Light Years Before We Die: A Night at the Drive-In (Daley)

It’s July 3rd, the eve of Independence Day 2020, and ET is playing at the Aut-O-Rama Twin Drive-In tonight in North Ridgeville, under the big, star-spangled sky. ET, that heart-sparking legend about an undocumented, homeless extra-terrestrial who gets befriended and sheltered by some American kids. I haven’t been to a drive-in—a place I only remember for getting sugar-stoned on concession stand freedom as a child or weed-stoned on ganga freedom as a teenager—since 1974. I don’t dabble much in sugar or weed anymore, but our friend Cindy, who’s invited us to the showing tonight, assures us drive-in viewing is the best thing since waterslides and sleepovers. Besides, it’s the safest place to catch a flick in these days of contagion.

Should we go? Covid-19 is boiling over across the South and simmering up again in Ohio. As we speak, President Trump is hiding from the virus in the shadow of a mountain stolen from red people while he lies to a cheering crowd of white people and uses the words evil and alien to describe the goals of Black Lives Matter activists. My bruised, disenchanted, unpatriotic heart could use a dose of extra-terrestrial sparking. Yes, we should go.

My husband John and I pack our zero-gravity lawn chairs into our trunk and follow Cindy and her partner Patrick across town. We park beside each other at the back of a crowded lot teeming with white kids in pajamas and white adults snuggled up with their cocktails in the beds of pickup trucks. We shuffle our chairs till they stop shifting in the railroad slag at our feet and are a Covid-kosher six feet apart, then sit back to chat while we wait for the sun to set and the show to begin.

Just to our right, semi-trucks keen along I-480, loaded down with who knows what—Hostess Cupcakes? cucumbers? face masks? riot gear? To our left, freight trains, probably carrying coal or oil or fracking wastewater, thunder through every twenty minutes. As fireworks whine and boom on the far side of I-480 and the concession stand loudspeaker crackles with country pop songs, it’s easy to pretend we’re all in a punk film about dystopian America. But then the real movie begins.

Between the trains, the highway, and the fireworks, it’s hard to hear what ET and his new Earthling friends are saying to each other, but that’s okay with me. It’s summer, it’s warm enough to wear almost nothing, and ET is presently healing his human buddy’s wound with the heartlight in his finger. I’m practically horizontal in my zero-gravity chair, head cradled in hands, gazing up at the sky, where I picture thousands—no, millions—of ETs with heartlights in their fingers, ever-ready and willing to heal our shit-for-brains humanity if we would only let them in.

I put on my face mask and head to the restrooms at the back of the concession stand, where a black guy is standing alone. He’s the only non-white Earthling I’ve seen here tonight, and there must be hundreds of Earthlings in this lot. I wonder if he feels alienated or fears for his life, like I would if I were in his shoes. Neither of us knows yet that tomorrow, on Independence Day, a black man trying to watch the lunar eclipse from the shores of an Indiana lake will be beaten by an unshirted group of white men and held against a tree while the leader commands one of his buddies to go get a noose. Neither of us will be surprised by this news, which goes forward and backwards through time. I want to bow to the grief in him, which is also in me. I want to tell him my heart is bruised by the hatred, by this drive-in’s lopsided whiteness, by our mutual lack of surprise. But what could my lily white sorrow possibly do for him? So I say nothing. I only look him in the eyes and nod, longing for a gesture as warm and uneclipsed by guilt as ET’s heart-lit hands.

As I settle back into my zero gravity chair, I think how the few stars I can spot in our city sky might be dead already, their final light sent out centuries ago and just now getting to us, just like ET’s story first pulsed from screens in 1982, and here we are, still bathing our hopes in its glow thirty-eight years later. Still all facing the same direction, drinking in the same story, secreting away the same wish that maybe someday, before we die, we’ll embody ET’s everlasting, ever-healing, ever-loving shine. Maybe someday, before we die—of Covid-19, or cancer, or racism, or a badly failed state, or living too long among humans—we’ll find our way home.

In her time, Katie Daley has scrubbed the toilets of poets and mowed the fairways of gangsters. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies and on stages across North America. She recently completed a memoir about her journey hitchhiking and migrant-working across the USA and aims to publish it soon.