We ran out of the theater as soon as the movie ended. When a man was questioned by the police about being forced to have sex with a prostitute while a knife was strapped to his penis, my mother grabbed my arm and squeezed till it hurt. I knew my mother was angry and embarrassed, and that the fear of further embarrassment is all that kept her in her seat as the graphic images rolled in front of our eyes. That word, 'grisly,' had been the key word used by the MPAA to describe the violence in the caption I had read in the newspaper that morning. 'Let's just give it a chance,' I replied.įor the next two hours, we stayed put through the cavalcade of torture murders and grisly crime scenes. 'I'm not sure I can deal with this,' my mom said. The opening credits are a montage of fingertips sliced with razor blades, then thumbing through the notebooks of a deranged mind-drawings of demons, photos of ghastly medical experiments, and snatches of perverted writings-with the industrial thump of Nine Inch Nails playing over the top. The moment the movie started, there was trouble. We were not strangers to bloody murder mysteries. I told her it was Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman on the trail of a serial killer. We had both seen trailers, but my mother still didn't know much about the movie going in. Still, we managed to grab seats in our preferred spot-left side, right on the center aisle, about half way back from the screen. The film had garnered a lot of hype, so the theater was packed. We were there to see David Fincher's ' Seven' on opening night.

We walked into the lobby and bought our tickets. It in no way seemed strange that she would use a mug one can't just drink straight from the bottle. I sat there silently as she finished off the mug in a few big gulps. She poured a healthy amount into a coffee mug she kept under the front seat. I moved to get out of the car, but my mother said, 'Give me just a minute.' She reached into her purse sitting on the back seat and pulled out a bottle of wine. We parked in the underground lot of the old Trolley Corners Cinema, a three-screen theater that within a few years would make way for the offices of local radio stations.

Three penises walking down the street