by John Demont
For fifteen years they worked together. When Art retired in 1988, Steve discovered that the business was changing. All of a sudden the big manufacturers like Dylex were charging for samples: on a four-thousand-dollar commission Steve had to cough up five figures for the shirts, pants, underwear, jackets and ties that were his main sales props. No such concerns weighed on him in the job he took next: selling Wonder Bras throughout the Ottawa Valley. “In sales you sell yourself,” says Steve. “Bras are a different product that ties and belts. But in the end it is just the same thing.”
Steve would leave on Sunday night and return on Friday. He would spend Saturday checking invoices. Then on Sunday he would do it all again. He was only forty, but had spent too many of those years on the road and was sick of so much time alone in motels, eating heart-stopping poutine and watching the Canadiens play on fuzzy TV screens. He took a job that allowed him to finish each day at home near Ottawa: selling towels, linens, toilet paper, garbage bags and floor stripper to motels along the St. Lawrence Seaway. When that outfit was taken over, Steve found work selling chemicals and, later, a job in Quebec’s Pontiac County, where the Forbes clan had long owned a cottage, peddling office products. For fourteen years he commuted back and forth to Ottawa. Then he met Anne. By the time Steve’s employer got in trouble and had to lay him off the Pontiac had become home. He says, “I left that job on a Friday. On Tuesday I started work at the Equity.”
THERE’S not a lot of customer turnover in the Pontiac. People tend to be lifers who’ve never left or retirees uninterested in opening up a business in a small, rural market. Steve sells all things to all customers because there’s no other way to make a buck in the work he has chosen in the place he wants to be. Consequently one minute he’s talking stationery with the suits at the local insurance company or fax paper with the receptionist at a doctor’s office and the next he’s stepping inside the CPM Service Station where the regulars have assembled: John Lunam, known as “McGill” because that’s where he attended university; “Doc” Chrétien, a dentist; “NASCAR,” the racing buff; and Noel, “the Mechanic,” who, naturally, owns the place.
Once a week they convene there at noon and eat lunch around the wood stove at the back of the service station. It’s one of those male environments where the ritual of a well-turned insult is more valued than expressing “one’s feelings.” Steve sits down, puts his feet up and lets the minutes tick by. Technically it’s work, since he sells Noel various cleaners, fluids and other stuff. Yet I get the undeniable impression that Steve would do what he does—the daily rounds, the schmoozing and the passing of gossip—free. He is a travelling salesman in the age of Amazon and eBay. For now, he’s like those old-time peddlers, the chime of bells heralding their eternally optimistic arrival over the hilltop.
In Ladysmith—home to Catholic Irish and Lutheran Germans—we lunch at a customer’s bar in the town’s sole hotel. Then we light out cross-country for Bristol, his hometown, and the metal hangar that houses Bristol Marine, a boat repair shop. The proprietor, Brent Orr, is tall and wide, with alert blue eyes and white hair bisected with a neat side part. Since Brent also happens to be Bristol’s mayor, they talk municipal politics for a couple of minutes. His Worship doesn’t need any hand cleaner, toilet paper, paper towels or stationery today. So Steve is soon on his way, heading back past Shawville to Quyon, a little port on the Ottawa River.
We drive around for a bit, taking in the ferry, the fabled Shamrock Bar at Gavan’s Hotel and some of the other sites, until we park across the street from a stone Anglican Church. “I want you to meet someone,” he tells me, getting out and walking back down Clarendon Street. “Hellooo, Mae,” Steve says. A straight-backed woman with a tight head of white curls, glasses and an apron says hi but keeps moving. Mae McCann, seventy-five, has been serving poutine, burgers, hot dogs, egg rolls and fries on that spot since 1969. “He’s a good lad,” she says of Steve, who has been supplying her with grill cleaner, bill pads, calculator rolls, disinfectant, paper towels and toilet paper for more years than he can say. “You can count on him.”
It’s three-ish as we head back toward Shawville, so what the heck: Steve cuts the wheel and crunches gravel up the long driveway to R.H. Nugent Equipment Rentals, where Paul Nugent—in his blue M. Willett ball hat and blue Adidas T-shirt—steps out from the back. They are men so the level of discourse is low: a little scandalous chitchat, girls, insults about Paul’s fishing abilities and Steve’s waistline. The conversation just flows naturally along.
Eventually things run their course. Steve asks, “Need anything, Nuge?” And Nuge, who depends upon him for toner cartridges, floor, glass and hand cleaner, paper towels and stationery supplies, replies, “No—I’m good, buddy.” Steve is fifty-six and has never done anything other than a job that may be dying out. If his face registers a flicker of disappointment, it happens too quickly for me to see. Salesmen sell. Tomorrow he’s in cottage country. He’ll have a clean order book. The weather is supposed to be gorgeous.
CHAPTER
NINE
SHOWTIME
Check one, check one. Niner, niner … I know the equipment works. I just always wanted to be a roadie. That guy at the concert who came on for about thirty minutes going “check, check.” You could time your buzz to that guy. Yep, my career goal was to be a roadie, and if you look around you can see I didn’t overshoot by much.
PAUL Peterson—the owner, operator and chief projectionist at the Mustang Drive-in on County Road 1 just outside of Picton, Ontario—has been emceeing the nightly show here for eighteen years. When he figures enough cars have arrived, he mutters, “Is it dark enough? Well, let’s start it then.” He flicks the switch on the radio transmitter. The vintage rock stops. He begins to talk. The words seep from a hundred car radios, rising above the seam of land and sky before evaporating into the gloaming. Some people say Paul’s sneaky way of starting the show is their favourite part of the whole evening. He begs to disagree. All the same, when he opens his mouth to ask the price of a head of lettuce in a grocery store checkout line, complete strangers turn, stare and ask if he is the “drive-in movie guy.”
Speaking of natural segues: Hello, my name is Paul. I’ll be your owner tonight. Thanks for coming. You know there are a lot of things I love about my job—the movies, the people, the charging you to get in. Oh yeaaaaaah, that works really well. Seriously, while I am ethically challenged and most people think I’m so crooked I could hide behind a corkscrew, if you have fun tonight, tell someone else. We’ve built this business on word of mouth. No one believes anything I say, but if you tell them, they listen. By the way if you don’t have fun, keep it to yourself. Nobody likes a whiner.
The heavens have been opening and closing all day in southwestern Ontario. But the show at the Mustang goes on rain or shine; people know that when they buy their tickets. Tonight—seventeen degrees with not a single cloud or mosquito in the sky—they’re offering the real goods: Date Night and The A-Team on the bigger front screen, Shrek 2 and Iron Man 2 on the smaller, more family-oriented back screen. Usually five hundred or so customers turn up for first-run movies on a Saturday night during the summer. With lousy weather looming, tonight’s gate is just 217. The Mustang’s grounds roil with life anyway: toddlers in pyjamas wriggle on the slides and swings; families open up the backs of their vans for a panoramic view of the big screen; couples slap on bug spray and snap open lawn chairs. Cars full of teens—giddy with the prospect of some serious dry-humping—traverse the hard-packed dirt and grass toward the rows of speakers. Beefy women in capris and middle-aged men with swollen prostates make a last dash for the washroom. Children, eyes startled with wonder, burst into the canteen and halt dead in their tracks.
A few things you need to know: If you have daytime running lights, congratulations, you have a nicer sled then me. I’ve never owned a vehicle from the decade I was living in, but hey, I’m not bitter. Here’s the thing. If you do turn your car off, put the emergency brake on and then restar
t it. That will normally work and you won’t light up the night sky or the car in front of you. If you need a boost, come and see me and I’ll get you on your way. I have cables a battery pack and an old copy of Popular Mechanics. We haven’t lost a car yet. If the canteen is closed, you’ll find me slipping into something more comfortable, like a coma, in the crappy van at the front of the canteen. Our website is thechequesinthemail.com. Go there, sign the guest book, and you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter. We then sell that list to a guy who sells life insurance for Amway.
Paul greets them all from behind John Lennon glasses that glow lunar white from the movie screen half a football field away. “My parents always told me that Jerry Garcia didn’t die,” a woman who goes by the handle “Lover Grrl” wrote in the Mustang’s online guest book, “he just owns the drive-in.” Paul has a face built for Woodstock: his deep-socketed, gentle eyes and wide wedge of nose framed by salt-and-pepper beard, and shoulder-length hair that looks like it was carved from steel wool. The voice is contemplative, a little world-weary; the wisest guy at the best used-vinyl shop in town. Things are “cool,” “great” or “terrific.” Paul is prone to verbal shrugs: everybody else is “smart,” “good” and “reliable.” At best, he’s just “lucky.”
A tad under six feet, with some extra weight around the middle, he ambles around in a black turtleneck, cargo shorts and sandals. I say “ambles” because he’s a big guy. But also because he doesn’t seem to fret or worry enough to get his pulse rate over eighty. Paul is a businessman. When he looks out the window tonight, he must see dollar bills sprouting wings and taking flight as though part of the retro cartoon he is showing on the big screen. By rights he should be stomping his feet. He should be shaking a fist to the heavens and, eyes bugging out of his head, cursing like Yosemite Sam. Instead, he leans into the transmitter and informs the clientele that here at the Mustang Drive-in just buying a ticket doesn’t ensure you see a movie.
If you’ve been here before, you know that this is the audience participation portion of tonight’s show. Sometime during the Paleolithic period … Okay I’ll skip ahead: about fourteen years ago we were making the jump to radio sound and it wasn’t exactly a seamless transition, and one night in a moment of desperation or inspiration I came on the mike and said, “Look, you’re going to honk at some point tonight, so why don’t we just get it out of the way right now.” Honk your horns, folks. Remind the neighbours how great it is to live next to a drive-in, and don’t suck or I’ll come back on the mike and mock you.
The din rises. Paul waits about a minute, then asks his pigtailed granddaughter, Anna, if it’s loud enough. When a nine-year-old thumb goes up, Paul flicks the transmitter switch. The big projector begins to hum. The blandly handsome faces of Steve Carrell and Tina Fey fill the screen. No one would suggest Date Night is destined for “The Criterion Collection.” And Paul has got a million things he should be doing. But the film only arrived a day ago and moving pictures just seem to draw his eye. They always have. So, he stands transfixed, peering through the little projector window. Watching the giant image of a man who appears to be trying to expunge his spleen through his nose, as the moon smoulders overhead.
THE Mustang Drive-in opened in April of 1956. A month later Paul, the son of a homemaker and a restless dairyman-turned-army-engineer, came into the world. So there’s a certain karmic inevitability that, thirty-two years later, he and his wife, Nancy, would be tooling around aimlessly one day just outside of Picton and notice a For Sale sign in front of the Mustang. It would have taken special people to sense the potential back then. Paul wouldn’t have known the backstory: how in 1932 Richard M. Hollingshead Jr.–the sales manager for the New Jersey—based Whiz Auto Products—thought it would be a good idea to nail a white sheet to two trees, place a radio behind the makeshift screen and then mount a Kodak movie projector on the hood of his car. How out of that deluded-sounding scheme sprang the “open-air theatre” or “ozone,” which, in time, came to embody every nostalgic impulse ever felt by a North American baby boomer. How the Mustang began as part of a chain created during those heady times. And how, by 1988, the drive-in was fading to black owing to the ascent of the VCR and cable TV and the urban sprawl swallowing up the land where outdoor screens once flickered.
It helped that Paul didn’t grow up thinking about profit margins and business plans. A dreamy, imaginative boy, by grade six he was in a band playing Tommy James and the Shondells covers (“Crrimmsssooonn and Cloooover, ooover and ooover”). Going all love-peace-marijuana-kill the pigs was not encouraged in the Peterson household. Paul caught the counterculture bug anyway, becoming the guy with the stack of Mad magazines under his bed and the milk crate full of psychedelic vinyl in the corner. The cool dude trying to sell his buddies on Monty Python, A Clockwork Orange and O, Lucky Man! (he loved Alan Price’s soundtrack) when everyone else was watching Dirty Harry and Summer of ’42.
Naturally he was drawn to lost causes. When it came time to choose a profession, he decided to help kids in crisis. Paul worked at a youth treatment centre in Richmond, British Columbia, and with street gangs in Vancouver. Later he returned to Ontario to toil for the Kingston Children’s Aid Society as a residential care worker for children in crisis. (At one point, he lost most of his hair and all of his eyebrows after opening the door to a resident’s room as she ignited the discharge of an aerosol can with a lighter.) He worked with the victims of sexual abuse. Some of his clients were prone to self-mutilation.
During the heat wave of 1998, when Paul and Nancy drove up County Road 1 past fields of corn, beans and strawberries, they could have glanced at the rusty, overgrown Mustang Drive-in, seen a forlorn symbol of a culture that had lost its way and continued driving. Instead, Paul pulled over, turned off the ignition and they got out. Paul took a couple of steps forward, gravel crunching under his feet. By then he was searching for a job that, end of day, would leave him with enough energy to put in a few hours working on his unpublished novels and screen and stage plays. Just looking at the Mustang jump-started fond memories of heading to the drive-in growing up in Kingston. And so he gazed up at the big screen and, in a voice rich with possibility, said the fateful words: “This could be cool.”
Nancy, who then ran her own restaurant in addition to her Children’s Aid Society duties, was skeptical. But drive-ins have an ability to make any adults of a certain age take leave of their senses. Something about remembering the subversive pleasure of being up late in your jammies while the other kids are home in bed, the economy of carload nights, the freedom of being able to make jokes at the screen while your parents smoked in the front seat. Growing up in the early sixties, even a Maritime kid with a brush cut and bad teeth could sense that strange days were upon us. To me the world still seemed orderly and familiar amid those rows of chrome and steel, speakers strapped like umbilical cords to the car windows, as I watched the dancing wiener on the big screen.
Half a century later, I’m living proof of the abiding pull that a drive-in movie screen has on the imagination. It would be easy to look at the twenty or so drive-ins currently operating in this country—accounting for less than a hundred full-time jobs the last time anyone bothered to look—and the estimated four hundred that have gone dark since the boom days in the late fifties and conclude that this is an industry on its last legs. Except every year nearly two million Canadians buy a ticket. If that’s not staying power, I don’t know what is.
I’m not the only person who thinks so. In 1998, photographer Carl Weese pulled his truck off the road in rural Connecticut. It took him a minute to figure out that he was looking at the screen of an abandoned movie theatre, overgrown with trees. A day later he got up early and photographed the screen at daybreak. He liked the result well enough to put it in a small travelling show of prints he was mounting.
What surprised him was that people reacted to the shot. “However they responded to the other pictures in the portfolio, everyone reacted to the print of the drive-in,” he w
rote in the commentary for his show The American Drive-in Theater, which includes some of the hundreds of drive-ins he has since photographed across the United States. “Some recognized the subject immediately. Others stared and stared before ‘getting it.’ ” Once the subject was identified, a smile was the invariable response, and then often a dreamy look as long-forgotten memories resurfaced. It was a showstopper.
Having seen his photos, which make drive-ins look like ancient ruins, I’m not remotely surprised. Weese thinks the rural settings touch something within people. Even the abandoned old screens, he writes, “resonate with the spirit of all who had spent time at them.” Mostly what tugs at the glaze-eyed folks who stand before Weese’s photos is the desire to reconnect with the objects of youth. They, more than anything, are reminders that there was a time when not every waking hour was spent worrying about fibre intake and whether little Aidan can cut it in French immersion.
I think people also love drive-ins because they’re reminded that people in this country once did lots of things together: they shopped at farmer’s markets; they went to church; they caught ball games, vaudeville shows and political rallies. Much of this coming together occurred in itinerant venues like carnival midways and tents where revivalist preachers, Chautauqua performers and travelling snake oil salesmen performed. Some of what they watched once upon a time—glowering wrestlers, ready to pay prize money to anyone who could survive a few rounds—smacked of ancient Rome. Nonetheless, sitting together hoping your hockey team would slap the shit out of the squad from the neighbouring town forged communal identities. Most of us have experienced the wonder of being part of a group uplifted as one by a song or some ringing oratory. And research shows that people who get out of the house and interact with others in some way are not only happier but also live longer.
