Texana
Screen Gem
Bigger than life, drive-in movies defined America’s giddy age of hula hoops, poodle skirts, and blue suede shoes. Even in its later years, the Cactus accommodated family values and teenage lust.
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While parents frantically ran around snatching up children, the bull rampaged in circles, breaking off posts and festooning its horns with speakers. Then it went after the cars that were bounding across the washboard of ramps in a primitive version of motocross. About this time, the manager came running into the lot waving his jacket, which sure enough caught the bull’s attention. For a moment our dude looked like a goner, but his rapid retreat through the playground led the bull into a swing set that joined its collection of speakers and posts and slowed it down enough to be roped.
Thanks to that stockyard on one side and Jimmy Shawn’s daddy’s old machine shop on the other, the Cactus provided an early experiment in Smell-O-Vision. A west wind enhanced viewer appreciation of a movie about auto racing or oil fields, while an east wind added realism to a western. Neither wind did much for a Carmen Miranda musical.
If the drive-in was great for families, it was a teenager’s dream come true. At 50 cents a person, the admission price for any carload of high schoolers could be calculated using the formula $ = .5 d + .5 (p - t), where d represented the driver, p the number of passengers, and t the capacity of the trunk.
So, a school-age ticket taker quickly developed the instincts of a customs inspector—a corrupt customs inspector. If a line of incoming cars included one that barely cleared the ground, you gave its teenage driver a ticket stub and a “you owe me one” look, knowing that the suspect vehicle would soon disgorge fourteen clowns and a donkey. If nobody else was waiting to buy tickets, you could lean in the window like a Southern deputy sheriff, shine a flashlight around, and ask if the driver had anything to declare. For good measure, you might even walk around the car and give the trunk lid a good thump, remarking that he oughta have them springs and shocks looked at.
Drive-in movies didn’t lead teenagers into sex, as adults mistakenly imagined. Any kid who could get there was already there, so the drive-in was convenient if you weren’t there yet. A girl who might resent a trip straight to some notorious necking spot could accept an invitation to the Cactus at face value. Once there, her carefully tuned mental computer could start processing data: Was the movie something anybody would actually be expected to watch? Was her escort Mr. Right, Mr. Wrong, or Mr. Maybe? And did he park near the concession stand or on the last row? (The back rows meant his intentions were bad—which might be good if he was Mr. Right—but the very last row meant he was also Mr. Stupid, because anyone circling the lot could see in the back window.)
By comparison, the young man’s brain was a hand-cranked adding machine used mainly to tote up the distance between his parking space and any carload of friends whose presence might keep his date on her best behavior. Beyond that, he just had to feel his way in the dark, so to speak.
It was widely reported and widely believed that lots of illicit sexual activity went on in the back rows of the drive-in, but since my friends were notorious liars, the only time you could believe them was when they stopped talking. I figured this out early on and kept my mouth shut, hoping my silence would be correctly misinterpreted.
Meanwhile, I worked on my own lines under the manager’s unintentional mentorship. This took place at the ticket booth, to which I had been assigned after spilling a few coolers of orangeade. Following the first-show rush, I usually had little to do but study the extremely complex neon mural, trying to decide on the one spot where—in that great spaghetti-work of tubing—one rock would put the most lights out.
A welcome break from this purely intellectual exercise was eavesdropping on the manager’s flirtation with the ticket girl. Today’s female ticket person would probably file a sexual harassment suit, but at that time flirting was an accepted occupational hazard.
The idea of the manager ever getting it on with my ticket girl did not sit well at all. On the other hand, I never had the foggiest idea of what to say on dates and needed all the help I could get. What I learned was how a smart woman can politely say no to a suitor 150 different ways and afterward giggle at the poor fool’s efforts, which didn’t do much for my own self-confidence.
So I quit. Actually, I was sort of let go. You might even say I was fired. When reassigned to concessions in the newly constructed building behind the projector, I had amused myself with little jokes—like burying perfectly clean and harmless june bugs in the snow-cone ice so that I could scoop one up for special customers. I also kept a pet rhinoceros beetle under one of the cone-shaped cups, which consequently moved slowly and mysteriously around on the shelf next to the cash register. These pranks must have come to the attention of the manager, who was probably out of sorts over his failures with the ticket girl—or maybe annoyed that I had told everybody about them.
Following my retirement, I remained a regular nonpaying customer, still wondering what to say to girls, especially to one in particular, with whom I had fallen madly in love. She was far too beautiful and intelligent and talented to have any real interest in a jerk who didn’t play football or anything, so we’d sit there on the eighth or ninth row, holding hands, watching romantic double features about Frankenstein and Dracula while she smiled and gave me sketches she had drawn of my old Plymouth. A couple of times she mentioned that some friends of ours had started going steady, to which I said something like, “Oh.”
Betty, if you read this, please forgive my unyielding stupidity, and know that while I might have some everlasting regrets, there are several good women out there who would probably tell you it all worked out for the best.
After a few profitable years, the Cactus sailed gloriously into the age of television—and sank like a rock. By the mid-fifties it was showing reruns and “made for drive-in” movies. Eventually it resorted to running porno flicks and using its parking lot as a flea market. Nothing worked, and the last time I saw it, sometime in the seventies, it looked like the wreck of the Titanic.
Jimmy Shawn’s daddy helped build the Cactus, and in 1978 he helped tear it down—to make way for a Wal-Mart that moved away and other stores that failed. Today the only thing that’s left to mark the Cactus drive-in’s grave is a moribund shopping center.
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