I grew up in Daytona Beach, a small city in central Florida. Like most kids I knew in those days, I didn’t have much money to spend on “frills”, as my mom called them, like comics, baseball cards, and of course, movies. My best friend at that time was a kid named Ronnie Berner. He was a year older than I was, chronologically, but several years older in maturity and life experience. I was never sure why he let me hang out with him, but I learned a lot from him while we were neighbors. One of the things I learned from him was how to sneak into a drive-in.

There were two drive-ins in our town. For you young folks (anybody less than fifty), a drive-in was a place where you could go watch movies from the “comfort” of your car. You bought your ticket and then found a place to park on a slight incline, facing a large screen. A speaker hung on a post next to where you parked, and you could either clip it onto your window or leave it on the post; then you were ready to watch the show. None of this was very high-tech. The picture quality was lacking, and the sound coming out of those antique speakers was sometimes unintelligible. However, this was the 1960s, so we didn’t know what we were missing. It was the best we could hope for at the time.

One day, we were reading the local paper (yes, GenZers, in those days we actually read printed newspapers) and saw that the Starlight, the drive-in closest to us, was showing a Robert Mitchum double feature. One movie was “Thunder Road”, which we had both seen, but wanted to see again. I don’t even remember what the other movie was, for reasons that will become clear. We had the same conversation probably half a dozen times that summer.

Ronnie would say, “Mike, you got any money?”

And I would say, “Nah, do you?”

“Nope. Guess we’ll have to sneak in.”

“Guess so,” I nodded.

And so we did. We rode our bikes to the Starlight and stashed them in a small wooded area by the exit lane. There was a rudimentary gate there to prevent anyone from driving in that way. It might have kept idiots in cars from getting in, but it didn’t deter teenagers on foot, like Ronnie and me.

After we made sure nobody was guarding the gate, which happened occasionally, we casually walked around the primitive barrier and up the exit lane into the drive-in. There was a playground in front of the large screen for the rugrats to use while waiting for the movie to begin, and between the slides and swings and the first row of cars were some benches. There were speakers behind the benches, which made it a good place to watch the movies for anyone who wanted to get out of their car. Or, for car-less interlopers like us.

There wasn’t anybody else sitting on the benches that night. We sat down in the middle, with a space between us. The last thing we wanted was to have anyone we knew seeing us sitting next to each other and starting rumors that we were homos (“gay” still meant happy in those long-ago days). That was the worst thing you could call a teenage boy in the ‘60s. Our timing was good. The previews had just ended, and as we settled into our not-very-comfortable seats, “Thunder Road” began. Even though we had both seen it before, I still felt a warm glow of contentment surging through my body, knowing how much I was going to enjoy seeing it again. I think it was a hormonal thing. I haven’t felt anything like that for a long time.

Ten minutes or so into the movie, something strange and wonderful happened. I felt someone sit down next to me, and I mean, right next to me. I turned and saw a girl about my age, watching the movie like there was nothing unusual about the fact that she had ignored the dozens of empty seats around us and chose to sit so close to me I could feel the warmth of her body against me. I turned to Ronnie, wondering if he was seeing what was going on, and saw that he had made a new friend too —a young lady who was clinging to him like iron filings to a magnet.

I turned back to my visitor. She wasn’t looking at the screen now; instead, she was grinning at me. If she had been a guy, I would have been scared, but instead, all I saw was this girl wearing shorts and a t-shirt, with a long ponytail. It was a little hard to tell in the light reflected from the large screen in front of us, but I thought her hair was either blonde or light brown. It was tied in a loose ponytail and hung down past her shoulders. She had a face that, as far as I could tell, while not beautiful, was still cute. I could see her braces flashing in the semi-darkness as she looked at me. I was frozen, unsure of what to do. All I could hear was the sound coming from the speaker behind us; then I heard her ask, “What’s your name?”

“M-m-mike,” I stuttered. My voice hadn’t betrayed me like that for months, but the weirdness of the situation was getting to me.

“Hi Mike. I’m Tammy, and my friend over there is Vera. We saw you guys sneaking in. Don’t worry, we’re not gonna tattle on you. We just want to hang out for a while.”