Dinner and a Movie

In the back seat of our cherry red Impala, my sisters and I fought for elbow room as we tooled up Ina Court. I took in the smells of the car from the center seat, the stream of fresh air slipping over the cracked windows, the plastic seat coverings and grease from door hinges, my father’s aftershave, and my sisters’ innocent scents from the woods and fresh soap. We were off to eat at a restaurant.

My father cruised through the intersection of Waterloo Road and Arlington Street and came to a pronounced stop in the restaurant parking lot. As I gawked at the outline of the giant Arby’s hat in flashing orange neon, my mother complained at the expense of roast beef, how a hamburger down the street cost twenty-five cents, and the gall of these Arby’s fellows charging three times that for a sandwich.

Inside the store, we children stood a polite distance from the counter, mesmerized by the central image, a brusque woman with large European lips in a white paper hat. With great speed, she spread something called Secret Red Sauce over each handful of roasted beef, the finished sandwich wrapped in foil and tossed into brown paper bags. Out in the car, each of us was handed a sandwich, no splitters. The tangy sauce tasted sharp against the buttery rich meat. I should tell you this was living the life of Reilly. Having dinner in the backseat of my father’s automobile marked a pinnacle in innovation beyond my expectations—food in a car! I chewed and garbled the question whether Batman and Robin ate sandwiches from Arby’s in the Batmobile, but only my sisters’ smacking lips answered.

Such bourgeois advantages as eating roast beef in a backseat spilled over the next summer. One evening it was announced we would be allowed to stay up past nine o’clock to see a movie—not some grainy Western broadcast through the aluminum foil of our television’s antenna or even a feature film at the Lynn Cinema on Waterloo Road. This was the real McCoy, Tinseltown in a car, the drive-in theater.

Earlier in the evening, we had been given the peculiar order to dress in pajamas, slick down our hair, and be ready to leave at the top of the hour. Gathering at the door, we were herded outside. The eccentricity of walking through the neighborhood in bedclothes and tennis shoes seemed freakish. My steps toward the car seemed like Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Chad Hay trotted by, his forehead moist from taking turns at the slide. He looked puzzled. “You guys going to the hospital?”

I caught myself bunching closer to my sisters, a tangle of embarrassment between us. “Naw,” I said, looking down at my cowboy-print bottoms, wanting to tell Chad to mind his own business. The family kept moving toward the parking lot, leaving Chad standing near the telephone pole with the same lost mien. Piling into the new station wagon my father had recently purchased, none of us seemed certain how, once the backseat was folded forward, we would jockey for a prime seat. Our father continued bragging to anyone listening that he had purchased the car in a deal, and what a deal. My mother shushed him, but I could see pride in his eyes darting about the rearview mirror.

Mostly anxious energy to experience a drive-in movie filled the car. Its motor fired up without hesitation, each of us settled back, and the family was off in a breeze of buttered popcorn that my mother had stowed up front. Riding through the city of Akron brought to mind a limited atlas, where bits of avenues and recognizable stores along certain streets cobbled together. The rest was left to a mysterious sense of navigation possessed solely by my father, or any other adult who seemed certain behind the wheel.

The family around me, it struck me, was high and mighty, on the fly. Nobody was telling us where to go. An older gentlemen in a big blue Cadillac pulled alongside us at a traffic light and grinned. The light changed and we sailed off along Wilbeth Road, finally taking a left onto Manchester that headed us toward the drive-in. My dad steered us into a gas station, where a man in a white jumpsuit and cap pumped the tank full of Sohio gasoline, its commercial jingle ringing in my head. My sister Tracy, whose thick blonde hair was woven into a pair of baubles, made a face and said, “Something smells like gas.”

My mother smiled over her shoulder and asked, “What do you think this car runs on, coal?” Her connection to The Andy Griffith Show was far from obscure and caused us to roar, repeating the punch line until someone up front told us to knock it off. My father paid the man, dropped the car into gear and motored ahead, snaking down the entrance lane at Barberton’s Summit Drive In, its marquee a carnival of rolling colorful lights in the shape of a giant arrow. At the admission booth, money exchanged hands, and everyone in the car was set to see the night’s double-bill of Western pictures.

We rumbled between two rows of cars until we swung wide into a final parking spot, inclining the wagon before a massive screen. My dad draped a corded loudspeaker inside the driver’s window, and a staticky melody about a girl named Venus filled the car. A sinister mood overcame me: What if a scoundrel, I supposed, could spray laughing gas through the line of our car’s speaker? My sisters could be asphyxiated, or we could all laugh our heads off. I had seen it done on television, the Riddler gassing people from Moldavia and a true-to-life mastodon. Hydrogen cyanide was no joke.

My father dropped the rear tailgate and finally folded down the rear seats with a metallic snap. We sprang out of the car and set off for the playground. In the distance a throng of children packed the carousel and monkey bars. With the silver screen beginning to flicker brighter than fireflies, it struck me that the drive-in was the only place in the world where any boy or girl, no matter how big or small, was allowed to play outside in pajamas. It seemed ridiculous traipsing over the gravel lot, one hilly grade after another, in our night clothes and tennis shoes.

Once we rushed into the company of other boys and girls dressed similarly, it sparked a festive mood. Kids everywhere shouted and raced along the spinning carousel or waited to catch an empty swing. The distant air blew rich with the steamy aroma of hot dogs and hot buttered popcorn. The warmth of the colossal screen dimmed and then ignited as nightfall eventually settled. Animated images of “taste-filled treats available at the refreshments stand” and commercial jingles echoed across the parking lot. Parents began shooing smaller children back to cars. We abandoned the carousel and started through the dusky magic, searching for our station wagon, passing strangers’ downed car windows. The picture of American friendship permeated the drive-in theater: So many people were sitting in wait for dreams launched by the celluloid of a motion picture.

There was an understood privacy to each passing car, an elusive hush to each interior, how it hinted of cologne or hair tonic, the familiar roast of a cigarette cherry. Passengers murmured secret and low, adult eyes reading us as we passed by in cowboy print cottons and butterfly nightgowns. My ears caught patches of foreign-sounding conversations, my eyes straight ahead, sensing the forbidden.

Once we were back to the car, my mother doled out paper sacks of homemade popcorn and Tupperware cups, ice-topped with grape Kool-Aid. Cartoon runs of Woody Woodpecker played to flashes of laughter but soon ended at the Universal Pictures globe. This was it, the matzo ball premiere. I was so excited I tickled my sister, she slapped me, I shouted, my mother told us to quiet down, my father shushed us all, and the giant screen flashed to grainy gray. A blocky “UA” marked the projectionist starting the first of the double-feature.

A Western whistle from a flute gave me the creeps. Up front my father drew from a piquant jar one red-hot sausage after another, nipping too from a pint of Mogen David. My mother periodically gave him the old squint eye to which he shrugged and kept drinking. For the first hour or so spent in the back of the car, I tried to understand why Clint Eastwood wanted to dig up someone’s coffin. This was clearly nothing Batman would do, and for that reason alone, I grew bored and disinterested in Clint Eastwood.

The projected stream of light reaching the big screen reminded me of Batman’s holograph when he had broadcast his symbol over Gotham’s night sky. Outside the rear window, fireflies drifted lazily by, and though I offered to step out and catch several to perhaps light up the back of the dark car, I was told instead to pipe down. For all the wonder of the drive-in, much of my curiosity rested with the legendary mystic of twinkle, The Sandman. Clutching a thick rope of blankets, my eyelids began to flutter in sequence, so I stretched beneath the open rear window and studied summer stars to the sounds of gunfire, Italian stringed music and a coyote. The cool air dizzied me into the sensation of drifting, darkening, drooping into June's dampening night.

Much later, music that ended the film stirred me awake. The Arabic opening of Two Mules for Sister Sarah twanged on metallic pieces that riveted the interior of the car. My dad laughed at the brassy trailer and shouted, “The foreign legion of Mexico never knew what hit them!”

“I’m tired,” I called from the backseat. My sisters groaned, turning again and again like blanketed mummies unable to find rest, my mother hushing us to sleep. Bodies around me spread out, whining drowsily, and tugging at pillows. I faded out once more and later that night awoke sleepily to the warm idle of the car’s engine, the soothing vibration of the automobile crackling over gravel. At the exit, there was a pronounced clip of wheels over the lip of the hard road, and we sailed off, the brisk night rushing throughout the heavy automobile.