Cool Hand Luke

You are nine-years-old, stretched out on the couch watching whatever your father wants to watch because he drives you on your paper route at 5am on Sundays when the papers are too heavy for you to lug on your bike. You will sit through a Sunday afternoon Movie of the Week even if he seems to be asleep, snoring through the scene of men in a chain gang, shirtless and digging ditches along a dirt road.  You are not particularly interested because it is 1994 and the film is all the way from 1967.  Your tastes are more contemporary: you particularly enjoy The Lion King.  Your father sits up in his armchair, changes the channel, repositions the wad of tobacco in his lip and looks at you out the corner of his eye under his glasses, with a slight tilt of the head so his lenses catch the overhead light and the glare masks the sideways-ness of his glance but you recognize that tilt: you are under heavy scrutiny.  He fiddles with the remote control, clicks through all the channels—his routine whenever there is mature content on TV, as if scrolling through nine channels (including the Mexican ones and the two religious ones and the one that is mostly static) will wipe your brain clean of graphic images.  But there is no mature content yet which means your father knows this old film, recalls mature content on the horizon and this is a preemptive mind-wipe cycle.  But instead of lingering on an alternate channel for 45 seconds (the average duration of mature content on network television), he completes the cycle and stops again on the Movie of the Week. 

The guys in the chain gang are distracted.  Anxious.  You can’t quite identify their emotional state but they share an excitement, all overtly giddy except Paul Newman who, well, just plays it cool.  Your father tries to play it cool, keeps one eye trained on you and repositions his chew, taps the remote control on the arm of the chair but doesn’t click the button.  The two of you watch the shirtless criminals shoveling sweating staring and finally the camera pans to what they are ogling: a woman in a threadbare sundress, young Joy Harmon with white-gold hair and porcelain skin and fullheavy breasts that could knock you out, literally knock you off your feet, and hips and big, round ass cheeks like a couple of overstuffed pillows inviting you to rest your face in the soft crack of their stack.