Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

“Tell me what face you want, kid. I want to show you what we can do. Naw, don’t tell me a thing. I know the face, and it ain’t pretty and it ain’t ugly. It ain’t really a face. You want something everyone will look at. You want it so when you step into a room all eyes go to you. Well, in the name of the Producer and the Great Director, by the power vested in me, and all that stuff, I give it to you.”

She waved the wand. “The stuff dreams are made of, kid.”

I felt a rush of energy. I was a thermometer and I was overheated and my mercury was about to explode out the top of my head.

Next thing I knew, I was on the floor, then I was coming out of darkness. I bl inked and found myself next to the hole that let in the tip of the TV pyramid.

I looked at my hands. They weren’t animated now. A big-handled mirror lay next to me. I picked it up and looked at myself.

What I had for a face was a TV, and that suited me fine. And my face operated like one. Inside my head was the mental switch, and with a twist of my mind I could tune into any movie, television show, commercial, or personal video I wanted.

And I could play it on my face and see it at the same time.

I was proud.

I tossed away the mirror and started down. I felt like Charlton Heston playing Moses in The Ten Commandments. But I wasn’t coming down from on high with the Ten Commandments. I had something better. Every movie, show and commercial ever made was tucked tight in my head, ready to explode onto my face at a whim.

It took me some time to get down, of course, but when I did, the drive-in was full of people. They had been wandering in for a time. They had built a stage of TVs in front of one of the drive-in screens, and they were taking turns going up there and acting out scenes from movies, quoting dialogue they remembered. They also did sound effects and screams. They weren’t too good at it.

When they saw me they stood open-mouthed, and when I turned my face on and filled it with Night of the Living Dead, their expressions turned to rapture. I sat down on a TV set and crossed my legs and leaned forward and they gathered before me and squatted down and watched. And when Night was over, I gave them The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then The Sound of Music intercut with Zombie. Now and then I gave them a commercial for GI Joe action figures and accessories, tossed in a California Raisins commercial, and one for some kind of shampoo. Things got cozy.

They loved me, and it was then that I gave myself a new name. I was in Hopalong gear and I had a TV face and my idol had been the Popcorn King, so naturally, I came up with Popalong Cassidy. I told my audience that was what they should call me, and they did. They would have called me anything to keep those images coming; they had learned that the images were the reality and all else was an illusion they had to work to invent. My face did all the work for them. It gave them all the reality they needed to know, minus the effort.

I found that I no longer needed to eat food. All I needed were the eyes and minds of those people on my face. That kept me full.

In time, more people came to the drive-in, and they too sat before my face and worshiped it, and I pulled energy from them and felt fuller and stronger than ever before.

I was loved. Loved by those who sat before me and ate the popcorn and candy that fell from the sky, drank the drinks it rained. Loved, goddamnit, loved. Me, Popalong Cassidy. Loved and admired and revered.

Course, there were some nonbel ievers. They wanted to stay away from my face. They saw it as bad. They blamed the movies for what had happened to them.

This was nonsense.

I had my followers rip them open and eat their guts and act out Night of the Living Dead. Then the heads of those stupid dissenters went up on tall pieces of antenna and we placed them all around the drive-in as a warning to the nonviewers who might come, and as an inspiration to the rest of us.

I had my followers strike sparks and set the TV pyramids on fire. They would have no other gods before me. I was it, and I didn’t want competition. No one else would be climbing up there to see my Fairy Godmother; no one else could have my prize.

This kept the drive-in a happy place. A new era had dawned. I was its messiah. Offspring of the Producer and the Great Director, whoever they were, and it was my job to make sure they were entertained. And I planned to give my heavenly parents a really big show.

Now let’s pause for this brief commercial message.

All the while Popalong had been talking, images were flashing on his face. Clips from movies and television shows. Now a series of commercials went lickety-split across the screen; everything from exercise machines to Boxcar Willie’s Greatest Hits. Damn if I hadn’t always wanted to try Boxcar Willie’s stuff, though I hated to admit it. If I ever got home, I was going to order his album.

I suppose there were subliminals at work under all that film stuff, but maybe not. I like to think it had no effect on me because I’m just too much woman to be taken in by a subliminal message; I like to think Mom and Dad raised a pretty stubborn girl and that my martial arts training allowed me to maintain my focus on who I was and what I thought.

Course, maybe the only subliminal in the whole mess was for me to buy a Boxcar Willie album, and that seemed to be working. Maybe all those people who had fallen for Popalong’s line of corn were just stupid. My dad always said, “Grace, most people are idiots.”

It was kind of cold-blooded, but life seemed to sort of be bearing him out.

The commercials wrapped up, and in spite of myself I liked the last one. It had to do with these carrots, potatoes and bell peppers with stick legs and shoes and stick arms and gloves. They were hopping off the face of a box and dancing across a kitchen table on their way to leap into a pan full of water resting in the mouth of an open stove.

“My message is simple,” said Popalong. “There is pleasure in darkness and pain. The light cannot be appreciated without the dark. Entertainment is where it’s at. At the end of the highway I have formed a humble Church of Darkness and Pain. Services every day. It all plays on my face. And when someone, shall we say, becomes a star at the church, like those nonbel ievers I told you about, we record their acting and play it again and again for our pleasure. No special effects. No wooden lines. No one pretending to eat guts. The real thing. It’s addicting, I kid you not.”

He leaned close to me. “Revolutionary, don’t you think?”

“It bites the moose,” I said.

“Now that’s ugly,” Popalong said. “After all I’ve shown you and told you, you’re still an asshole. I’m afraid you’ll have to be edited out of what you call life. But don’t worry, I’ll make you a star. I’ll make sure your agony is recorded forever in the only way that really matters. On film.”

He turned to Sue Ellen. “Her, I think she’s got potential. I think she can see the light of my face and know it for what it is, don’t you? I think she’s rather pretty. She might make me a nice queen. I’d like that. I mean I may be a messiah, but to hell with this Jesus stuff where you don’t get any pussy. I’m a new kind of messiah, and I say hey, what’s the point in being a messiah with all kinds of control, if you don’t throw some pork to the women. You see, I can give them any face they want while I make love to them. Whatever star they want, man or woman, hell, Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, I can call them up on my screen, and presto, I’m who they want me to be.”

The rain had stopped and daylight was creeping beneath the tarp and poking through the holes where the rain had come through. The fires in the television sets were dying down and the smoke from them was thinning and becoming lighter, going as soft and gray as the cottony strands of an old man’s hair.