Confessions of a Transylvanian (45 page)

Even though Rocky had never really been his thing, David was pretty excited about the prospect of hanging with us for the entire night. I thought it mostly had to do with the fact that (a) he would be cruising around the Village after-hours at the tender age of 15 and (b) he would be doing so in the company of two smoking-hot young ladies.

I had to agree with him. Both of those prospects sounded pretty good to me, too.

We were given permission from on high by our Lord Father to take the train to Sunda
y’
s and, thanks to his unbelievably explicit directions, we found the apartment without a problem. We buzzed-in downstairs and hopped on the elevator up to Sunda
y’
s New York digs.

Nothing Sunday had ever said to me about her father (which had
n’
t really been much) could possibly have prepared me for the experience of stepping into his apartment that night. David and I did our best to remain cool and aloof, but it was a jaw-dropping sight.

When I pictured a New York apartment, I generally envisioned a place like my Da
d’
s. Small, slightly cramped but, all in all, tolerable, given that putting up with the tight confines meant you got to live in one of the greatest cities in the world. I never dreamed that New York apartments came in any size besides Extra Small.

This place, Sunda
y’
s fathe
r’
s joint, was enormous. “Cavernous” was a word that sprang to mind. It went on for miles in all directions. In a city that measured its worth in inches of floor tile, this place was a palace. The Madison Square Garden of apartments.

And it was
n’
t just the size that knocked the wind out of you. The place had
windows
. And they were
everywhere
. Looking out from their living room, yo
u’
d swear that you could see into virtually every other apartment in the city.

The decor was modern, elegant and very intimidating, but the forbidding nature of the place was offset by the playfulness the current inhabitants had brought to it. For one thing, there were at least three working pinball machines lining the living room wall. Actual, real,
functioning
pinball machines. In their fucking
house
.

The artwork was kooky. Silly, but unpretentious. Like the owners had bought it because they actually liked it, not because it was an investment. And there were pictures and sculptures and little, hidden art pieces all over the place.

Finally, and maybe most important to my brother, there was the stereo.

In every home I had ever entered, be it an apartment or a house, I had discovered that the best way to get a feel for the person who lived there was to pay close attention to what was coming out of the speakers. The quality of the sound system was important, of course, but the musical selection was the real indicator.

No music at all? That meant that you were likely dealing with a very understated and probably very uninteresting person.

Classical music = educated, stuffy but artistic.

Jazz = Asking for trouble.

Smooth jazz = Mind-numbingly boring.

Blues = Either incredibly deep or astonishingly shallow. It went both ways.

Zydeco = Probably stoned.

Rock and roll = If classic rock was playing and they were over 40, it meant they were nostalgic middle-aged folks pining for their youth. If
modern
rock and over 40...

...actually cool. You rarely ran into that.

We did at Sunda
y’
s.

Her father did
n’
t come out of the kitchen wearing a pair of silk pajamas and offering us hits off his wizard bong, nor did he walk in pulling off his necktie and bitching about his awful day at the office. He strolled in, relaxed and mellow, offering us each a warm handshake.

He was a silver-haired, middle-aged guy with a wide smile. He was deeply tanned and wrinkled the way guys who spend too much time lounging about Central American beaches are wrinkled. He did
n’
t actually smell of cocoa butter, but I would have bet that he had requested that some equally tanned woman assist him in smearing it on his person in his recent past. We Floridians can sense these things.

In an attempt to be cool in front of his daughter, the first thing he did was offer us a beer. We declined, but it was nice to get the offer anyway. He made small talk, asking politely about the Rocky show in Florida. I did my best to be polite as well and took special care not to say anything that could be misconstrued as inappropriate or incriminating. Sunday would have wrung my neck. Her father seemed positively
charmed
to meet us.

Sunday, on the other hand, looked supremely uncomfortable and not at all thrilled to have us hanging around the apartment, poking around in her personal life and, worst of all, conversing with her father. I could hardly blame her. I would
n’
t have been all that happy about her meeting
my
Dad either.

These two worlds of ours did
n’
t often collide, and we liked it that way. Real life was over here and Rocky life was somewhere else entirely. Unfortunately for Sunday, the twain were meeting right in her da
d’
s living room and it was decidedly unpleasant for her.

This meant that when Tracey finally arrived, we set a new record for quick exits. Sunday wanted to get gone, and so, gone we got. We said our goodbyes to Sunda
y’
s father and skedaddled.

“Jesus, I could
n’
t wait to get the fuck out of there,” Sunday said once we were out on the street. “Guy can talk your ear off, ca
n’
t he?”

“He seemed pretty cool to me,” I said, earning an incredulous look from Sunday. Nobody likes to hear good things about their parents.

Tracey was practically euphoric. “Which way?” We were to take a subway down to Washington Square and then walk over to the theater. We had allowed ourselves two full hours of lead time, expecting the crowd at the theater to be huge on a holiday weekend.

We rode the train and the torrent of our conversation never ebbed. We talked about the how Thanksgiving had gone, our respective families and how great it was to get out of Florida and into civilization. Then David and I recounted the difficulty we had endured in securing the necessary permission to come. Sunday and Tracey were amazed that we had put up with our own fathe
r’
s stubbornness.

“If my father had told me I could
n’
t go to a midnight show,
I’
d have walked right out the door. No question,” Sunday said. And I believed her. She was
n’
t a big one for parental control of her life. Tracey was in total agreement. They lived their own lives. Their parents no longer drove the bus.

David and I, for all our supposed wild-and-crazy South Florida lifestyles, were about as Victorian as these two could imagine. We were considered absolute wimps for having obeyed our own father.

We got to the Village in almost no time at all and were standing in front of the theater by 10:30. To our amazement, there was almost no line. Three or four people were queued up, but that was it. No down-the-block group of fanatics clamoring to be the first in the door like we had expected. Hell, the Ultravision line was longer than this. Here we were, at Rocky Central, and no one seemed all that interested. It was disappointing.

Maybe, we told ourselves, we were just too early for the real crowds to show up. Probably it was a New York thing, showing up late. We made little comment on it and took our places at the back of what line there was.

Lucky for us, it was a fairly warm night by Northern standards. Being Florida folk, we were horribly chilled by temperatures that dipped below 50 degrees. Considering that it had snowed the previous week and had gotten down into the teens only a short while before, we had it unbelievably easy.

A little after 11:00, we saw some of the cast members arrive. There was, of course, no huge parking lot like we had down South, so the New York cast generally were dropped off or showed up on foot. They were hard to miss. Some came pre-dressed in their all-too-familiar Transylvanian outfits but the majority were in their civvies, slipping in the door to go get changed. Even out of costume, it was easy to see who they were. Their attitude was pure Rocky.

We were on the lookout for two people in particular, the only two Rocky personalities who were nationally known. The first was the aforementioned Sal Piro, known for both his founding and presidency of the official Rocky Horror Fan Club and for his brief appearance in the movie “Fame.” In the film, Piro is featured in a scene from the live Rocky show that had been shot at this very theater. So, as Rocky celebrities went, he was the Big Kahuna.

The second Rocky legend was the 8th Street Playhous
e’
s famous long-time Frank-N-Furter, the renowned Dori Hartley. We had seen pictures and read interviews with Sal and Dori over the entire time that w
e’
d been involved in Rocky and we felt sure we would recognize them on sight. In fact, Dori had appeared in a lightning-fast cameo in the Tim Curry video “Paradise Garage” that we danced around to every weekend.

The two of them were as close as it came to Rocky royalty.

But of course, this was late 1982 and, by now, the show had been running in this theater for years. When we did
n’
t spot them, we reasoned that Sal and Dori had either retired from the Rocky game altogether or were taking a well-deserved break from the show. In any case, seeing the two of them was not the real purpose of our visit. We were here to check out the show and, naturally, see how we measured up to them.

Or, rather, how they measured up to
us
.

At about 11:30, they opened the doors and we finally piled in. As showtime approached, the crowd had grown to a pretty respectable size, the line outside the theater stretching down the block. But by my educated count, they still only drew about 200 people. If that seems like a lot, remember—we were in the middle of New York City, one of the biggest metropolitan areas in the entire hemisphere. Given that there were more than 200 people living on that block alone, this was not quite the throng we had anticipated.

None of us had bothered to bring any props or throwable objects, by the way. No newspapers, toast or cards. We were
n’
t tourists, after all. We were veterans. Regulars. That sort of thing was for civilians. Still and all, it was a thrill to walk into the lobby, finally setting foot in the place where it all started.

And while the theater was a lot smaller than our playing space down in Florida, that was to be expected. This was a Greenwich Village movie theater sitting atop the most valuable real estate in the world. Naturally, their stage was going to be a lot tighter than where we performed. That said, it was still a pretty nice theater and the fact that they had actual aisles that went up
through the audience
made it look like a fun joint to put on the show.

Their pre-show was fun, but there was nothing about it that made me feel like I was letting anyone down during my own warm-up at the Ultravision. Many of the chants and callbacks sounded pretty familiar too, and it dawned on me that many of the audience-participation bits I had been doing in Deerfield had likely originated in this very room.

Finally, the moment came. Like virgins at their first show, we chanted:

“
We want lips! We want lips!
”

The lights went down. The screen flickered to life.

And what do you know? We got our lips.

What do you want me to say about The Show? That we were blown away?
I’
d love to. But we were
n’
t.
I’
m sorry, but i
t’
s the truth.

Did we have a good time? You bet we did. We shouted our time-honored South Florida lines at the screen (some of which were new to the New York crowd) and we picked up some lines from the 8th Street crowd to bring home with us. We saw some great performers, some okay performers, some clever solutions to staging challenges and some scenes that fell completely flat.

All in all, it was an impressive display, no question about it.

But did the 8th Street Playhouse Rocky cast teach the three of us a lesson in how the live Rocky show was supposed to look?

The hell they did.

Now, in all fairness, we were seeing this cast after they had been doing the show for a number of years. The original cast at 8th Street had long since hung up the fishnets and, this night, we were clearly looking at third- and fourth-generation cast members. The people they had were solid. Serviceable. Maybe not the best w
e’
d ever seen but, hey, after all that time, maybe we did
n’
t get to see their A-game. Perhaps this holiday weekend, four years into their run, it was unfair to judge them. A couple of years earlier, in their prime, maybe then they would have rocked our world.