You Knew He Was a No-Good Kid

I’ve been iffy on the show Glee since the very beginning. I find the pacing wildly uneven, the characters flimsy, and the plot lines absurd. Every time I watch it, I find myself asking why. But then Tuesday rolls around, and I find myself wondering what my favorite character Brittany is up to, and I tune in again. This week, the kids were putting on a novelty version of The Rocky Horror Show . . . with changes in the lyrics I thought were fairly sacrilegious.

The exercise was homogenized good fun enough to make me think about my own Rocky Horror experiences.

My first exposure to The Rocky Horror Picture Show came in 1982, when I was eighteen and a sophomore in college and living in special-interest housing on campus. One of my best friends lived with a young woman, Barb, whose claim to fame in a dorm full of second-year students forbidden to have a car on campus was that she was a junior with her own vehicle. Everyone wanted her as a friend, but because of my friendship with her roommate, I was on the first tier calling shotgun.

One of the odd hobbies that Barb had was going out on Saturday nights to see Rocky Horror. It had only been running as a midnight movie for a handful of years at that point, but if it had gotten as far as the boonies of Tidewater, Virginia, it was already well on the way to becoming the mainstream Saturday-night activity for freaks everywhere. I’d vaguely heard of it, the first time I agreed to go; I knew it was the film where people shouted stuff and threw things and talked back to the movie screen.

The only place that showed the movie was in Newport News, which was a good forty-five minutes from campus; the venue was a mall cineplex with narrow theaters and a perpetual odor of rancid popcorn topping. At midnight, there were only about a dozen of us sitting in the seats for the show. Then the lights went down.

LIIIIIPS! LET THERE BE LIPS! shouted the audience. And then the show began, and I saw for the first time a movie that also suffers from absurd plot lines, flimsy characters, and wildly uneven pacing.

The point of Rocky Horror was never the film itself, occasionally engaging and tuneful though it can be. It’s all about the audience floor show. The first time I saw a man dressed up as Frank N. Furter, it was something of a revelation; it was the closest I’d ever seen to a drag queen in my young life. When I saw the Magenta and Brad and Janet lookalikes prancing around up in front of the screen, miming and dancing as the action unfolded up above, I completely understood the charm. There were more kids in the show than in the audience, but it was a community ritual that kept me coming back for more all through my sophomore and junior years.

I wasn’t so regular that I ever entertained notions of joining the floor show. I went often enough, however, to appreciate the people who put in so much time and effort in maintaining their costumes and makeup for the event every week, and would clap loudly for their clumsy and endearing performances. After a certain point, though, I went for the guy who played Eddie.

I always found the middle section of Rocky Horror a little bit on the slow side—particularly after midnight. One showing when I had to pee, I snuck out after the dinner scene and went to the men’s room, where I was standing at the urinal when floor-show Eddie walked in. The singer Meatloaf plays Eddie in the movie, of course; he has one brief scene and then is carved up and spends the rest of the film in a coffin. That gave floor-show Eddie remarkably little to do for most of the evening. “Hey,” he said to me, when he swaggered in wearing his leather jacked and slicked-back pompadour. The restroom of the mall theater was as grungy and decrepit as the rest of the joint. There were only two urinals, so he stood at the one next to mine, and unzipped.

“Hey,” I said back, nodding at him. I tend to be pee-shy when people are talking to me. His proximity wasn’t helping. His jacket had that sharp, musty scent of vintage clothing; his hair stunk of whatever it was he’d put in to keep it under control. Floor-show Eddie wasn’t a slice cut from the Meatloaf pan. Instead, he was even taller than I and about as lean. And, I couldn’t help but notice when his dick flopped out, he was bigger than me down there, too. I averted my eyes.

He didn’t seem to notice any discomfort on my part, as I stood there and attempted to pee while he chatted away. “I’ve seen you before,” he said. “You come here a lot. With that girl.”

He meant Barb. “Yeah.”

“She your girlfriend?”

“Nope. Just a friend. A friend with a car.”

“Got it.” He seemed to understand. “I don’t got a girlfriend either. Well, I got this girl I’m seeing, but . . . you know.”

He was looking directly at me. I recognized the evaluative stare. Since peeing wasn’t an option, I let my dick harden in my hand.

He inched back from the urinal a tiny bit. His own meaty dick was stiffening rapidly from between the dark denim opening of his jeans. When I didn’t flinch, or run away, he stepped back a little more. His cock had to be a good nine inches, and very thick. I angled my body so that I faced him, showing off my dick as well. He looked it over and nodded. “You want some of this?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

I nodded.

I ended up sitting down in the stall on the toilet. He came in and fed me his dick, sliding it back and forth between my hungry lips. He was so girthy that I didn’t think I’d be able to swallow it for long; my jaw ached from the effort of accommodating him. Luckily he didn’t last long. His hands grasped the tops of the metal door frame as he thrust in and out, fucking my mouth with a lust-driven vengeance. Spurts of semen clogged my throat. His hands grasped at the back of my neck, holding me on his dick as if he thought I might try to escape. A little longer he held me there, until I swallowed.

And then he was done. He buckled and zipped, then nodded at me. “All right. Thanks man.” I waited a couple of minutes after he’d exited before I slipped back into my seat, just in time for “Rose Tint My World.”

That night started a little ritual that seemed as inevitable as the squirt guns or the toast. Every time I’d hit the theater, I’d leave my seat after the dinner scene and blow floor show Eddie, then return from my assignation and finish out the rest of the movie. We never discussed getting together for more. I never learned the guy’s name. Thinking of him as Eddie suited me fine. In the floor show, he was a low-down cheap little punk—with a tasty dick.

It wasn’t until years and years later, when I bought the DVD of the movie and watched it again that I got to the “Planet Schmanet” sequence and had absolutely no memory of it. “Was this in the original movie?” I asked people who’d know. They all assured me it was.

Then I realized I’d probably never seen it because while Brad and Janet are accusing Frank of being a hot dog, I was chowing down every week at my own personal restroom concession stand.