”Drive-INfection“
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DRIVE-IN 1: Drive-INfection
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It was years later that I realized I'd been infected at an early age.
We were going to see a family cast away on a Pacific Island... like Robinson Crusoe's island… in full colour too, just like real life, only better I could only picture black and white Batman that showed on CBC at 430pm Thurday after school if I'd done my spelling. Little did I know what was in store for me in that fallow farmers field filled with Fords and Fairlanes the weekend my parents took us to a Drive-In instead of church.
Mysterious music fills the car from the tinny speaker.
Martian Scientist 1: What have we here? Such bright colours, what a remarkable species! I always imagined Planet Earth to be a tiny soap bubble, a dew drop!
Martian Scientists 2: An advanced species to be sure, and in such an unlikely little spot! Let us take a closer look!
Martian Scientist 3: Quite primitive by todays standards. Marvelous how they travel about in such highly organized fashion – such an ingenious form of locomotion. What we have here on Planet Earth, well, if not great, clearly on the cusp of greatness...?
Martian Scientist 1: Fascinating they have parasites trained to wash and feed them!
I become one with the giant screen I am not in the car yet alone in the car I merge and am one with the voice intoning from above on the screen. I am gone
what do we have here / what grabs me is looking down on us / our cars fill the screen / ah this blue planet looks in-ter-es-ti-ng
A voice of god but not: these cute oceans, the rich verdant land crusted areas / how utterly charm-ing / theres movement onscreen, the slithering of — but what have we here the voice intones / mock horror
I learned early on that ufos were taboo, the grainy black and white images irrefutable on the bookshelf nearest the door to my dads den when it wasn't only open an inch or two, I was infected at an early age
It turned out that we, that we are ghosts carried about, that we, we were the problem, the cars, the overlord intoned godlike, visiting from a distant home planet, it was the cars that polluted our perfect earth, our garden of eden despoiled.
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At the drive-in you could go high tech and tune into a radio station. It was the new thing to do. My parents opted for the radio speaker you perch dangled crackling on the half-opened driver side window. As the feature film irradiated the evening air, my mom who would be driving us home afterward kept inching the windowglass up, lest the mosquitoes keep getting in. Maybe it was one of the mosquitoes as I slept before final credits and our grey station wagon with the red hearse curtains and rocket red stripe down each side herded out headlights reflecting chaotically off puddles splashed muddy in the procession back to the asphalt the sound of popcorn and mud squelched I didn't even watch tv on the car ceiling on the drive home. I wasn't myself. I didn't know what abduction was all about, I only grew up playing road hockey until after the streetlights had come on.
I wasn't abducted that night they screened “What on Earth!” before the big summer hit The Swiss Family Robinson when I got bit by an alien mosquito: my young imagination was freed. No, i wasn't abducted, I went willingly with the scientists in the flying saucer, I wanted off earth and to learn about other intelligent species.
I’d gone back to Mars with the flying saucer scientists
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One Sunday my dad decided to take us to the drivein instead of church, he'd always wait idling the car, a drivein couldn't be worse. We promised to read ahead in the Bible stories we'd miss whats a movie, like tv only much bigger, way bigger out by the farmers fields where there weren't even any streetlights
the turned on tv we were supposed to leave the rabbits ears alone, the picture everything was black and white until that movie of people smiling, children and adults too, strange animals the family lived in a tree with bedrooms and coconut phone lines a kitchen that made breakfast in bed served piping hot with some hidden system of pulleys.
But that’s not how I got infected, it was much worse than all this.
Everything was black and white until my first movie. My big sister told me in the car that it was like a giant TV screen beside the farmer field. Before the lapping ocean blue and treehouse green appeared in the nighttime sky this is what infected me. It was only much later that I realized there was a movie before the main movie, a movie within the movie.
There was no way I might have prepared. Unwittingly, we worshipped the car, it was all about how cars would fly one day, or basically fly themselves.
The family up the street had a colour TV with a plastic push button box wired into the television set to change the channels, even a pool table where most families we knew had a dining room set-up. We had a clothes hanger for rabbits ears to make the snow go away.
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DRIVE-IN 2: The Shadow of Icarus
I take the Red Line across from Harvard Square alone to the wilds of not Belmont, where kids' parents would sometimes be away and we'd party, Arlington, Mount Auburn Cemetery. Owls watch cemeteries, their large eyes portend: portals to the underworld where G and A and A's sister are. White caskets floating.
Levitation and yogis were all the rage. I stole a pair of sunglasses from the Coop, ten dollars seemed like so much at the time. Could buy Fleetwood Mac or April Wine in the vinyl section up the hushed dusty tiled stairwell, the bustle of Harvard Yard falling away below through the walls. A tumult falls away, replaced by a hushed reverence. The hum of fluorescent lighting crossing tiled ceiling there were a couple steps up midway over to where the R - T records were, that album with a zipper on the cover. Lips. A banana. The Red Line took me in the other direction, theatres described as dens of iniquity.
I learn the emotional texture of vertigo, alone, looking down, my shadow spreads across the land, imperilled.
