Fast Food Parking Lot: Portraits of Texan Teenagers Eating in Cars
All photos by Bertie Pearson

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Fast Food Parking Lot: Portraits of Texan Teenagers Eating in Cars

How the marriage of fast food and car culture reshaped small town life.

Central Texas has a major dearth of soft-openings, product-launches, and DJs who are actually models who actually do a line of post-fetish harness jewelry. But instead, it has the drive-in.

All photos by the author

From 6 PM to 11 PM, on school nights and weekends, trucks of young cowboys, single moms in Civics, and nervously chatty pep squad members, stuffed like clowns in their dads' Acuras, pull into stalls at the Sonic Drive-In, the Top Notch, the Stars Drive-In, the Storm's.

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Without having to leave your air conditioner, your radio station, your comfortably adjusted bucket seat or king cab bench, you can order through a little transmitter and be brought a chili cheese dog by a smiling car hop, sometimes, I kid you not, on roller skates. Then you roll up the windows and dine as a little world unto yourself, surrounded by other little worlds, happily munching side by side, each to a separate soundtrack.

Like hermit crabs, diners bring their own cordons of safety, but spindly legs gently reach out to touch the car next door: shouts about high school rivalries, about golf scores, Migos lyrics, 4H.

A car full of sweaty tenth-graders hide acne and awkwardness behind And Justice for All t-shirts and long, unwashed hair, as the fourth most popular girl in school emerges from the kitchen to bring them a tray of shakes. Norteño blares at maximal volume from the open windows of the next truck over, as a 17-year-old drywall hanger buys dinner for his cousin's neighbor (his future wife).

An overwhelmed dad in a Prius looks across the median into the sympathetic eyes of a lone woman in an understated Volvo, as the sleepover guests filling his backseat burst into another chorus of Frozen's "Let it Go." While an immaculate El Dorado on 20-inch rims glides in next to another El Dorado whose faded bumper stickers read, "POW MIA" and "McCain-Palin: The Ticket for America."

And here at the drive-in is everyone who you don't see at your church, everyone who will be at a different barbecue next Saturday afternoon. Class divisions, racism, political rifts—they still haunt us, but here we are, side by side, nodding at one another, smiling and eating burgers in our cars.