Rocky Horror Picture Show

"I'll be with a sixteen-year-old dressed in lingerie." We were headed downtown and I'd began keeping a running total of various state and federal crimes my passenger had inadvertently admitted to breaking. At that point we were at five, and we'd only been in the car eight minutes. I'm beginning to wonder why this happens to me. Over the course of my life I have had more terrifyingly frank conversations with vague acquaintances than I care to remember. On the bus, in my car, in the library, the location doesn't really matter. Hatless Jack: confessor to the world.

We were headed to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was something I had been meaning to check off my "Things To Do" list. The whole adventure had started out haphazardly, what with him coming over out of the blue and asking for a ride down to "Rocky", and me spending over an hour trying to figure out what the hell "Rocky" was. That was resolved eventually.

"Just so you're warned, there are going to be a lot of transvestites there. Just in case you're not comfortable with that type of thing."

Anti-anti-gay protest. To the left of me is a set of nine-foot tall puppets made of papier-mache engaging in a parody of all manner of preternatural acts. To my right is a phalanx of punks decked out in leather, gas masks, spikes, and blades. On all sides are angry, militant queers of every imaginable description. The cops hold at the outer limits of the crowd, waiting. "Holy shit man, this is a madhouse. There are two guys fucking over there." My friend is dressed like he just survived and explosion at the rainbow factory. "Where?" I ask, because you can never be too jaded to see public acts of sodomy. "In the middle of the intersection, man."

"I think I'll manage, somehow."

We finally arrived downtown, and we circled our destination several times due to my ineptness at navigating and lack of driving ability in general for good luck. We walked over to the theater entrance and I saw a gaggle of Gen Y washouts dressed in lingerie and angel wings. I choke down bile and twist a sneer into a smile. The number of people here that remember the cold war can be counted on one hand. And I'm one of them.

At that point I noticed my right foot was suddenly engulfed in a flurry of sparks, and several people had jumped back. I looked up to see a blond kid in a black designer straitjacket looking at me, waiting for my response. Great, I'm dealing with Hot Topic anarchists with fireworks. Peter Kropotkin is rolling in his grave. I realized that this evening was probably going to end in blood unless I made a concerted effort to become, in the sage words of Bruce Lee, like water. "If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend." Yeah... go with the flow and groove on it, baby.

My guide and I entered the theater and I paid for both our tickets, which is a horrible habit I developed somewhere along the line. My guide turned to the person holding the cashbox and said, "I brought a virgin." The only possible response leapt to the tip of my tongue, "Yeah, It's just like high school all over again." The person holding the cashbox handed him a tube of lipstick and he drew a large cochineal "V" across my left cheek and a dot on my forehead. Then we entered the theater itself. I knew this particular theater dated back to the roaring twenties and I took a moment to drink in the accumulated history. For a moment I could see the crowds hush and gasp as they watched The Phantom of the Opera. I saw Lon Chaney splashed across the screen in grotesque makeup, And then I realized that wasn't Lon Chaney at all. It was Martin Lawrence. We were watching "The Black Knight". A little part of me died inside.

Fortunately, before I could grow too suicidal over the freefalling gyre of our civilization, my guide spoke up with a loud, "Hey, I brought a virgin tonight." I was going to hear this a great number of times in the next twenty minutes. I turned and came face to face with an immaculately defined, six-foot-five, man who also happened to be wearing womens' underwear. He responded in as sultry a voice as the male vocal cords can produce, "Great, I love virgins... especially short ones." I'm six-foot-three. This slight against my height could not be allowed to stand unavenged, "If I wore heels I'd be that tall too."

Afterwards my guide and I returned to the street, mostly so he could sell clove cigarettes (which happened to be in my car) to the blond straight-jacketed kid. I learned many interesting facts and met many interesting people before the show started. The blond kid and my guide apparently knew each other because my guide dated his "Mom", who wasn't really his mom but apparently still filled some form of maternal role in his life. They were also loosely connected to my guide's "best friend" who was a gay male in his late teens who was on the cast and had just recently acquired fake breasts (non-surgical) which everyone in the conversation dutifully squeezed. Furthermore, we met someone calling herself "Chaos" who had the thousand-yard-stare of either methylenedioxymethamphetamine usage or some other stimulant combined with sleep deprivation. She reminded me of a lost puppy looking for a friend. Then I found out about my guide's various ex-girlfriends, most of whom happened to be about a distance of four feet in any direction, and who he was hoping didn't see him, somehow. One of them apparently... Actually, I've been trying to forget most of this for about a month now so let's just flashback to the gay rights protest instead:

"Man, I'm all for equal rights, but there are just some things gigantic puppets shouldn't be allowed to do in public."

"Goddamned puppets. What has this country come to?"

"Unnatural. That's what it is. Just unnatural."

Throughout our time on the street I was frequently introduced by my guide as "The virgin I brought." Every time he did this everyone looked at me with a knowing smirk that was beginning to concern me. I began considering where I'd have to draw the line. That evening I made several startling realizations about where I would draw the line, and I fashioned several hypothetical situations each more hedonistic than the last. I knew, for example, I was probably going to have to tap out when they brought in the goat semen unless said semen happened to be mango flavored (in which case all bets were off).

Right before midnight we entered the theater again and took our seats towards the back. Most of the cast was assembled on stage, and there was a lot of mincing, some prancing, some capering, and I swear I saw a sashay or two.. It was the gayest thing I've ever seen in my life and most of it was perpetrated by the tall transvestite I'd encountered earlier that evening. I was about to comment on how gay that whole pre-show was shaping out to be when my intrepid guide leaned over and said "He acts gay, but he's really straight." Which was really a relief for me because there is no way a homosexual would act that gay.

Then the virgin hunt began. The cast dispersed out into the audience and people were willingly dragged upstage. I held out for a while but even I was eventually brought up stage by a lovely young woman dressed in a flurry of tight fabric, sequins, feathers and an elegant masquerade mask. I heartily approved of this outfit mostly because she was a knockout, but also because the outfit reminded me of the historical legacy of the theater itself. That last part of the previous sentence is a blatant lie. We had a short conversation, but that was interrupted by the festivities.

The virgins were lined up and paired off except for me. I was the odd man out in a couple of ways: First there were an odd number of virgins. Second I was the only man in the entire theater who admitted to being a Rocky Horror virgin (also: I'm fairly certain I was the only man on stage who wasn't in drag, but that should really go without saying by now). The game was simple: The tall heterosexual tranny introduced everyone by name (often taking a few moments to mock, joke, and queer it up like Liberace frolic) then he gave each couple a cherry flavored twizzler and the instructions "Eat it in as sexy a way as possible." I almost immediately walked off the stage. The filthy degenerates! Had they been raise by wolves! Had they no sophistication! What of culture! Clearly I was amongst vulgar, depraved, filthy, filthy, philistines. Goat semen was one thing but they can't ask people to eat twizzlers. Jesus...

Finally it was my turn. After some showboating, they managed to scrounge up another virgin, but she chickened out. So that left me with the lovely and elegantly dressed woman who had brought me to the
stage. Yeah... fat chance. The tranny placed the twizzler between his crimson lips and I knew what I had to do. I gazed into his eyes, brought my face close to his, and used my left arm (the arm facing the
audience) to reach around to the back of his neck also conveniently blocking the audience's view of our lips. I clipped off my share of the twizzler with my teeth as quickly as possible and then used my other arm to lean him back in a mockery of all that is passionate and romantic in the world. There was dead silence and then loud applause. Then came the awards. Needless to say, I took the grand prize: two
tickets to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and a plastic trophy. I spent the rest of the time discontentedly picking waxy and stale pieces of twizzler out of my molars with my tongue.

I returned to my seat for only a moment since my guide and I were invited up front to sit with some clique or another. I heard "That was awesome, dude." frequently the rest of the night. While I appreciated the sentiment, I didn't need to be told that because my base state of awesomeness is not just an empirical fact, it's a mathematical truth. I am the teapot. Then it happened:

"START THE FUCKING MOVIE! START THE FUCKING MOVIE! START THE FUCKING MOVIE! START THE FUCKING MOVIE! START THE FUCKING MOVIE! START THE FUCKING MOVIE!"

What followed was utterly indescribable.