All is True: The Naked Girl in the Treehouse
Battle of the Drive-In
Chapter 9
The next pages of our madness in crossing the United States as two Brits traveling as the Rolling Stones would require a quartet of decisions, a couple of great discoveries and, as either of us could have prophesied for a dime, disaster.
The decisions were radical: Yes to Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
No to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Yes to Bryce Canyon in Utah.
No to Las Vegas in Nevada.
“See here, Thom One,” declared my companion David Carpenter with all the weight of the one who was most behind the wheel of our Plymouth Savoy. “We don’t have the kind of money to lose it all in Vegas.”
“And the Grand Canyon’s just a hole in the ground that’s14 miles long,” I said, anxious to be done with all of this and reunited with my girl Mary back in England, the real world of the real Stones.
Pike’s Peak turned out to be a physical high point, of course. Fourteen thousand-feet-high in fact, one of 50 or so peaks in Colorado of that height, this one named after a fellow called Zebulon Pike, Jr. The Arapaho name, we were told, was heey-otoyoo.
And Bryce Canyon, too, was beyond words, billions of little pink towers called hoodoos poking up out of the Paunsaugunt Plateau like nothing we’d ever seen or heard of. All we could tell our pals back home was, “Go there.”
Now, we were free at last to head north to Wyoming so we could tell our pals that we’d seen with our own bare eyes the magical townships of Cheyenne and Laramie. Magical mainly because “Laramie” was an American TV program shown on BBC in Britain that featured two ranch partners who ran a stagecoach operation. Not necessarily a favorite of Mary’s but everyone else would be speechless to learn that we’d actually been to such mythical cities.
First, the disaster.
It occurred in the outer reaches of Denver where we decided to attend, for the first time in our lives, the phenomenon known as a drive-in movie. Nothing else like it in the whole wide world, it was a concept that cruelly tempted us for its unlikeliness, its wild promise. Much like a striptease, whatever that might be.
It was indeed a dose of oxygen. The newly released film showing in this western suburb was the black-and-white “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Love the Bomb,” by Stanley Kubrick whose dark humor would, we quickly realized, remain a spectacle of Technicolor fireworks for the rest of our lives.
Both David and I, sitting side by side on the wide front seat of the Plymouth, were so gob smacked that neither of us paid much attention as I eventually reversed out of there and just took off for the exit. It was a maneuver that cracked the passenger window in two while the speaker formerly attached to the top of that window now flopped off its post.
The car’s window was a goner. So was the theater’s speaker. Oh, the horror!
We shamefully hightailed it out of there.
About a mile away in the darkness, I told David to pull over so I could make things worse. With the jack from the trunk I struck the damaged window in an effort to remove the glass altogether. What happened was that two splintery holes appeared in the window looking like nothing less than two fresh bullet holes.
And so it was that on the road to Cheyenne and Laramie we were pulled over by a Wyoming motorcycle cop who aimed his gun at us and yelled a question about what the hell kind of fight we’d been in.
No answer from us.
Hey, the battle of the drive-in…?
“You boys are coming with me,” we heard for the umpteenth time.
Could the Rolling Stones trick save us once more?
Next week: No.
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