The Drive-In by Joe R. Lansdale

Author:Joe R. Lansdale
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Comics & Graphic Novels, Horror
ISBN: 9780553274813
Publisher: Bantam Spectra Books
Published: 1988-07-01T12:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

THE POPCORN KING

(With Scabcorn and Other Bad Stuffs)

1

The Popcorn King was happy.

He was a smiley kind of guy—with both mouths— and he could talk that trash. I mean,

say you're in this little universe of the drive-in, and maybe we should say the smaller

universe of your car or truck, and all you've got is movies. You got no real food, and you

got soft drinks for liquid, you're hypoglycemic to the max and your hope don't work no

more. All you got is this voice, sleek as a starlet's thighs, soft as duck fluff, as

intoxicating as rum and honey. A voice that oozes out of the speaker and flows in your

ears, jells around your brain like candied fruit.

The voice of the Popcorn King, telling you how it is, offering you truth, telling you he

loves you and will feed you and take care of you, and all you've got to do is love him

back, and all you've got to do is understand that what you see on the screens are the

visions of gods, the way it is, ole buddy, and the manner in which you should live, for so

speaks the messiah, the Popcorn King.

Yeah, the Popcorn King was happy.

And he was crazy.

And he helped make everyone else more crazy than they had become.

Back up.

Speculate.

This is how I think it came about; the birth of the Popcorn King.

So Willard and Randy go up on the roof during the storm, wandering up there because

they are nuts on junk food and high on a kind of love for one another that isn't quite

homosexual, nor exactly the passion of friendship. They're parasites feeding off one

another, trying to make something whole out of two halves.

They wander up there on the roof after they have cleared out the concession with the

knife, after they have killed. And maybe somewhere deep down, they realize this is

something they don't like, this killing. Or maybe, like me, they're so high on sugar it all

seems hokeydokey. Or maybe they just didn't give a fuck all along.

Well, you add all that together, toss in their insecurities, and what you have here are a

couple of buddies a couple bricks shy a full load. Or to put it in Yankee terms, "They are

on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

There's this storm, and it crackles and hisses and fizzles and pops, brightens the sky.

Sheet-metal thunder rolls. And these guys up there on the roof are working off little more

than the impulses of the primitive brain; that part that takes care of raw survival.

And so they yell at the storm (they don't like the noise, see), call it names. And perhaps by

design, because the B-string gods up there are looking for a twist in the plot, or maybe

they just don't like being talked to like that . . . and maybe there are no B-string gods and

my dreams were just dreams and Bob and I only thought we saw tentacles poking out of

the blackness and it's nothing more than an accident that this bolt pops out and zaps the

living shit out of our boys, makes them one creature full of power.

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