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Deserts & Drive-ins
“Hey, you remember the Fort drive-in?”
My brother, Bryant, cracked open a beer after his boys had gone to bed and continued the grown-up version of “Storytime,” a bedtime tradition he had begun both for my benefit and for theirs.
“Sure, that place was awesome.” I immediately thought of the crisp salt tang smell of popcorn, the synthesized tinkle of arcade games. We had spent many a summer at the Fort, with its options of indoor or outdoor Hollywood fare and its dark, seductive, neon glow.
“Did you know that there was a porno screen back in the woods there that whole time? A PORNO drive-in!!”
Bryant laughed his genuine, full-bellied (no small thing, at nearly 300 pounds) infectious giggle that had remained the same since we were kids. Imagine a six-year-old’s giggle bubbling up from his gut, gaining resonance in his throat, spilling forth uncontrollably, and infecting the air and room around him with joy.
Now imagine that same six-year-old’s giggle coming from a 40-year-old country boy with a mullet and goatee.
That’s Bryant.
I laughed despite myself at the thought of a hidden porno drive-in just feet from where we spent the most innocent summers of our lives, buried behind two-hundred-year-old oaks in the Virginia forests of my childhood. All the assumed…