A Warm Summer
Night in the Good Old Days
by Don Drewniak
On a warm,
summer Saturday night in 1960, I used my ’57
Olds-powered ’51 Mercury to go with three
friends to the Somerset Drive-in Theater.
Somerset is a small town located across the
Taunton River from the once-upon-a-time cotton
manufacturing capital of our galaxy, Fall River,
Massachusetts. For the purposes of this narrative,
I’ll call the friends Lenny, Jack and Mitch.
Admission was
by the head. As a result, the three of them
decided beforehand to flip coins to see which two
would go into the trunk. Being the driver, I was
exempt from the trunk lottery.
Lenny and Jack
“won.” About a quarter mile from the
theater, I stopped the car, opened the trunk and
watched the two of them imitate sardines in a can
before slamming the trunk lid shut. That evoked
colorful protests from the prisoners. Mitch and I
laughed as we headed back to the front seat.
Just as I
rolled to a stop at the admission booth, Lenny
yelled, “Hey, are we there yet?”
The ticket seller was a guy not much older than
the four of us. (Three of us were seventeen, one
was sixteen.) He laughed, took a dollar from each
of us, waved us on and said, “You ought to
leave him in there.”
Once underway,
Mitch said, “We fooled him.”
“How?”
I asked.
“We got
two in there, not one.”
I couldn’t
argue with that. However, the comment about
leaving Lenny in the trunk gave me an idea. Once
we found what to my way of thinking was a premium
parking spot, Mitch and I headed to the trunk. I
whispered to him to play along with me.
“Okay,
guys, time to let you out.”
“Dammit,
get us the hell out of here. We’re
suffocating;” screamed Lenny.
“Here we
go,” I replied. I then proceeded to tap the
key and scrape it a few times against the lock.
“Holy shit,” I cried out, “the key
broke off in the lock.”
Picking up on
my cue, Mitch yelled, “You idiot! How the
hell are we going to get them out?”
A volley of
swears flew out from inside the trunk along with
the sound of the banging of fists against the
inside of the trunk lid. After a minute or so
passed, I said in a loud voice, “Hey, look,
Mitch, the key isn’t broken.” With that,
I popped open the trunk.
“You are
a total shithead,” said Jack as he staggered
out of his self-made prison.
“You owe
us fifty cents each,” I replied.
UBI: Fifty
cents in 1960 is the equivalant of slightly more
than $5.00 today.
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