Disruption at the Drive-In or The Night I Ate the Car

The South Main Drive-In Theater was a mere three and a half miles from our four bedroom house on Brookmeade in South Houston. Drive-In Theaters were invented up in New Jersey where the air actually cools down somewhat on a summer night and mosquitoes are not measured by the width of their wing-spans.

In Texas, they're not such a good idea. Nope, the infestation and the fetid atmosphere combined with the marketing ploy of admission prices per carload instead of per person made a drive-in experience in Houston somewhat like a cross-Atlantic trip jammed into the cargo hold of a slave ship...with an in-flight movie.

Any available space in an automobile was utilized. A standard VW Beetle became a clown car that could hold 12 people:

1 Driver
1 in the passenger seat
1 on their lap
3 in the back seat
3 on their laps
1 in the little cubby hole in back
2 in the trunk. You could fit as many as three in the trunk but then you had no room for the large cake-holder Tupperware tub of home-made popcorn.

The second you pulled into the drive-in and found your place, everyone piled out and went to their pre-arranged areas to socialize and wait for the movie to begin. Adults stayed in the car while teens went to the pavilion near the snack bar, and the kiddies ran down to the front where the ancient playground equipment lay rotting and rusting and festooned with tetanus.

When the movie started, you all jammed back into the car where you craned your neck around the other passengers and strained to hear the dialogue through a speaker that was built sturdier than the black box on an airplane and had a sound quality slightly higher than WWII prisoners of war enjoyed while listening to BBC on their home-made crystal radio sets.

When I was five years old, my father came home one night with the very first brand new car he ever owned. It was a 1963 Ford Fairlane. White with red trim and red plastic interior. It had a steering wheel with a bullet-shaped center that was certain to impale the driver upon any impact greater than 30 miles per hour, no shoulder harnesses, no safety glass, electric windows that were powerful enough to decapitate and side fins that jutted out at right angles that were as threatening as those jagged wheel hubs on Massala's chariot in 'Ben-Hur'




Detroit couldn't have constructed a greater monument to mobilized death if it had super-glued razor blades onto a killer whale.

As my father proudly displayed his new acquisition to neighbors and friends, my mom came out of the house with a Tupperware container filled with popcorn. We were taking the new car to the drive-in.

We all piled into the new car. My brother and two sisters in the back and my mom and dad in the front with me in between. As we settled in and inhaled that new car smell, my mom ran her hand over the newest feature Detroit had come up with; a padded dashboard. In reality, it was the standard metal dash with about a quarter inch of padding and red vinyl covering. The incentive here was to lessen the number of third-degree burns that came from touching a hot metal dash that absorbed solar radiation like a black hole.

As we pulled into the drive-in, dad went up and down the aisles looking for a place to park that would keep his new car free from dings and scratches and still offer us a decent view of the screen. I watched his face beam as he passed cars that honked and let out wolf-whistles in appreciation of the shiny new car with less than a dozen miles on the odometer.

Tonight's feature was a Vincent Price offering, "The Pit and The Pendulum", the only similarity between the movie and Edgar Allen Poe's work being the title itself. If you want to watch it, you can actually view it online for free at www.hulu.com. If you don't have the time for that, the embedded trailer I found on Youtube should be sufficient to give you an idea of the kind of movie that parents took their five-year old kids to back in my day.

As the movie got under way, I leaned forward to move myself as far as possible away from the body heat radiating from my parents on either side of me. My face came to rest on the padded dashboard.

During the course of the movie, Vincent Price's character, who was certain that he had mistakenly buried his wife in the family crypt while still alive, was making his way through the cobweb-infested crypt while his wife's taunting voice hissed out his name. To this day I can't watch a Ricola commercial because the wife's voice had the same sing-song meter to it

"NICH-o-lasssss"

As Vincent Price made his way deeper and deeper into the crypt, I became more and more absorbed into the movie. The violins played with greater urgency and I opened my mouth in engrossed awe....the padded dashboard slipped between my teeth and I unwittingly began to chew upon it.

As Vincent Price came to his wife's tomb, it opened slowly....I chewed with a bit more gusto. A bloody hand crept from the open grave.....my teeth were moving like a sewing machine. Suddenly, the wife's corpse shot from the grave and her accusing voice rang out. "NICHOLASSSSSS!!!!!!!"

I chomped down on the dashboard of my dad's new car and reared back away from the bloody harpie on the screen, tearing a huge chunk of the dash with me.

I have to depend upon information from my brother at this point because I lost conciousness a moment after I tore the chunk of dash from the car. I do, however, remember one over-riding thought before I slipped into oblivion, SWALLOW THE EVIDENCE!!!

My brother and sisters, who were in the back seat of the car and were just as hypnotized by the movie as I was were suddenly and rudely brought back to reality by my father and mother screaming "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!?" and pummeling me as if they were trying pound the life out of me.

This was the era of the sixties...the Red Menace...McCarthy....in short, paranoia.

Fearing that my parents had been made crazed killers by some mind-altering substance that was slipped into the Kool-Aid we had snuck into the drive-in and were brought to their crazed state by some hidden trigger-phrase uttered by Vincent Price, my siblings tried to escape through the rear windows of the two door Fairlaine while my parents were occupied with killing me.

The neighboring cars, also caught up in the crescendo of this horror movie, saw what was certain blood-lust and mayhem in the neighboring car and began to react as well. People erupted from their cars screaming and falling to their knees begging God to deliver them...which set off the next wave of cars and so on and so on until a full-on riot occured.

From that day, until my father traded in his car. My punishment was to sit in the front seat directly in front of the damaged dash board now covered with red tape, listen to my parents sigh heavily and then look at me and shake their heads.