Attack Of The Fifty Foot Vagina And The Very Very Very, (I Swear!) Very Last Picture Show…

My friend G drove a 1966 Fleetside Chevy pick-up with bench seating, mag wheels, a straight six with three-on-the-tree shifting. It sported a metallic gold-flake paint job, a wood and chrome steering wheel, and an eight-track player that blasted Van Halen’s “Running With The Devil” wherever he went. When you are sixteen, and you just got your license, and all you own is a 250 enduro Honda motorcycle, you think that is pretty cool.

Oh, the places you will go!


Having bench seats (with a new seat cover!) and a shift lever on the column meant that four people could squeeze together on the front seat and go places and do things.

Talk about a brave new world!

Anything and everything was now within our reach. Pool together gas money. Crank her over. Head on out to an adventure and a hoot and a holler…

I helped G install a CB radio with a bullhorn function, meaning, we could yell at people, whoot at girls, and generally make sixteen year old nuisances out of ourselves. In traffic snarls coming out of rock concerts, we could pretend to be cops trying to clear a fire lane and then skedaddle right on through it.

We could point out to people tailgating us just how annoyed we were.

All that stuff.

At sixteen, having wheels and friends and gas money meant we all could get on out there and experience the life we’d been missing having been saddled with youth and bicycles up to this point in time. As adventurous types in general, we utilized this new paradigm and routed ourselves into some pretty unusual moments, to be sure.

My friend Rolf approached G and I one day and told us he had a friend of a friend who was working the booth at the old drive-in down near Petaluma. Now in 1979, drive-ins were on their way out in my neck of the woods. But before they actually finally died- being razed and converted into housing tracks- they usually did ignominious stints as pornographic projectionists, and the weekend late night panorama was often filled with fifty foot penises and mountainous boobs and caverns so big you could hide a standing army in them.

But you had to be eighteen or a cow standing in a field to see them.

So yeah, we were excited to hear this news. What it meant was that four of us could get in under-aged, without fake IDs, and plans were made and the 1966 Chevy Fleetside long-bed truck gassed up, and Rolf, G, myself, and another friend named JJ (whose father had just fired him from his burger flipping job because he told a complaining woman that she was far too fat to be eating his dad’s burgers anyway), piled in four abreast and headed down the freeway to Petaluma, shoulder to shoulder, squeezed in and excited to be on a road trip, after all.



We waited until just before the movie started to pull through the line. R leaned over JJ and G (driving) and gave his “I know so and so” spiel. I sat at the passenger window and kept a “look out”, though I knew not what for. I mean, WHO goes to a porno drive-in and then turns in some under-aged boys? Anybody?

We were told to “behave” by a twenty-something girl with tats and a wonky halter top and hair like Janice Joplin, and we all eagerly nodded and agreed to “behave” ourselves, and we giddily pulled into the old, fenced-in establishment full of humping parking spaces, drove around a lap or two, and parked..

(Looking back, I suppose we could have gotten out of our truck and snuck around to some of the other vehicles with some flashlights, jumping up and pointing the spotlight where it was most unwelcome, yelling “What are you doing in there?!” but we were in it for the porno. Truly. I mean, come on… Sixteen year old boys and a chance to see a thirty foot orifice? My God! Talk about getting an education. And we were really into education, back in those days, being so young and naïve and all.

So we pulled the front wheels up onto a hump and inserted our speaker. Four young healthy boys sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench seat of a pick-up truck in the summertime. About us were maybe thirty other vehicles, all evenly spread out. It was a warm night and yet blankets were thrown over the occupants in many of the cars. We didn't have blankets.

The movie started. It was one of those “Deep Throat” era movies. It started with a woman, lying in bed with a teddy bear, and she was, uh… having an itch that required lots and lots of rubbing and scratching.

The camera zoomed-in… THERE IT WAS. All thirty five feet of it. Looking much more rubber-like at this magnification… Like a Godzilla spawn... Something.

And where there were once four boys sitting side by side in a pick-up truck bench seat, unsure of what to do with their hands, now there were eight of us and the truck got extremely crowded in a hurry. No one dared “adjust” themselves for fear of being caught, yet every one of us was suffering from knotted whitey tidy syndrome. We were all too cool to fix our own discomfort, as that amounted to touching your erection in a truck full of boys who could see everything you did. "The Boyhood Book Of Coolness" Stated--You don’t fondle an erection in front of other boys, especially in these cramped conditions. I mean, you don’t fondle in a fox hole, right?

Imagine it.

Four young guys.

Four raging, bent and folded erections.

Sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder, trying to be cool while a woman scratched and scratched at herself in HUGE close-up detail.

I mean, none of us had imagined it would be like this! This… this wasn’t HOT. This was torture! This was embarrassing! This wasn’t even funny!

Nobody wanted to be the uncool one and suggest we resolve the problem or simply take the matter into their own hands. Nobody wanted to say what we were all thinking, and that was “Oh jeez… I have an erection and this movie IS NOT HELPING!” None of us had the life experiences yet to admit defeat, to admit we couldn’t handle the situation, to admit that the torture was just plain too tortuous.

About fifteen minutes into the movie, a light bulb went off.

No, I mean, really (and thankfully!). The bulb went out in the old projector and it became very dark suddenly.

We all cussed and swore and then simultaneously agreed to start the fleet side truck and leave the repair and the rest of the film behind.

We were far too cool to tolerate this nuisance. I mean, we paid good money for this!

And we were all a bit on the uh, hungry side, after all...