Stories (2011) (10 page)

Once there was over 4,000 drive-ins in the United States,
now there are about

3,000, and according to some experts, they are dropping off
fast. However, in Texas there is a re-emergence and new interest in the passion
pits of old. They have become nearly as sacred as the armadillo.

The LoneStarState alone has some 209 outdoor theaters in
operation, and many of these are multi-screen jobs with different movies
running concurrently alongside one another. Not long ago, Gordon McLendon,
"The Drive-in Business King," erected the 145 in Houston, a drive-in
capable of holding up to three thousand automobiles. In fact, it claims to be
the biggest drive-in in existence.

* * *

Why does the drive-in thrive in Texas when it's falling off
elsewhere?

Three reasons:

(1) Climate. Generally speaking, Texas has a pretty
comfortable climate year round.

(2) A car culture. Texas is the champion state for
automobile registration, and Texans have this thing about their cars.

The automobile has replaced the horse not only as a mode of
transportation, but as a source of mythology. If the Texan of old was
supposedly half-human and half-horse, the modern Texan is half-human and
half-automobile. Try and separate a Texan from his car, or mass transit that
sucker against his will, and you're likely to end up kissing his grillwork at
sixty-five miles an hour.

(3) Joe Bob Briggs.

* * *

Okay, start the background music. Softly please, a humming
version of "The Eyes of Texas." And will all true Texans please
remove your hats while we have 5 short discussion of Joe Bob Briggs, The Patron
Saint of Texas Drive-Ins, He Who Drives Behind The Speaker Rows, and columnist
for The Dallas Times Herald. In fact, his column, "Joe Bob Goes to the
Drive-in," is the most popular feature in the paper. As it should be,
because Joe Bob--who may be the pseudonym for the Herald's regular film critic
John Bloom-don't talk no bullcorn, and he don't bother with "hardtop"
movie reviews. He's purely a drive-in kind of guy, and boy does he have style.

Here's an example, part of a review for The Evil Dead:
"Five teenagers become Spam-in-a-cabin when they head for the woods and
start turning into flesh-eating zombies. Asks a lot of moral questions, like
'If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? Carve her into
itty-bitty pieces or look the other way?'

One girl gets raped by the woods. Not in the woods. By the
woods. The only way to kill zombies:

Total dismemberment. This one could make Saw eligible for
the Disney Channel."

Single-handedly, with that wild column of his-which not only
reports on movies, but on the good times and bad times of Joe Bob himself-he
has given the drive-in a new mystique. Or to be more exact, made the non-drive-in
goers aware of it, and reminded the rest of us just how much fun the outdoor
picture show can be.

Joe Bob's popularity has even birthed a yearly Drive-in
Movie Festival--somewhat sacrilegiously held indoors this year-that has been
attended in the past by such guests as Roger Corman, King Of The B's, and this
year by "Big Steve," known to some as Stephen King. (If you movie
watchers don't recognize the name, he's a writer-feller) "Big Steve"
was given the solemn honor of leading off the 1984 ceremonies with Joe Bob's
"drive-in oath" and arrived wearing his JOE BOB BRIGGS IS A PERSONAL
FRIEND OF MINE T-shirt.

The festival has also sported such features as The Custom
Car Rally, Ralph the Diving Pig (sure hate I missed the boy's act), the stars
of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Miss Custom Body of 1983, "unofficial
custom bodies" and Joe Bob his own self. And last, but certainly not
least, along with this chic gathering, a number of new movies like Bloodsuckers
From Outer Space and Future-Kill made their world premieres.

What more could you ask from Joe Bob?

Kill the music. Hats on.

* * *

The drive-ins I grew up with went by a number of names: THE
APACHE, THE rim PINES, THE RIVERROAD being a few examples. And though they
varied somewhat in appearance, basically they were large lots filled with
speaker posts--many of which were minus their speakers, due to absent-minded
patrons driving off while they were still hooked to their windows, or
vandals--a concession stand, a screen at least three stories high (sometimes
six), a swing, see-saw and merry go-round up front for the kiddies, all this surrounded
by an ugly six-foot moon shimmering tin fence.

They all had the same bad food at the concessions. Hot dogs
that tasted like rubber hoses covered in watery mustard, popcorn
indistinguishable from the cardboard containers that held it, drinks that were
mostly water and ice, and candy so old the worms inside were dead either of old
age or sugar diabetes.

And they all came with the same restroom. It was as if THE
APACHE, RIVERROAD and TWIN PINES were equipped with warping devices that
activated the moment you stepped behind the wooden "modesty fence."
Suddenly, at the speed of thought, you were whisked away to a concrete bunker
with floors either so tacky your shoes stuck to it like cat hairs to honey, or
so flooded in water you needed skis to make it to the urinals or the john, the
latter of which was forever doorless, the hinges hanging like frayed tendons.
And both of these public conveniences were invariably stuffed full of floating
cigarette butts, candy wrappers and used prophylactics.

Rather than take my life into my own hands in these rather
seedy enclosures, I often took my chances battling constipation or urinating
into a Coke cup and pouring the prize out the window. The idea of standing over
one of those odoriferous urinals--and there was always this item of crayoned
wisdom above them: REMEMBER, CRABS CAN POLE VAULT--and having some ugly, fuzzy,
multi-legged and ravenous leap out on me was forever foremost in my mind. Nor
did I find those initialed and graffiti-carved seats-when there were seats at
all-the more inviting. I figured that no matter how precariously I might perch
myself, some nameless horror from the pits of sewerdom would find access to
that part of my anatomy I most prized.

In spite of these unpleasantries, come Saturday night, a
bunch of us guys--the ones who couldn't get dates--would cruise over there,
stopping a quarter mile outside the place to stuff one member of our party m
the trunk, this always the fellow who had the least money to pool toward
entrance fees, having blown it on beer, Playboy magazines and prophylactics
that would certainly rot in his wallet. Then we would drive up to the pay booth
and promptly be asked, "Got anybody in the trunk?"

Obviously we were a suspicious looking lot, but we never
admitted to a body in the trunk, and for the same reason we were never forced
to open up. After we had emphatically denied that we would even consider it,
and the ticket seller had eyed us over for a while, trying to break our
resolve, he would take our money and we would drive inside.

My Plymouth Savoy was rigged so that the man in the trunk
could push the back seat from the inside, and it would fold down, allowing our
unthrifty, and generally greasy, contortionist to join our party.

That Savoy, what a car, what a drive-in machine. What a
death trap. It took a two man crew to drive it. The gas pedal always stuck to
the floor, and when you came whizzing up to a red light you had to jerk your
foot off the gas, go for the brake and yell "Pedal." Then your
copilot would dive for the floorboards, grab the pedal and yank it up just in
time to keep us from plowing broadside into an unsuspecting motorist. However,
that folding back seat made the sticking pedal seem like a minor liability, and
the Savoy was a popular auto with the drive-in set.

The drive-in gave me many firsts. The first sexual action I
ever witnessed was there, and I don't mean on the screen. At the APACHE the
front row was somewhat on an incline, and if the car in front of you was parked
just right, and you were lying on the roof of your car, any activity going on
in the back seat of the front row car was quite visible to you, providing it
was a moonlit night and the movie playing was a particularly bright one.

The first sexual activity that included me, also occurred at
a drive-in, but that is a personal matter, and enough said.

The first truly vicious fight I ever saw was at the
RIVERROAD A fellow wearing a cowboy hat got into some kind of a shindig with a
hatless fellow right in front of my Savoy. I've no idea what started the fight,
but it was a good one, matched only by a live Championship Wrestling match at
the Cottonbowl.

Whatever the beef, the fellow with the hat was the sharper
of the two, as he had him a three foot length of two-by-four, and all the other
fellow had was a bag of popcorn. Even as the zombies of The Night of the Living
Dead shuffled across the screen, The Hat laid a lick on Hatless's noggin that
sounded like a beaver's tail slapping water. Popcorn flew and the fight was on.

The Hat got Hatless by the lapel and proceeded to knock
knots on his head faster than you could count them, and though Hatless was game
as all-get-out, he couldn't fight worth a damn. His arms flew over The Hat's
shoulders and slapped his back like useless whips of spaghetti, and all the
while he just kept making The Hat madder by calling him names and making rude
accusations about the man's family tree and what members of it did to one
another when the lights were out.

For a while there, The Hat was as busy as the lead in a
samurai movie, but finally the rhythm of his blows--originally akin to a Ginger
Baker drum solo-died down, and this indicated to me that he was getting tired,
and had I been Hatless, that would have been my cue to scream sharply once,
then flop at The Hat's feet like a dying fish, and finally pretend to go belly
up right there in the lot. But his boy either had the I.Q. of a can of green
beans, or was in such a near-comatose state from the beating, he didn't have
the good sense to shut up. In fact his language became so vivid, The Hat found
renewed strength and delivered his blows in such close proximity that the sound
of wood to skull resembled the angry rattling of a diamond back snake.

Finally, Hatless tried to wrestle The Hat to the ground and
then went tumbling over my hood, shamelessly knocking loose my prized hood
ornament, a large, inflight swan that lit up when the lights were on, and
ripping off half of The Hat's cowboy shirt in the process.

A bunch of drive-in personnel showed up then and tried to
separate the boys.

That's when the chili really hit the fan. There were bodies
flying all over that lot as relatives and friends of the original brawlers
suddenly dealt themselves in. One guy got crazy and ripped a speaker and wire
smooth off a post and went at anyone and everybody with it. And he was good
too. Way he whipped that baby about made Bruce Lee and his nunchukas look like
a third grade carnival act.

While this went on, a fellow in the car to the right of us,
oblivious to the action on the lot, wrapped up in Night of the Living Dead, and
probably polluted on Thunderbird wine, was yelling in favor of the zombie,
"Eat 'em, eat 'em!"

Finally the fight moved on down the lot and eventually
dissipated. About half an hour later I looked down the row and saw Hatless
crawling out from under a white Cadillac festooned with enough curb feelers to
make it look like a centipede. He sort of went on his hands and knees for a few
yards, rose to a squatting run, and disappeared into a winding maze of automobiles.
Them drive-in folks, what kidders.

* * *

The drive-in is also the source for my darkest fantasy--I
refrain from calling it a nightmare, because after all these years it has
become quite familiar, a sort of grim friend. For years now I've been waiting
for this particular dream to continue, take up a new installment, but it always
ends on the same enigmatic notes.

Picture this: a crisp summer night in Texas. A line of cars
winding from the pay booth of a drive-in out to the highway, then alongside it
for a quarter mile or better Horns are honking, children are shouting,
mosquitoes are buzzing. I'm in a pickup with two friends who we'll call Dave
and Bob. Bob is driving. On the rack behind us is a twelve gauge shotgun and a
baseball bat, "a badass persuader." A camper is attached to the truck
bed, and in the camper we've got lawn chairs, coolers of soft drinks and beer,
enough junk food to send a hypoglycemic to the stars.

What a night this is. Dusk to Dawn features, two dollars a
carload. Great movies like The Tool Box Murders, Night of the Living Dead, Day
of the Dead, Zombies and I Dismember Mama.

We finally inch our way past the pay booth and dart inside.
It's a magnificent drive-in, like the 145, big enough for 3,000 cars or better
Empty paper cups, popcorn boxes, chili and mustard-stained hot dog wrappers
blow gently across the lot like paper tumbleweeds. And there, standing
stark-white against a jet-black sky is a portal into another dimension; the six
story screen.

We settle back on a place near the front, about five rows
back. Out come the lawn chairs, the coolers and the eats. Before the first
flick sputters on and Cameron Mitchell opens that ominous box of tools, we're
through an economy size bag of "tater" chips, a quart of Coke and a
half a sack of chocolate cookies.

The movie starts, time is lost as we become absorbed in the
horrifyingly campy delights of Tool Box. We get to the part where Mitchell is
about to use the industrial nailer on a young lady he's been watching shower,
and suddenly--there is a light, so red and bright the images on the screen
fade. Looking up, we see a great, crimson comet hurtling towards us. Collision
with the drive-in is imminent Or so it seems, then, abruptly the comet smiles.
Just splits down the middle to show a mouth full of grinning, jagged teeth not
too unlike a power saw blade. It seems that instead of going out of life with a
bang, we may go out with a crunch. The mouth gets wider, and the comet
surprises us by whipping up, dragging behind it a fiery tail that momentarily
blinds us.