A Good Day's Work (30 page)

SHOWTIME

P
AUL
Peterson—the owner, operator and chief projectionist at the Mustang Drive-in on County Road 1 just outside of Picton, Ontario—has been emceeing the nightly show here for eighteen years. When he figures enough cars have arrived, he mutters, “Is it dark enough? Well, let's start it then.” He flicks the switch on the radio transmitter. The vintage rock stops. He begins to talk. The words seep from a hundred car radios,
rising above the seam of land and sky before evaporating into the gloaming. Some people say Paul's sneaky way of starting the show is their favourite part of the whole evening. He begs to disagree. All the same, when he opens his mouth to ask the price of a head of lettuce in a grocery store checkout line, complete strangers turn, stare and ask if he is the “drive-in movie guy.”

The heavens have been opening and closing all day in southwestern Ontario. But the show at the Mustang goes on rain or shine; people know that when they buy their tickets. Tonight—seventeen degrees with not a single cloud or mosquito in the sky—they're offering the real goods:
Date Night
and
The A-Team
on the bigger front screen,
Shrek 2
and
Iron Man 2
on the smaller, more family-oriented back screen. Usually five hundred or so customers turn up for first-run movies on a Saturday night during the summer. With lousy weather looming, tonight's gate is just 217. The Mustang's grounds roil with life anyway: toddlers in pyjamas wriggle on the slides and swings; families open up the backs of their
vans for a panoramic view of the big screen; couples slap on bug spray and snap open lawn chairs. Cars full of teens—giddy with the prospect of some serious dry-humping—traverse the hard-packed dirt and grass toward the rows of speakers. Beefy women in capris and middle-aged men with swollen prostates make a last dash for the washroom. Children, eyes startled with wonder, burst into the canteen and halt dead in their tracks.

Paul greets them all from behind John Lennon glasses that glow lunar white from the movie screen half a football field away. “My parents always told me that Jerry Garcia didn't die,” a woman who goes by the handle “Lover Grrl” wrote in the Mustang's online guest book, “he just owns the drive-in.” Paul has a face built for Woodstock: his deep-socketed, gentle eyes and wide wedge of nose framed by salt-and-pepper beard, and shoulder-length hair that looks like it was carved from
steel wool. The voice is contemplative, a little world-weary; the wisest guy at the best used-vinyl shop in town. Things are “cool,” “great” or “terrific.” Paul is prone to verbal shrugs: everybody else is “smart,” “good” and “reliable.” At best, he's just “lucky.”

A tad under six feet, with some extra weight around the middle, he ambles around in a black turtleneck, cargo shorts and sandals. I say “ambles” because he's a big guy. But also because he doesn't seem to fret or worry enough to get his pulse rate over eighty. Paul is a businessman. When he looks out the window tonight, he must see dollar bills sprouting wings and taking flight as though part of the retro cartoon he is showing on the big screen. By rights he should be stomping his feet. He should be shaking a fist to the heavens and, eyes bugging out of his head, cursing like Yosemite Sam. Instead, he leans into the transmitter and informs the clientele that here at the Mustang Drive-in just buying a ticket doesn't ensure you see a movie.

The din rises. Paul waits about a minute, then asks his pigtailed granddaughter, Anna, if it's loud enough. When
a nine-year-old thumb goes up, Paul flicks the transmitter switch. The big projector begins to hum. The blandly handsome faces of Steve Carrell and Tina Fey fill the screen. No one would suggest
Date Night
is destined for “The Criterion Collection.” And Paul has got a million things he should be doing. But the film only arrived a day ago and moving pictures just seem to draw his eye. They always have. So, he stands transfixed, peering through the little projector window. Watching the giant image of a man who appears to be trying to expunge his spleen through his nose, as the moon smoulders overhead.

THE Mustang Drive-in opened in April of 1956. A month later Paul, the son of a homemaker and a restless dairyman-turned-army-engineer, came into the world. So there's a certain karmic inevitability that, thirty-two years later, he and his wife, Nancy, would be tooling around aimlessly one day just outside of Picton and notice a For Sale sign in front of the Mustang. It would have taken special people to sense the potential back then. Paul wouldn't have known the backstory: how in 1932 Richard M. Hollingshead Jr.–the sales manager for the New Jersey—based Whiz Auto Products—thought it would be a good idea to nail a white sheet to two trees, place a radio behind the makeshift screen and then mount a Kodak movie projector on the hood of his car. How out of that deluded-sounding scheme sprang the “open-air theatre” or “ozone,” which, in time, came to embody every nostalgic impulse ever felt by a North American baby boomer. How the Mustang
began as part of a chain created during those heady times. And how, by 1988, the drive-in was fading to black owing to the ascent of the VCR and cable TV and the urban sprawl swallowing up the land where outdoor screens once flickered.

It helped that Paul didn't grow up thinking about profit margins and business plans. A dreamy, imaginative boy, by grade six he was in a band playing Tommy James and the Shondells covers (“Crrimmsssooonn and Cloooover, ooover and ooover”). Going all love-peace-marijuana-kill the pigs was not encouraged in the Peterson household. Paul caught the counterculture bug anyway, becoming the guy with the stack of
Mad
magazines under his bed and the milk crate full of psychedelic vinyl in the corner. The cool dude trying to sell his buddies on Monty Python,
A Clockwork Orange
and
O, Lucky Man!
(he loved Alan Price's soundtrack) when everyone else was watching
Dirty Harry
and
Summer of '42
.

Naturally he was drawn to lost causes. When it came time to choose a profession, he decided to help kids in crisis. Paul worked at a youth treatment centre in Richmond, British Columbia, and with street gangs in Vancouver. Later he returned to Ontario to toil for the Kingston Children's Aid Society as a residential care worker for children in crisis. (At one point, he lost most of his hair and all of his eyebrows after opening the door to a resident's room as she ignited the discharge of an aerosol can with a lighter.) He worked with the victims of sexual abuse. Some of his clients were prone to self-mutilation.

During the heat wave of 1998, when Paul and Nancy drove up County Road 1 past fields of corn, beans and strawberries, they could have glanced at the rusty, overgrown
Mustang Drive-in, seen a forlorn symbol of a culture that had lost its way and continued driving. Instead, Paul pulled over, turned off the ignition and they got out. Paul took a couple of steps forward, gravel crunching under his feet. By then he was searching for a job that, end of day, would leave him with enough energy to put in a few hours working on his unpublished novels and screen and stage plays. Just looking at the Mustang jump-started fond memories of heading to the drive-in growing up in Kingston. And so he gazed up at the big screen and, in a voice rich with possibility, said the fateful words: “This could be cool.”

Nancy, who then ran her own restaurant in addition to her Children's Aid Society duties, was skeptical. But drive-ins have an ability to make any adults of a certain age take leave of their senses. Something about remembering the subversive pleasure of being up late in your jammies while the other kids are home in bed, the economy of carload nights, the freedom of being able to make jokes at the screen while your parents smoked in the front seat. Growing up in the early sixties, even a Maritime kid with a brush cut and bad teeth could sense that strange days were upon us. To me the world still seemed orderly and familiar amid those rows of chrome and steel, speakers strapped like umbilical cords to the car windows, as I watched the dancing wiener on the big screen.