by Matthue Roth
And then we moved past the line of people, and straight into the theater.
I tugged on Bethany’s sleeve. It was loose and bulky. She was wearing a trench coat straight out of the sleazy-old-man rulebook.
“Don’t we have to get tickets?” I whispered. A hint of desperation sprung into my voice. I was quickly falling behind everyone else. “What are we doing?”
“Oh, we don’t need tickets,” she replied breezily. “Haven’t you figured that part out yet? We’re the show.”
I turned around, taking one last glance at the line of people before Roderick yanked me in. Hovering above them in the sky like a big shining UFO was the marquee, with four words spelled out in blood-red capital letters:
ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW
I flashed back: That night that never happened, me in heavy plastic glasses with my hair combed into Vintage Nerd style, next to Larissa in a white satin slip, the two of us deep in our roles, pretending to be cozy in love. Mitch playing the mad bare-chested monster. We never made it that far, and I thought now, could we ever? Did any of us feel as comfortable in our bodies as Roderick and Carrie; could any of us have pulled off the moves, the attitude?
Backstage, everyone was all business. Carrie directed two huge, burly shaved-head guys with backdrops and props. Roderick craned over the shoulder of this slight girl who sat at her computer, arguing with him over the pre-show soundtrack. Little Jen stuffed more bags with props, the same props that were undoubtedly in mine: Bags of rice, newspapers, rubber gloves, a roll of toilet paper, pieces of toast—the latter to throw during the scene where Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the cross-dressing sex-crazed alien, offers a toast. I knew this. I’d learned it all with Larissa.
Now, I suppose, I was moving into the big time.
*
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but chances are that you’ve never seen it like this. It’s a movie about a naïve young Middle American girl and guy who stumble upon a house full of aliens with an incredibly bizarre wardrobe and even more bizarre sexual practices.
Anyway, it’s a movie, and you can watch it at home or whatever, but the real experience can only be obtained watching it in a theater. There are actors playing all the parts live, in front of you, as the movie’s playing, and the audience shouts lines out loud—like, one character says, “Oh, I was saving myself!” and then everybody yells at her, “For a rainy day?!”
So that’s one level of the real Rocky Horror experience. Even more intense than that, however, is watching your friends—or people you’ve gotten to know fairly well in a conventional, modern-day high school type of setting, transformed into lusty Transylvanians in tight-fitting clothes, vamping around and lip-synching and groping each other onstage.
The lights went dark, except for a spotlight. The curtains came up. Little Jen stood at the front of the theater, perched in a seductive pose. The film screen towered behind her.
I sat in the front row, alone, nervous and terrified.
The rest of the row was empty. I’d only been to Rocky Horror once before, with Larissa. I didn’t have all the call-and-response lines memorized. What if they put me on the spot and single me out? What if they embarrassed me in front of the entire theater?
It didn’t take long to find out.
A pair of giant lips, shockingly red, splashed across the movie screen. A single lascivious lick, and they started to sing. At the center of the stage, Little Jen mouthed along.
From the first line she was electric. Her entire face contorted with each word, acting the song, owning it. Her body unfurled into an even more lurid, erotic dance. Before the first verse was over, she’d jumped down from the raised platform and made her way into the audience. And then she was going for me.
“Science fiction,” she fake-belted out, planting her hands on my armrests and throwing her head back, her mouth wide open as she sang. “Double feature,” she flung herself forward, way too close to me, jiggling her cleavage in my face. She was an excellent performer. To everyone else, I must have looked like the luckiest guy alive. Up close, though, she grinned, wide-toothed, teasing me, whispering friendly taunts at me the whole time.
I wasn’t watching her body. I was looking at her eyes. And the weird thing was, inside her eyes—behind her confident body, where every move was purposeful and impeccable, she looked trembley, unsure, not risque but risky—she didn’t know what she was doing. She was trying this out. Just like I was in an uneasy dance with my body, as it told me what it wanted and I tried to balance that with my out-of-control feelings, she was feeling out the wild surges within herself. She thrust her torso one way and the other, stuck a smooth bare shiny leg in the air, high-heel propped on an armrest, shook her breasts in my face like she wasn’t sure what they would do, if they would actually jiggle, or what my reaction would be—she looked at me and behind her confident body Little Jen was as bewildered as I was, and just as confused.
She was still working things out. She was still getting used to being her.
“Wow,” I whispered.
“Wow yourself,” she said into my ear, and everyone probably thought she was giving my earlobe a tongue bath. “What do you think? Next week, maybe I’ll lend you this costume and we can switch?”
She unhooked her leg from my armrest, pulled away, and strutted her way down to the fourth or fifth row. She walked with one high kick after another, sending a leg over the head of each person as she passed them. Appreciative cheers came from the crowd. I watched her work the audience. She had them in the palm of her hand—this girl who, the first day I met her, treated me hostilely for checking her out a second too long—and I marveled at the difference. Now, she was really showing off. But now she was the one in control of how she was doing it.
The number ended, and the show began for real. Bethany and this guy I didn’t know were the innocent couple. Usually Bethany was so snarky, and everything she said was ironic or had a double entendre attached. That made it even stranger to see her so doe-eyed and eager, cowering on her stage boyfriend’s arm, nodding gullibly at everything he said.
Then Roderick came on, as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, and the whole atmosphere of the place changed. The way he strutted out on his stiletto heels, digging them into the theater’s trim carpet. He commanded attention. He peeled off each rubber glove, snapped it with no small amount of suggestiveness. Everyone went crazy for him. And then he tsked, once, and everyone fell silent.
He was so good. He was Roderick, harmless, friendly, perpetually back-slapping and ego-boosting, and yet, now, he wasn’t. Carrie, Little Jen, and the others fawned over him. Bethany and that guy she was with quaked in fear of him.
The others made eye contact with me, checked in sporadically to see if I was doing okay. (I always flashed them a smile or a thumbs-up in reply.) But Roderick would never. Breaking character, I got the feeling, would be against his religion.
And he got the others into it, too. When I saw Carrie scrape her nails across his bare chest, I admit it, I got jealous. He was easy for them to flirt and act and play with because they knew it wasn’t real. He wasn’t a straight guy, he wasn’t even Roderick—he was Frank-N-Furter. And neither Frank-N-Furter nor Roderick would take their flirtation any further than they wanted to take it.
I was so enraptured, so caught up in the spectacle of the show, that I didn’t notice somebody slip into the seat next to me.
A hand touched my wrist on the underside. The soft part.
I yeeped.
Fortunately, my cry came at the exact same part where everyone onstage was doing the Time Warp. The music was blasting, rendering the poor unequipped theater stereo system as a huge wall of fuzz. Nobody heard.
Nobody, that is, except the person who touched me.
Two marble-dark eyes stared at me in disbelief. For my own part, I pulled back from them in the chair, maybe to get a better view, maybe just because, at that moment, I felt more secure and at home in this cold, dark, and unknown the
ater than I did looking at the person standing beside me.
“Arty,” said Larissa, “what in the world are you doing here?”
larissa
“Arty,” she said again, “how did you get here? Don’t you realize how late it is?”
At first I thought she sounded worried about me. Then I realized she was fiery mad.
“I—I came with my friends,” I stammered. “I have all these new friends.”
“Really? Then where are they?” She seemed heated up, and I didn’t understand. “Please, Arthur, tell me you didn’t follow me here.”
“You’re out late, too,” I pointed out to her.
I stammered through three varieties of trying to tell her that my new acquaintances were actually the performers, the freaks and the weirdos and the people who she was paying to see, but I tried to say all three things at once and none of them came out.
“I just…” I paused. I swallowed—not just my phlegm, but everything I was going to say, the explanation, the excuses. “I have other friends now. I don’t need you, Larissa. Not any more.”
“Is that what we were about to you? Just that we needed each other for something at some point, and now we’re through using each other?”
“Maybe you should tell me,” I said, nearly shouting. I wasn’t talking higher, though. It was just, the words that were coming out of my mouth were bigger, louder words. “You’re the one who first decided we were finished.”
“I didn’t say we were finished!” she erupted. “I just couldn’t take you being more traumatized than I was about getting raped!”
We both stopped talking. Neither of us realized until that very moment just how loud we had gotten.
Larissa cut herself off abruptly. Everyone in the theater was staring at us. The people right behind us. The people way behind us. The actors.
My friends.
Above our heads, the movie played on. The film was still loud, but, with the audience focused elsewhere, it felt curiously muted.
“Excuse me,” said a man in an aisle seat—clearly a tourist; he was wearing a shirt that said I Love Philadelphia, which no one from Philadelphia would ever wear—“is this a part of the show?”
“No,” said Larissa.
“No,” said one of the actors, a beefy three-quarters-naked blond guy whose chest Carrie’d been rubbing oil all over before the show.
And I felt the earth tilt and split; I felt the page end, and the panel cut off, and I was standing in the blank white margins, the space where nothing was supposed to exist, and I could tell I was out of my element. I was not supposed to be there. My new friends, the Yards kids, the people who knew where I was coming from, were on one side. Larissa and the rest of the audience, the safe place, the place I’d tried to exist and failed, were on the other. And I was stuck in the middle. In the no man’s land.
I reached out in the dark, grabbed Larissa’s wrist. She was wearing a long-sleeve shirt but it ended early, and my fingers, when they went to her, touched bare skin. Her skin felt hot and unfamiliar.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Not to Larissa, but to the whole audience. I was only speaking at a normal volume, but my words carried throughout the room. “We’ll step outside.”
Carrie, still in position next to the nerdy guy, and still in character, took a single step toward me. In the unspoken language of new friendship that we were only just learning to speak to each other in, she was asking if I needed her to come.
I smiled back sadly. Thanks, but no thanks.
I’ve got to do this alone.
*
Outside the night had turned bitter. It was below zero for sure. Zero was supposed to be freezing, and our bodies were mostly water, so how was it possible that people standing outside didn’t literally freeze into fleshy ice cubes? I reached inside my mind and pushed the theoretical chemistry aside. Larissa was in front of me, in a thin jacket and leggings. It was impossible to see what was under that. Her hair whipped all around her head in the wind, giving her a distinct resemblance to Cousin Itt. She was composed and a mess and unnervingly beautiful.
“Is that all you’re wearing?” I said. “Do you want my jacket?”
“What are you, my mother?” She half-laughed, half-coughed. “I’m fine. I thought we were just going straight into the movie, that I wouldn’t need one.”
“But the line took like an hour—”
“We were running late,” she said. “Do you really want to talk about this?”
“I guess not.”
“Should we walk?” she said.
We walked.
The buildings moved by fast in the background. The air was cold on my face. I could only imagine what it was doing to her skin. We rounded the border between the slummy outer downtown, where the theater was, and the sleek new buildings on the other side of Broad Street. It was like we’d stepped out of a post-apocalyptic future and into the ’80s. I wondered how far away from the theater we’d let ourselves wander. I felt too nervous to break the silence, and so I waited for her to.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t really think you were stalking me.”
“That’s okay. A month ago, it probably would’ve been true.”
“You weren’t kidding, huh, Arthur? You really did come here with the performers.”
I shrugged, unsure how I was supposed to act—proud? chill? nyah nyah nah nyah-nah? “They’re all from the Yards, can you believe it?”
“I always said the Yards had hidden treasures.”
“You always agreed with me that it was a rotting, maggoty hellmouth!”
“Okay, um, yeah, okay, maybe. That’s true. But look at you! Ten-fifteen on a Saturday night and you’re downtown, in the center of the city. Arty, you’re definitely doing something right.”
“You’re here, too,” I pointed out charitably.
“Yes, I am. I’m here with—well, you saw them. The entire population of Bridleton High. The portion that isn’t too afraid to venture to the city, anyway.”
“Nice of you to invite me.”
“Nice of you to ever call.”
She had me there.
“So are we finished?”
Until she replied, I wasn’t sure which of us had said that, her or me. No, it wasn’t me. It was the aching, quaking fear inside me, which had grown so big and so distinct that it was practically its own artificial intelligence.
“Sometimes I think of friendships like animals,” she said. “We’re like bears, or fish. Sometimes we’re running around the forest, we’re doing everything together, and then sometimes we need to, like, hibernate.”
“Is that what we’re doing now?” My heart and stomach both leapt. “So we’re going to sleep through the winter and wake up...together?”
She rubbed her lips together and tasted the cold. A million smells floated in the air, alcohol and people’s stinky perfume and French fries.
She said, “There was a time when we thought absolutely no one would ever understand us except each other. Do you remember?”
Did I remember? I could think of nothing else. Some days I had to force myself not to think my thoughts in terms of what-am-I-going-to-say-about-this-to-Larissa. Right now, being so close to her, I was trembling. It was all I could do to not hug her and never let go. My entire body was throbbing with her-ness.
But: what did she understand about me, anyway? She must have known how much I’d needed to talk to her these past months. If she’d known how bad it was tearing me apart—I mean, if she’d really known, really felt it—she would have called me in the flash of a second.
I tried to say something, but my throat was too close to crying. I just nodded and hope it didn’t seem too loser-esque.
I felt numb. I felt horrible. I hadn’t even thought to ask her how she was, what was she doing with her life. As if right now I knew anything, anything about her. I nodded dumbly and let the cold take over.
“I think I’ve learned not to invest all of myself in one person,” s
he said. “I think that before I do that, I need to figure out who exactly I am.”
“What do you mean? You’ve got so much going on. You’re more intense than literally anyone else I know.”
“Maybe that’s it. I don’t want to be intense. I don’t want to be the girl Mitch raped or the girl who Damon wants to date or the girl who might be in love with you. I want to be a lot of things. But for now, I just want to lie low and figure out what I already am.”
“I don’t ever want you to stop being who you already are,” I said. “We had so many plans. We were going to take over the whole world.”
“We will, Arty,” she said. “But I think everybody does that, sooner or later.”
“I’m sorry I abandoned you, Larissa. I’m sorry I—that I cared more about how what happened affected me than how it affected you.”
