Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

“Why the trouble?” Crier asked. “You boys got dates?”

“Just a thing I prefer, if you’ll do it,” Bob said.

Crier found the blankets and the sardines and the knife. He brought the sardines out and we ate all we could stand, Crier feeding them to us, as our hands didn’t work so good.

He cut the blankets and pulled them over our heads. Sam didn’t even notice. He was trying to sing “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.”

“What about her?” I asked, nodding at Mable.

“Dead, ain’t she?” Crier said.

“Maybe you could pile some boards on her or something, set her on fire if you had a mind to. She ought to have some kind of burial.”

“Ain’t you something,” Crier said.

“And the Popcorn King,” I said. “He ought not just be left.”

“You’re kind of tight with everybody, ain’t you?” Crier said,

“Before he was that, he was two friends of ours,” Bob said. “I know it’s a bother, but could you?”

“Hell,” Crier said. “Good thing you boys are paying by the hour.” He piled some boards on Mable and set fire to her and she caught poorly at first, but after a time was blazing away. It didn’t take so much to get the Popcorn King burning. He caught quick and flared like a torch, the blanket whipping to flame immediately. Black smoke churned up from the corpses and floated up into the clear sky and faded.

“Now,” Crier said. “Any little ole chores you boys want performed? Just anything would be all right. Maybe you’d like to see if I can make a few laps around the lots.”

“Would you?” Bob said.

“You know what you can do,” Crier said.

Crier helped Bob and Sam into the back of the truck and led me around to the cab. It seemed to take forever and my feet felt like raw stumps. I had Crier on one side holding me up, and the truck on the other. I touched the truck with my elbow because my hand wouldn’t take it. I still couldn’t open or close either one of them. They looked like talons.

Inside the cab, Crier started the truck again, leaned on the wheel and looked around. “Strange, I feel funny leaving.”

“Maybe you can get over it,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“One thing, Crier,” I said. “You saw what that crowd was about to do to us. I know you couldn’t have stopped them, but would you have helped eat us? Could you have done that?”

“Been the first in line if I could have. No sense missing a free meal, even if it is made up of a couple of guys I kind of like.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s one way of looking at things.”

I leaned against the door and kept my sore hands in my lap. As we started rolling, I looked around at all the vacant cars, many of them wrecked. There were also lots of bones. You could see that clearly now. We drove by one car with its roof decorated with human skulls wearing popcorn sacks, and there was another car with a baby seat sitting on top of it with a little skeleton in the seat holding a rattle.

I glanced through the gun rack and the back glass, saw Bob and Sam stretched on the floor of the camper. Bob was up on one elbow, gingerly managing sardines from a can Crier had opened and left for him. Sam wasn’t moving. Later Bob told me he died before we got out of the lot.

We went through the exit, and though the highway was there, the yellow line had faded and the concrete had buckled and grass grew up through it in spots. Nothing else was remotely familiar. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised. I remembered what Sam had said: “It ain’t over yet. It ain’t never over.” No, it wasn’t over. It was time for the second feature. A lost world movie. As we drove, a massive shape stepped out of the jungle foliage at the right of the highway and Crier eased on the brake and we watched. It was a Tyrannosaurus Rex covered in bat-like parasites, their wings opening and closing slowly, like contented butterflies sipping nectar from a flower.

The dinosaur looked at us in a disinterested way, crossed the highway and was swallowed by the jungle.

“I don’t think this leads home anymore,” Crier said, and eased forward again, started picking up speed. I looked in the truck’s wing mirror and I could see the drive-in in it, one of the screens in Lot B. The projector might still be running back there, but if it was, I couldn’t make out a picture. The screen looked like nothing more than an enormous slice of Wonder Bread.

The Drive-in 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, wasn’t a book I expected to write. I didn’t have plans. I had a few ideas left over from the first book, and I from time to time thought about what to do with them, but nothing came to mind. And then, my editor, Pat LoBrutto called.

He wanted a sequel.

I’ve always balanced my career between art and pragmatism. If I want to write something, I generally write it, no matter what. Sometimes, I’m asked to do a project I didn’t originate, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a project I wouldn’t like to do. Often I pass on things I’m offered. But when Pat LoBrutto asked me to do another novel about the Drive-in world, needing to keep my career going, needing money to pay bills, and liking the challenge. I went for it. The first time had been a tough experience that turned out well, so I thought, been there before, so this one will be more fun to write.

It wasn’t. It too was hard. There was something about telling these kind of stories, making them seem simple, and sliding in the ideas I wanted to portray at the same time. But, I had a sense this one was good, even though it was tough. I chose to let it end in what for some might be an anticlimactic manner, but was for me, the perfect ending. As always, I go my own way.

It was received with a little less enthusiasm, but over the years the fans for it have grown, especially those who have read the first book.

I like it quite a bit. I think it has some of my best satirical work. It’s also weird with a side of weird. The first novel had a character called the Popcorn King, who I believe to be as unusual an invention as I’ve ever come up with-or at least I thought so until I wrote The Drive-in 2 with Popalong Cassidy.

No doubt all of these books seem to have at their core a love-hate relationship with the entertainment media, TV, movies, etc., as well as a love for false profits and a strange desire to identify with pretty horrible people.

The novel, like the first, was written quickly, though perhaps a little less quickly. Like the first, I was uncertain what I had wrought. Upon reading it in galley form (I don’t think the term galley is used so much these days), I found myself pleased with it. The first is somehow more powerful, if for no other reason than it’s the first, but this one is highly inventive and as a writer, I got to explore the Drive-in world some more and find out what was out there.

What was out there was pretty weird.

Here, let me invite you on the journey. Keep your hands and feet inside the car, and if you think you see something weird, it is weird.

Enjoy.

– Joe R. Lansdale, 2009

Pay attention. When I’m through there will be a test.

One day suddenly you’re out of high school, happy as a grub in shit, waking up with a hard-on and spending your days sitting around in your pee-stained underwear with your feet propped up next to the air conditioner vent with cool air blowing on your nuts, and the next goddamn thing you know, you’re crucified.