Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

So, here I am, telling you this: I had no plans to write a third novel about the Drive-in world, but Bill Schafer and I began to discuss it. He wanted me to do it for Subterranean. And then, one day, out of nowhere, the novel caught fire and I was back in that world. It was easier this time, and fun.

I wrote the novel very quickly.

It had been so long since I had written the last, I didn’t realize I had left out one of the main characters from the other novels. Just plain forgot him. A couple of readers called me out. I solved that problem with a small revision.

I’ll let the novel speak for itself on that matter.

Also, I realized when I finished this novel, I didn’t give a pure and perfect answer to the world of the Drive-in, and it’s left open for yet another that need not exist. I left it that way for the reader. But I won’t go into that anymore. My telling you that doesn’t spoil the book or have any effect on the reading of it, but I won’t explain beyond that. I will say this. What I’ve said about the other two.

Enjoy.

– Joe R. Lansdale, 2009

In which the Great Jack, during a hypoglycemic high, ponders the universe beneath God’s asshole while writing The Drive-in Bible and contemplating a journey by school bus.

They all lived in the great Orbit Drive-in beneath a hole in the sky that swirled with shadows and on occasion squeezed out, sphincter-style, dark sticky goo.

The goo reeked.

The goo stuck to your feet.

Some thought it edible, because once upon a time it had rained chocolate almonds and such, but this wasn’t chocolate almonds. Not by a long shot. The eaters grabbed their bellies and screamed, and they were outta there.

For awhile their bodies lay stacked by the drive-in fence, ready to go. And go they would, but not far.

(More on that later.)

The stuff, the god turds, was finally shoveled with makeshift scoopers made of car hoods, deposited up against the drive-in fence to reinforce it. This worked well. Turned hard as cement. When you piled fresh stuff on the old stuff, it stuck. And so the wall grew.

But back to the hole in the sky.

Those who lived beneath this hole in the sky in the Orbit Drive-in called it God’s Asshole. Or rather Jack did, and it caught on.

Jack was the man. Leader of all that was Drive-in, baby. Like everyone else, he hadn’t aged a day in all the time he had been there. Least not physically. Emotionally, mentally, man, he was some kind of wreck. His mind needed a cane. His emotions needed a walker.

But he had become the man.

Jack, the Drive-in man.

The drive-in movies, for some inexplicable reason, played at night and all night. We’re talking four big screens in four connecting lots which had become individual communities, christened cleverly: LOT ONE, LOT TWO, LOT THREE, and THE BIG LOT, which was larger than the rest (hence, the BIGness). It also had a larger screen. The four screens spread their flickering blue-white light along with images of blood and destruction. Tool Box Murders. Chainsaw Massacre. Night of the Living Dead. Others. Spread it across the screens like rancid butter on old slices of bread.

And on cool nights, which seemed evenly measured with those that were hot and dry, the residents of the Orbit stared in the direction of the screen, watched the shimmering images, quoted from the movies aloud as if praying in unison to Mecca, and did just a whole lot of fucking.

Along with all that movie watching, fucking had taken the place of good meals, intense conversation, and wondering what movie stars and rock stars were doing.

Yes sir, that fucking be helping something serious, brethren and sistern. It gave the drive-inders community as well as unwanted pregnancy and sometimes big red swellings. Fortunately, sexually transmitted diseases were not rampant, or the whole damn pack of them would have been full of it and sick of it and gone within a year. Whatever a year was in the drive-in and its surrounding jungle. Time was hard to measure. The sun seemed to rise and set on its own time scale. Sometimes the drive-in crowd sat in darkness, nothing to keep them going but the drive-in light, powered by who knows what from who knew where.

Not a happy series of communities, dear hearts. No, sir. There were strains at the seams. Always had been. True, they were no longer surrounded by a constant twenty-four hours of darkness and black goo that would eat you. That had long passed. And they had driven away from the drive-in only to find it at the end of the road again (bummer). They were in repeato situation, inside the drive-in fence, surrounded by daylight and night, sunlight and moonlight, and a big old jungle. Stuck in there, flimsily barricaded from the outside world. Trying to be safe. Wanting to be safe. Hoping to be safe.

But it wasn’t safe. Dinosaurs and strange things roamed about and dotted the skies. Showed teeth. Showed claws. Sometimes they knocked down the fence and came in for a drive-in dinner. Jack and his people had learned to run the eaters off with spears of wood and car metal, fire-licked torches, rocks slung from slings made of shoe tongues and fan belts.

Even the water hole where they had to go for the wet stuff was a dangerous place. Critters waited there for them.

Finally great catapults made of jungle wood and twisted vines were fashioned and cocked and made ready behind and along the fence. Got loaded up with car transmissions and engines, old tires, batteries, anything worn out and real damn heavy.

Sometimes, when a person died (remember those eaters stacked by the fence, dear hearts?), they were catapulted into the jungle for the scavengers to take. It got so scavengers, smaller critters, lurked there all the time, in beg position, hoping for an offering. This dead-body launching was decided not to be a great idea. But burying was no good. Outside the drive-in they got dug up anyway, and inside

… Well, the smell of the dead wasn’t a good idea. Critters could smell them even if the gravel and asphalt were scraped back and they were buried way under. Once, after Jack and others slaved to bury a body beneath the asphalt, a great pterodactyl, beating its wings faster than a teenage boy can beat his meat, swept into the drive-in and clawed the body from the ground. A brave woman, some friend or relative, tried to protect the corpse, but the winged beast took her and the body away, one in each claw. Dinner and dessert.

In an unknown year, the Great Jack died, and the drive-in tribes divvied up, and the ones who had known Jack the best, the Yippie-Ki-Pussy tribe, struck off on their own.

Jack had founded the Yippie-Ki-Pussy tribe himself, after an especially flavorful event that involved the poking of two women. Upon emerging from the old bus, in which he now lived, his privates wet with sex, he yelled, “Yippie-Ki-Pussy.”

This seemed like a good and humorous idea, and thereafter, the tribe, looking for some identifying name, called themselves the Yippie-Ki-Pussy tribe after their leader, Jack.

Jack, now there was a good looker. A fine specimen of manhood made of bones and a hank of hair, dressed in rags, the flappy remains of shoes on his feet. He walked fast. He looked like a tired and perhaps alcoholic Bozo the Clown coming into the center ring to do some stumbling trick.

But still, he was arresting, ole Jack was.

Yes, I am.

Well, there goes the third person, and here comes me, the first-person narrator. I can’t keep me out of it. I should. But, hell, this is all about me and all about them, and that means it’s all about us, but mostly, since I’m telling it all, writing it down, it’s about, you guessed it…