Joe Lansdale - The Complete Drive-In

I’m going to go back and lie down now. Thinking about all this, my head is starting to hurt.

Please, Sleepy Time, come to me, oh sweet love. Open unto me and swallow me and hold me down in the deep dark and make me happy.

Or at least a little less miserable.

I awoke feeling like David Innes, a character from a novel I read by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I liked feeling like David Innes because he was strong and brave and true, all the things I wanted to be, and wasn’t.

In the Burroughs book he lived at the center of the earth, and at the center of the earth there was eternal sunlight, the sun being a ball of lava or something, hanging at the top of their world, which was the center of the earth. So, this being the case, they never knew how much time passed since their sun did not move and there was no night.

Did they sleep eight hours?

Or eight years?

You never knew in Pellucidar.

(A side note which breaks my light and day and night and dark discussion, but shit, it’s on my mind, so here it is:

Like here, in Pellucidar-way down there at the center of the world-you had to watch out for man-eating beasts. Consider this a reminder and another reason I can relate to good old David Innes.)

Back to how hard it is to know a true day from a false day, like in Pellucidar.

Something like that.

So, pick up with It felt the same here on the Drive-in World, where there were changes in light, but no measure of time. This is something that has become more and more confusing, as if some device is playing out, a fuse needs to be replaced or something.

And this is kind of scary (and what isn’t here?), there’s a sputtering from time to time, and suddenly there’s no light (the films stop instantly), and it’s dark and it’s a dark beyond dark, it’s so goddamn dark. Then someone pours some light that would never have been thought light before into the darkness, and what was so black it was beyond black, just becomes black. Just good old night’s black.

(Hot damn. Glad to see it. Hands are visible there in the dark, shadows coiling between the gaps in the fingers when you hold your hand before your face, where before, you couldn’t see your hand before your face.)

What if (that age-old question) the fuse does go and the light doesn’t come back, and, well, here we are, nothing left but the sound of each other breathing, the touch of each other’s hands, the sharing of lice, the sharing of fleas.

I think bad things would happen.

And, hey. What if the fuse kills the climate altogether and there’s nothing but void?

My take on that is it wouldn’t be good.

But, as it stands now, you can start a fire and cook a meal, and the sun could rise and set and rise and set again before you finish your ration of dinosaur egg on some kind of gooey weed, or your fistful of grubs with a dirty root.

And next time you cook, the day or night seems to go on forever.

When it’s night, there are the movies.

Films, as we intellectuals call them.

They show from the moment the darkness falls to the time it goes away. Throbbing light displaying horrible deeds, chainsaws, and power tools. Once I found it entertaining. I see too much real life in it now, even if it has become as familiar as the flat brown mole on the top of my dick. Well, maybe that mole is on the left side of the old cable. But, you know what I mean, Mr. Journal. Old Bitch Diary. Whatever you are, made up of composition notebooks and pages here and there and backs of envelopes and such, written in pencil and ink and crayon and charcoal and mascara, all wrapped up tight and stuffed in a knapsack found in the back seat of a car, next to the remains of a dead body.

Skeleton actually. Small. Some idiot took a child to see an all-night horror show. That skeleton wasn’t entirely a skeleton. It was a body of rags, and the rags were flesh, the bulk of it having been ripped from the bones and eaten. The bones had been cracked open and the marrow sucked out, and it was no longer a horror to see that, and I knew, just a slight push, a slight change of the emotional weather inside my head, and I too would be snatching flesh and cracking bones, chewing up meat, sucking up marrow like chocolate sauce through a straw.

But the movies. There’s no way to turn them off. We’ve thought about tearing down the screen, but frankly, we find this a scary idea. If the screen is gone and there are no movies, then, at night, there is very little light, depending on if the moon comes up (when it comes up some nights, we can hear what sounds like a crank, like someone is jacking it up from the horizon on chains and pulleys), and if it should cease to come up, if the machinery, which I think must be getting old up there behind that curtain of sky, should cease to work, then we will have no light at night, and in this place, no light, that’s scary, baby.

I mean, what if the light never comes again? And here we sit. In darkness. The occasional fire, but mostly, darkness.

Not good.

And there are the sounds.

Wouldn’t want to lose them.

I have become accustomed to the screams and yells and stupid dialogue from all the films.

They are like a mama’s lullaby at night.

If they cease to play and cease to light and cease to sound, there is only emptiness. And ourselves. And all that we have done, nestled in the backs of our minds, moving around to the front. Most of those memories are bad. Being completely inside yourself without outside sounds and interference, that is very hard for the very weak, and that be us, baby. The very weak.

Did I mention the dark?

I did, didn’t I?

It’s on my mind. The darkness.

Now that I think about it, except for that part about not knowing how long I’ve slept, I don’t feel that much like David Innes at all. I’m not only weak, I’m always scared shitless.

But let’s talk about the bus.

If I can focus on the bus, get something to eat soon, maybe I’ll be all right. As is, I’m rambling, I’m free associating, I’m all over the place, and if I’m not careful, I’ll once again talk about the dark.

I need to pee. And shall, out by the drive-in fence, in that special spot where the aroma of a zillion pees rises up and overwhelms and bullies and makes one hasten the act. But, hey, it ain’t nothing compared to a little farther down at what we call the Shittin’ Section. Now there’s some smelly business…

The bus.

The bus.

Focus, Jack.

The bus.

Will it run?

It starts. It runs. But will it run great distances?

Must pee.

I’ve peed. I’ve eaten. Had some boiled fruit. I had to go outside the drive-in, in the jungle, to pick it, and I was scared, doing it by moonlight, but I was more hungry than I was scared. I brought back a stick with the fruit. I wrapped the fruit in my ragged shirt and tied it to the stick and toted it back that way. Later I put the stick in the community fire and got it ablaze, came back to my bus, and using wood I had carried from the jungle and stored in the bus, I boiled water in a hubcap-the water taken from the community water-put the fruit in the hubcap and cooked it down and made a kind of goo, ate it with my fingers, which I burned. It gave me strength (fruit power, baby), and now I feel better. Less hypoglycemic. More organized.

But my fingers hurt.

Now, here are my plans. I write this feeling better, less loopy. I can write now without feeling like the script itself will come off of the page and dance.

This is what I am going to do:

There is a trail that leads into the woods. An animal trail. It’s fairly wide. It has to be to accommodate dinosaurs.

Once, while hunting down the trail, looking for something weak, looking for eggs or edible roots, me and Steve and a couple of the boys, as we call the “Popcorn Kids,” came across-now get this – a school bus.