It was the summer of Uncle Buck, of Parenthood, The Abyss, and Honey I Shrunk the Kids; the summer when Harry met Sally, Batman arrived, James Bond once again kept his promise to return and the Ghostbusters simply did. With my then-fiancée at my side and while settled into the threadbare front seat of a 1972 Buick Riviera (with more miles on it than I can recall), we would watch them all, and many more.
1989 didn’t just mark the end of a decade. It was also the greatest movie summer of my life. There was Lethal Weapon 2, Field of Dreams, and Star Trek V. But it should be remembered that these were different times in America, the last gasp of the outdoor drive-in movie theatre, that place where films that might not have seemed so great or even good while viewed in a proper cinema, achieved their own special kind of grandeur when watched under the stars through a windshield, and heard through a steel speaker that hung on your car door window.

So without any embarrassment I will also say that this was the summer of Lock Up, of Turner and Hooch, The Package, Casualties of War, and what might have been the greatest drive-in movie ever made.
We would be married that September and like most couples starting out and paying for their own wedding and honeymoon, money was tight and frivolous expenditures impossible. Our entertainment would have to come cheap and in the early mornings we would walk, because walking cost nothing but also for the exercise and to enjoy that time together before real-life intruded on our new romance in the form of jobs. As we made our way around the neighborhood, the excited discussion was of the future, our future. Because there is nothing more thrilling than realizing that your whole life lies ahead of you, except in the knowing that you have found someone to share it with.
There are no rose-colored glasses thick enough to convince me that those days were perfect. Fifty hours of my week were spent making a living as a retail bill collector, and my wife was the victim of one of those bosses who took advanced college courses in making the lives of his employees miserable. We didn’t just hate our jobs, we dreaded them, and when Father Time finally found the charity to deliver up a Friday night, we were bursting with the need to get out into it, to celebrate our two day furlough, to do anything to mark the moment as the special one it was. But we were also broke.
The price of admission wasn’t five dollars per person, it was five dollars per carload, and that admission wasn’t for one movie, it was for two and sometimes three. We would always arrive early so there would be no competition for a parking slot that no small amount of experimenting had proven to be the very best: a spot just off center but built a little higher than the others where the front wheels sat. As hours of movie-watching passed, this small advantage proved easier on the neck.

To avoid the cost of concessions there was the Styrofoam cooler, always packed with a beer or two for him, a wine cooler or two for her, and hot dogs wrapped in tinfoil that we would warm up between shows on the Riv’s mighty engine block.
In the dusk, children would take advantage of the broken-down playground that sat directly in front of the giant screen, and the sounds of their pleasure would then blend with the even sweeter sounds of tires crunching gravel, car doors slamming, and far-off adult voices and laughter all set to the tinny music that played through those deceptively heavy speakers before the show began. The sounds were timeless, and if you closed your eyes and took a moment, you could transport yourself back to when your parents were young. For all the many wonders available for only five-dollars a carload just off of Highway 145, the Starlight Drive-In was also a perfectly-kept time capsule of the year of its construction.
Before it got dark enough to justify doing so, the projectionist would always stubbornly start the first feature anyway, usually a second-run film. Still, we would all honk our horns and flash our headlights to mark the occasion. And what an occasion Hollywood delivered.
I think of 1989 as one of the years before. Before movies were bloated, preachy and confusing. Before Mel Gibson and Danny Glover would break our hearts, James Cameron would turn on his own country and the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise was staffed with squatters. It was a time when the warm and wonderful John Candy still walked the earth and Rick Moranis was our favorite cool-nerd, when James Bond was politically incorrect, Stallone made action movies, and the special connection we felt with Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan and Bill Murray remained as they had yet to go off in pursuit of importance. John Hughes was with us too, still a few years away from returning to his beloved Midwest and taking so much of our childhood with him.
But this was also before anyone could ever imagine anything strong enough to kill Patrick Swayze.

There are many uniquely special movie moments in my life, but few as perfect as a summer night over two decades ago as I sat in an old car hypnotized by the sublime drive-in greatness of Road House as it badassed in exquisite B-movie glory before my eyes. It remains a memory as vivid as any and to this day whenever I hear the sound of tires cutting through gravel I’m transported back to that moment, and the transportation is so complete that I can smell her perfume, taste the cheap beer, and feel once again, if only for a moment, what it’s like to be all of twenty-three years old and living deep in the heart of a Friday night with both a weekend and the rest of a life still unspent.
In the years that followed, as we got on with the business of living, trips to the drive-in became less and less frequent and would finally stop altogether after we moved out of state in 1993. The following year the Starlight would close forever.
Should I be lucky enough to become an old man and even luckier to know someone willing to feign interest in an old man’s stories, I promise to embellish just a little the very few adventures of my life and not to dwell on the sentimental. But at my next stop, that place where life is as it should be, it will forever be Friday evenings during the summer of ’89, when hot dogs taste best fresh off an engine block, Hollywood still keeps its promises, and both my wife and I and our romance are still young.
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