A cool, crisp summer night, the Texas stars shining down like rattlesnake eyes showing in a deep, dark wood. A line of cars like a tacky necklace trailing from the paybooth to the highway, stretching alongside it for a mile or better.
Horns are honking.
Children are shouting.
Mosquitoes are buzzing.
Willie Nelson is singing about blue eyes crying in the rain from a tape deck, competing with Hank Williams, Jr., Johnny Cash, ZZ Top, The Big Boys, The Cars and Country Bob and The Blood Farmers, groups and singers you can’t identify. And it all rolls together into a metal-velvet haze until it’s its own kind of music; the drive-in anthem, a chorus of cultural confusion.
And say your car is about midway in line, and clear as your first good wet dream, standing tall, you can see the Orbit’s symbol-a big silver globe with a Saturn ring around it, spinning on a gradually tapering concrete pole jutting up to over a hundred feet above the concession stand; little blue and white fairy lights flittering out of it, alternating colors across your windshield. Blue. White. Blue. White.
God Almighty, it’s a sight. Like being in the presence of The Lord of Razzle-Dazzle, The Dark Crown Prince of Blood and Mayhem and Cheap, Bad Popcorn. The All-Night Horror Show God, his own sweet self.
You drive on into this Friday-night extravaganza, this Texas institution of higher partying, sex education and madness, and you see people dressed out in costume like it’s Halloween night (and it is Halloween night every Friday night at the Orbit), yelling, talking, cussing and generally raising hell.
You park your car, go to the concession stand. Inside it’s decorated with old horror-movie posters, plastic skulls, rubber bats and false cobwebs. And there’s this thing called bloody corn that you can buy for a quarter more than the regular stuff, and it’s just popcorn with a little red food coloring poured over it. You buy some and a kingsize Coke to go with it, maybe some peanuts and enough candy to send a hypoglycemic to the stars.
Now you’re ready. The movies begin. B-string and basement-budget pictures. A lot of them made with little more than a Kodak, some spit and a prayer. And if you’ve watched enough of this stuff, you develop a taste for it, sort of like learning to like sauerkraut.
Drooping mikes, bad acting and the rutting of rubber-suited monsters who want women, not for food, but to mate with, become a genuine pleasure. You can simultaneously hoot and cringe when a monster attacks a screaming female on the beach or in the woods and you see the zipper on the back of the monster’s suit winking at you like the quick, drunk smile of a Cheshire cat.
So there you have it. A sort of rundown of The All Night Horror Show at the Orbit. It drew me and the gang in there every Friday night like martyrs to the sacrifice; providing popcorn and Coke instead of wine and wafer.
Yes, sir, brethren, there was something special about the Orbit all right. It was romantic. It was outlaw. It was crazy.
And in the end, it was deadly.
PART ONE
1
I suppose, ultimately, this will read like a diseased version of those stupid essays you’re asked to write in school each fall after summer break. You know, “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”
Guess that can’t be helped.
This is where I think it begins.
It was Saturday morning, the morning after a night at the Orbit. We drove back to Mud Creek smelling of beer, popcorn and chocolate bars.
Our eyes were cl oudy, our minds more so. But we were too wired, or maybe just too stupid, to go home. So we did what we usually did. We drove over to the pool hall.
The pool hall, or Dan’s Place, as it’s called, is an ugly joint in an ugly section of an overall pretty nice-looking town. It’s the area where you hear about knifings and the lowlife congregating, twenty-dollar women, bootleg whisky and Mud Creek’s drug deals.
Dan’s was a beer drinker’s pool hall, had a bar along with the tables. Theoretically the place didn’t serve beer until after noon, but Dan and the guys who came there were real short on theory.
There were a few men in there when we went in that morning. Most of them were in their forties or older, and they were sipping long necks, their hats on their heads or on the bar or the stools beside them. Those without cowboy hats and boots wore blue and gray work clothes with worn work boots, and it seemed that no matter how quietly you came in, they always heard you and turned to look with disapproval.
The place was supposed to be off limits to minors, but who were we to tell, and Dan wasn’t telling either. Not that he liked us, but he did like our money for the pool games, and once in a small while, when he felt brave and we did too, he’d let us buy a beer, just like he didn’t know we were underage.
But there was this: he always had a look about him that let us know he’d take our money, but for little or no reason wouldn’t mind killing us for the fun of it. And he looked quite capable of killing us without breaking a sweat. He was kind of fat, but it was hard-looking fat, like there was a great iron wash pot under his too-tight T-shirt. And his arms were big and meaty. Not bodybuilder arms, but workingman’s arms; arms that had done real work: bounced drunks, and, from what I’d heard, slapped wives. He also had funny-looking knuckles; knuckles that had remolded facial flesh as if it were silly putty, and, in turn, had been remolded themselves.
Still, we’d go in there like men born for a suicide mission. There were things we wanted out of the place. Attractions. It was forbidden, for one, and that was appealing. Gave us a sense of manhood. Danger hung in the air like a sword on a hair, and as long as the hair didn’t snap and the blade didn’t fall, it was stimulating.
Dan’s was where we met Willard. Saw him there the first time we went inside, which was about the time we started going to the drive-in. I guess we felt if we had permission to stay out all night, we could go over to the tough section of town and shoot pool. Maybe talk some about the twenty-dollar women we didn’t dare actually speak to (we weren’t even sure we’d seen any) for fear we’d have to shell out money and perform. Something none of us was sure we wanted. We had heard vague stories about viruses and carnivorous insects that grew like sourdough starter in the pubic thatches of twenty-dollar women, and we felt that they would know so many tricks, and we’d know so few, that the cheap little hotel rooms where we planned to consummate our financial arrangements would ring of feminine laughter instead of the satisfying squeaks of bed-springs.
But the poolroom and the possibility of violent death didn’t worry us as much as sexual embarrassment, so we went there Saturdays to play pool and to watch Willard do the same.
First look at Willard, and he seemed downright skinny. But closer examination proved him long, lean and muscular. When he bunched over the table for a shot, let the cue glide over the top of his thumb, you could see the muscles roll beneath his hide, and the tattoos on his biceps popped forward and back so fast they were like billboards viewed on the highway at top speed. The left tattoo read KICK ASS and the right read EAT PUSSY. It was understood that he could do either, and probably quite well.
But Willard was a nice guy in an odd sort of way. Smart, too, if, shall we say, not classically educated. He was three years older than us physically, and about ten years older in experience.
That was one of the reasons we liked to be around him. He gave us a glimpse of a world we didn’t normally see. Not one we wanted to live in, but one we wanted to investigate.
And I think Willard liked us for the reverse reason. We could talk about something besides beer, women and the plant where he worked all week and Saturday afternoons making aluminum lawn furniture.
None of us had to work. Our parents provided, and we were all college material. Had dreams and a good chance of seeing them come true, and I guess Willard wanted some of that hope to rub off on him.
