THE HOLY LAND OF DRIVE-INS

http://www.driveinmovie.com/OK.htm

The music and the sounds of my upbringing will be with me as they always have been.

They have remained inside me since I first saw the wild buffalo roaming on the plains of Oklahoma. I once could see what the Indians could see: the flat belly of fields spewing oil, wet from blood, not naked but derelict, huddled in the debris that the white man salvaged for them.

In Oklahoma, when my heart first heard music-or rather, first listened to what music would become-I saw what replaced the Indian dreams.

In the distance, the pull of the giant screens emerging from the flat earth like the stones of Easter Island-another mystery I have no time for-lured me daily. I could not drive past them with my preacher father and teacher mother without hoping that, the next night, under the dark sky covered with yellow stars, I could catch a glimpse of giant red lips or the bare leg of a monstrous goddess.

The drive-ins calmed the plains while the buffalo roamed behind the screens staring in to the bright lights of the automobile. My family's pink Mercury station wagon rolled over the bumps, blinding these ancient creatures, parking weekly at night in front of the images reaching toward God.

What god, the Indians would ask?

Before I heard music, the gods were Walt Disney, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jerry Lewis. The images of their films projected out into the universe of Oklahoma, over the beat-up convertibles and flat-tops and crewcut haircuts, through the dark peace that only the Indian knew-and that I had heard once. What an unearthly peacefulness it was then: challenged only by the drive-ins and oil and fading cowboys.

I have not known such peace since then.