March 14, 2012

There are not so many drive-in movie “theaters” around these days, but when Darlene and I were just awakening to sex (well, I was just awakening; I think Darlene had been up several hours before me), they were very important because those darkened pastures furrowed with alleyways which were in turn spiked every few yards with speaker stands were just about the only place a couple of kids could go with even a modicum of expectation of the privacy necessary to grow up.

Here’s how drive-ins worked: A huge movie screen fitted in a sturdy wooden or tin frame stood with its back to a road or highway but removed from the sound of traffic by several hundred yards. You turned off the road onto a long driveway of sorts that led to a ticket booth. You paid, not much, and drove through the symbolic gate (it couldn’t have physically stopped you from cruising right through it), past the screen and into the field where row after row of metal poles with square speakers attached, one to each side of a pole, were arranged in a very slightly curved semi-circle in front of the screen. From front to back of the field, from just in front of the screen to the fence at the rear were maybe thirty rows of these speakers. You would turn, usually left, into one of those rows and find a spot that suited you, as much toward the middle as you could, and then turn, again left, into place beside the pole with the speakers attached, the speaker for you being right there by the driver’s window when you stopped the car on the slight incline that elevated the nose of the car ever so slightly to match the angle of your vision to the height of the screen. You rolled down your window on the driver’s side and hooked the square speaker over the top of the three or so inches of glass you left above the car door frame by the wire or plastic hook on its back. A knob on the front of the speaker controlled the volume. You were set to watch the movie.

That is, if you went by yourself. But if you had a date, you drove directly to the back of the lot, found a slot on one end of the row or the other, turned up the volume of the speaker but left it on the stand, and waited not for the movie to start, but for night to fall. I always thought it was funny that you left the speaker on the stand (how did we learn these things?). I realize why it was that way—the deal was that when you started to “make out” with your date, you rolled the window up for privacy. Now, windows being what they are, rolling one up doesn’t give you much privacy, unless you assume that whatever sounds you make over the course of the next two hours or so will interfere with the dialogue from the movie as it is being enjoyed by the older, married couple with two kids in the back seat whom, you hope anyway, have not pulled up into the slot next to yours.

In any case, two young folks determined to find the intersection of desire and automobile design were all set soon enough. The car was important. This all took place before bucket seats were standard in American automobiles; most cars had bench type front and back seats, which were, as you are now guessing, very inviting. Most of what went on in the front seat was pleasant if a bit awkward, given the presence of the steering wheel, the gear shift, and the transmission hump that ran the length of the car floor from engine to rear axle. When I applied to join the Air Force years later, one form to be filled out asked if I had ever been denied employment because of an inability to assume certain positions; I immediately thought of the front seat of my 1948 Plymouth, my first car, and many a summer night at the Joy Drive-in. Not employment but certainly fulfillment had been denied.

But that was not to be the case the night I lost my virginity, if not my innocence. (These are different things, as I am sure you understand. Read Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, to see how that argument goes.) Luckily for me, my father had, a couple of years earlier, suffered one of his rare lapses in taste and bought a Rambler station wagon.

As you can see, this is not a classically handsome car, but as we were planning a move to California, ill-fated in some ways but exciting for me, and we were going to do it in one trip hauling everything we owned, something boxy and solid seemed called for. The Rambler got us there and back and a couple of years later I discovered the Rambler’s contingent appeal: the back seats laid down flat into the cargo area and created the drive-in equivalent of a double bed. Whereas with a standard sedan a couple could crawl over the seatbacks from the front onto the narrow but unobstructed back seat (for reasons of delicacy, we never wanted to be seen opening the doors of the front seat, emerging, and reentering the car in the back; that was like signaling to the world our intentions), with the Rambler, you just slid into the expanse of the cargo bay which the young man of the duo had already prepared with such amenities as he could muster with arousing his mother’s suspicion.

It was at the Sunset Drive-in, in the beloved Rambler, that Darlene let me know that we were about to push past the observed limits of going steady. I’ll skip the details but will say that it was a warm night, Darlene knew what she was doing, and because we had the windows rolled up as I have explained already one would do, it had got a bit steamy in the car. Now when we had parked next to our speaker stand, we were the only car on that row and it was already dark. I have no idea what the movie was or how long we had been there, but my memory is that it wasn’t long, Darlene being propelled by a sort of urgency that most men pray to encounter at least once in their careers, before the game was afoot. Actually, given what happened, it is probably more accurate to say the game was a rear.

Warm late spring Saturday night, sex, clothes get in the way for any number of reasons. There was just enough light from the distant movie screen through the steamed up windows of the car for me to make out the contours of Darlene’s bare rear end as she lay there beside me, leaning on her elbows (ironic, that, no?) and gazing into my eyes as if to ask, “So, what do you think of that?” I reached across her back to roll down the window as it was more than a little close in there at the moment and as the window came down I found myself looking into the face of a middle-aged woman who had apparently just arrived because she was reaching out of her open car window for the speaker, her shoulders and head halfway out of her own car and her hand about to grab it. At first she just looked at me but then, attracted I am sure by the effect of white light on bare skin, looked directly into the frame of Darlene’s considerable charms positioned perfectly in the rectangle of our own car window. This was not the movie for which the lady had paid. I have to admire her discipline though. She simply, and slowly, drew back her hand, her arm, her shoulders, and rolled up her window. I was transfixed. She started her car and backed out, then drove away.

Darlene seemed unmoved by the experience but I was certain that Missus Lady was headed straight for the outdoor concession stand in the middle of the lot, where we would be reported to some sort of agency of control. After a bit of pleading I got Darlene back into her jeans and we sped off into the night, Darlene’s mission accomplished but without much time to reflect or savor. But then again, as I was to discover, most teen-aged sex, of whatever degree, left one with little time or even reason to savor or reflect.