Every one of those seats is a plush red-velvet rocker. I barely weigh enough to hold down its spring-loaded, flip-up mechanism and worry I’ll be catapulted into the rows at the rear of the theater.
The seats at the back have ashtrays built into the armrests. When the houselights go down, ghostly blue smoke is visible, rising like a wraith through a beam of projector light. The bubble of fear in my stomach expands. I look back frequently, or a mile up at the ceiling, because it’s better than looking forward, at the screen. The SS Poseidon looks exactly like pictures I have seen of the Titanic, but its fate—I learn instantly—won’t be nearly as pleasant. “At midnight on New Year’s Eve, the SS Poseidon, en route from New York to Athens, met with disaster and was lost,” reads a title card in the opening credits, preempting any hope for a happy beginning, much less a happy ending. “There were only a handful of survivors. This is their story…”
On that insane Southtown screen, the captain appears at his post—white-haired Leslie Nielsen, his head seventy feet tall, looking grave and important. When a kid named Robin Shelby staggers onto the deck, rain-lashed and wind-whipped, I become that little boy for the next two hours, my only ambition to remain alive against all odds. A “seaquake” has triggered a tidal wave on the Poseidon’s final voyage. It is ninety feet tall, more than twice the Green Monster, and serves—when it turns the ship upside down—as yet another sign of nature’s malevolence: earthquakes, tarantulas, quicksand, the Devil’s Triangle, the Loch Ness Monster, killer bees, Bigfoot, Venus flytraps, and raging infernos are all much on my mind, several of them fodder for a disaster film still to come, many of them by this film’s producer, Irwin Allen, creating the disaster-epic genre before my very eyes, which are already obscured behind my splayed fingers.
The forecast is dire, but Mr. Linarcos, a representative of the ship’s owners, insists that our captain, Mr. Nielsen, power onward to Athens, full steam ahead. “You irresponsible bastard!” Nielsen shouts at him, and my ears burn at the language. Likewise, young Robin tells his big sister, Susan, “Why don’t you shove it! Shove it, shove it, shove it!” I fear I’ll be punished just for hearing these words, but Dad is happily eating popcorn, unmoved by the profanity.
The only swear word Dad ever says is “God dammit.” Mom says “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” or “God bless it” when she’s angry. These are standins for profanity. She says “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” instead of “Jesus Christ” and “God bless it” instead of “God dammit.” It’s a clever bit of Catholic alchemy, turning blasphemy into praise. What I’ve heard other grown-ups call “dog shit” is always, in Mom’s phrasing, “dog doo.”
Dad doesn’t mind the language on the SS Poseidon, though to be fair he might be distracted by the spectacle of Pamela Sue Martin and Stella Stevens. They have been ordered by Gene Hackman to remove their dresses, for safety reasons, before climbing a Christmas tree to higher ground as the ship is consumed by biblical fire and flooding, necessitating many upshots of the two scrambling nearer to God in hot pants and underwear, respectively. The ship’s lounge singer, Carol Lynley, spends the entire film in a soaked, skintight sweater, so whenever Ernest Borgnine screams “You son of a bitch!”—which he seems to do every five minutes—Dad doesn’t quite appear to notice.
And neither, eventually, do I. Poised on the edge of my opulent seat, both from the excruciating tension of the film and to keep that seat from ejecting me into the black void—this place is practically a planetarium—I am desperate for Robin to survive. When the boy and a few near-naked ladies are finally spirited to daylight and into a rescue helicopter—Stella Stevens, for safety reasons, remains stripped of her dress but is still wearing six-inch silver heels, God bless her—my every nerve ending is alive with feeling. I smell of relief, urine, and secondhand Winstons. But the greatest of these is relief, a profound relief to be in the cool evening air in the Southtown shopping center parking lot and no longer upside down in the SS Poseidon.
This same sense of relief supervenes whenever the commercials air during NBC’s annual Easter-season screening of The Wizard of Oz, a movie that instills no wonder in me, only terror. The music alone ignites the acids in my stomach, yet I sit in front of the Zenith with my terrified brothers and sister in a five-way game of chicken, each of us holding our hands to the flame, refusing to flinch, exhaling only when the commercials abruptly appear. They act like smelling salts or a bucket of cold water thrown over a drunk, snapping us out of one world and returning us to the real one. I am grateful for their temporary respite from tornadoes and witches and flying monkeys. “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh what a relief it is.”
And then the movie is back on, and I am envious again of John, in his football pj’s, too young to be terrified, or already too tough.
Even before he can walk, John is conscripted into our basement games, placed like a sack of laundry in front of our floor-hockey goal as we practice rifling tennis balls past him. By the time he can stand he is “roughing up the crease,” raking his stocking feet over the basement concrete as if coarsening freshly Zambonied ice with the blades of his goalie skates. He seems to enjoy the hockey as much as we do. Only rarely do we have to duct-tape him to the uprights to keep him in goal.
Amy is largely protected from this violence. Dad dotes on his only daughter. He calls her Amelia Bedelia and often sings “Once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy…” Jim, Tom, John, and I are The Boys. “Where are The Boys?” Mom will ask, often with an air of suspicion. “Amy, have you seen The Boys?” Like the singin’ bird and the croakin’ toad, I want to tell them, echoing a song on the radio, I’ve got a name. I’ve got a name. The house has now divided, like Viet Nam, into Amy, with her beautiful strawberry-blond hair, and The Boys, with their basement boxing bouts and bathroom sword fights.
Dad will hear another parent say of his own five kids, “I have one redhead and four shitheads.” This is exactly what he has, exactly what we are, though the math is complicated. Jim is also a redhead, so we are technically two redheads and four shitheads, though there are only five of us, because one of our redheads is also a shithead.