullet would ricochet and hit me. And, though I wasn't really doing anything with my life, I wasn't ready to fold my hand, either.

A week later, another memorable thing happened. A two-year-old girl bounced off the side of my Foto booth. I had just arrived for the evening shift, overly alert, no longer feeling safe in my controlled, Petri dish environment. A 1982 Oldsmobile caught my eye as it made a tire-squealing turn out of the 7-Eleven parking lot and into traffic. The back door of the car flew open and a bundle was propelled out across the asphalt. Only after it somersaulted against the door of my booth and rolled back onto the drive-thru did I realize it was a small child, a little brown-eyed girl who looked up at me through my sliding glass window. Without a thought, I threw open the door of the booth and grabbed the child up off the pavement.

A number of cars came to a halt on the street and at least 15 people ran from all directions towards the Fotomat. The child's mother, crying, arms in the air, made her way through the traffic. In those seconds before anyone reached us, the little girl, seemingly free of any major injury, looked at me calmly and said, "I falled."

It was only after she saw her mother's terrified face and heard the shouts of people saying, "How horrible," "She could have been killed," and "She must be hurt," did she start to cry. Until then, the incident had just been a temporary change in placement. Not pleasant, perhaps even painful. But in her innocence she was willing to accept it for exactly what it was: a fall.

I certainly know much worse things could have happened to that little girl. They didn't though, and her resilient little body carried her to my door and I got to look into her fearless eyes.

I could have died at gunpoint for misinterpreting a look. You know, choosing the wrong eye. I didn't though. I was only reminded of the pointlessness of being afraid of life. Because if you're alive, and you can think and feel and make decisions, then it's never a waste. And, if you're dead, then you are. Anything short of that is a fall. Just a fall.