The Complete Drive-In

1

And so the sun came up, and I called it tomorrow. I hitched up my mind and my resolve, and I said to myself, Self, I’m driving out of here.

Today, baby, is the day.

So I went to Grace and Steve, and I said, “I’m leaving.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Hunting. Foraging?”

“Leaving,” I said.

Grace, long and lean and beautiful, and quite naked, stood up and stretched (I could smell that they had been sexin’ it up), and said, “You asking us to go?”

“I’m telling you I’m going, and you want to go you can. It’s up to you. There’s a couple others I’m gonna ask, and then I’m gonna go, without folks or with folks.”

“We have been here a long time,” Grace said. “I think. I really don’t know. But it seems like we have. Shit, I say we go, Steve.”

Steve nodded. “Beats nailing your dick to a two-by-four.”

The day was as bright as a rich man’s day, and I had all the world before me.

Such as it was.

Stuffed with dinosaurs and monsters and strangeness.

But, I didn’t want to think about that.

The sun was bright. The trail was clear.

So, what we did was this: We found a few others who wanted to go. Most were afraid to go. Afraid if they got away from the drive-in with its relative protection, they would surely be on their own.

It was amazing. Once they had all been mostly young partygoers out for a weekend night at a four-screened drive-in, and now they called it home. And didn’t want to leave. Did not want to go out into the world with a New Big Bad Wolf, but wanted to stay with the Wolf They Knew.

I guess it was best to have only a few with us. Less to worry about. Fewer personalities to mess with.

Me, I wanted to go to my real home.

Didn’t know how.

Didn’t know if I could.

But I had to find out.

We managed to take a gas tank out of a car with tools found in the trunk of another car, and we put that tank in the bus, filled it with gas we siphoned from vehicles, and we corked the spare tank with a wooden plug, as the exterior screw-on cap had been long lost, and we put it in the back of the bus for reserve. We put some fruit back there, as well. Steve and Grace had some meat that wasn’t too rancid (dead critter found in the forest the day before, ants part of the treat), some water in gourd containers, a few odds and ends, and then we gave each other our best wishes and were off.

Or we would have been, but Steve came up with an idea.

“If we’re gonna be traveling about, and we don’t even know where we’re going, I think we ought to be prepared.”

“We got fruit and a dead thing we can eat. If we don’t wait a long time.”

This was from a guy named, and I shit thee not, Homer.

He was one of our volunteers. He looked like what you thought a Homer ought to look like. Kind of tall and lean and goofy with hair the color of watered-down shit that fled over his head in good patches, but showed through in spots and was as shiny there as a dog-licked dinner plate.

“Right you are, Homer,” Steve said, “but that stuff will run out. We’ll need new food.”

“I knew that,” Homer said. “You think I didn’t know that?”

“I know you do, but what I’m talking is strapping them goddamn pontoons on either side of the bus, and if we need to float across a river, we can do it. I think, if we work on the backdoor window, we can fix it so we can take it out when we want. And we can make a rudder, stick it out the window there, and though we can’t motor this baby across a river, maybe we could guide it some.”

“It’s a thought,” I said.

“Hell, it’s a good idea,” Steve said.

We spent another day transferring the pontoons to the bus and making the rudder. We rigged the glass on the back door so we could take it in and out; rigged it so we could poke out the rudder and hook it on the window frame with some wire Steve found somewhere in the drive-in. Steve also rigged us up a tape player and we took tapes from all the cars we could find, except for Barry Manilow or similar shit, and then we were ready to go.

We put the box of tools inside, and just before we were to leave, a young woman came up the trail. She was short and pretty nice looking, or would have been, had her clothes not been made of an animal hide with a hole cut in it, draped over her head and cinched up with an old belt. It might have helped too if her hair had been clean and she wasn’t so scratched up on the legs, and she hadn’t had a look in her eye that made you think maybe she could see something just to the left of her nose no one else could see.

She was carrying a pack made of an animal skin. Wild dog. The head was still on the pack, and so was the tail, which she had turned into a kind of strap.

She said, “I want to go, too. I brought some dried meat and some dried fruit. I dried them good on the roof of my car. They’re a little chewy, and the fruit has got some bugs in it, but they make it a little tastier.”

“Protein is good,” Grace said.

Grace, who today was wearing clothes (more of a bikini, really) made of animal hides, looked marvelous. Considering the rest of us all looked like scarecrows, I don’t know how she did it. But she wore those skins great, like Raquel Welch in that movie, One Million Years B.C. Her hair was as shiny as the chrome on a brand new motorcycle, and that came from the fact she wasn’t afraid to go down to the river out back of the drive-in and bathe and wash her hair, and use some kind of weed that if rubbed together made a pretty good excuse for soap. Her hair was all combed out too, was real long, and when she moved, it moved, flowed around her, and was the color of scorched honey.

Looking at her, dressed like that, I thought about the time me and her hooked up, and right then I was thinking on how I’d like to do the trailer hitch thing again, and damn if she didn’t look at me and catch my eye, and give me a kind of grin, like, you know, you done had yours, and I pitied you, and it’s probably the best pussy, if not the only pussy you ever had, so you best think back on it a lot, ‘cause it’s not a repeater, if you know what I mean.

I got all that out of that little smile.

I smiled back, kind of a thank you, ma’am. Ain’t nothing else I’d rather have had, and in fact, it is my favorite present to date, and in memory sense, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Then she turned away, and the old bad world came back, and there was Reba, looking at me like a dog confused by language.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, my mind still on Grace, fearing my thoughts would show on my forehead, or that she might notice my pecker had moved to the left of my worn pants, as if in search of prey.

“Reba.”

There were also James and Cory. They were buddies. Good ole boys meet Heavy Metal types. Cory was bulky. James was wiry. Cory said he wished we had some Black Sabbath cassettes.

Steve said it was a shame we didn’t. But he didn’t mean it.

When we were ready, I, as tour guide, I suppose, said to everyone: “Well, climb on in, and let’s shag ass on out of here.”