The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Okay, start the background music. Softly please, a humming version of “The Eyes of Texas.” And will all true Texans please remove your hats while we have a short discussion of Joe Bob Briggs, The Patron Saint of Texas Driveins, He Who Drives Behind the Speaker Rows, and columnist for the Dallas Times Herald. In fact, his column, “Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-in,” is the most popular feature in the paper. As it should be, because Joe Bob — who may be the pseudonym for the Herald’s regular film critic John Bloom — don’t talk no bullcorn, and he don’t bother with “hardtop” movie reviews. He’s purely a drive-in kind of guy, and boy does he have style.

  Here’s an example, part of a review for The Evil Dead: “Five teenagers become Spam-in-a-cabin when they head for the woods and start turning into flesh-eating zombies. Asks a lot of moral questions, like, ‘If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? Carve her into itty-bitty pieces or look the other way?’ One girl gets raped by the woods. Not in the woods. By the woods. The only way to kill zombies: total dismemberment. This one could make Saw eligible for the Disney Channel.”

  Single-handedly, with that wild column of his — which not only reports on movies, but on the good times and bad times of Joe Bob himself—he has given the drive-in a new mystique. Or to be more exact, made the non-drive-in goers aware of it, and reminded the rest of us just how much fun the outdoor picture show can be.

  Joe Bob’s popularity has even birthed a yearly Drive-in Movie Festival — somewhat sacrilegiously held indoors this year — that has been attended in the past by such guests as Roger Corman, King of the Bs, and this year by “Big Steve,” known to some as Stephen King. (If you movie watchers don’t recognize the name, he’s a writer-feller.) “Big Steve” was given the solemn honor of leading off the 1984 ceremonies with Joe Bob’s “drive-in oath” and arrived wearing his JOE BOB BRIGGS IS A PERSONAL FRIEND OF MINE T-shirt.

  The festival has also sported such features as the Custom Car Rally, Ralph the Diving Pig (sure hate I missed the boy’s act), the stars of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Miss Custom Body of 1983, “unofficial custom bodies” and Joe Bob his own self. And last, but certainly not least, along with this chic gathering, a number of new movies like Bloodsuckers from Outer Space and Future-Kill made their world premieres.

  What more could you ask from Joe Bob?

  Kill the music. Hats on.

  The drive-ins I grew up with went by a number of names: The Apache, The Twin Pines, The Riverroad being a few examples. And though they varied somewhat in appearance, basically they were large lots filled with speaker posts — many of which were minus their speakers, due to absent-minded patrons driving off while they were still hooked to their windows, or vandals — a concession stand, a screen at least three stories high (sometimes six), a swing, see-saw and merry-go-round up front for the kiddies, all this surrounded by an ugly six-foot, moon-shimmering tin fence.

  They all had the same bad food at the concessions. Hot dogs that tasted like rubber hoses covered in watery mustard, popcorn indistinguishable from the cardboard containers that held it, drinks that were mostly water and ice, and candy so old the worms inside were dead either of old age or sugar diabetes.

  And they all came with the same restroom. It was as if the Apache, Riverroad, and Twin Pines were equipped with warping devices that activated the moment you stepped behind the wooden “modesty fence.” Suddenly, at the speed of thought, you were whisked away to a concrete bunker with floors either so tacky your shoes stuck to it like cat hairs to honey, or so flooded in water you needed skis to make it to the urinals or the john, the latter of which was forever doorless, the hinges hanging like frayed tendons. And both of these public conveniences were invariably stuffed full of floating cigarette butts, candy wrappers and used prophylactics.

  Rather than take my life into my own hands in these rather seedy enclosures, I often took my chances battling constipation or urinating into a Coke cup and pouring the prize out the window. The idea of standing over one of those odoriferous urinals — and there was always this item of crayoned wisdom above them: “Remember, crabs can pole vault” — and having something ugly, fuzzy, multilegged and ravenous leap out on me was forever foremost in my mind. Nor did I find those initialed and graffiti carved seats — when there were seats at all — the more inviting. I figured that no matter how precariously I might perch myself, some nameless horror from the pits of sewerdom would find access to that part of my anatomy I most prized.

  In spite of these unpleasantries, come Saturday night, a bunch of us guys — the ones who couldn’t get dates — would cruise over there, stopping a quarter-mile outside the place to stuff one member of our party in the trunk, this always the fellow who had the least money to pool toward entrance fees, having blown it on beer, Playboy magazines and prophylactics that would certainly rot in his wallet. Then we would drive up to the pay booth and promptly be asked, “Got anybody in the trunk?”

  Obviously we were a suspicious-looking lot, but we never admitted to a body in the trunk, and for some reason we were never forced to open up. After we had emphatically denied that we would even consider it, and the ticket seller had eyed us over for a while, trying to break our resolve, he would take our money and we would drive inside.

  My Plymouth Savoy was rigged so that the man in the trunk could push the back seat from the inside, and it would fold down, allowing our unthrifty, and generally greasy, contortionist to join our party.

  That Savoy, what a car, what a drive-in machine. What a death trap. It took a two-man crew to drive it. The gas pedal always stuck to the floor, and when you came whizzing up to a red light you had to jerk your foot off the gas, go for the brake and yell “Pedal!” Then your co-pilot would dive for the floorboards, grab the pedal and yank it up just in time to keep us from plowing broadside into an unsuspecting motorist. However, that folding back seat made the sticking pedal seem like a minor liability, and the Savoy was a popular auto with the drive-in set.

  The drive-in gave me many firsts. The first sexual action I ever witnessed was there, and I don’t mean on the screen. At the Apache the front row was somewhat on an incline, and if the car in front of you was parked just right, and you were lying on the roof of your car, any activity going on in the back seat of the front row car was quite visible to you, providing it was a moonlit night and the movie playing was a particularly bright one.

  The first sexual activity that included me, also occurred at a drive-in, but that is a personal matter, and enough said.

  The first truly vicious fight I ever saw was at the Riverroad. A fellow wearing a cowboy hat got into some kind of a shindig with a hatless fellow right in front of my Savoy. I’ve no idea what started the fight, but it was a good one, matched only by a live Championship Wrestling match at the Cotton Bowl.

  Whatever the beef, the fellow with the hat was the sharper of the two, as he had him a three-foot length of two-by-four, and all the other fellow had was a bag of popcorn. Even as the zombies of Night of the Living Dead shuffled across the screen, The Hat laid a lick on Hatless’s noggin that sounded like a beaver’s tail slapping water. Popcorn flew and the fight was on.

  The Hat got Hatless by the lapel and proceeded to knock knots on his head faster than you could count them, and though Hatless was game as all-get-out, he couldn’t fight worth a damn. His arms flew over The Hat’s shoulders and slapped his back like useless whips of spaghetti, and all the while he just kept making The Hat 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 Night of the Living Dead, and probably polluted on Thunderbird wine, was yelling in favor of the zombies, “Eat ‘em, eat ‘em!”

  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 The Toolbox Murders, Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, Zombies, and I Dismember Mama.

  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 Toolbox. We get to the part where Mitchell is about to use the industrial nailer on a young lady he’s been watching shower, and suddenly — there is a light, so red and bright the images on the screen fade. Looking up, we see a great, crimson comet hurtling towards us. Collision with the drive-in is imminent. Or so it seems; then, abruptly the comet smiles. Just splits down the middle to show a mouth full of grinning, jagged teeth not too unlike a power saw blade. It seems that instead of going out of life with a bang, we may go out with a crunch. The mouth gets wider, and the comet surprises us by whipping up, dragging behind it a fiery tail that momentarily blinds us.

  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 Toolbox on the screen.

  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 fe
asting 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 taking.

  But when it seems we are going to join her, there is a red light in the sky. The comet is back, and once again it swoops down, collision looks unavoidable, it smiles with its jagged teeth, peels up and whips its bright tail. And when the glow burns away from our eyes, it is daylight and there is a world outside the drive-in.

  A sort of normalcy returns. Engines are tried. Batteries have been unaffected by the wait. Automobiles start up and begin moving toward the exit in single file, as if nothing has ever happened.

  Outside, the highway we come to is the same, except the yellow line has faded and the concrete has buckled in spots. But nothing else is the same. On either side of the highway is a great, dank jungle. It looks like something out of a lost world movie.

  As we drive along — we’re about the fifth automobile in line — we see something move up ahead, to the right. A massive shape steps out of the foliage and onto the highway. It is a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.

  The dinosaur does nothing. It gives our line of metal bugs the once over, crosses the highway and is enveloped by the jungle again.

  The caravan starts up once more. We drive onward into this prehistoric world split by a highway out of our memories.

  I’m riding shotgun and I glance in the wing-mirror on my side. In it I can see the drive-in screen, and though the last movie should still be running, I can’t make out any movement there. It looks like nothing more than an oversized slice of Wonder Bread.