Joe Lansdale: The Complete Drive-In

I figured as long as I was punishing myself, I might as well sit up in bed and get so I could see all the spines and really feel rotten. There were also books on Eastern religions that mainly had to do with holding your thumb next to your forefinger, wrapping a leg around your neck and making with some damn-fool chants. There was even one of those hip modern books that told me I just thought I was a schmuck, but wasn’t really. It was everyone else, and I was a pretty neat fella. I liked this one best until I realized that anyone with the price of a paperback was a pretty neat fella. That sort of let the air out of my tires.

Only book I didn’t have up there on my shelf was one on divining the future through chicken guts, and I’d have had it had it been for sale.

I couldn’t figure why I was such a sucker for that stuff. I wasn’t unhappy, but the idea of everything just being random didn’t suit me, and didn’t seem right. And I didn’t like the Big Bang theory. It was kind of disappointing, came across like a lab experiment that had gone wrong and made something. I wanted things to be by design, for there to be some great controlling force with a sense of order. Someone or something up there keeping files and notes.

I figured I just hadn’t found the right book.

I got out of bed, got a trash sack out of my closet and took all those little dudes off the shelf and put them in the sack. I went downstairs and threw them in the main garbage in the washroom, then went into the kitchen.

Mom was in there running that crap she has for breakfast through a blender. It smelled like wet dog hair and mildewed newspapers to me.

“Want some eggs and bacon?” she asked, and smiled.

She was standing there in her tennis outfit, her long blonde hair pulled back and bound with a rubber band. I’m sure some backyard psychiatrist will make an Oedipal thing out of this, but to heck with it. My mom is damn fine-looking.

She started pouring the smelly mess from the blender into a glass.

“Well, I don’t want that,” I said. “And if I were you, I’d see if a nest of roaches, or maybe a rat died in that blender overnight.”

She grimaced. “Does smell bad, doesn’t it?”

“Oh yeah. How’s it taste?”

“Like shit.”

I got some cinnamon rolls out of the fridge. “Let’s have these.”

She patted her flat stomach. “Nah. Got to keep my girlish figure. Otherwise, I’ll die while I’m out playing tennis. Bad form to die on the court.”

“You couldn’t gain a pound if you were wearing galoshes.”

“For that, you may have two bone-building, nutritious cinnamon rolls. And though I wouldn’t normally eat that garbage, pollute my body with those foul chemicals and sugars, I will, on this occasion, knowing how you hate to eat alone, make an exception.”

“If you ever finish your speech, that is.”

“Precisely.”

She sat down and ate four rolls and drank three cups of coffee. When she was through she smacked her lips. “God, but I hated every horrible minute of that. Each bite was agony, acid to my lips. The sacrifices mothers make for their children.”

Dad came down. He was wearing an old brown bathrobe that Mom hated. She had tried to throw it away once, but he’d found it in the garbage, rescued it and slinked upstairs with it under his arm. Mom had laughed after him and he had looked down at her, hurt.

She had also given it to Goodwill, thinking they’d turn it into rags, but they’d washed it, put it on the racks. And Dad, looking for used paperbacks, saw it, bought it and came home mad. He told Mom never to say his robe had come apart in the washing again.

That robe is an ugly thing, tattered and threadbare. He had at least three good ones in a drawer upstairs, but as far as I knew, he had never so much as tried them on. Wearing that old brown one, his feet in house sandals and his hair thinning on top, he always reminded me of Friar Tuck.

He wobbled in sleepily, weaved over to the counter and came suddenly awake when he got a whiff of what was in the blender.

“Goddamn, woman,” he said. “There’s something dead in that blender.”

“That’s what I said, Dad.”

“Funny,” Mom said. “It’s just that old robe you guys smell.”

“Ah,” Dad said. “The melodious voice of the serving wench. Make me some ham and eggs.”

“Poof.” Mom said. “You are some ham and eggs. Any more requests?”

“None I can think of,” Dad said. He got a bowl, spoon, milk and cereal, arranged them at the table and pulled up a chair.

“What happened to the ham and eggs, Your Majesty?” Mom asked.

“Too lazy to fix them myself.”

“And I won’t feel sorry for you, will I, snookums?”

“Looks that way,” Dad said. He looked at me and grinned. “Up early, aren’t you?”

“Friday,” I said.

“Ah. No school and tonight is the big night. A trip to the Orbit with the boys. You should try going out with girls, son. They’re a lot more fun.”

“I go with girls,” I said. “It’s just that the Orbit is special

… something I prefer to do with the guys.”

“I always liked drive-ins with girls.” He looked at Mom. “A purely puritan adventure, of course.”

“That’s not the way I remember you,” Mom said. “Aren’t you running late this morning, Mr. Big Shot?”

“I own the company, my dear. I can do damn well as I please. Outside of this house anyway.”

“Ha,” Mom said. She got up and started for the cabinet. Dad slapped her on the butt. She whirled. “Harold… could you do that again?”

I laughed. Dad stood up, grabbed her, bent her back like they do in those old movies. “Woman, my little dove. You are the love of my life. Patting your ass is a pleasure unmatched by gold and video… And remember, serving wench, no TV dinners tonight or I sell you to the Arab traders.”

He kissed her.

“Thank you, Harold. Now will you lift me up. My back hurts.”

“When the going gets rough, when it looks like we’re not going to make it, I’ll save the last two bullets for us.”

“Harold, you’re crazy. Now pull me up, will you? My back hurts.”

He pulled her up. “That’s what happens when you get old. Back trouble. And no sense of romance.”

“Go shower and shave… and for heaven’s sake brush that hair off your teeth,” Mom said.

“My breath is sweet. I go to bed with sugar breath, and I awake with it even sweeter. I-”

“Go!”

“Yessuh, Massuh,” he said, and shuffled off.

When he was gone Mom gave me an exasperated look. “He’s crazy, you know?”

“I know,” I said.

A little later on, Mom went to play tennis and Dad went to work and I never saw them again.

Before we started going to the drive-in, come summer mornings you couldn’t get me up if you fired a bazooka under the covers. But now Friday meant the Orbit, and I was usually up early. And there was also The Early Morning Monster Show that I had acquired a taste for. It showed on Channel 6 at eight and Randy came over every Friday to watch. Bob would have, but he worked half a day at his dad’s feed store. As I said, none of us had to work, but Bob was more willing, and he liked having plenty of pocket change.

So Randy came over and the movie was The Crawling Eye, and it wasn’t bad until the monsters showed up. The wind kind of went out of its sails after that. It was hard to feel threatened by things that looked like large rubber mops. Still, I enjoyed it, and it gave Randy a chance to make fun of the special effects.

He got what I thought was a sort of strange, even perverse, pleasure out of that, considering most of those movies had been made on a rubber-band budget. But I think it was important for him to have something to look down on, considering he felt pretty much low man on life’s totem pole. He had brains and he was nice, but there was some invisible thing about him that led others to direct their hatred toward him, the incident with Bear being a case in point. In fact, I sometimes felt that behind that mousy, quiet exterior was a tyrant without courage, someone looking for his edge on humanity.