Difficult Simple

On Fridays after I take Nemo to school in Baltimore, and if there’s something I’d like to see, I stop at the Muvico Egyptian 24 to catch the first show. Bear in mind that the Egyptian isn’t that far from Baltimore, so I tend to show up quite a bit early (usually about nine o’clock) and kill time reading, listening to my iPod or walking the mall. Today I did that, bought my ticket at 11:05 and settled in to wait for the show at 11:35. This week: Doomsday, which I’ve been excited about for quite a while.

I saw all the promotional stuff showing in the theater last week — 10,000 BC, ugh — so I kept my headphones on and listened to music. Headphones. On head. Silent to all others. My phone was already on vibrate, too.

I bought a vastly overpriced bottle of water ($3.50 for a half-liter!) to take my cold meds when it was time and once the trailers started I blew my nose so I wouldn’t have to during the movie. I did all this because I actually, you know, care about the moviegoing experience. I wish the same could be said for other patrons.

Here’s the scene: I’m in the middle of the third-to-last row in the back. There are maybe a dozen others at the showing. One guy is way over on the right hand side, one row up. He hears me blow my nose, turns around and shouts at me, “What’s your fucking problem?”

Maybe I’m stupid, but I asked him, “What’s your problem?”

“You!”

“Well, you might as go to another theater, because I’m not going anywhere.”

The trailers are well underway now and it’s louder than hell. He’s still yelling, and all I can here is fuck, fucking, fuck, fuck and so on. And now I know I’m stupid because I get up to get closer to the guy as to hear what he’s saying.

“You’re a fucking asshole!” he informs me.

“I’m not leaving. If you have a problem, then complain or go.”

“Fuck you!”

“What do you hope to accomplish with this?” I ask.

Being the master of witty repartee, the guy says, “What do you hope to accomplish?”

“I hope to accomplish watching this movie!”

“Well, you’re a fucking rude asshole!” says he.

This guy’s clearly deranged, and we’re getting nowhere. I left him, went out to the front and asked the (very nice) girl at the desk for some help. There’s a guy out of control in Theater 2 and he needs to be ejected.

The girl gets on the radio and summons Matt and a woman whose name I never got. Matt is apparently in charge of pissed off customers. So I tell him and the woman what’s going on and they go to the theater to get the guy. I return to my seat. As they’re walking him out, the guy gives me the finger and shouts, “Fuck you!” Remember this, because it becomes important later.

So he’s gone. I figure there’s no way he’s coming back, but I start thinking ahead. Somebody that nuts might wait around outside the entrance to assault me. Luckily the theater has a second exit, so I figured I’d use that after the movie was over. But then… the woman whose name I don’t know comes back with the guy!

“He says it’s your fault. Can you stay in the movie together?”

“No way! That guy’s out of his mind!”

I’m shocked and bewildered and, as I said, there was no way I was going to stay in a darkened theater with somebody that out of control. I go outside to find Matt and the senior manager, William. I learn from William that the guy claimed I started accosting him, and then the guy told all of these assembled managers that he was going to assault me. Exactly what I feared and, one would think, grounds for immediate ejection as per my request.

Time for the cops. I get the dispatcher on the phone and tell her what’s up. I’m trying to get specific info from the management folks to give to the dispatchers, but they’re providing robo-service and simply repeating stuff like, “He voiced a concern about blah, blah, blah,” until finally I told the dispatcher that they’d have to have the police speak with the managers because they weren’t telling me anything.

Off the phone and waiting now. I tell the story again, because apparently William hadn’t even been told that it was me who brought the initial complaint. He then says he’s powerless because it’s “he said, she said.” I told them that as long as the other guy is the she in that setup, I’d let him have that one, but there’s a snag: he threatened me directly to the managers. That’s not a hearsay situation, but a straight-up issue of customer safety. When a customer threatens another customer, the threatening customer has to go. Period.

A forehead-smacking moment comes when the lady whose name I don’t know and Matt, who were right there when it happened, said they didn’t hear the guy accost me on the way out. “Oh, I didn’t catch what he said,” says the woman whose name I don’t know. Like that matters, anyway: having returned to my seat to quietly watch the film, I still have the guy yelling at me. What did she think he was doing, sharing his favorite meatloaf recipe?

The cops show up. The story is repeated. One understands what’s happening and the other one starts lecturing me on the First Amendment. To which I replied that if I told him I was going to kick his ass, that’s considered a terroristic threat and is punishable by law. The cop then tries to tell me that if I force them to question the other man, he might make claims that I assaulted him, or what have you. I turned over my ID and told the cop, “I’m not afraid of anything he might say, because I haven’t done anything.”

Meanwhile I’m on the phone with Muvico corporate. It’s kind of chaotic in the foyer now — cops, managers, gawkers, etc. — the guy is pulled from the theater and questioned. Finally he’s ejected for being a psycho, but not charged with anything. I’m put through to Cynthia at Muvico’s standard contact line and then to Beatrice at corporate. I explain to her what’s going on and why I’m upset. I’ll get my $7.50 back, but that’s not the point: Muvico failed to provide adequate response to a potentially dangerous situation. The minute that guy opened his mouth and threatened to punch me, even the most conservative of managers should have known what to do without hesitation.

Moreover, no one has stopped to ask this question: if I’m the monster here, then why would I waste my time and miss my movie just to draw attention to some wrong I’ve done? That’s beyond stupid. What possible advantage do I accrue to myself? My admission back? I could get that just by asking for it and leaving; I certainly didn’t need to involve a handful of managers, cops and (eventually) mall security for eight bucks.

Over an hour has passed during all of this. Beatrice promised to pass my concerns on James Herd, someone in the upper echelons of corporate, but there’s no way to confirm this. I plan to follow up throughout the afternoon until someone can explain to me how this happened.

What happened to me in the end? I got a security escort out to my car because no one knew where the crazy guy had gone and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get caught out in the parking lot for a full-contact edition of “he said, she said.” I prefer my fisticuffs onscreen and in the ring, not at the mall.

It should go without saying, but I never did get to see Doomsday. And I may never go back to the Muvico Egyptian 24, either, because their managers need some retraining, and I mean right now.