Read The Complete Drive-In Online
Authors: Joe R. Lansdale
The Complete Drive-In (2 page)
Well, I went home with that copy of The Nightrunners and one other book, something called The Drive-in. I don’t know exactly why I immediately gravitated to The Drive-in as the first one to read. Was it that subtitle on the cover, “A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn Made in Texas”? Probably.
I dove right in to the horror, humor, and overall freaky audacity that was, and still is, The Drive-in. Joe writes his books like movies, he sets up the bizarre scenes, populates them with memorable characters, and then lets them talk in that amazing Nacogdoches dialect of his. Then Joe cranks up the suspense, action, and humor. Another amazing talent Joe has is a phenomenal abil ity to mix up genres. In The Drive-in, he got me started with what seemed like a traditional coming-of-age story, then effortlessly moved into post-apocalyptic survival and finally an out-and-out horror monster tale! I was halfway through the book when I realized this will make for a frickin’ fantastic movie!
I have a friend named Jeff Conner who was once the publisher of that terrific, and now-extinct, small publisher Scream Press. Since Jeff was the only person I knew in the publishing business, I asked him to track down Joe’s phone number for me. Jeff immediately began working his contacts and got me Joe’s home phone number. I called Joe up and got him on the phone.
The first thing I noticed in that call was that Joe speaks in this amazing East Texas accent. It’s a lingo that is really unique, strange (to me), and wonderful. For the first few moments of our conversation I was so taken with his language that I wasn’t really responding. Joe inquired politely if I was still on the line, so I got right to the reason I had called. I told him I was a fan and wanted to make his book The Drive-in into a movie. Joe was very nice, but told me there were a couple other people interested and gave me his agent’s contact information.
I then did two things. The second thing I did was to call up Joe’s agent and make my pitch. But the first thing was a bit unconventional. I hired a brilliant Russian-born illustrator, Nikita Knatz, to help me visually conceptualize what a movie of The Drive-in might look like. Nikita had done some epic visualizations for me on my film The Beastmaster. Nikita had a knack for the weird and strange and I commissioned him to do a series of illustrations of The Drive-in world. I probably should have waited to secure the movie rights but back then I was a guy in a hurry. Imagine my surprise a couple months later when I learned that Joe’s agent had optioned the rights to somebody else! Nikita had just finished his work and it was immediately destined to go into my file cabinet for the next couple of decades.
Later I called Joe up, still despondent over the loss of The Drive-in movie rights. Joe’s response was to invite me down to Texas. He was certain that once we met in person we’d be able to cook up something for us to work on together.
About a month later I arrived in Houston and took the two-hour drive north to Lansdale country. Anyone who gets to know Joe Lansdale knows that his hometown of Nacogdoches informs his entire being. This small town and its residents have had a tremendous influence on him and his work. As he showed me around, Joe told me how Nacogdoches was the first town in Texas and that later it was the last stop on the vaudeville circuit for legendary comedians like Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. As it is just a few miles from the Louisiana border, Nacogdoches has a distinct Deep South conservative sensibility, yet Joe is one of the most progressive guys you’ll ever meet. Joe happens to be a martial arts master and, coincidentally, the few other liberal-minded citizens of the town all happen to be martial arts experts also. I hear they all like to hang out at Joe’s martial arts studio and are happy to talk politics with their right-wing neighbors as long as it’s in the dojo and on the mat in the event discussions get hot.
In addition to the tour of Nacogdoches and meeting the entire Lansdale family, including Joe’s terrific wife Karen and their two adorable kids, Keith and Kasey, I had the distinct honor of attending a “B-movie night with popcorn” in Joe’s den. Later I was to learn that the movie night with popcorn was a coveted invitation and a notorious rite of passage for many of Joe’s author friends. It’s a little known secret that many of Joe’s greatest writerly inspirations came to him in the middle of the night after watching a B-movie and eating the special Nacogdoches popcorn.
The VCR cranked up and Killer Klowns from Outer Space started to play. Karen was in the kitchen getting the popcorn popping. During a lull in the Klown action, I looked over my shoulder into the kitchen and saw Karen preparing the popper. She had hold of an ice cream scooper and put several large scoops of what looked to me like vanilla ice cream into the popcorn kettle. I’m thinking to myself, “Now that’s a novel way to cook up popcorn—with an ice cream flavor.”
A few minutes later Karen came into the den and presented each of us with a monster bowl of the famous popcorn. It was fantastic! I started wolfing the stuff down as Joe told me how he got inspiration for his stories from eating the popcorn, watching the B-movies, and then enduring the fever-induced dreams those two things created in him. I was a bit skeptical that popcorn and B-movies would create a peyote-like experience, but what the hell, I still ate two full bowls of the stuff. I then asked Karen where she got the idea of putting ice cream into the popcorn. It wasn’t ice cream, she informed me, they made their popcorn the old-fashioned way, with scoops of
lard
! No wonder it tasted so good! But if I’d known the key ingredient, I would have paced myself a bit and not quaffed it down whole hog, so to speak. The rest of the movie was a hallucinatory blur as the popcorn rumbled its way through my digestive system. It was definitely having an effect as I started hearing a ringing in my ears and the Killer Klowns were actually terrifying to me.
lard
! No wonder it tasted so good! But if I’d known the key ingredient, I would have paced myself a bit and not quaffed it down whole hog, so to speak. The rest of the movie was a hallucinatory blur as the popcorn rumbled its way through my digestive system. It was definitely having an effect as I started hearing a ringing in my ears and the Killer Klowns were actually terrifying to me.
After the movie ended I shakily followed Joe downstairs and across the yard to his office where I would be bunking for the night. I was going to be sleeping in the same bed that such literary luminaries and friends of Joe’s had slept in, including Lewis Shiner, Richard Christian Matheson, and David Schow. I was wondering if those gents had eaten the popcorn too and what kind of effect it had on them.
As we moved through his yard in the dark, Joe warned me to watch out for the water moccasins that would slither up from the creek at night. He said something about pitying the poor fool who would step on one of those poisonous critters. I was sweating profusely and my eyes were darting around looking for water moccasins in every shadow.
I fell into the bed and spent the rest of the night in a popcorn-induced fever dream chock full of water moccasins. Every half hour I’d wake to see shadows on the blanket and would flail at them, trying to get the snakes off my bed. I was dreaming of water moccasins on the bed, under the bed, on the floor, in my shoes. Flying moccasins, swimming moccasins, you get the picture. If I were Joe, I would have jumped up the next morning and put those visions to paper in the form of an audacious short story.
A few years later I heard that, due to an interest in a better diet, Karen would not al low Joe to eat the popcorn anymore. I will leave it to the biographers and literary researchers to one day go back and analyze Joe’s body of work “pre-popcorn” and “post-popcorn” to see if there is any difference. Sometimes I wonder if Joe just made that whole story up. He is a terrific storyteller and how could an author like Joe pass up one about magic popcorn that, combined with B-movies, generates strange stories in a writer’s mind? Stories like
The Drive-in
, contained herein, where the protagonists are literally torn to shreds by “The Popcorn King.”
The Drive-in
, contained herein, where the protagonists are literally torn to shreds by “The Popcorn King.”
I’ve been back to Nacogdoches a couple times since then but never slept at Joe’s again, never watched B-movies with him again, and never, but never, allowed myself to eat any of that Lansdale popcorn. I guess I am a witness that Joe’s claims may be true. For me, there is no question that the trip to Nacogdoches and the B-movies with popcorn were a source of hallucinatory night-sweats and nightmares. Unlike Joe, I was just too lazy to put it down on paper, until now.
BOOK ONE
THE DRIVE-IN
A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas
INTRODUCTION
B
ack in the eighties I kept having this dream.
ack in the eighties I kept having this dream.
Every night, as soon as I drifted off I found myself at a giant drive-in theater. I could tell, even though I was dreaming, that I was putting together all the drive-ins I had ever attended and was combining true experiences with dream experiences.
The dream got weirder. It was like a movie serial. Every night I was excited because I got to see what happened next. What happened in the dream was I was with some friends, and we got trapped in the drive-in by a big black acidic blob that surrounded it and we couldn’t get out. Contained in the drive-in without food and rules, people turned to murder and cannibalism and not washing their hands after peeing.
Anyway, the dream stayed with me, night after night, even though it got to a point where it was no longer advancing; it started repeating itself. I was on a weird drive-in loop.
Then I got a call from T. E. D. Klein at Twilight Zone. He asked if I would write a non-fiction piece for the magazine. They had run other articles by other writers, and they wondered if I had something. I don’t know why I was chosen. Maybe it was because I had sold them a few stories and Ted—as he was known to most, not T. E. D., even though that was his writer tag—got along with me pretty well, and we had had a number of conversations. On the other hand, maybe I was the last pick in the bag. I don’t know.
But I decided to write an article about drive-ins. It contained some drive-in history, and my feelings about drive-ins, and Joe Bob Briggs let me quote him at the front of the article. I then added my dream to it and turned it in.
It really went over well, not only with the editor, but the readers, and one of those readers was my editor at Doubleday, Pat LoBrutto. Pat is one of those unsung heroes of the field. He published dozens of writers on their way up, and dozens on their way down. Good writers who were starting out, or who no longer had a solid home in the publishing industry and should have.
Anyway, he asked if I’d write a book based on the dream.
I said okay, and started writing away. I wrote The Drive-in in a little over two months, if memory serves me, and as soon as I finished, I started writing Cold in July, as I had a contract for that one at Bantam at about the same time.
I hated The Drive-in. I found it hard to write. I wanted it to read simply, and fun, but I had a dark sort of message inside of it, and it weighed on me. I don’t say this with any great feeling of philosophical superiority. I just feel a book is at its best when it has subtext. I felt I had perhaps missed the boat on both humor and philosophical underpinning.
I tried to write what I thought was a kind of loving satire of horror films and the stupidity of man. The desire to believe almost anything if it made them feel better. Religion. Astrology. Numerology. You name it. I thought the book was quite serious, and I hoped funny in a kind of biting, satirical way.
The book came out with a cover that didn’t fit it at all. It was more of the kind of cover reserved for Ron Goulart’s humorous S.F. I liked Goulart’s work, by the way, but this was a totally different kind of animal. It wasn’t actually S.F., though it used some S.F. tropes. It wasn’t exactly horror, though it certainly used elements of that. And it wasn’t exactly a mainstream novel because it was too weird. Perhaps it was weird fantasy? I don’t know. I didn’t care. It was mine.
Anyway, the book came out. It acquired a readership and a kind of underground following. A lot of writers have told me that it was a big influence on their decision to become a writer or that it influenced the way they wrote, or the things they wrote about. That’s pretty high praise.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I often do.
Anyway, backtracking, I hated writing the book and thought it was awful, but when they sent me the galleys, and I read them, I was surprised and pleased. I felt I had done what I started out to do. The problem was the book was written quickly, but intensely, and the things I was writing about, humor or not, underneath were dark and unsettling. At least to me. So, the writing had been tedious and painful, but the reading of the book was not. I am one of those writers who loves writing, not having written. I believe the act itself is what matters most. But for this book, I didn’t really enjoy the act at the time or finishing it either. I thought I had written a loser. I wrote much of it sort of free associating, and just going where it wanted to go, no matter how wild it seemed. I let my subconscious lead the way.
It wasn’t, as I said, until I held the galleys in my hot little hands that I realized I had done something unique. To this day a lot of people tell me how much they love the novel. Many say they love it because it is light and fun. Well, yeah, if you look at it from one angle, that’s true. Some say they think it’s the darkest thing I ever wrote. Yep, so do I. The humor is nothing more than a clown suit on a corpse. The important thing is, for whatever reason, it endures, and so does its influence.
Simply put, I’m proud of it. The book has been back in print before, but not as much as I would like. Not considering it is to my way of thinking one of my more unique and important novels. That, of course, is ultimately for the readers to decide.
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