Maximum Overdrive (1986)

directed by Stephen King

Joe Squance

This is not an essay about Maximum Overdrive. How could it be? Maximum Overdrive is a movie about machines coming to life in order to kill, starring a semi-tractor trailer with a goblin’s face and directed by a hillock of cocaine wearing a pair of men’s glasses. AC/DC provides the soundtrack. What else could I possibly have to say about it—that it’s good? It’s not. That it’s special to me? It isn’t. No, this is not an essay about Maximum Overdrive; this is an essay about the time, when I was twelve years old, that I took a nap and never woke up.

/--------\

After my parents divorced and my mom was awarded what amounted to pretty much full custody of me and my two brothers, she moved us out of the house where we’d been living as a family and into a duplex, which she was better able to afford. She had a new fella by then, a younger guy named J—y, and he moved into the duplex too. He had messy hair and an unconvincing mustache. He mostly wore red sweats and gray T-shirts. He drove a Toyota Supra with a sunroof, and sometimes, when no other cars were around, he would let my older brother stand on the front seat and stick his whole upper body through it. He kept one cassette in his car and it was Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits Volume 1 & 2; to this day, whenever I hear “You May Be Right”—a song about a man so very irresponsible he would ride his motorcycle in the rain—I can only think of him.

This was all deeply suspicious. I didn’t trust him, or the situation I found myself in. My mom seemed too happy about it all. And her fella was too much fun. J—y was nothing like my dad, the Policeman, who I remember from the time as stolid and imperturbable. My dad moved furtively; he kept everything in. This new guy was spastic, bouncy. He laughed a lot. And he was always screwing around, in a childlike sense—always screwing with things and screwing with people, curious about how far he could push them, about how much he could get away with. On one side was my dad, the professional rule enforcer; and on the other this new guy, the chaos agent, who drove a bus for a living. And there I was: a kid on the precipice, drifting between one thing and another.

/-------\

The primary action of Maximum Overdrive involves a rag-tag group of survivors, led by a frankly gorgeous, pre-Young Guns Emilio Estevez, who find themselves trapped inside of the Dixie Boy Truck Stop while a convoy of big rigs, coated in dirt and axle grease, drive themselves in a circle outside. The noise, I imagine, must have been an exhilaration! Around and around they go.

It reminds me now of Ernest Hemingway’s story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which two characters—named “the American” and, simply, “the girl”—sit on the platform of a train depot, drinking beer and absinthe and waiting for the train that will take them both to Madrid, where the girl will get an abortion. They drink and they talk about whether or not the abortion is a good idea, and their conversation is circular. It’s clear the American wants the abortion, and almost just as clear that the girl does not. Around and around they go, and the silence at the center of it all as they never speak the words “abortion” or “child” or “pregnant,” and the girl never says “I want to keep it,” is like a star collapsing in a vacuum, awful and woeful.

Funny that these two stories should take place in a truck stop and a train depot: two way-stations between the place you left and the place where you are going.

/------\

And so, about that nap. I have never been the kind of person who takes them. I rarely take naps now, and certainly didn’t take naps as a kid. I’m not sure how or why it happened, but on a Sunday afternoon, in my bedroom in the duplex where I lived with my brothers and my mother and her new boyfriend, I laid myself down for a snooze and when I woke up again I was totally alone. My house was empty.

All was silence and stillness. Late afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows, projecting golden squares onto the walls. I drifted like a mote from room to room, finding nothing but empty shoes. I crept downstairs in my sock feet, quietly, and listened through the wall for any signs of life from the neighbors. There were none. I checked the kitchen: empty, cold. I peeked out the back door and into the parking lot to see if our cars had been moved, but there they sat—there was my mother’s brown Chevy Nova, there was J—y’s Toyota Supra, headlights tucked in to the frame like a pair of closed eyes.

I checked all the obvious places where my mom might leave a note telling me where she’d gone and when she’d be back but didn’t find one. I was twelve years old and had never really been left alone. It didn’t feel real. I wondered if I might go back upstairs and find myself still sleeping in my bed.

/-----\

J—y bought us our first VCR as an Easter present. He left it in the oven for us to find at the end of a long scavenger hunt. At one point, he managed to get his hands on a second VCR and concocted a plan to dub rented movies, and so we snagged the best one we could find, The Terminator, and watched as he carefully rigged up the wiring and pushed in the tapes. He hit “play” on one VCR and “record” on the other. But it didn’t work. The signal got scrambled in the in-between.

/----\

The clocks in the duplex all read 5:55 but I didn’t know if that meant AM or PM. The sun was either just starting to set or had just risen—either option seemed equally plausible. Had I slept through the night? I couldn’t tell, and there was no one home to ask. I stood in the center of the living room wondering what to do next.

I did not think to call my dad, I’m not sure why. He may still have been living in the guest bedroom of a fellow policeman, in that man’s family home. Or he may have moved into his own apartment by then. But he worked odd hours—second shift, in a pattern of days that I couldn’t discern—and the details of his life were a smudge in my kid brain, a single yawning lacuna.

Instead, I turned on the TV to guide me. The TV, I reasoned, would explain every unexplainable thing in my life to me, and would do it in a language that I understood. The TV would sit me down, the TV would smooth my hair, the TV would tell me I was right to be confused, to be disoriented. The TV would clamp a hand on my shoulder and guide me through one doorway and into another. I flipped through the channels and found Maximum Overdrive.

/---\

If ever a movie was designed to be and say nothing, it is this one. Maximum Overdrive is not a movie—it’s a blank space where a movie might go. The only film that Stephen King ever directed, it is nonsense. I may have loved it at the time—it’s possible—but what difference does that make? It’s a movie with a child’s aesthetic, made by lazy men. Its target demo is twelve-year-old boys like me, and all those who have taken their first tentative steps out of childhood and into whatever long, amorphous phase comes between that and manhood. It is loud, colorful trash, and makes as much sense at six o’clock in the evening as it does at six o’clock in the morning.

Maximum Overdrive told me nothing. Instead, I decided the best thing to do was to sit down and wait.

/--\

I have few other specific memories of my life in the duplex. It was a pit stop between the family that had fallen apart and one of the new ones that would grow up in its place. Clearer are my memories from the red house on the quiet, tree-lined street that J—y moved us into later. By this time, he’d stopped driving a bus. He got his realtor’s license, then his broker’s license. He sold some houses. He traded in the Supra. Eventually, he founded his own real estate company and made good on whatever promises he’d made secretly to himself or to us. The duplex, it seemed, had been the site of his transformation too.

/-\

At the end of Maximum Overdrive—or maybe in the beginning—it’s explained that the Earth has passed through the tail of a comet and the ensuing radiation has brought our machines to life. Eventually, the Earth passes through the comet’s tail and the entire mysterious episode is over. The trucks go idle and everything returns to normal—the survivors needed only to hunker down and be patient and wait it out.

Things worked out for me in a similar way. There was no great reveal—my family simply rematerialized, and life resumed as if nothing had changed. The waking dream extended far out ahead of me, ceaselessly.

/ \

If it can be said that I ever really woke up from the dream, then it probably happened the moment my daughter was born, in that long stretch between night and morning, and I suddenly found myself a father, cutting through the soft tissue of an umbilical cord. Or maybe—probably—it was the night that Jeffrey died in a medical bed in the bedroom he shared with my mother in the house that he’d built for us all, at around 11 pm on a quiet Thursday night. Out he went, in a silence nearly unbearable. Later, in the thinning liminal dawn, my wife and I went upstairs to try and sleep, the house still full of people. I crawled into bed and laid there, my eyes wide open.

Joe P. Squance lives in Oxford, Ohio and teaches in the English department at Miami University. His stories have appeared in The Best Micro Fiction 2019, Atticus Review, Cease Cows, Everyday Fiction, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere, and he has written essays for Salon, Runner's World, Organic Life, and Serious Eats. He lives with his wife and their little pip of a daughter.