Banana Factory

7:32 and Zoe Qualkenbush of R*gal Cinemas Theater *5 (F*irfax T*wne C*nter) finds herself alone at the mercy of the Wednesday night rush. “Rush” is generous, of course — and if anything it is at the mercy of her. She’s pretty good at her job, she reminds herself.

Also it’s a weeknight. Weeknights are dead as hell excluding Tuesdays which at times rival Weekends thanks to the devilish deal that is “Two for Tuesday” pricing in which two tickets can be purchased for the price of one (Military, Senior and Student pricing aren’t factored in, though the reduced matinee price is; a matinee is any show that starts before 4:00). Most theaters she’s been to are straight up half off on Tuesdays, but not here. Here, rather strangely, a customer must purchase an even number of tickets to get the best value. A lone moviegoer or family of five would be SOL, as they say, more so the former, obviously; four half off tickets and one full price ticket is still a decent deal, Zoe feels. There’s no discount on concessions on Tuesday (or ever, excluding R*gal Crown Club RewardsTM) though you’d think someone somewhere was handing out fliers decreeing it so with how many people insist that they should pay $4.99 instead of $9.99 for their large popcorn. Counting the times Zoe has had to explain all of this is aneurysm-inducing.

Wednesdays still aren’t ideal, though. Wednesday was their deal night until about half a year ago when some guys in suits somewhere decided that having deal nights be consistent across all R*gal locations would make a line on a graph go up. Along with the move to Tuesday was a change to the “two for one” pricing model. Two for Tuesday — the alliteration was irresistible, Zoe reckons; it’s a dumb little caveat otherwise and she’s not the first to bitch about it. For some time after the switch they’d get people on Wednesday night pissed that they missed deal day and that no one told them the day moved or that the specifics had changed and that they should get half off tickets anyway/free tickets/a large coke for their trouble. Oh, to be deprived of half off movie tickets. For a few months there Zoe’s work-related anxieties experienced a new midweek peak. Once uneventful Wednesdays were now occasionally peppered with entitled jerk-offs who invariably ruined her night. At its worst she asked not to be scheduled for Wednesdays. It didn’t happen every Wednesday obviously, but just the possibility was enough for a non-zero percent of her mind to be cluttered with the dread that it might. Those little dreads pile up.

The line grows. Three or four orders, one of them a family with three kids. No sweat; John should be back soon. From the john.

Zoe feels at least a little freaked out most of the time and struggles to explain why without feeling like a lunatic (pardon the pejorative.) Even Kay (angelic empath, witty as hell, gorgeous curls, etc.) scoffs a bit at the things Zoe worries about. Sometimes even Zoe scoffs at the things Zoe worries about. Some guy being rude to you about stale popcorn isn’t a slight on your character, babe. A year into her stint at the banana factory you’d think she’d stop taking customer service turmoil so goddamn personal. Really she just wants to help people, to become an efficient little cog, to leave no impression on those she helps other than an innocuous friendliness. Then she gets paid on Thursdays and goes home to watch cute girls on Instagram shred on electric. There are few jobs with lower stakes, yet still the thought of something going wrong at work makes her sick some mornings. Of course she’s number to it now than she was day one, yet still there remains in her a worry that the tedium has yet to iron out. That’s her core, she figures: a ball of nerves. Nothing short of a lobotomy’ll gut that sucker out.

Enough to drive one bananas, this banana factory. “Banana” is code for rodent, of course. Whenever the topic of bananas comes up everyone’s quick to point out that R*gal isn’t the source of the infestation but rather a casualty of the nest at the Chinese place down below. Implicit sinophobia aside, she always found it a bit odd how even her more cynical peers went to bat for the company like that. A way to feel better about the things scuttling around your feet in the dark, maybe. She learned about bananas her first week from Jenny, an old manager. How in the know it made her feel! Jenny was sweet to her though not to anyone else apparently, her departure a few months ago met with hushed celebration from floor staff, short-lived since the lady that replaced her (a tiny brunette from Connecticut who wears a jacket with padded shoulders — lovely bob cut) was even worse. Apparently? Adrien is nice to Zoe, too. If you do your work and carry yourself inoffensively enough you’ll be treated sweet by just about everyone.

Not quite. She suspects half her co-workers find her insufferable. She’s been Ms. Goody Two Shoes since pre-k, after all. Teacher’s pet, they called her. Never got why and still to this day she denies it in these fun little private dialogues of hers. It’s just that she happens to be of a more reserved temperament and such a temperament happens to play well with authority. She never tried to appease anyone. Rather, this meek little people pleaser is her true, pure self. Can’t be helped. The world needs people pleasers, after all.

John’s still gone. No matter, the line’s thinned a bit. Who’s a good cog?

The guy at the back taps his foot while the girl he’s with checks her phone, her elbow locked snuggly with his. Zoe’s taking a while with this family (How many kids combos was that?) but that’s okay. Young people tend to be more understanding, retail trauma closer behind them and all. One of the kids eyes the arcade machines, then wanders to the Bat mobile and jumps in. He hollers at Mom for quarters. Mom asks Zoe for change. Zoe complies. Kids are exhausting; her bloodline shall end with her. Zoe butters another bucket.

That John, in the john. Kind of hard to read sometimes. Tonight he’s been rather quiet. Their first shift together he was reading some stuffy renaissance playwright’s collected works. Not Shakespeare; too cool for Shakespeare, apparently. Instead it was Faustus guy. Why not Shakespeare, something she’s familiar with so she can feel smart and quip about poor Yorrick? Probably he’s read all of Shakespeare. The sight of that gangly blonde boy hunched over a thick omnibus during a slow night was dread-inducing at first, reminding her of the type she dated during her rather embarrassing heterosexual phase (comphet, baby) but then she asked him what he was reading and he started gushing about the plotline of the play he was on with unfakeable enthusiasm. So unpretentious! He’s a drama major, aspiring screenwriter/actor. She imagines straight Zoe a few universes over — how she would be all over this pasty kid — and finds it rather pitiable. Maybe instead bizarro John is a girl. Joan. That’s better. She wonders if having a straight alternate universe counterpart negates one’s gold star lesbian status. In some sects, perhaps. Out in the mountains somewhere toils a tribe of gays who are gay across all timelines. They wear shiny badges to celebrate their perfect gayness. Good for them.

The straights she helps now (that patient young couple once at the back) are seeing Midsommar. Get fucked, Spider-man! Kudos to Ari Aster for getting couples on date night to sit awkwardly through psychedelic pagan rape rituals. Like poor Dani’s trip to Sweden the movie tests relationships — hard. Oh, they only want tickets, no snacks? Wonderful. What’s in that bag, missy? Outside food? You think you’re so clever…lucky she’s feeling merciful. Also Matt’s at door and gives zero shits vis-a-vis rule-breakers. Once he got in trouble for admitting some (clearly) underage kids into an R-rated show about killer crocodiles or something and all he got from Adrien was a slap on the wrist. See, she’s not so bad. Enjoy the show.

Now she’s alone. Maybe John ditched her. Doesn’t seem in-character, not that she knows the guy terribly well. Could be he’s in camp insufferable regarding the whole Zoe issue. Kay’s out ushing tonight, which means she’s probably in the back row of some theater on her phone instead of sweeping the hall or out on stand helping her (tasks you’re supposed to default to when there are no empty theaters to clean according to the employee handbook — what a dorky detail to recall.) Matt will come to her if he wants to talk (unlikely; another camp insufferable?)

The State Farm jingle jingles overhead. With no one around it’s just her, the ads and the subtle hum of the popcorn light. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Across from stand the arcade machines flicker, Bat mobile kid long gone. The lobby’s floor is close to immaculate, no need to sweep. Quietly, she hopes someone will come by stand and liberate her from her thoughts.

#

John Rowlands sits in a bathroom stall, phone dead, pants up, thinking about all the times he’s made his mother cry and ranking them along various criteria. He imagines a list like the ones you see in Wikipedia articles that let you arrange the rows vertically in ascending or descending order in regards to a specific variable. Instead of the length/average discharge/drainage area of rivers in North America it would be intensity of crying/level of guilt/public embarrassment index. “Refused to dance with her during parent-child dance at obscure aunt’s wedding” ranks high by all major metrics and can reasonably be considered his greatest failing as a son. He thinks like this whenever he’s feeling bad for no particular reason as he figures worrying about something specific is better than aimless anxiety. Or maybe there’s no intentionality to it and these are just what one might call intrusive thoughts. Other regulars include: your family is going to die someday; you will die someday; you will die alone; you are inherently unlovable; list of tall bridges on east coast. The old school method. Let gravity do the work — makes a statement but isn’t too flashy like a gun or car wreck, just the right amount of melodrama. His corpse might find its way to the bottom of the Chesapeake and sustain a happy crab family for a few generations. Lovely, Johnny Boy.

A urinal flushes. Pants zip. He really should get going…

His mother worked at a movie theater at his age and sometimes describes it to him with starry-eyed nostalgia. She watched The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles from the projection booth, studying up there when school got hectic. Here there’s not so much a projection booth but rather one long projection hallway where hulking machines whir in the dark, the booming of different shows leaking in from all sides. No one’s really supposed to go up there aside from managers, and even then only when something’s gone awry. Adrien took him up there once, presumably to crush what little spirit he had left. It worked. The trip was sobering; nothing romantic about a dark room where robots unthinkingly play ads, then previews, then a movie, then ads, then previews, then the same movie again until closing. The heat, too. What an inhuman place; no college students changing the reels and cramming for exams, peaking into the theater to catch the cathartic scene in Breakfast Club where everyone sits on the floor and sorts their shit out. The multiplex grinds all to dust. Maybe one day concessions will be automated and he’ll be out of a job — what mercy. Maybe one day customers will be automated, too, and the multiplex will reach its final form: a concrete box where machines sit in a dark room to watch images generated by other machines.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. A sign it’s time to go back, maybe. Zoe can handle stand fine on her own but even so maybe his absence is starting to be felt. What, he’s depriving her of his presence or something? Covert narcissism is still narcissism. Always trying to impress her, going on about Marlowe like he’s hot shit. Talk about Avengers or something, dude. Midsommar. Down the hall on one of the screens a shitty boyfriend is getting stuffed into a bear and set on fire. He’s not shitty because of the infidelity but rather because he was dismissive, condescending, cold. Not there for her, basically. Also those Swedes got him high before the sex started and you can’t exactly give constant, enthusiastic consent when high out of your mind, can you? Christ, don’t say any of that. Unusable.

What to say, then? Majoring in undeclared; short hair with pink highlights; kind of androgynous; she/they energy. She looks like most of the girls he crushed on in high school, therefore an 80% gay probability can be assumed. How to compliment her without coming off like a man? Any friendliness is bound to be interpreted as romantic interest, why bother. Talk about how much this job sucks: a safe, uncontroversial topic if ever there was one.

#

Kay Castellano scrolls through Twitter in the dark, her feet up on a reclining theater seat. The seats are too bougie for such an otherwise run-down place, she feels. Occasionally she glances up to a screen of white people walking through a field of green so saturated it’s surreal. Actually there’s one black guy: the guy from the Good Place. He’ll be the first to go, probably. So typical. Horror films are usually her thing but this one isn’t striking her. A24’s keeping the spooky stuff out of the trailers, it seems. It’s not paying off — this theater’s dead as hell. Everyone’s at Spider-man, probably. She peeps her head in for checks and all she ever catches of Midsommar is the damn green field. Very pretty. Not all that scary, though. It’s a slow-burner.

Mark says the guy who did Hereditary did this one. Hereditary was an artsier kind of horror, psychological and grounded…until the Satanists showed up at the end, Rosemary’s Baby-style. Lame. If you’re gonna have stupid shit in your movie don’t be shy about it. She watched that one with Mark and he agreed. Still, that movie tormented her. Made her think of Luis and what a shitty sister she is, how she might have accidentally decapitated him under the right circumstances. One day he’ll be big and strong and won’t have to depend on her or mom. Then it’ll just be her and Mark. No kids. Might stay in touch with the more tolerable co-workers, but otherwise she’ll be far from R*gal — what’s left of it once the rats band together and revolt, anyway. Do the rats need a class traitor? If yes she volunteers. A few weeks ago Adrien showed her the banana traps under the seats with a sort of sick glee: Hey, wanna know a secret? It radicalized her. Could be a banana under her right now, squirming in that steel death box, its last thought a lustful hunger for the cheese that has tricked it. Actually it’s not even cheese but instead a nutritionless cheese-scented goop. Too cruel. She wants no part of it.