showed its teeth, then it went still and was nothing more than a vivid tattoo.
The other tattoos on Willard’s body (they had been thrashing and lashing about) followed suit. The last of them to lie down were EAT PUSSY and KICK ASS. They had been walking across Willard’s upper arms like tall, stiff ants.
Randy continued to look peaceful up there on Willard’s shoulders, like a real estate agent who had just closed a big deal. I looked for a sign of my friend in that wrecked one-eyed face, but saw not a clue.
Willard and Randy lifted a hand and waved to the left, then to the right. From my position I could see a few people waving back-reflex reaction, or maybe after seeing what these guys could do, they just felt friendly.
The mouth that belonged to Randy opened and a powerful voice came out. “I am the Popcorn King, and my rein has begun. I will take care of you.”
“That’s damn nice of him,” Bob said.
Then the King ceased to wave and went inside the electrified concession. And so began the reign of the Popcorn King.
PART TWO
1
The Popcorn King was happy.
He was a smiley kind of guy-with both mouths and he could talk that trash. I mean, say you’re in this little universe of the drive-in, and maybe we should say the smaller universe of your car or truck, and all you’ve got is movies. You got no real food, and you got soft drinks for liquid, you’re hypoglycemic to the max and your hope don’t work no more. All you got is this voice, sleek as a starlet’s thighs, soft as duck fluff, as intoxicating as rum and honey. A voice that oozes out of the speaker and flows in your ears, jells around your brain like candied fruit.
The voice of the Popcorn King, telling you how it is, offering you truth, telling you he loves you and will feed you and take care of you, and all you’ve got to do is love him back, and all you’ve got to do is understand that what you see on the screens are the visions of gods, the way it is, ole buddy, and the manner in which you should live, for so speaks the messiah, the Popcorn King.
Yeah, the Popcorn King was happy.
And he was crazy.
And he helped make everyone else more crazy than they had become.
Back up.
Speculate.
This is how I think it came about; the birth of the Popcorn King.
So Willard and Randy go up on the roof during the storm, wandering up there because they are nuts on junk food and high on a kind of love for one another that isn’t quite homosexual, nor exactly the passion of friendship. They’re parasites feeding off one another, trying to make something whole out of two halves.
They wander up there on the roof after they have cleared out the concession with the knife, after they have killed. And maybe somewhere deep down, they realize this is something they don’t like, this killing. Or maybe, like me, they’re so high on sugar it all seems okey-dokey. Or maybe they just didn’t give a fuck all along.
Well, you add all that together, toss in their insecurities, and what you have here are a couple of buddies a couple bricks shy a full load. Or to put it in Yankee terms, “They are on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
There’s this storm, and it crackles and hisses and fizzles and pops, brightens the sky. Sheet-metal thunder rolls. And these guys up there on the roof are working off little more than the impulses of the primitive brain; that part that takes care of raw survival.
And so they yell at the storm (they don’t like the noise, see), call it names. And perhaps by design, because the B-string gods up there are looking for a twist in the plot, or maybe they just don’t like being talked to like that… and maybe there are no B-string gods and my dreams were just dreams and Bob and I only thought we saw tentacles poking out of the blackness and it’s nothing more than an accident that this bolt pops out and zaps the living shit out of our boys, makes them one creature full of power.
Down through the trap they go, smoking like bacon too long in a pan. And they are no longer angry and confused, but they’re not just well done either. They have been given power, and this power has straightened their confused asses right out. It has moved through them like a quick, happy cancer, spreading little roots of energy from head to head, from toes to toes.
They are one sho’-ugly critter now, but they are not aware of that. They feel pretty. In their mind’s eye they are darling. So sweet with that one eye in the center of the top forehead, and the other head without eyes, just two gaps dripping ooze, puffing smoke.
Their brains no longer work independently of one another; this happy cancer has spread its tendrils through them so that their gray matter operates as one. Randy’s eyes are Willard’s eyes. Willard’s muscles respond to Randy’s needs. So, instead of they and them, these two are now one, and say at his feet are a few stray popcorn kernels that are blossoming in the electrical current, popping high up to greet him (“take me, take me”), and he thinks, uh-huh, happy little subjects, these popcorns, and he names himself the Popcorn King.
The Popcorn King is very happy because he feels as if he has been told the ultimate joke by the ultimate jokester, and he has understood the punch line perfectly.
He knows now he is the Chosen One. Feels that what led him up that ladder, onto the roof, was more than just confusion. It was ordained. Destiny.
Yeah, that’s it. He thinks it again. Destiny.
He can feel a network of raw power spiraling through him, replacing the blood and bones inside him with something new; something that makes him master of his flesh (tattoos wiggle like maggots in dung).
The air around him hums (no particular tune) with that blue electrical current. (And while I’m hypothesizing here, sports fans, let’s have some of those paper bats-now real-flap around his head, let’s have some paper skulls- now real-roll at his feet and nip at his heels like happy pups.) He walks among the carnage of the concession, sees: the manager with his face through the counter glass, his blood having splashed the wrapped and boxed candies and congealed like cold gravy; the little girl that was kicked to death, looking like strawberry pulp; other dead folks, including the Candy Girl (later I would see her corpse in the window, hanging there like a prize cold cut in a butcher’s display); and he moves through the blue air, into the film room, (the bats at his head, the skulls at his feet), sees that there are three projectors, pointing like ray guns in three directions at three six-story screens.
He goes over to one of the little slots by one of the projectors and looks out, sees The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He goes to another and looks out, sees the tail end of I Dismember Mama. He examines the last projector slot, sees The Toolbox Murders.
He sighs contentedly. This is his domain. His throne room. His damn concession stand. And all those people out there watching those movies are his subjects. He is their King, their Popcorn King. And he is a fun kind of guy.
But what’s this? A bunch of fat men on motorcycles are riding around and around in circles out front of his palace, calling him names (had one of them actually called him “dog puke”? Sure sounded like it), yelling for him to come out.
The little people are upset. A rebellion is brewing. The peasants are revolting.
Time to nip this crap in the bud.
So he steps out with the gun fused to his hand, the tattoos shucking and jiving like snakes on hot glass…
And from there, I have given you an eyewitness account.
When it was over and the tattoos had settled down, and the King had waved, he went inside the concession
