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
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.
What a night this is. Dusk to Dawn features, two dollars a carload. Great movies like
We finally inch our way past the pay booth and dart inside. It’s a magnificent drive-in, like the I-45, 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 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 half a sack of chocolate cookies.
The movie starts, time is lost as we become absorbed in the horrifyingly campy delights of
When the crimson washes from our eyeballs and we look around, all is as before. At first glance anyway. Because closer observation reveals that everything outside the drive-in, the highway, the trees, the tops of houses and buildings that had been visible above the surrounding tin fence, are gone. There is only blackness, and we’re talking BLACKNESS here, the kind of dark that makes fudge pudding look pale. It’s as if the drive-in has been ripped up by the roots and miraculously stashed in limbo somewhere. But if so, we are not injured in any way, and the electricity still works. There are lights from the concession stand, and the projector continues to throw the images of
About this time a guy in a station wagon, fat wife beside him, three kids in the back, panics, guns the car to life and darts for the exit. His lights do not penetrate the blackness, and as the car hits it, inch by inch it is consumed by the void. A moment later, nothing.
A cowboy with a hatful of toothpicks and feathers gets out of his pickup and goes over there. He stands on the tire-buster spears, extends his arm… And never in the history of motion pictures or real life have I heard such a scream. He flops back, his arm gone from the hand to elbow. He rolls on the ground. By the time we get over there the rest of his arm is collapsing, as if bone and tissue have gone to mush. His hat settles down on a floppy mess that a moment before was his head. His whole body folds in and oozes out of his clothes in what looks like sloppy vomit. I carefully reach out and take hold of one of his boots, upend it, a loathsome mess pours out and strikes the ground with a plopping sound.
We are trapped in the drive-in.
Time goes by, no one knows how much. It’s like the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about Pellucidar. Without the sun or moon to judge by, time does not exist. Watches don’t help either. They’ve all stopped. We sleep when sleepy, eat when hungry. And the movies flicker on. No one even suggests cutting them off. Their light and those of the concession stand are the only lights, and should we extinguish them, we might be lost forever in a void to match the one outside of the drive-in fence.
At first people are great. The concession folks bring out food. Those of us who have brought food, share it. Everyone is fed.
But as time passes, people are not so great. The concession stand people lock up and post guards. My friends and I are down to our last kernels of popcorn and we’re drinking the ice and water slush left in the coolers. The place smells of human waste, as the restrooms have ceased to function altogether. Gangs are forming, even cults based on the movies. There is a Zombie Cult that stumbles and staggers in religious mockery of the “dead” on the screen. And with the lack of food an acute problem, they have taken to human sacrifice and cannibalism. Bob takes down the shotgun. I take down the baseball bat. Dave has taken to wearing a hunting knife he got out of the glove box.
Rape and murder are wholesale, and even if you’ve a mind to, there’s not much you can do about it. You’ve got to protect your little stretch of ground, your automobile, your universe. But against our will we are forced into the role of saviors when a young girl runs against our truck while fleeing her mother, father and older brother. Bob jerks her inside the truck, holds the family — who are a part of the Zombie Cult and run as if they are cursed with a case of the rickets — at bay with the shotgun. They start to explain that as the youngest member of the family, it’s only right that she give herself up to them to provide sustenance. A chill runs up my back. Not so much because it is a horrible thing they suggest, but because I too am hungry, and for a moment they seem to make good sense.
Hunger devours the family’s common sense, and the father leaps forward. The shotgun rocks against Bob’s shoulder and the man goes down, hit in the head, the way you have to kill zombies. Then the mother is on me, teeth and nails. I swing the bat and down she goes, thrashing at my feet like a headless chicken.
Trembling, I hold the bat before me. It is caked with blood and brains. I fall back against the truck and throw up. On the screen the zombies are feasting on bodies from an exploded pickup.
Rough for the home team. Time creeps by. We are weak. No food. No water. We find ourselves looking at the rotting corpses outside our pickup far too long. We catch the young girl eating their remains, but we do nothing. Somehow, it doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, it looks inviting. Food right outside the truck, on the ground, ready for the
