Confessions of a Transylvanian (13 page)

Who was this mystery man who was so capable of creating such a vast cultural divide?

Steve “Do
n’
t Stop Believi
n’
” Perry.

The lead singer for Journey was a unique persona in the way that he inspired either complete and total devotion on the part of his fans or, conversely, caused his detractors to involuntarily vomit into their own mouths.

Sunday and Andrea rose to Perr
y’
s defense valiantly, but they were clearly convincing no one.

“Nobody else sings like that. Nobody,” Sunday offered on his behalf.

“Thank God for that,” answered Tony.

“Hey, fuck you, Tony. Who else in music has a better voice than him? H
e’
s got more range than anybody in rock and roll right now,” Andrea volleyed back.

The table erupted.

“Complete bullshit!”

“Are you fucking
kidding
me?”

“Who?” Sunday demanded. “Give me a name, assholes!”

Russ knew his music, so he offered a few names. “Rod Stewart, Bob Seger, Robert Plant...”

Andrea dismissed them out of hand, “Absolutely not. Perry is better than any of them. Nice try, Russ, but no dice.”

“Tha
t’
s what I said,” Sunday was nailing down the lid of the coffin. “Ther
e’
s not one singer out there who gets anywhere near Perry, so get used to it.”

In the silence that followed, a thought occurred to me and, though every instinct in my body
should
have warned me to keep my Transylvanian mouth shut, I piped up, offering the following observation in an apologetic tone: “Well…ther
e’
s Freddy Mercury.”

Well, that did it.

Sunday and Andrea knew, the moment I said it, that they had lost the argument. The Perry-haters at the other end of the table knew it, too. At the mention of Freddy, they smelled the blood in the water and went in for the kill. I had given them an Arthur capable of defeating Andrea and Sunda
y’
s Black Knight, and they had the time of their lives rubbing it in the girl
s’
faces for the rest of the evening.

As the abuse rained down on them, the two young ladies turned to me and gave me a pair of stares so intense, I was surprised I did
n’
t turn to stone.

I was
n’
t exactly making friends with the two Rocky divas. Must get to work on that.

Not wanting to look like a lightweight for two nights running, I stayed out that Saturday until everyone was heading out the door. Steve again offered me a ride and I took him up on it.

As we were walking out of the restaurant, Russ (who was climbing into Donn
y’
s car) said something that puzzled me the entire week.

“Hey, you guys. Party at the Orphanage next Friday. Try to make it. Should be a lot of fun.”

“Okay,” I said, as if this made perfect sense. “Ca
n’
t wait.”

“Later,” said Donny. “Hope you boys had a good time this weekend.”

“Absolutely,” Steve said.

I was nodding my head in agreement. “No question.”

“So...w
e’
ll see you next week?”

I frowned, not quite understanding what he meant. Then it hit me: Donny was actually questioning whether we had enjoyed ourselves enough to justify a return to the show. Inexplicably, he seemed to have some doubt as to whether the Rocky experience had lived up to
our
expectations.

We both practically fell over ourselves assuring him that we would most definitely be back.

“Cool,” said Donny. He and Russ piled into his car and took off.

On the ride back to my place, Steve and I tried to make sense of what Russ had mentioned just before he left.

“Did he say party...at the
‘
Orphanag
e’
?” I asked Steve.

“Sounded like that to me.”

We pondered that one for a moment.

“Any clue what that could mean?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Guess
I’
d have to wait until Friday to find out.

It would be worth the wait.

6

Over At The Frankenstein Place

T
he Orphanage, I soon learned, came into being entirely by accident. Her
e’
s the scoop:

Years before I ever set foot in the place, Russ and Donny began dating these two girls, Christie and Bea, who happened to be roommates. After a while, they all decided it would be a good idea for them to live together in one place and, to that end, started hunting around for a suitable residence.

They eventually found a house (not an apartment mind you—a house) that they could all rent together. And it was a big one, too—four bedrooms in all—that lay in the shadow of the Hollywood Bread building in Downtown Hollywood, Florida. (Hollywood Bread is now a defunct baking company. More about the building, if not the company, later.)

As it happened, the house was also just a mile or so from the Florida Twin, where Russ and Donny first performed the Rocky show, so the price and the location could not have been better.

But, as these things happen, almost immediately after the two couples had signed the lease, but days before they were to move in, Donny and Bea split up. Suddenly, it looked as if the three roommates would be short on the rent. So they decided to start looking for a new tenant or two. After all, they had plenty of room.

Thus began the round-robin subletting of the rooms at the place that would very soon be dubbed “the Orphanage.” Russ, Donny and Christie found a roommate, but...it did
n’
t last. Then Russ and Christie broke up. Another roommate was needed. People began moving in and out at a furious pace. Donny eventually drifted away, too, leaving Russ to rule the roost.

Pretty soon, it became a refuge of last resort. If you were in the Rocky cast and your life hit the skids, you usually wound up at the Orphanage. If you got kicked out of your house by your parents, or you ran away from an abusive home, or your folks found out you were gay and tossed you out on your ass, or even if you simply broke up with your current live-in partner,—whatever the reason—you could give Russ a call and, before you knew it, you had a place to stay.

Lord knows how many people lived there over the years. Some would stay a week, some a few months. But no one had squatte
r’
s rights. If you did
n’
t pony up the dough to Russ when the rent came due, he might cut you some slack for day or so, but rules were rules. Under the Orphanag
e'
s roof, you could live whatever way you chose but, man, do
n’
t you
ever
try to stiff Russ on the rent. Yo
u’
d find yourself back out on the street.

Simply put, as long as you paid your bills, you could marry a Vietnamese pig and get Pacific-rimmed in your room at all hours of the day or night for all Russ cared. He was
n’
t one to judge.

The relaxed rules at the Orphanage also allowed for parties to occur there at any hour of the day and at a momen
t’
s notice. These parties did
n’
t happen nightly (they could
n’
t—no one could sustain such an effort), but when a party began, it would often last for days. This meant that it was possible for you to go to the Rocky show on Friday night, stop off at Denn
y’
s for a bite and then drive down to the Orphanage and join the party already in progress. Once there, you would stay up all night and all of the following day, go to the Saturday night Rocky show and...repeat. Most folks did
n’
t last all the way until Sunday night, but it sure was fun to try.

The architecture of the Orphanage also lent itself to being a party house. When you entered the front door, you immediately found yourself in a large, open room. To your right, in the front, was a huge rectangular table. This was, ostensibly, the “dining room” but there was no dividing wall between it and the “living room.” This area, just past the table, featured a few couches that faced a large fireplace (though, what a fireplace was doing in South Florida was anyon
e’
s guess). In front of the couches was an enormous square coffee table, usually strewn with all manner of detritus from the various tenants (unpaid bills, lighters, half-smoked joints, porn mags, etc.) and above it loomed a large skylight.

Continue through this room and yo
u’
d walk into a big kitchen with an enormous refrigerator and a perfectly hideous sink full of dirty dishes. (I understand they took them out back and hosed them off in the lawn when it got really bad in there.)

Every room was painted the same dingy-white and the only artwork was a few posters that had been slapped up on the wall by tenants who had long since departed. There was a communal bathroom that served whomever lived in the front three rooms. (Russ was smart enough to commandeer the master bedroom, which sported its own facilities). The bedrooms all branched off of the main room. And that was it.

So generally, when you arrived, you would join the party taking place in the main room and for the rest of your stay that was about as far as you needed to go, unless it was for a bathroom break or to get more beer from the kitchen. Music poured in an unending stream from the radio. Revelers floated in and out, some into the bedrooms for brief periods, but always returning to the central area.

It was, as one might expect, a complete mess. Ashtrays piled high with butts, similarly overflowing garbage cans, stacks of beer cans, piles of pizza boxes, empty fast-food bags, and bits and pieces of clothing (and underclothing) could be found everywhere. Props from the Rocky show were also stored there: wheelchairs, laser guns, feather dusters, steering wheels, copies of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, electric carving knives, hair dryers and costumes of all sorts, including what must have been the most elaborate collection of fishnet stockings in the lower forty-eight states.

Plus, there were the souvenirs people would find and bring to the Orphanage just for the hell of it. Supermarket carts, stand-up movie promotions, elaborate homemade bongs, blow-up dolls, broken TVs, chairs and tables of all kinds, lamps of every description, neon beer signs (some of which actually worked), car parts, sex toys, handcuffs, motorcycle helmets, a weight bench with various dumbbells and free-weights, stash boxes and a million different ashtrays and shot glasses...it was a veritable flea market of discarded goods. When prompted (or simply bored) we could often put these items to good, or at least
entertaining
, use.

The best part about the place was: Virtually nobody lived nearby. The Orphanage was surrounded on three sides by empty lots and the closest house was almost a block away. Federal Highway was about a hundred yards to the west, but the passing cars did
n’
t seem to mind the loud music. The Hollywood Bread Building was right across the street, but the entrance to the building faced the highway, so all you could see when you walked out the front door of the Orphanage was the outside of Bread Buildin
g’
s parking garage.

All in all, the Orphanage was perfectly situated to serve as Rocky Horror Cast Party Central. We could do whatever we wanted, to whomever we wanted at whatever time of the day or night suited our mood and we never, ever had the police show up to put an end to our fun.

Well, except that one time…but
I’
ll get to that.

After the excitement of that first weekend, the school days seemed to limp by. I was living for Friday again, but this time knowing exactly what I was missing made the wait even worse. I needed a distraction and, since my grades were the thing that would guarantee my continued work with the cast (per my deal with Mom), I decided to hit the books.

But my arrival back at school that Monday felt different somehow. There was something about having experienced my first couple of shows in the clutches of Rocky fever that had brightened my outlook in general. For example, I began, for the first time, to look around at the girls at school and see them not as unattainable creatures to be gazed upon from afar but, instead, as actual human beings that could be approached and, perhaps, enticed into going out with me.

Tha
t’
s not to say that I had
n’
t dated any girls until I was 16. Things were
n’
t
that
bad. But for some reason the entire process had been, up to now, an utter disaster. I would no sooner get some girl to agree to go out with me than I would begin convincing myself that the relationship was doomed. As self-fulfilling prophecies go, these were
amazingly
self-fulfilling. The brief relationships I had tried to kindle to life had suddenly burst into flames and had to be stomped out with flame-resistant combat boots. These failures had made me understandably gun-shy about dating.

Part of it was insecurity, of course. What teenage boy who is
not
on the varsity team does
n’
t suffer from insecurity? But there was also this nagging fear that there were not any girls my age—or close to it—that were interested in having an actual, physical relationship with a guy like me and, if they were, they were
already
in long-term relationships with guys like me and had been for some time.

And it was
n’
t just sex that I wanted. Not at all. I wanted to have a loving, genuine relationship with a girl, first and foremost. To form a kinship wherein we could open up to each other in a safe, affectionate environment. A close, emotional attachment that can only arise from a personal, respectful connection of souls.

In addition, I also wanted to have hours and hours of sweaty, torrid sexual congress with this girl until we fell back onto the bed, entirely spent.

You know. The whole package.

Until then, something like that actually happening to me seemed an impossibility.

But my acceptance into the Rocky fold (well, if not my complete
acceptance
, at least my
lack of rejection
) gave me the confidence to believe that, just maybe, somewhere out there was this mythical girl who was nice, sweet, interested in me and, when all was said and done...
willing
.

I thought of my own class, the junior girls of Zion Lutheran, and then immediately dismissed them. There was not a single girl in my own grade that I was the least bit interested in dating. Our constant contact with each other, day after day, class after class, had resulted in our finding each other repulsive and horrifying. The idea of attempting to be
intimate
with one of them was…unspeakable.

The senior class was similarly out of the question. They were
way
out of my league. I do
n’
t know what it was, specifically, but there was definitely something that happened to girls between their 16th and their 17th birthdays. At 16, they were girls. At 17, they were
women
. And I knew that, at my tender age, I was not even remotely ready to handle a woman. Not even close.

That left, by process of elimination, the sophomore class. My brothe
r’
s class, in fact. And while the tenth grade at Zion was
n’
t as teensy-tiny as mine was, Davi
d’
s class was
n’
t exactly Woodstock. He had thirty-three classmates, seventeen of whom were girls. Tha
t’
s all, folks.

Fortunately, the sophomore class (as compared to my grade full of shrieking harpies) was fairly jumping with good-looking, funny, sweet young things. Wha
t’
s more, I already knew most of them either through my brother or from the fact that, in a school that size, you could
n’
t help but know everyon
e’
s names. And the names of their brothers, sisters, pets and interestingly shaped birthmarks. W
e’
re talking about a
small school here, people
.

I spent the week, therefore, casting an eye around the sophomore class. There were a lot of possibilities, but most of the real knockouts were already dating upperclassmen. (Ai
n’
t it always the way?) Still, there were
n’
t all that many of
them
either, so that left plenty of unattached young ladies. And one in particular seemed responsive to the attention I was suddenly starting to pay.

Holly was a lot like the other kids at my school in that she came from privileged stock. Zion, being a private parochial school, was not cheap. If my Dad had
n’
t been footing the bill for my brother and me to attend, my mother would have had no choice but to enroll us in the local public school and pray that we, someday, with a great deal of luck, became fortunate enough to get promoted to Burger King manager.

Our comparative poverty occasionally made things awkward at the school for me and my brother but we usually did
n’
t let it bother us.

However, on the scale of affluence at the school (and it was a pretty big scale), Holly was a cut above the rest. Her parents were
n’
t merely rich. They were
loaded
. They lived in this huge mansion situated on the Intracoastal Waterway that ran through Pompano Beach, had a simply gigantic swimming pool in their backyard (with a hot tub attached) and a dock on the water where they could tie up their speedboat. No shit. A freaki
n’
speedboat
.