The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (56 page)

The drive-in theater may have been born in New Jersey, but it had the good sense to come to Texas to live. Throughout the fifties and sixties it thrived here like a fungus on teenage lusts and families enticed by the legendary Dollar Night or Two Dollars a Carload.

And even now — though some say the drive-in has seen its heyday in the more populated areas, you can drive on in there any night of the week — particularly Special Nights and Saturday — and witness a sight that sometimes makes the one on the screen boring in comparison.

You’ll see lawn chairs planted in the backs of pickups, or next to speakers, with cowboys and cowgirls planted in the chairs, beer cans growing out of their fists, and there’ll be the sputterings of barbeque pits and the aromas of cooking meats rising up in billows of smoke that slowly melts into the clear Texas sky.

Sometimes there’ll be folks with tape decks whining away, even as the movie flickers across the three-story screen and their neighbors struggle to hear the crackling speaker dialogue over ZZ Top doing “Tube Snake Boogie.” There’ll be lovers sprawled out on blankets spread between two speaker posts, going at it so hot and heavy they ought to just go on and charge admission. And there’s plenty of action in the cars too. En route to the concession stand a discerning eye can spot the white moons of un-Levied butts rising and falling to a steady, rocking rhythm just barely contained by well-greased shocks and 4-ply tires.

What you’re witnessing is a bizarre subculture in action. One that may in fact be riding the crest of a new wave.

Or to put it another way: Drive-ins are crazy, but they sure are fun.

The drive-in theater is over fifty years old, having been spawned in Camden, New Jersey, June
6
, 1933, by a true visionary — Richard Milton Hollingshead.

Camden, as you may know, was the last home of Walt Whitman, and when one considers it was the death place of so prestigious an American poet, it is only fitting that it be the birthplace of such a poetic and All-American institution as the drive-in theater. Or as my dad used to call them, “the outdoor picture show.”

Once there were 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 Lone Star State 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 I-45 in Houston, a drive-in capable of holding up to 3,000 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 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 a short discussion of Joe Bob Briggs, The Patron Saint of Texas Driveins, 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 Bs, 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 Twin 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 something ugly, fuzzy, multilegged 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 in 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 some 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 co-pilot 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 Cotton Bowl.

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
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, this 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 this boy either had the
IQ
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 diamondback 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, in-flight 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 zombies, “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 note.

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 bad-ass 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.