The Complete Drive-In

by Joe R. Lansdale

  But I decided to write an article about drive-ins. It contained some drive-in history, and my feelings about drive-ins, and Joe Bob Briggs let me quote him at the front of the article. I then added my dream to it and turned it in.

  It really went over well, not only with the editor, but the readers, and one of those readers was my editor at Doubleday, Pat LoBrutto. Pat is one of those unsung heroes of the field. He published dozens of writers on their way up, and dozens on their way down. Good writers who were starting out, or who no longer had a solid home in the publishing industry and should have.

  Anyway, he asked if I’d write a book based on the dream.

  I said okay, and started writing away. I wrote The Drive-in in a little over two months, if memory serves me, and as soon as I finished, I started writing Cold in July, as I had a contract for that one at Bantam at about the same time.

  I hated The Drive-in. I found it hard to write. I wanted it to read simply, and fun, but I had a dark sort of message inside of it, and it weighed on me. I don’t say this with any great feeling of philosophical superiority. I just feel a book is at its best when it has subtext. I felt I had perhaps missed the boat on both humor and philosophical underpinning.

  I tried to write what I thought was a kind of loving satire of horror films and the stupidity of man. The desire to believe almost anything if it made them feel better. Religion. Astrology. Numerology. You name it. I thought the book was quite serious, and I hoped funny in a kind of biting, satirical way.

  The book came out with a cover that didn’t fit it at all. It was more of the kind of cover reserved for Ron Goulart’s humorous S.F. I liked Goulart’s work, by the way, but this was a totally different kind of animal. It wasn’t actually S.F., though it used some S.F. tropes. It wasn’t exactly horror, though it certainly used elements of that. And it wasn’t exactly a mainstream novel because it was too weird. Perhaps it was weird fantasy? I don’t know. I didn’t care. It was mine.

  Anyway, the book came out. It acquired a readership and a kind of underground following. A lot of writers have told me that it was a big influence on their decision to become a writer or that it influenced the way they wrote, or the things they wrote about. That’s pretty high praise.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I often do.

  Anyway, backtracking, I hated writing the book and thought it was awful, but when they sent me the galleys, and I read them, I was surprised and pleased. I felt I had done what I started out to do. The problem was the book was written quickly, but intensely, and the things I was writing about, humor or not, underneath were dark and unsettling. At least to me. So, the writing had been tedious and painful, but the reading of the book was not. I am one of those writers who loves writing, not having written. I believe the act itself is what matters most. But for this book, I didn’t really enjoy the act at the time or finishing it either. I thought I had written a loser. I wrote much of it sort of free associating, and just going where it wanted to go, no matter how wild it seemed. I let my subconscious lead the way.

  It wasn’t, as I said, until I held the galleys in my hot little hands that I realized I had done something unique. To this day a lot of people tell me how much they love the novel. Many say they love it because it is light and fun. Well, yeah, if you look at it from one angle, that’s true. Some say they think it’s the darkest thing I ever wrote. Yep, so do I. The humor is nothing more than a clown suit on a corpse. The important thing is, for whatever reason, it endures, and so does its influence.

  Simply put, I’m proud of it. The book has been back in print before, but not as much as I would like. Not considering it is to my way of thinking one of my more unique and important novels. That, of course, is ultimately for the readers to decide.

  I’m excited and pleased that it, and its companions, are being brought out in this form and fashion. I hope this volume brings new readers of the novel into the Drive-in fold. I’m glad to see it have a new life and for it to be presented in this respectful and attractive manner.

  Enjoy.

  —Joe R. Lansdale, 2009

  FADE-IN PROLOGUE

  I’m writing now about the time before things got weird and there was high school to kiss off, college to plan, girls, parties and the All-Night Horror Show come Friday night at the Orbit Drive-in off I-45, the largest drive-in in Texas. The world, for that matter, though I doubt there are that many of them in, say, Yugoslavia.

  Think about it for a moment. Set your mind clear and see if you can imagine a drive-in so big it can hold four thousand automobiles. I mean, really think about it.

  Four thousand.

  On the way to the Orbit we often passed through little towns with fewer people listed on the population sign than that.

  And consider that each of those cars generally contained at least two people, often more—not counting the ones hiding in the trunks—and you’re talking a lot of cars and people.

  And once inside, can you imagine six monstrous drive-in screens, six stories high, with six different movies running simultaneously?

  Even if you can imagine all that, there’s no way, unless you’ve been there, that you can imagine what goes on inside come Friday night and the tickets are two bucks each and the cars file in for The All-Night Horror Show to witness six screens leaking buckets of blood and decibels of screams from dusk to dawn.

  Picture this, brethren:

  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 h
ave 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

  THE ALL NIGHT HORROR SHOW

  With Popcorn and Comet

  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.

  We didn’t really know much about him. Story was his father didn’t think the kid looked like him at all, and had been told by some Louisiana Mojo man that the boy had a curse on him, and since Willard’s mother, Marjory, was into weird business, like believing in old gods and voodoo-type stuff, this made him even more suspicious. Bottom line was the father left before the baby could crawl. Baptists around town called Willard and his mother sorry as part of their entertainment, and truth was, his mother was no prize. She later took up with a man who had a bad back and a regular check of some sort, and when he went away she took up with another with ailing posture and a steady government income.

  This initiated a pattern. Men with bad backs and checks, and it kept Marjory in cigarettes and Willard in throwaway diapers. But when Willard turned sixteen, his birthday present was goodbye and the street—a place he spent a lot of time anyway. Marjory went away to who knows where—probably a fresh town full of bad backs and welfare checks—and Willard did the best he could. Dropped out of school when he was old enough and got some odd jobs here and there, the best of them being a projectionist at one of the movie houses. When he turned eighteen, he went to work at the aluminum chair factory.

  It seemed obvious to me, in the short time that I had known him, that he was hungry for something beyond that, something more substantial, something that would give him respect in the eyes of the Uptown folks, though I doubt he would have admitted that—even to himself.

  But to get back to it, we came into the pool hall this Saturday I’m telling you about, and there was Willard in his familiar pose, pool cue in hand, leaning over the table, eyeing a ball.

  Shooting against him was a guy we’d seen a couple of times before but avoided talking to. His name was Bear, and you didn’t ponder why he was called that. He was six-five, ugly as disease, had roux-brown hair and a beard that mercifully consumed most of his face. All that was clearly visible were some nasty blue eyes and a snout that was garage to some troublesome nose hairs thick enough to use for piano wire. The same gruesome down as in his nose also covered his arms and curled out of the neck of his T-shirt to confuse itself with his beard. What could be seen of his lips reminded me of those rubber worms fishermen use, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see shiny silver hooks poking out of them, or to discover that the whole of Bear had been made from decaying meat, wire and the contents of a tackle box and a Crisco can.

  There was something rock ‘n’ roll playing on the jukebox—a rarity for Dan’s, which mostly catered to country and western—and Randy went over to lean on it. Wasn’t just because he liked what was playing, it put him closer to the door.

  Being black, Randy was a bit uncomfortable about bopping around
a redneck pool hall. Even if he was with Bob, who wore a toothpick-laden cowboy hat, dipped snuff and wore snakeskin boots. And me, Mr. Average and All-Around Natural Blender.

  Wasn’t that Randy was the only black that came into the place (though just about), but he was the only one that was skinny, five-five, with headlamp glasses and an inferiority complex. And, most importantly, he was the only black in there this morning I’m telling you about.

  I guess if Bob and I had really thought about what we were putting him through as a member of our “gang,” we probably wouldn’t have gone in there in the first place.

  This is not to say Bob and I weren’t nervous. We were. We felt like weenies compared to these guys. But there were those attractions I told you about, and there was also our onrushing manhood we were trying to deal with, attempting to define.

  When Willard raised up from his shot he nodded at us, and we nodded back, found places to lean and watch.

  Bear wasn’t playing well. He had a mild temper on, and you could tell it even though he hadn’t said a word. He didn’t have a poker face.

  Bending over the table, Bear took a shot and missed.

  “Damn,” he said.

  Willard winked at us, shot again, talked as he did. He wasn’t a temperamental player. He liked to joke and ask us about the movies we’d seen, as he knew our schedule.

  He was also interested in special effects, or professed to be, and he liked to talk to Randy about that. Randy was the resident expert; he wanted to do movie makeup and special effects when he got out of college. And there was something between those two from the start. A sort of bond. I think Willard saw in Randy the intellectual side he wanted, and Randy saw in Willard street savvy and strength. When they were together, I had the feeling they considered themselves whole, and there was a yearning to know more about one another.