St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) by Terence M. Green Page B

quite over, but it was ending. The numbers leveled, the enthusiasm waned. By the end of the eighties, they were closing with regularity. Suburban ones were engulfed by housing and shopping developments, their property too valuable. Many of the rural ones just withered and died. There are close to a thousand dead drive-ins across the U.S., weeds sprouting freely—graveyards, the speaker posts like headstones.
    The States has fewer than a thousand left. Canada has about seventy-five.
    The drive-in theater. Although you can find one in most countries on the globe, they're a particularly American hybrid. Passion pits for teens, cheap entertainment for families. Young couples with an infant could avoid the hassle of a baby-sitter—just plunk junior in the backseat with a bottle, let him sleep.
    Yet what was its life span? Seventy years? Eighty? Like a person's: birth, development, excitement, expansion, set- ding, then decline.
     
    When I was a kid in the 1950s, I always wanted my parents to take me to a drive-in movie. It never happened. They would just chuckle when I mentioned it. It wasn't something they could relate to. I guess there's no better way to build an obsession.
    The first one I ever managed to get to was with my older cousin Jo-Anne—Eleanor's daughter—and her boyfriend (later husband) Bob. They were teens and my brother Dennis and I were six and eleven. It was summer vacation, near Bancroft, Ontario, some 160 miles northeast of Toronto, where Jo-Anne and Bob lived. Just outside of town, you turned off at Bird's Creek, onto a dirt road.
    The Bancroft Drive-in. I loved it—a horror double bill. On a hot July night, Dennis and I sat in the dark, in the backseat of Bob's car, enthralled.
    Last summer, when Jeanne and I were visiting a friend who has a cottage in the area, I detoured down that road just to have a look. The road is paved now, and there's no sign of the drive-in theater. It's gone. Vanished. Not abandoned or grown over, just gone. Houses line the road. After more than forty years, I couldn't even determine where exacdy it had been. I even wondered if I'd imagined the whole thing.
    But I didn't. It's still there. I know it is. Like my '60 Chev, like everything else that ever existed, it's all there. Because it happened. Because I was there. Because it's inside me.
     
    I remember a summer evening in my teens, cruising around Toronto in my father's car with my buddy, Joe. We ended up on Kennedy Road, north of Eglinton, near the Scarboro Drive-In.
    Summer '61. I was seventeen. Mantle and Maris each had thirty-five home runs by mid-July, and Ford Frick, Commissioner of Baseball, ruled that for either of them to beat Ruth's record of sixty, they had to do it in 154 games, instead of the new, expanded 162-game schedule. Gus Grissom was pulled from his Mercury capsule The Liberty Bell in the Atlantic near Grand Bahama Island, just before it sank three miles to the ocean floor. The baseball Leafs were probably playing the Buffalo Bisons down at the old stadium near the foot of Bathurst. I think that was also the summer that Cupcakes Cassidy was at the Casino ("Tops in Variety and Burlesque") at Queen and Bay.
    If I'd stayed home on a Saturday night, I'd end up sitting with family—Mom, Dad, Nanny, maybe Dennis too—all compromising on acceptable fare on the RCA black-and-white: Gunsmoke at eight; LawrenceWelk at nine. My only hope was talking them into switching from good old Lawrence at nine-thirty to Have Gun Will Travel. Now that wasn't bad.
    Anyway, the Scarboro Drive-in while cruising. From the Terrace was playing. Adult entertainment. I don't remember the second feature.
    We didn't drive the car in. We parked it on a dirt road and went in on foot, across fields, through ditches, over a barbed-wire fence—all in the dark.
    I remember my feet were soaked, that Joe fell on his back, his leg hooked onto the barbed wire, that even as we were doing it, we knew it was insane.
    Why did we do it? Because we