Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

After a while, one of the men got up and raced to the wrecker and climbed on it. When he jumped off he had a big load of magazines under each arm. He went from TV to TV and put magazines into their blazes. I saw the covers of some of the magazines before the flames devoured them. TV Guide, People, Tiger Beat, Screen Gems, all of them decorated with the faces of movie stars and fading celebrities. I thought: Where in hell did that stuff come from?

When the fires were really popping and the air was tinged with smoke, the man darted back to his place with the others, and Popalong lifted his head and looked at me and turned his face on. A test pattern filled it. The dials below the screen split apart again and the tongue of tangled wire presented itself briefly and disappeared. “Don’t think there’s any hatred in my heart for you or anyone,” Popalong said. “My heart has no room for that. It’s full of electromagnetic waves and they jump about like frogs.”

He got down off the antenna and came over and bent forward and looked at me, as if hoping to find something reflected in my eyes. The rabbit ears poked out from under the hat and touched my hair and I felt a faint electric sizzle ride the circumference of my skull. “You have no shadow, you know. It’s because you haven’t learned to belong. That’s what I think. I think when you belong here you have a shadow. I think you earn it. You haven’t earned anything. When you’re like us you’ll have a shadow, a familiar made up of the absence of light.

“Pay attention. Keep sharp. I jump around a lot. It’s the sign of a good mind. I’m trying to tell you there’s a confusion about good and evil. We worry about which is which way too much. Let me just say that good is too easy. It requires nothing. No real commitment. You can’t get the real good out of goodness until you know darkness. Death. Pain. These are instructive tools. Or as Dr. Frankenstein said in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, ‘To know death, you have to fuck life in the gall bladder.’

“I know this now, but all my life I have been looking for this truth and it’s been under my nose all the time. The images taught me where it was at. There are good images and there are bad images, but the bad images make the best show, so I’ve opted for the bad images. I praise the Orbit for leading me to the truth. I praise the night I went. The Popcorn King was right. Movies are reality and everything else is fraud. But the King was not the Messiah, as I thought. He was John the Baptist. I’m the Messiah. I was given powers and position by the Producer and the Great Director, and they wanted a sci-fi horror picture. We’re number two of a double feature.

“Why me, you ask? Because I have seen more hours of television than anyone. I can quote commercials by heart. I know the name of the Green Hornet’s secret identity, the name of the sleek, black car he drives. I know the name of Sky King’s niece and what Batman eats for breakfast. Everything that is important is in this square head.

“Let me tell you too, I was made for it. I’m a preacher’s son. I grew up with fire and brimstone and channel nine, the only channel we could get at that time.

“My father spoke savagely to us from the pulpit and every Sunday afternoon after church he beat my mother with his thick belt, then came downstairs and beat me too. I never ran. I took it. He would beat me until his arm got tired, then he would switch arms and wear down. He left welts on my ass.

“When he was finished, he would become remorseful and read the Bible to me and pray. Then he would tell me to turn on my television set and watch it. That I was redeemed. That the sin was cast out of me by pain.

“My mother went away when I was eleven. I thought about her a few days after she was gone, but I never missed her. She had been nothing more than someone around the house, going this way and that in a plaid housecoat and slippers with the backs broken down. She ate a lot of sweets and drank lots of coffee and sipped Nervine that she poured from a bottle into a great big spoon. She seldom spoke to me and never fixed meals. I took care of myself. I grew up on Cokes and Twinkies. The characters on TV spoke to me in her place.

“When I graduated, passed more out of courtesy than from any other reason, my father took his belt to me and beat me until I couldn’t get off my knees. He gave me a new Sylvania set and told me to be gone by morning and to never come back. He had taken care of my raising until I was a man, and now I was a man, and to go.

“I went. I couldn’t get a good job. The people out there were cruel. Unlike TV, they expected things of you. They wanted college educations. I wanted a satellite dish and more channels. The chance to see time and again Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, The Andy Griffith Show. It really didn’t matter. Just images. My images. Part of my holy communion. Kurtz and Opie, Leatherface and Lassie, side by side.

“I ended up working at a filling station. I could never get the work straight. I mostly put nozzles in gas tanks and dreamed of Gilligan’s Island and a trip on The Love Boat, of chain-sawing pretty people and stripping their flesh so that I could wear it, jacking air in a gutted corpse. I missed my father’s belt. Gasoline ran over my shoes.”

As he talked, silent scenes from films and TV shows and commercials ran across his screen like track stars. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. Something about them tugged at me. I felt drunk. I wanted Popalong to turn his face off and shut up. I wanted a hot bath and a good meal and a hot fuck. I wanted to be home in Nacogdoches, tooling down Main Street with the car windows down and a hot wind in my face, looking to see what historical house or building they would tear down next.

But what I got was more of Popalong.

But the boss kept me working even if I wasn’t any good. It wasn’t a place that got much business and nobody else wanted to work there because the pay was cheap. Lucky for the boss, I didn’t need much and no one else would have me. He let me watch television there at the station between cars. I was between cars a lot.

The money I made kept me in Twinkies and Cokes, TV Guide and the cable. I saved up and bought a VCR. I bought a belt like my father used to beat me. I was cozy. I lived in a one-room, walk-up apartment that smelled like the winos in the doorways below. I often saw them when I was walking to work, shuffling ahead of me in search of a bottle. For some reason they made me think of Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.

At night I would take the belt like my father’s and slap my naked back with it. I did this while I watched tapes of Hopalong Cassidy reruns. Hopalong had a face like my father’s. Watching him made the beltings work all the better. I slapped myself until I bled. I tore pages from the TV Guide and stuck them to my back to stop the blood. Sometimes there were not enough pages.

When I finished, I would put the videotape of The Bible into the VCR and watch a few minutes of that while I knelt and held the box the tape had come out of. I prayed there would be no electrical blackouts while I was watching a movie, I prayed my television would not wear out until I could afford a big-screen TV. I prayed I would someday have a place of my own away from the noise of the winos, a place where I could have a satellite dish and fill my head with channels. I wondered who I was praying to.

So it went until a week before Halloween. I was on my way home from work eager to get my belt and put in the Hopalong tape, and what do I see in the window of the costume shop between Sylvester the Cat and a pirate outfit but a Hopalong Cassidy costume. I felt weak in the knees.

I went in there and blew all the money I had. I knew I would have to buy some cheap brand of soft drink and some sort of pastry that wouldn’t match Twinkies, but I had my Hopalong suit, complete with hat and boots and holsters, though the guns in it were cap pistols.