The Phantom of Skid Row

By Harry Ringel

1965. Young Tito Scaffone loves vintage horror movies more than life itself. He is especially enamored of Lon Chaney's 1925 The Phantom of the Opera-the majesty of the sets, the silent-celluloid beauty of Mary Philbin, but most of all the mastery of Chaney's makeup as the hideously disfigured phantom. But monsters in movies are one thin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Auctus Publishers
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781733445665

Harry Ringel

Harry Ringel's Shemhazai's Game, a novel of Jewish fantasy was published by Auctus Publishers in February 2020. Previous fiction publications include a novel of speculative fiction, The Tender Seed (Warner Books). His English-as Second-Language textbooks for New Readers Press continue to be distributed world-wide His newspaper features and investigative journalism articles have appeared in Philadelphia magazine, Sight and Sound, and a variety of other periodicals.

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Praise for The Phantom of Skid Row

Time was when every city of any size had a Grindhouse Row, a string of movie theaters with low admission prices, open all night and often playing movies of a sensational nature. The clientele ranged from those needing a place to sleep to the occasional film enthusiast who braved the sometimes dangerous conditions inside those theaters. In New York’s fabled 42nd Street, Grindhouse Row was largely in long-faded former vaudeville houses from a prior century. In Philadelphia, the setting of Harry Ringel’s rewarding new novel, Grindhouse Row was in the shadow of City Hall. Admission prices ranged from 25 cents to $1.25.

The Phantom of Skid Row is set in the Dreamland, an old theater built for the 1876 Centennial. Over the years it has accumulated many secrets and tragedies and also a most unwelcome supernatural entity, which still haunts the theater now that it’s become a grindhouse and home for the denizens of Skid Row. While this book will enchant the movie lover with its cinematic lore, it also will surprise with its insights into love and history and the human condition, along with the natural and supernatural ways in which a heart can be haunted.

— Joseph Kaufman, Executive Producer,

Assault on Precinct 13 and Nails

More Praise for The Phantom

of Skid Row

Harry Ringel's The Phantom of Skid Row is a cinephile's dream. Young Tito Scaffone is the ideal hero for this saga of discovery, not only of the residue of magic in aging or abandoned theaters, but also of B movies of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The novel takes the reader into bygone film exchanges where distributors and theater managers haggle over rental prices and what films to show. One travels as well into city neighborhoods long past their prime. Anyone who has entered the doors of a vintage movie palace will find much to savor in these pages.

Also woven within the novel's rich and atmospheric tapestry are poignant tales of haunted families indelibly touched by forces both natural and supernatural. Harry Ringel truly understands the spellbinding passion & romance of film. But he has also created a moving and at times disturbing tale of the uncanny. The Phantom of Skid Row brims with sympathy, pathos, and, above all, affection!

—Lee Tsiantis, Former Corporate Legal Manager, Turner Entertainment Group

The Phantom of Skid Row

Harry Ringel

www.auctuspublishers.com

Copyright© 2021 Harry Ringel

Book and Cover Design by Colleen J. Cummings

Published by Auctus Publishers

606 Merion Avenue, First Floor

Havertown, PA 19083

Printed in the United States of America

The Phantom of Skid Row is a work of fiction. The characters and events in the novel are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events, specific locations, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

All rights reserved. Scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without permission in writing from its publisher, Auctus Publishers, is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic edition.

ISBN 978-1-7334456-5-8 (Print)

ISBN 978-1-7334456-6-5 (Electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number 2021932556

Suddenly, I felt a need to see beneath the mask. I wanted to know the face of the voice…Swiftly my fingers tore away the mask. Oh horror! Horror! Horror! If I lived to be a hundred, I should always hear the superhuman cry of grief and rage which he uttered when the terrible sight appeared before my eyes…You have seen death’s heads, when they have been dried and withered by the centuries…All those death’s heads were motionless and their dumb horror was not alive. But imagine, if you can, Red Death’s mask suddenly coming to life in order to express, with the four black holes of its eyes, its nose, and its mouth, the extreme anger, the mighty fury, of a demon…

— The Phantom of the Opera (1911) by Gaston Leroux

PART ONE

Upper Darby, Pennsylvania

October 31, 1958

chapter 1

Special Halloween Showing

Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera

Tonight Only. 8:00 PM.

Houston Hall, 2nd floor

Penn Campus 3417 Spruce Street

Free Admission

Maybe there really is a God , Tito thought. How else to explain the unlikely sequence of events that had led to his discovery?

It had been a typical Friday afternoon. After school,Tito had walked down to the business center of Upper Darby. Most of the other ninth graders stormed the record shop next to the Terminal Theater for their weekly infusion of rock and roll 45’s. As always, Tito kept walking. Alone he entered the Sun Ray drug store to scan the magazine rack for a new issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Finding none, he settled for a Peanut Chews. At the cash register, he stood with head lowered while digging out the change. There, on the floor, he found the trampled copy of a newspaper called The Daily Pennsylvanian and its tiny boxed ad. Or it found him. With its ad for what was supposed to be the greatest Lon Chaney film of them all.

Reverentially, he folded the newspaper into the breast pocket of his coat and started home. It came from the University of Pennsylvania, which was how far? He only knew it was nowhere near Upper Darby. He did know Spruce Street, which ended where West Philadelphia stopped and Upper Darby began, about half a mile from his house. From there a bus route headed east into West Philadelphia, where Tito had never gone. But how far down was 3417? And what would Mama Ruth say?

The air held that late-October Philadelphia kind of cold that tricked people by being warm in the morning but plunged to freezing by mid-afternoon. He sat on the steps of his row home anyway. He wasn’t too late yet. Mama Ruth wouldn’t be peeking through the blinds, her small, gray face consumed by worry. The steps were clean. Mama must have washed them this morning before the chill arrived. Inside would be especially spotless for her Friday evening dinner with Tito. To others it was just another row home, one of hundreds that filled the side streets of Upper Darby. But to Mama Ruth it was a refuge past whose portal she seldom ventured, and then only in the company of her son.

Tito took out the paper. Gripping it against an assault of wind, he folded it to the ad. Again, he let his gaze slide over the words. Chaney, Phantom. Just reading the names stirred in him the most luminous joy. He had never seen a Lon Chaney movie. They were all silent, too old to play in theaters or on television. But Famous Monsters had photographs of Lon Chaney in makeups as disparate as the personalities of their tortured characters. The grinning vampire with bulging eyes and top hat in London After Midnight. The 100-year-old Chinese man, high cheeks layered in wrinkles, in Mr. Wu. The bald grubby cripple crawling up a rope in West of Zanzibar. Lon Chaney. Man of a Thousand Faces. To gaze at his characters was to be transported to a world, dank and solitary, where a tormented soul dwelled, his inner goodness unrecognized. A world of outcasts whose gentle natures were warped to cruelty by their disfigurements.

Tito’s world.

A world with no room for Cue Ball.

Cue Ball.

How I hate to be called that! Tito thought, as he showered. It was how other ninth graders would mock his size, his shape, his pallor. Cue Ball, not Eight Ball. Because Eight Balls were black. And Tito’s skin possessed the conspicuous paleness of someone who spent most of his time inside. Cue Ball. Half a foot shorter than most boys his age. Round, like a billiard ball. Once the nickname caught on at school, comments pricked him from nowhere. If-he-fell-down-he’d-roll-forever comments. When he was noticed at all.

He stepped out of the shower. Quickly, he wrapped a towel around his middle, positioned himself before the bathroom mirror, and waited for the steam to evaporate. Then he considered himself. The soft, round belly and sagging chest, the hairless white skin, the black curls of his hair plastered flat against his round skull—You have such lovely eyes, Mama Ruth had once commented. Shimmering black, dark and soulful, set off by long lashes, ringed by circles that show you think, you care. Tito thought they made him look like a raccoon.

Cue Ball. Sometimes he was glad they called him that. It was his mask, one that concealed the true darkness inside him. What if some girl ever did pull that mask off, like in The Phantom of the Opera? He didn’t know the whole plot, only that the Phantom lurked in the bowels of the Paris Opera and loved a girl named Christine, who inhabited the bright world above him. He knew that in the most famous scene, Christine rips the mask off the Phantom’s face and exposes its naked horror. What happens then? She probably escapes. He probably gets killed. That’s what always happens in horror movies about deranged hermits. The crazy guy builds a wall between himself and the taunts of the normal world. It had to be the Phantom’s way—to erect a wall around his pain, to fend off all intruders. Except Christine.

You’ll be home in time for trick-or-treaters, won’t you? Mama Ruth asked. It’s Friday night. There might be a lot of them.

I’ll try, Mama.

"Good. Then we will watch Jackie Gleason and Phil Silvers. And The Thin Man. It’s a better show than we thought it was going to be. Isn’t it?"

Yes, Mama.

Her doe-like brown eyes fell. Already she was sensing something off in his reactions. Even the slightest change in his inflection could trigger her alarm.

Mama Ruth— Tito thought to blurt out his plan, but his mother had already turned away. He watched her slight body glide back through the living room, her polio-shriveled left leg clanking in its brace. He thought to reassure her some more, maybe run after her, kiss her cheek. But that would only make things worse later. When he didn’t come home until late.

He waited until after their Friday night dinner to speak. I think I’ll go out for a while. Take a long walk, try to lose some weight. So what will you do, Mama?

I have a painting to finish. Do you want to see what I have so far?

He followed her into the living room. It had become something of a ritual, her asking him to evaluate one of her works as it neared completion. Mostly she captured memories from her childhood. This one presented a blackened canvas at whose center was a small square of light—a window from a darkened room, beyond which were the miniaturized sections, silver and skeletal, of a playground’s monkey bars. Gray Matter, she had titled it. From his biology class, Tito knew why. Polio means gray in Greek. The disease infects the gray matter of the spinal cord.

Tito, why don’t we walk together down to the Acme and buy some cookies?

It’s too cold, Mama. Anyway, I gotta go. I saw this show on TV about how being overweight is bad for you.

Her resigned nod intimated that she had seen right through him.

Don’t open the door to anyone, okay Mama? Not even trick-or-treaters, he added lamely and was gone out the door.

He walked fast to Spruce Street and the bus stop from which his odyssey would commence. He had to hurry. Already it was 6:30. That gave him an hour and a half to find 3417 Spruce. Anything could happen. The bus might not come. Or it might break down. He knew little of West Philadelphia. Maybe he’d be beaten up and robbed, left unconscious until way past show time.

The bus came right away. He asked the driver how far 3417 Spruce was.

Twenty minutes, the man yawned, his weary glower intimating that his route passed that address a dozen times daily.

Tito sat near the front, in case the door opened and closed too quickly. He stuck his hands into the pockets of his light brown corduroy coat and slumped down, eyes high enough to watch the street numbers descend. By the time the bus reached 40th and Spruce, the pedestrians changed from the worn-down gait of men and women nearing the end of their day to younger people who flew along the sidewalks with a kind of self-propelled urgency. College people. Wasn’t that what Penn Campus on the ad meant?

At 36th Street, Tito rushed down to the sidewalk. Across Spruce, halfway down the block, wide steps led up to brown wooden doors on a two-story stone building. It didn’t look like a theater. Was this Houston Hall? He crossed the street, climbed the steps, and went inside. Nobody stopped him. The first floor was warm, with college people lounging on old furniture, big and plush, like you might find in a castle. He took out the newspaper ad. Second floor, it read. Upstairs, several rooms fed off a square hall space. All had regular doors, more like for meetings than for movies. His heart sank. What if there was some awful mistake? Panic growing, he circled the perimeter. Penn Players Rehearsal, a handwritten sign read. Mask and Wig Social Hour, said another. Arts Club Mixer—it’s here, he hoped. Except the time announced was 4:00 p.m., which meant the event was over.

Next to this room, an anonymous door stood half-open. Near the entrance, a movie projector perched on a cart—16 millimeter, they called these at school. Beyond the cart, two sections of metal folding chairs faced a home movie screen. Chin tucked low, Tito marched inside. No one stopped him. No one was there.

Two film cans lay on the cart’s shelf under the projector. Phantom I was scrawled in black on the top can. Which meant Phantom II was under it. Which meant it was here. So close he could touch it, hold it. Or someone could steal it. But not if he was here to guard it until the authorities came back. But what kind of authorities would be so careless? He slid a folding chair over to the cart and sat down. Arms crossed, he waited. Still no one came. He was almost an hour early. That explained something. But leaving The Phantom of the Opera unattended? And why didn’t the door announce that the showing was here? The title alone would be better than nothing.

Tito remembered the art supplies on the tables next door. Returning to the empty hall area, he slipped into the Arts Club room, grabbed a handful of markers and a poster board, and hurried back to where The Phantom of the Opera would be shown. He sat on the floor and drew the letters of the title, alternating black and orange, in homage to Halloween. He added 8:00 in bright red. Vertical stripes on either side trumpeted LON (in black) and CHANEY (in orange). Now all he needed was a piece of tape. He found one by the light switch, where someone had posted a note reminding the room’s users to turn off the lights upon exiting. It was just enough for Tito to press his poster to the door. Then he went back inside and resumed his post at the projector.

Footsteps clomped into the room behind him. Turning, he looked up. And up, at a guy much taller than he was. But still a kid, about Tito’s age. Broad shoulders filled an army-style leather jacket, chocolate brown, rich in grease stains, adorned in gashes. The white dress shirt and narrow black tie underneath seemed incongruous. His blonde hair was shaved crew-cut-short. His eyes fell lazily on Tito.

You stick up that sign? he asked.

Yes. I thought—

Thanks. I was in the toilet. He wiped both hands down his shiny black dress slacks.

They studied each other.

Tito’s first reaction was that this fellow was of such brawn that he could wad Tito up and bowl him down the hall if he had a mind to do so. His second thought was one of pity. The kid radiated a certain sincerity, dim, inarticulate, as if it would be a challenge for him to see one thought beyond another. He reminded Tito of the students who boarded the tech school buses that left school in the morning. Tito was trying to find the words to ask what a kid like him was doing showing The Phantom of the Opera in a place like this when the guy interrupted.

You gonna be in here until show time?

Tito nodded.

"You mind keepin’ an eye on things? I’ll be in the Penn Players room. They’re rehearsin’ Guys and Dolls. I seen college chicks goin’ in there. Wearin’ bikinis under their coats. He stopped and thought for a moment. Unless you wanna go watch."

No thanks.

I’ll be back. On that he was gone.

For the next half hour, no one else came. The wall clock edged past 7:45. Just when Tito was beginning to think that he would be the only person in attendance, he heard footsteps. Two older men entered, separately, both sad-eyed, gray hair slightly overgrown, suits lightly rumpled. They took seats near the back. Their eyes had the wary intelligence of his eighth grade English instructor. Maybe they were college teachers?

Just before eight o’clock, the big kid returned.

Thanks, he said again, his voice deadened by honoring a courtesy someone had taught him. Go sit where you want. Okay?

Tito went all the way down front. He liked for movies to swallow him into their worlds. His connection to The Phantom of the Opera had to be that pure. Lights clicked off. The door closed. Darkness took over. The projector whirred to life. The screen filled with white. Numbers jumped past. 10…9…8…

At five, the door banged open. Three tall shapes sauntered down the aisle and stopped in the middle, blocking the film title and actor credits, blocking Lon Chaney’s name while they were deciding where to sit. Finally, they moved into Tito’s section. With simmering giggles, they settled into the row directly behind him.

A pang of alarm passed through him. What if they kept making noise after the movie started? But they did fall quiet—an extra good thing, as no sound at all accompanied the images. Tito had never seen a silent film. Weren’t pianos supposed to play along with them? The first few minutes elicited nothing more than restless shifting and a honked yawn behind him. Then it started. On the screen, the opera ballerinas were reacting to a stagehand describing the Phantom by bugging their eyes and scampering in tandem and twirling full circles in their tutus. After that scene, the three launched salvos of derisive laughs at every grimaced reaction shot, every sped-up dash.

The first appearance of the masked Phantom, profiled in shadow, did silence them. Maybe they are finished. Maybe the film has taken hold of them after all, Tito thought. On the screen, the Phantom has drawn Christine through her dressing room mirror. His gloved hand touches her shoulder from behind—tentatively, like a shy boy who has finally shored up his courage to approach the girl he likes. They did not laugh at that. They did not laugh when, turning, Christine faces the Phantom, his mask sad-eyed, apologetic, his sunless world lit by her beauty. And Christine, played by Mary Philbin, is beautiful—even more beautiful than in the stills he had seen of her in the monster magazines: almost child-like in her slenderness, her figure veiled further by the voluminous layers of skirt and long sleeves and high throat of a gown laced so tight across her bosom as to render it nonexistent. Her timid eyes run to Erik in admiration, then retreat in fear. Her brunette hair tumbles in vague dishevelment that mirrors the disorder the Phantom himself has injected into her life. Her bee-stung lips retain their pursed bewilderment over this stranger whose voice has tantalized her, his form now emerged from the darkness. Fully, except for the mask.

They are standing, Christine above the Phantom, on a long flight of stairs that plummet along a massive wall of grimy stone blocks to the very depths of the Phantom’s realm. Taking her hand, he begins leading her down. But then Mary Philbin lets her head flop back. She ceases being Christine and becomes an actress who has been told to look overpowered by a male force more mysterious than any she has ever encountered.

This time the laughter behind Tito escalated to whoops and hisses and groans.

Tito rose from his chair and faced them.

You should be quiet, he blurted, wondering if the tremor in his voice was noticeable. They looked him up and down. More laughter burst from them, louder than ever, as if the surprise appearance of this roly-poly 12-year-old added sublime punctuation to the unintended comedy of the film. Tito sat back down. He had asked; what more could he do? He tried to inject himself into the flow of the story, but he could only anticipate their next outburst. Then the backrest of his metal chair was being kicked. A shoe mashed his spine through the space below.

A hand grabbed his shoulder from the side. The big kid bent over him. He had taken off his bomber jacket. Broad shoulder muscles filled the too-tight white shirt. The black tie swung as he inclined toward Tito, eyes steeled for trouble.

Go on up the aisle. Sit in the back. Watch the projector. If the film jams, turn it off.

How— Tito began.

Just go.

Tito did as he was told.

Down front, the tall kid entered the row behind Tito’s. Leaning over, he whispered something to the nearest of the three college guys, who shrugged before returning his attention to the screen. The tall kid straightened. His chest heaved once. His right hand lashed forward and closed around the college guy’s shirt collar. In one fast jerk he lifted the man out of his seat, dragged him up the aisle, and shoved him out the door. Then he headed back down for the other two, who had already escaped to the far side. One called out some faint jeer as they slipped from the room.

Go on back to your seat. The tall kid resumed his post by the projector.

From this point to the end, the only sound to be heard was the whir of the projector.

The lights went on.

The two professor types were gone; only the tall kid remained, at the projector, coaxing the tail end of the film from the full rear reel into a slot on the emptied front reel. A switch clicked. With a dutiful hum, the machine fed the film back onto the front reel. Tito went to him. In silence he observed the ritual of rewinding. How had the movie come to be here? The kid certainly didn’t look old enough to possess such a treasure. His legs seemed more than half of him, much longer than the upper part of his body, like a colt not yet grown into a stallion. And the fellow could not have been much older than Tito was. The steel-blue eyes communicated a boy’s wonderment at the world’s ways. The mouth hung a little open. The blonde crew cut made him look ten years old. Only the shoulders were fully a man’s. Broad and brawny, they rolled at the slightest flex of his too-snug white shirt.

How did you get hold of it? Tito asked.

Get holda what?

"The movie. The Phantom of the Opera."

"My Uncle Stan. He said I gotta get educated. He said there was more to movies than just I Was a Teenage Werewolf and, and…"

"Invasion of the Saucer Men?"

Yeah. That was what we sent out with it.

Sent out? The answer puzzled Tito.

Why did you show it up here? Tito asked.

That was Uncle Stan too. He booked the room. Uncle Stan says I gotta make more friends. Leastways, ones that ain’t Cro-Magnon, he says. Whatever that means. Say, what’s your name? he asked, as he threaded the second reel to rewind.

Tito. That’s what my Dad calls me. Mom likes to call me Jakie. Short for Jacob.

Jacob. Like the Jew guy in the Bible?

My Dad was Italian.

Wow. A wop dad and a Jew mom. That’s pretty good. Me, I’m Pollack, through and through.

What’s that? Tito asked.

Polish. Third generation South Philly. Name’s Jan. Short for Janusz. Janusz Klosek.

I’ve never been to South Philly.

You oughta come over some time. Jan blinked several times. I got lotsa films.

"You mean The Phantom of the Opera is yours?"

Sure. Uncle Stan gave it to me for my birthday. Sixteen millimeter home movie edition, no sound. Pretty lousy condition, but there she was. Foxy Mary Philbin, right on the wall of my living room. I’d give a month’s allowance to get into her pants.

Tito was silent.

I got lotsa films, Jan repeated. He tightened the lid on the film cans, removed the take-up reel, and screwed the projector cover back over the machine’s working parts.

Do you have any more Lon Chaney films?

Sure. I got ‘em all.

"Even The Hunchback of Notre Dame?"

"Sure. The Wolf Man too. And Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Lon Chaney’s great in them flicks too, ain’t he?"

Those were Lon Chaney Junior. Tito didn’t correct him.

Like I said, you oughta come over some time.

I don’t know, Tito said.

Okay. Have it your way. Jan put on his leather jacket and zipped the two film cans under it. Dangling the take-up reel by one finger, he grasped the projector by its handle and muscled it off the stand. See ya’ around. Maybe. He started for the door.

What I mean is, I don’t know if I can, Tito called after him. But Jan kept walking into the hallway. Pausing to turn off the lights, Tito hurried to catch up. Let me have your telephone number. Okay?

Jan stopped just outside. He set the projector down, petted his pockets for pen and paper, found none. Tito brought him a scrap of poster board and a red marker from the Arts Club room.

You want me to carry something? he asked, following Jan downstairs.

Nah. I just gotta walk to the subway. My house is close to the Broad Street line. Real close.

Together they entered the cold. Tito accompanied him to the corner of 34th Street. There, Jan headed on alone. Halfway down the block, he looked over one shoulder at Tito. A spark of enthusiasm lit his eyes before fading to the dark caution of the friendless.

I got ‘em all! he shouted, his breath misting, before he continued on. Lit by a joy he had never known before, Tito whirled on his heels and started home.

He heard the clank of Mama Ruth’s retreating hobble even before he opened the door. He knew that rush, the anxiety behind it, but he hadn’t expected to see tears on her face.

Jakie, no. You can’t ever— she pivoted on her good leg and limped to the stairs. Shamed, he watched her labored ascent. Barely five feet tall, she had never seemed smaller. He waited until she disappeared into her bedroom. Then he followed.

She was lying face down on her bed, fists tight, like a child that