Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 15

Part 2: Chapters 34 & 35

In order to smooth things over with Leigh, Arnie takes her (in Christine, natch) Christmas shopping at the Monroeville Mall. Ice cream is eaten, presents are bought, ice skaters are watched  — a fine time is had by one and all.

That is until, on the way home, they pick up a hitchhiker and stop at McDonald’s. While Arnie goes inside the fast food restaurant to get their order, the hitchhiker (a Pitt student on his way home for the holidays) tells Leigh that he senses “bad vibes” sitting in the backseat. He also asks her if she smells something bad. She says no, but the truth is she does smell it.

Arnie drops the hitchhiker off on JFK Drive, but before he can pull away from the curb, Leigh chokes on her hamburger. As she tries to cough up the bite of burger, Leigh sees Christine’s dashboard light up like a pair of eyes watching her die. Before Arnie can act, the hitchhiker pulls Leigh out of the car, performs the Heimlich maneuver, and saves her life. As they drive to Leigh’s house, the smell of rot and decomposition overwhelms her.

Once at her house, Leigh puts her foot down. She tells Arnie that she refuses to go anywhere with Arnie in Christine. Arnie, of course, tries to tell her that she is crazy and that she sounds just like his mother. Leigh is adamant. She goes on to accuse Arnie of letting her choke in his car because that is what Christine wants.

Infuriated with Leigh’s accusations and demands, Arnie runs off to motorvate with Christine… and someone else…

Things started off pretty well for Arnie and Leigh, did they not, Blog-o-weeners? Heck, Arnie was even charming the support hose off of Leigh’s mom. Even a trip to the mall during the height of the holiday shopping season wasn’t enough to poop the lovebirds’ party. I suppose it’s true: there’s nothing like a trip to the mall during the Christmas shopping season to fill the heart to overflowing even as it empties the wallet down to moths, amirite?

You know, that reminds me… there were a few other people who spent Christmas at a mall in Pittsburgh in December of 1978. Of course, they had the whole place to themselves. Business at the mall was… dead.

Heh-heh-heh!

Before the postwar boom in the 1950s, Monroeville, PA, (next-door neighbor to Libertyville) was mostly rural farmland. With the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 376 (the road that Dennis and Arnie spent the summer working on), Monroeville had a growth spurt both commercially and residentially.

Come the mid-1960s, Don-Mark Realty proposed the building of a shopping mall on a site once known as Harper’s Mine. The mall was to be the largest in the United States. Construction began in 1967, and two years later the Monroeville Mall opened for business.

The Monroeville Mall had it all: 125 stores, a large clock tower that featured twelve animated puppets (each one representing an ethnic group in the Pittsburgh area — yikes!), a large skating rink with the picture windows of an Italian restaurant lining one side (so you could twirl your spaghetti while watching the skaters twirl their Salchows), a bank, several restaurants (including The Brown Derby — which was not associated with the more famous Hollywood eatery), pharmacies, and even a ministry center. Don-Mark Realty envisioned the mall as the indoor “town center” for the entire Monroeville community.

Which is why it made for the perfect setting of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the follow-up to his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. While not a strict sequel to Night, Dawn follows the exploits of four people who are trying to leave modern society and the zombie revolution behind. Instead of pushing on to Canada, our fearless foursome stop over at the Monroeville Mall. Sealing themselves off from the rest of the world like a modern retelling of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” our heroes soon discover that having 24/7 access to everything they desire isn’t the panacea that they think it is.

Dawn of the Dead was filmed during the winter of 1977 at the mall. Romero and his crew filmed overnight, so that meant taking down then resetting all of the mall’s Christmas decorations every day. If you watch the movie, then you can get a sense of what Arnie and Leigh are experiencing — except for the gun shop. The mall never had a gun store on the premises. Romero filmed those scenes at a downtown Pittsburgh gun shop. I mean could you imagine… a gun store… at an American mall? That’s crazy!

Isn’t it…?

Sadly, things have not been as rosy for the Monroeville Mall as of late. In January 2025, it was announced that the mall had been sold to an anonymous buyer. A month later, the buyer was revealed to be Walmart, who planned on demolishing the building. Formal plans for this demolition (originally scheduled for April 2027), however, have not been submitted to the municipality, so who knows? The mall, as of now is still opened.

In June 2026, some 3,000 fans of Dawn of the Dead attended the Living Dead Weekend at the mall. In addition to the fans, there were more than sixty cast and crew members, including three of the four principal stars Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross (sadly David Emge passed away in 2024). There is another Living Dead Weekend planned for THIS VERY WEEKEND! If you are in the Pittsburgh area (and not, say, in Burlington, VT!), get your tickets here and check it out.

Things go south for Arnie and Leigh after they leave the mall. It begins with them picking up a hitchhiker on the way back to Libertyville. He’s described as looking a bit like Charles Manson, with his wild shoulder-length hair. I like to think that this is King himself making an appearance. In his college days, ol’ Stevie looked a bit like the Prophet of Spahn Ranch.

Arnie and Leigh had originally planned to go to dinner at the British Lion Steak House. There’s no such place that I could find, but it does remind me of a steak joint that we used to eat at when we went to the Beaver Valley Mall: York Steak House.

York Steak House began in Columbus, Ohio, in 1966. A second link in the chain was opened in 1971 in the Maine Mall in South Portland, Maine. Somewhere along the way from its inception to it dissolution in 1989, a York Steak House opened in the Beaver Valley Mall. York had a “Ye Olde English” decor that matches with the idea of the British Lion Steak House that King references. 

Not having enough time for a “fancy” dinner, Arnie and Leigh decide to stop at that old stand-by, Mickey-Ds. Oddly enough, Arnie parks Christine and leaves Leigh with the hitchhiker while he goes inside the restaurant to order their food. Why didn’t they just use the drive-thru?

Long story, short: McDonald’s restaurants did not offer drive-thrus until 1975. In Sierra Vista, Arizona, soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Huachuca Army Base were not allowed to appear in public in uniform. Therefore, they could not do what Arnie does in this chapter: park their cars and enter the restaurant. In order to help these soldiers enjoy the freedoms of America, McDonald’s built their first drive-thru window. (Other restaurants had already been offering this service.) It was a big hit, and McDonald’s began building drive-thru windows at their other stores. It just may be that the Libertyville McDonald’s had yet to catch up with the times.

If there’s one thing I am squeamish about its anything to do with choking. Brrr! It freaks me out, so this scene may be the scariest scene in all of Christine for me. Lucky for Leigh (and me!), Barry Gottfried, the Manson-esque hitchhiker, knows how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver.

Dr. Henry Heimlich, the man credited for popularizing the “abdominal thrust” to save choking victims, didn’t publish his views until 1974. So, although Gottfried says he learned the technique at the University of Pittsburgh cafeteria, it was still a relatively new idea.

This isn’t to excuse Arnie from attempting what Heimlich himself claimed only lodged the foreign matter deeper into the windpipe — the back slap — but I think it ameliorates his part in the situation somewhat. He’s a seventeen-year old kid, after all. 

And, as I’ve mentioned before, this is a horror novel. We know the history of Christine and the fate of people choking in her vicinity. We know that the back-slap method was tried on six-year-old Rita LeBay, and we know the person responsible for applying that disastrous method was her father, Roland. And we know how that turned out for her. And because this is a horror novel, I think we all know who or what kept Arnie from doing what I believe deep down he knew needed to be done to save Leigh’s life. But he — like Leigh — was under the watchful eyes of Christine.

We get more of Arnie/LeBay’s gaslighting of Leigh and his/their negation of her feelings about Christine. Leigh, however, remains steadfast in her refusal to ever ride in Christine again. (Do ya blame her?!) Arnie takes her criticism that he “seem[s] to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham” (276) with grace and dignity — NOT! He screams that he doesn’t need her, then runs back to the open arms of his one true love.

Together, Christine and Arnie go cruising, but it isn’t just the streets of Libertyville they traverse:

“The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL/CIO conventions, a future of labor and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock ’n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport; three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMs. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they got really dedicated. Fifties newscasts wow. That was

(never heard anything like that before)

a really neat idea. That was

(totally insane)

pretty neat.” (278-9)

Arnie, in those parenthetical asides, knows that something is desperately wrong. Arnie — the old Arnie — is still in there somewhere, and he knows that what he’s hearing isn’t some old time radio stunt. And if he didn’t know it then, LeBay’s appearance next to him as a rotting corpse surely helps him to realize it. That Arnie, however, is quickly put down as the new Arnie swims to the surface to motorvate though the streets of Libertyville and of time itself, thinking of ways to make the shitters pay.

Speaking of motorvating, I think we’ve done enough of it for one day. I see a motel up ahead. Before we pull in for the night, however, there’s one more fun reference I want to point out.

It’s mentioned that Sandy Galton, the look-out for Buddy and his gang when they beat the stuffing out of Christine at the airport parking lot, has disappeared. Some say he hightailed it out of Libertyville for the sun of Mexico. Others say that Buddy leaned on the young man to hit the road. No one seems broken up about his leaving. Not his mother and not his younger brother, “who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High (280).

Gornick Junior High is not a real school, but it is named after a real person. Michael Gornick was a longtime collaborator of George A. Romero’s. He was the director of photography on one of the best five picture runs in film history: Martin (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Knightriders (1980), Creepshow (1982), and Day of the Dead (1985). Gornick was the director of Creepshow 2 (1987), as well as episodes of Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.

The lady at the front desk says there’s a York Steak House nearby. Let’s freshen up, then get us a couple of sirloins and baked potatoes, and then come back to the room and crash out. Well, I’ll crash out. You, dear Blog-o-weener, have some reading to do first: Part 2: Chapters 36 & 37. Our friend Buddy Repperton shows up again. He and some friends are out motorvating when he sees a pair of dual headlights in his rearview mirror. Oddly, no matter how much gas he gives his old Camaro, those duals keep getting closer… and closer… and closer… 

Man, I used to love our yearly trip to the Monroeville Mall during the Christmas season. It was a big to-do driving from Beaver County all the way to the east of Pittsburgh. Watching the skaters on the old ice rink (now the site of a food court) was the highlight of the visit. I thought ice skating looked like a lot of fun — and it looked so easy, too.

Sadly, such was not the case when I finally got to try it for myself at the North Park outdoor skating rink years later. Getting up on my skates was the easy part… staying there was a little more challenging. Turning before I hit the curved wall was also harder than it seemed to be. It taught me that you can’t always learn how to do things by watching people who are skilled at them. I probably should have watched a few people like me who didn’t know what they were doing, because…