The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

but be reminded of it every time I looked up at that empty screen. My future seemed to stretch out before me up there, a bigga bigga hunka daunting emptiness that only I could fill up, and every one of those barnacled panels seemed to hold a very special kind of challenge for me.

Ahab’s flapping arm, Gregory Peck’s voice: Bring it on, kid… and put it up here.

Somehow, I was determined to do just that. But I had no idea how to begin, and the very idea of trying scared me more than a little.

But there were other things around the drive-in that scared me, too.

There was the hunchback.

I can’t remember what the hunchback did at the drive-in. It runs in my mind that he might have managed the snack bar, or maybe he delivered the new movies when the program changed. Whatever he did, he was around the place a lot. Chris and I always knew when he was coming, too. The hunchback drove a muscle car, glass-packed muffler and all that, and you always heard his car a good five minutes before you ever saw him.

The hunchback couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Apart from the hump, he looked like any other member of the Woodstock generation. He had acne, stringy Neil Young hair that he was always brushing away from his black horn-rimmed glasses, and more than a few paisley-patterned shirts that must have been specially tailored to accommodate his twisted back.

I’m ashamed to say that the hunchback scared me at first. But once I got past the idea that he looked a little different, I realized that he was pretty much the same as the guys my older brother hung around with. For one thing, he loved to talk about his car. I can’t remember what kind of car it was — to tell you the truth, I know as much about cars as I do about baseball — but I do remember that the engine in the hunchback’s street machine really gleamed. I’d never seen anything like it, and I’d been around my share of gearheads (at the tender age of six I had a hot-rodding babysitter who liked to borrow my red crayons to touch up the stripes on his tires, but his car’s engine always looked like it was lightly basted in Pennzoil).

Every now and then the hunchback would stop and talk with Chris and me. Once he even gave me a bunch of old movie posters, including one for The Crimson Cult because he knew I liked Boris Karloff. But Chris always worried that we were getting in the guy’s hair. Maybe he was afraid that the hunchback would find out about our raids on the snack bar, where we’d sometimes wash buckets of day-old popcorn down with forbidden Cokes from the concession dispenser. Whatever his reason, Chris thought it was best that we steered clear of the hunchback most of the time. If we were anywhere close to the snack bar when he showed up, we’d jump on our bikes and head off to “shoot the humps.”

That was another favorite drive-in activity. We’d pedal as fast as we could and tear over the mounded rows that allowed drive-in patrons to park at an incline so they could get a good view of the screen. We’d launch ourselves from the crest of those mounds — getting airborne, coming down hard, pedaling again to take the next row and praying we wouldn’t wipe out… because that meant taking a gravel bath.

One day the hunchback came roaring up in his muscle car while we were shooting the humps. He leaned against the hood and watched us for awhile. We did our best to show off, pedaling like crazy to build up a good head up steam, pulling up on our butterfly handlebars as we launched ourselves, hitting the breaks and kicking up gravel with our fat “slick” back tires when we landed… and then topping it all off with the grand finale — letting our bikes slip out from under us while we held onto the handlebars as we came to a stop.

That last bit really notched on our own personal coolness meter, but the hunchback wasn’t impressed. “Looks like a lot of fun,” he said after watching us for awhile. “But how’d you boys like to try a real thrill ride?”

When you’re ten years old and you don’t want to look like a hopeless chicken, there was only one way to answer that question. We shouted out “sure thing” and the hunchback told us what he had in mind. By then there was no way we could back down even if we wanted to, and pretty soon we found ourselves lying on the hood of the hunchback’s car, painted flames beneath our chests warmed by a presently idle engine that had just recently been tearing up the highway on a hot summer day. The hunchback gave us one last chance, asking us if we were absolutely positively 100% sure we wanted to try his thrill ride, but there was no way we could chicken out now.

“Okay,” he said. “You boys better grab onto those windshield wipers, though. I’d hate to see one of you take a tumble and end up with a bad case of road rash.”

The hunchback climbed behind the wheel while I wondered what he was talking about. Road rash?  I’d never heard the expression. He keyed the ignition, and the glass-pack muffler growled. I felt the big, spotless chrome and steel engine vibrating beneath me, and Chris and I exchanged what the hell are we doing? glances, and the hunchback floored it and the car’s rear wheels kicked up a spray of gravel and we were on our way.

There were maybe ten rows of parking humps between the snack bar and the screen. The hunchback hit the gas as he crested every one of them, trying to get airborne like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. Of course, the humps were too close together to pick up much speed in between, but even a little speed turned out to be more than enough.

See, it wasn’t the going up that was dangerous… it was the coming down. Every time the hunchback’s car landed, the front shocks screamed and Chris and I yelped, holding onto those windshield wipers for dear life.

I should have closed my eyes, but I didn’t. I looked to my right and saw a sea of gravel waiting to chew me up and spit me out. I looked to my left and saw Chris beside me, trapped somewhere between a laugh and a scream. I looked straight ahead and saw the bug-splattered windshield, remembering the joke my dad told every time an insect ended it all in a kamikaze smear: “Well, he won’t have the guts to do that again.”

I stared at the bugs, suddenly feeling that we shared a certain kinship. The hunchback eyed me from behind the steering wheel. He was laughing his head off, his stringy hair slashing his hornrimmed glasses as he bounced in the driver’s seat. His twisted spine prevented him from seeing more than a couple inches above the wheel under the best of circumstances, and I suddenly wondered if he could see over me at all when he wasn’t bouncing.

Finally we crested the last hump. Okay, I thought. It’s almost over now. This crazy maniac will stop his car, and we’ll get off, and then we can all have a good laugh and lie about how much fun this was —

But the hunchback didn’t stop his car. He kept going, following an access road that ran along the playground fence and looped around to the back of the lot.

The hunchback hit the gas and headed in that direction.

I stared through the windshield.

I saw the look in his eyes.

I knew exactly what he was going to do.

Jesus Christ! I thought. This crazy asshole’s going around again!

And he did just that, starting from the rear of the lot, hopping row after row as he headed for that big white Moby Dick screen. I held on for dear life, like a drowning Ishmael grabbing fistfuls of Queequeg’s coffin, the sharp back edges of the windshield wiper digging into my hands. But even if I managed to hold on, that didn’t mean the wiper itself would hold — after all, I knew kids who broke those off for fun, like automotive toothpicks.

I wasn’t going to so much as look at that gravel now. I was too scared of what it could do to me. Road rash. Now I knew exactly what that meant. I didn’t want a terminal case. I closed my eyes, but that only tuned in my senses to The Hunchback’s Wild Ride soundtrack — gravel rattling in the car’s wheel wells like machine-gun fire, the shock absorbers screaming, and the radio blaring sixties rock. I don’t know what the song was, but it should have been the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out.”

We shot another hump. My chin hit the hood. My eyes flashed open. The hunchback was still laughing, still having a great old time behind that bug-splattered windshield. Either he didn’t have a clue as to the level of our terror (I couldn’t believe he might actually think we were enjoying this), or something else was going on in his head —