(no subject)
At The Drive-in
by Jeffrey Eugenides
About a half mile from the drive-in, Pruett pulled the car over to the side of the road.
I was in the back seat, looking unhappy. Pruett and Conley were in the front seats, looking extremely pleased.
“You fuckers,” I said.
Heh-heh-heh, they went.
We had just shot for it and I had lost. Pruett got out and went around and opened the trunk. In the setting sun, he resembled his Grand Prix, his hair feathered back aerodynamically, his golden suntan matching the exterior paint job. His Frye boots might have been made of the same faded leather as the bucket seats.
I got out and went around to the back, too. “I told you we should have taken my dad’s car,” I said. “Your trunk’s too small.”
I was wearing flip-flops, madras shorts, and an alligator shirt. The six-pack in the back seat had come from the cooler on my father’s sailboat. The joint that Conley was rolling belonged to him. Once a year, maybe once every two years, Conley would buy an ounce of dope and smoke it up in a day and a half. The rest of the time he smoked other people’s pot.
I went up to Conley’s window. Crouching down beside the car, I took a hit. Then I went and crawled into the trunk. The last thing I saw was Pruett’s face, grinning at me.
The half mile to the drive-in seemed to take a long time. We stopped and started in what I assumed was the line of cars waiting to get in. Exhaust was seeping into the dark space where I lay curled.
It hadn’t been that smart a move to get stoned prior to my captivity. Nor was being trapped in a trunk worth getting into a drive-in for free.
As soon as the engine quit, I began to bang on the lid with my fist.
From somewhere near the trunk lock, which was partly rusted out, I heard Pruett’s voice. “Be cool,” he said. “There’s a guy watching us.”
Ten minutes passed. Twenty.
I began to kick my feet against the trunk lid.
Then Conley was speaking through the rust hole. “Eugenides,” he said, “you might want to know why they gave this movie an R rating. For one thing, there’s a lot of nudity. It’s about these two girls, at college, in a coed dorm, and they’ve been nude just about from the credits on. Pruett and I are almost sick of seeing tits at this point.”
I made no reply. My sense of cunning was increasing. I knew that if I said nothing Pruett and Conley would (a) tire of the prank, (b) begin to worry about my eventual level of retaliation and decide it wasn’t worth further provoking me, or (c) begin to worry, under the spell of their own increasingly paranoiac highs, that I had suffocated. For all these reasons, I kept mum.
Being locked in a trunk, at a drive-in, brought back other drive-in memories. Once, the three of us, Conley, Pruett, and I, had crawled through a hundred yards of underbrush in northern Michigan in order to get within view of a midnight showing of “Deep Throat.” That was something to see: your first X-rated movie, on a screen as big as a football field, without sound. About ten minutes into the film, however, a flashlight began raking the brush where we lay. Footsteps approached. “O.K., show’s over,” a man’s voice said. “Get out of here before I call the police.” We three lifted our heads. All around us, other heads started popping up. Fifteen or twenty other teen-agers had been lying in the grass with us.
I had memories of being with my family at drive-ins, too, in decorous situations with packed sandwiches and potato salad. And memories of being with my girlfriend in the back seat, of her going, “This is so cliché. This isn’t even erotic it’s so cliché!”
Somewhere in the middle of these pleasant recollections, Pruett opened the trunk and let me out.
“You guys die,” I said.
Pruett and Conley were shaking with laughter. In their place, I would have been shaking with laughter, too. I understood this and, on some level, forgave them, while plotting my revenge. In a week or two, I would forge an alliance with one of them to fuck the other guy up.
Now, however, I just wanted to open a beer and sit back and watch the movie.
For a moment, I was amply rewarded. On the huge screen was what appeared to be an immense, life-altering view of a woman’s naked cleavage. It was snow-white, gently undulating. My concentration on this image was so intense that it took me a few moments to realize that I was watching a herd of sheep. A herd of sheep moving over a green hill in what was probably Scotland.
“What’s this?” I complained.
“They’re playing a different movie than I thought,” Pruett said.
He lit another joint and passed it around. We took hits of the harsh dope, cooling our burning throats with sips of beer.
We shot for it and Conley lost and had to go get food. He came back with chili dogs, French fries, ice-cream bars.
And then for a long time we were silent, watching the sheep move over the hills, over the green hills, somewhere in Scotland. ♦
All i want to do is read more by this guy, and ... he is failing.