Basement Tapes

Robert Allen

July 23, 2023

Like Tom Hanks, I became a movie nerd

in the seventies, when many old-fashioned

single-screen theaters had gone repertory.

In my hometown, for a dollar a ticket,

you saw two different features every night

at the Olmos, which is where my wife says

we went on our first date. I still have one

of their old schedules somewhere on my desk,

but now it makes me think of my best friend

from grade school days: His name was Robert, too.

For a brief while, the Olmos Theatre

was where we learned our film vocabulary.

I will say Robert was perhaps the smartest

and certainly the most creative person

I have ever known. His weird cartoons filled

the school newspaper. His writing inspired me

to try it myself. Once, he led me down

into the basement of his modest home

where he had guitars, a bass, a drum set,

and this four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder.

He let me play the drums and sing, if you

can believe that, while he played a guitar

and his younger brother Russell played bass.

All afternoon we made music together,

planning ahead of time which instruments

to play in which order, so the machine

would record each track on the preferred side

and the finished songs would sound stereophonic,

like our favorite albums. A glorious time

this was, exploring what talents we had

so we could feel like artists. It was homemade

nirvana. Somehow I never went back.

Maybe after graduation life sent him

on some strange new path. Last I heard, my friend

was staying in a hotel on Times Square,

no doubt to work in Broadway’s theater district,

marching his own way to a different drummer.

But in the seventies, Broadway was not

the mecca it is today. Crime rates soared,

new shows were few, some theaters closed or turned

burlesque. Did some mishap befall my friend?

He has not come to any class reunion,

and when I see a certain kind of movie

where nerdish boy makes good and gets the girl,

I always wonder what became of him—

Robert, Cindy, Dennis, Yvonne, and all

those people I loved once, yet not enough.

Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and three cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, 2023 Texas Poetry Calendar, and TPA. He loves going on long walks to new places, hates to throw things away, and facilitates Gemini Ink's in-person Open Writer's Lab.