Strange fish, like nothing he’d ever seen pictures of or imagined. They flitted and skirted about like flashes of light.
As he looked up, he saw, nearing the moon, a big dark cloud. The only cloud in the sky. That cloud tied him to reality suddenly, and he thanked the heavens for it. Normal things still happened. The whole world had not gone insane.
After a moment the old man quit hopping among the fish and came out to lean on the car and hold his hand to his fluttering chest.
“Feel it, boy? Feel the presence of the sea? Doesn’t it feel like the beating of your own mother’s heart while you float inside the womb?”
And the younger man had to admit that he felt it, that inner rolling rhythm that is the tide of life and the pulsating heart of the sea.
“How?” the young man said. “Why?”
“The time lock, boy. The locks clicked open and the fish are free. Fish from a time before man was man. Before civilization started weighing us down. I know it’s true. The truth’s been in me all the time. It’s in us all.”
“It’s like time travel,” the young man said. “From the past to the future, they’ve come all that way.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it… Why, if they can come to our world, why can’t we go to theirs? Release that spirit inside of us, tune into their time?”
“Now, wait a minute…”
“My God, that’s it! They’re pure, boy, pure. Clean and free of civilization’s trappings. That must be it! They’re pure and we’re not. We’re weighted down with technology. These clothes. That car.”
The old man started removing his clothes.
“Hey!” the young man said. “You’ll freeze.”
“If you’re pure, if you’re completely pure,” the old man mumbled, “that’s it…yeah, that’s the key.”
“You’ve gone crazy.”
“I won’t look at the car,” the old man yelled, running across the sand, trailing the last of his clothes behind him. He bounced about the desert like a jackrabbit. “God, God, nothing is happening, nothing,” he moaned. “This isn’t my world. I’m of that world. I want to float free in the belly of the sea, away from can openers and cars and —”
The young man called the old man’s name. The old man did not seem to hear.
“I want to leave here!” the old man yelled. Suddenly he was springing about again. “The teeth!” he yelled. “It’s the teeth. Dentist, science, foo!” He punched a hand into his mouth, plucked the teeth free, tossed them over his shoulder.
Even as the teeth fell the old man rose. He began to stroke. To swim up and up and up, moving like a pale, pink seal among the fish.
In the light of the moon the young man could see the pooched jaws of the old man, holding the last of the future’s air. Up went the old man, up, up, up, swimming strong in the long-lost waters of a time gone by.
The young man began to strip off his own clothes. Maybe he could nab him, pull him down, put the clothes on him. Something…God, something&.But, what if
A great shadow weaved in front of the moon, made a wriggling slat of darkness that caused the young man to let go of his shirt buttons and look up.
A black rocket of a shape moved through the invisible sea: a shark, the granddaddy of all sharks, the seed for all of man’s fears of the deeps.
And it caught the old man in its mouth, began swimming upward toward the golden light of the moon. The old man dangled from the creature’s mouth like a ragged rat from a house cat’s jaws. Blood blossomed out of him, coiled darkly in the invisible sea.
The young man trembled. “Oh God,” he said once.
Then along came that thick dark cloud, rolling across the face of the moon.
Momentary darkness.
And when the cloud passed there was light once again, and an empty sky.
No fish.
No shark.
And no old man.
Just the night, the moon, and the stars.
Hell Through a Windshield
We are drive-in mutants.
We are not like other people.
We are sick.
We are disgusting.
We believe in blood.
In breasts,
And in beasts.
We believe in Kung Fu City.
If life had a vomit meter,
We’d be off the scale.
As long as one single drive-in remains On the planet Earth,
We will party like jungle animals.
We will boogie till we puke.
Heads will roll.
The drive-in will never die.
Amen.
—”The Drive-In Oath,” by Joe Bob Briggs
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
Camden, as you may know, was the last home of Walt Whitman, and when one considers it was the death
