Confessions of a Transylvanian (25 page)

Having performed in a principal role did not, of course, automatically earn me a membership into the “elite” club of Rocky royalty, the Clique itself. I no longer felt the need to genuflect before them but I was
n’
t exactly issued a membership card, either. Not yet.

Breaking through that glass ceiling and rising to the level of my social betters was going to take a lot of time and work. But I was on my way.

Part of the reason for the exclusivity of the Clique was that the ex-Hollywoodians had gone through so much together before setting up camp at the Ultravision. Years of drama, upheaval, squabbling, recrimination, bitterness, forgiveness and, ultimately, redemption. They were like a family, albeit a wildly diverse, unpredictably volatile family. Maybe they developed these bonds because, for many of them, their own flesh-and-blood relatives were so horrifying. Tough to say.

At any rate, no one in the cast took this bond more seriously than Ron. Though he never talked much about his life before Rocky, I had picked up on the fact that Ro
n’
s childhood had
n’
t exactly been a carefree, “Leave It to Beaver” existence. As a result, when you bonded with Ron and became a member of his extended family, you
stayed
bonded. His relationships with young ladies might have resembled a carousel (with all the hopping on and hopping off), but if you were family, you were family for life.

Ron had formed one such attachment with Donny. I often heard them refer to each other as brothers and I knew there was a deep trust and affection between them. I never knew exactly where it had originated until one night when Ron was finishing up after the show, peeling off his Brad gear and climbing back into his civvies. As a finishing touch before heading out the door, Ron slipped on a dangly ruby earring and took a moment to admire it in the mirror. Donny spotted him doing this and remarked:

“I can give you another one of those if you like.”

Ron grinned and shook his head. “Thanks, brother, but one is enough for now. If I need another,
I’
ll let you know.”

Donny shrugged his massive shoulders and continued on his way. “Anytime. Give me a holler.”

When he was gone, I could
n’
t help but ask. “Donny pierced your ear?”

Ron smiled again. “Yeah. About a month or so before we came to the Ultravision. I had mentioned that I wanted to get it done during a cast meeting and Donny jumped at the chance. Said h
e’
d done it dozens of times and it was perfectly safe so I thought,
‘
Why not
?’
So one night w
e’
re at the Orphanage and Donny walks over to me carrying a bowl of ice cubes and this huge pin. Looked like a fucking knitting needle to me and he says,
‘
You ready
?’

“I do
n’
t know if I was or not but I said,
‘
Sure
.’
He sits down in front of me and puts a little stud into my hand.
‘
Once I get the hole poked
,’
he says,
‘
put that in and keep it clean. Okay? You do
n’
t want an infection
.’
I say,
‘
Fine
,’
and he gets to work. He holds the ice up to my lobe and numbs it down for a while. Then he holds my head steady, grabs the pin and gets this intense look on his face. Before I knew it, I feel this sharp pain, just for a second…and i
t’
s done. Donny takes the stud and slips it in, cleans up what little bit of blood there was and that was it.

“Then he leans back with this big smile on his face.
‘
Not bad, huh
?’
he says. And I say,
‘
No, not bad at all. Thanks a lot
.’
And he goes,
‘
No need to thank me. I always wanted to do that for someone. Now I have. It was pretty cool
.’

“I could
n’
t believe it. Fucker had never pierced an ear before in his life and decides to experiment on
me
. Son of a bitch,” he said fondly. (It is
n’
t easy to say “son of a bitch” fondly, but Ron managed it.) He took another look in the mirror and again admired the little jewel dangling from his lobe. “Nice, though. Is
n’
t it?”

Now, if I had discovered that someone was practicing their lobe-piercing skills on
me
without my full knowledge of their amateur status, I would have lost my marbles. I told this to Ron and he did
n’
t seem surprised by my reaction. Neither, however, did he regret his decision.

“It all worked out. He never would have hurt me. H
e’
s my brother. My
morbid
brother, but still.”

“What do you mean,
‘
morbi
d’
?” I asked.

“Well…it kinda goes without saying that Donny has a sort of twisted sense of humor, right? The stuff he finds funny, it is
n’
t what
everyone
would find funny. So this one time, w
e’
re driving to the show in Hollywood and Donny sees this…
thing
dead in the road. I do
n’
t know what it was. Possum. Kangaroo. Who knows? But it was bizarre and very, very dead. So Donny pulls the car over, gets out and tosses this thing in his trunk.”

“He
what
? He put the roadkill in his
car
?”

“Yeah. Decided he wanted to show it off to the cast. Kept it there all night. Showed people after the show. Made
‘
em guess what it was. It was totally sick. He got rid of it the next day of course, but…” Ron leaned over to me, “not before paying a visit to Mar
k’
s house. The night before, see, Mark refused to look in the trunk. Did
n’
t want to see it. So that next day, Donny picks me up and we drive over to Mar
k’
s house. Mark is in the backyard, so Donny and I sneak into his bedroom. After a minute or so, we come out on the back porch and tell Mark we left a little something on his bed.

“Mark goes white as a sheet and tear-asses into the house. A couple of seconds later we hear this
screech
.” By now Ron is laughing, remembering Mar
k’
s reaction. “He comes out of the house…h
e’
s screaming like a girl, freaking out.” Tears are streaming down Ro
n’
s face, h
e’
s laughing so hard. “What happened was—Donny bought an old coonskin cap on the way to pick me up and we brought it over to Mar
k’
s. Donny puts this thing under Mar
k’
s pillow with the tail hanging out…”

Suddenly I can picture it. Mark walking into his room, seeing the tail protruding from under his pillow, imagining the
rest
of this creature.

“We could
n’
t get him to calm down for about an hour, even after we told him the truth.
Man
, that was great.” Ron smiled, recalling the charming little roadkill joke they shared. “Donn
y’
s been my morbid brother ever since.”

One morning, a week or so afterward, I found myself standing outside of the Orphanage looking up at the Hollywood Bread Building. Ron was sitting on the porch behind me, enjoying the last of an impromptu breakfast h
e’
d conjured up in the kitchen a few minutes earlier, and he seemed to sense that I was in the mood for trouble. Being the Maitr
e’
d of Mischief himself, he was naturally disposed to lend a hand.

“Wha
t’
s on your mind, Jack?”

I wanted to
do
something. Up to this point, I felt as if
I’
d started to fit in with the cast pretty well.
I’
d taken over Dr. Scott completely and felt that I was slowly becoming one of the gang. But I had
n’
t yet done anything
distinctive
.

And I was anxious for that to change.

Right then, looking up at the six stories of the Hollywood Bread Building parking garage across the street, it hit me. The perfect plan.

“
I’
m thinking,” I said very casually, “of walking up the stairs to the top of the parking garage and just tossing all my clothes off. How does that sound?”

I turned to Ron with what I considered to be a wicked grin and hoped to see him with his jaw on the floor, flabbergasted by my audacious idea.

He was singularly unimpressed.

“I
t’
s been done,” he said, sipping his orange juice.

“What?” I could hardly believe it. My idea of climbing up the stairs of a parking garage in downtown Hollywood and tossing off all my garments...was
unoriginal
?

“Oh yeah. Donny did it about three months ago,” he paused, letting that image sink in. “It was pretty memorable.”

I was stunned. Deflated. Jesus, was there anything this cast had
n’
t done?

I turned my attention back to the parking structure. There had to be
something
I could do that was actually unique and memorable. But what?

It was about this time that I noticed something about the structure itself. It was, like most parking garages, made up of slanted ramps that corkscrewed up to the top and back down again. Also, it was open on the sides, with slits in the wall to allow natural sunlight inside (thus, I presume, cutting down on having to light the thing from the inside all day). Finally, there were drainage pipes that ran out of each level, jutting out a foot or so from the building near the bottom of each ramp.

These pipes, it suddenly occurred to me, looked remarkably like hand-holds.

Before I could even think about reconsidering, I turned to Ron and said, “Oh, yeah? I betcha Donny did
n’
t climb up the
outside
of the building.”

At last, I got the reaction from Ron that I had been looking for. His eyes lit up like a little ki
d’
s on Christmas morning.

“No,” Ron replied. “No he did not.”

Without another word, I crossed the street, gazed up at the mountain to be conquered and, getting a good grip on the drainage pipe, started my ascent. Ron, smiling from ear to ear, was right on my heels.

It was
n’
t really all that difficult, the climb itself. The place was practically
begging
to be scaled. The stucco exterior of the building was a bit of a pain (the white powder came off on your hands and clothes at the merest touch), but the pipes, the slits in the wall and the ledges of the ramps themselves made the place into a virtual ladder.

The only bad thing was that after a flight or two, you quite suddenly found yourself about thirty feet in the air with nothing between you and the ground but yo
u
r own inflated sense of self.

In other words, the idiocy of this little adventure hit me at about level three.

By that time, though, a small crowd had gathered outside the Orphanage. Word had spread quickly and everyone inside had ventured out, wanting to see the little Spider-Men as we made our climb up Mount Bread Building.

Ron and I never let on to each other that we were in the least bit frightened by what we were doing. Perhaps Ron was
n’
t scared at all. But by the time we got to the top of level four, I was seriously questioning my own sanity. What I was doing was certainly going to be remembered, but I was hoping that it would be remembered as “Jack and Ro
n’
s Amazing Climb” and not “The Day Those Two Fucking Morons Fell to Their Deaths.”

The higher we got, the more enthusiastic the crowd below became. I looked down at one point and saw Andrea, Sunday and Tracey gazing up at us with big smiles on their faces and I became inspired. Only twenty feet more to go and w
e’
d be living legends.

Then, all at once, the cheering stopped. It took me a second or two for this to register and for a heart-stopping moment I feared that Ron had fallen. Holding my breath, I turned to look down.

Ron was still clinging to the wall below me, safe and sound. But the crowd of people outside the Orphanage was gone.

It had been replaced by three police cars.