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 suspicious4ooking 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 plow-ing 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 dia-mond 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 hypogly-cemic 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.