(Say It! Starts with “P”, rhymes with “Asian”) —pation.

The Hollywood Theater in Dormont was one of those grand old dames that you sometimes get in small towns, from the days when it wasn’t odd to find a cinema right in the middle of a block of businesses. She wasn’t big, but she still had a bit of that faded elegance that makes you think about walking over her plush red carpets while queuing up to see Casablanca or something with Gene Kelley and Judy Garland. You could almost feel the weight of history while looking at hand crafted plaster molding that predated the modern cineplexes by at least twenty years. Sure, she’d seen better days, but the old girl was still beautiful in the same way that Jane Wyman or Liza Minnelli were. Then you pack that gorgeous old building with a bunch of goth kids, geeks, and general weirdos and it takes on a whole new life. One of the last true silver screens in the Pittsburgh metro area, it had also been the home of the Junior Chamber Of Commerce Players since the early ‘80s.

The JCCP was (still is, matter of fact) the Pittsburgh chapter of the Rocky Horror Fanclub. And my housemate at the time was its president. Joe (yes, the same Joe that would end up marrying my on-again off-again girlfriend Jess a few years later) was just about the second straightest guy I ever saw wear lingerie (the straightest guy I ever saw in lingerie was also a member, jock by the name of Cody who got suckered into joining by his girlfriend Casey who was as queer as a three dollar bill), but he was dedicated to it in a way that bordered on religion, paying fealty to Tim Curry almost as much as he did the true head of his personal pantheon, Bruce Dickinson. Well, as I mentioned elsewhere I was having an affair with his fiancé Cindy, and between the two of them they dragged me to The Hollywood.

Now I’d lost my Rocky Virginity a couple years back when I was a Freshman at Pitt and a bunch of us had attended, but that had been the last time I’d set foot through those doors. Between those two points a lot of shit happened to me, not the least of which was accepting my bisexuality (these days I call myself pansexual but back then I’d never heard the term, nor did I understand the fine distinctions between sex and gender; for all that I’ve learned over the years I’m still a little vague on it). I’d played around with crossdressing a bit over the years, and I used to look damn good in a dress, so I figured, fuck it. A few weeks into attending they needed a Brad for the cast, and from then on I was in.

We actually had groupies. Seriously, there were people who came just to watch our performances. Jess and I actually met because of Rocky. But that’s neither here nor there, and is a whole nother story for a different time.

We’re talking about Bob. He was a shy kid, just barely 18, with the kind of coltish body that’s usually associated with prepubescent girls. Soft and angular at the same time. The first time I saw him, he was cosplaying as Columbia, having dyed his hair fire engine red and styled it into a pixie cut instead of his usual (I would later learn) sort of shaggy mane. My first impression was something akin to “Damn, nice ass.” I’ve sorta always had a thing for girls with short hair. I’ve talked in detail about it before so that’s all I’ll say now. But what I perceived as a skinny hot chick with short hair and a bubble butt dressed up in gold sequins was pushing a few of my buttons, not gonna lie.

It was about a month into my tenure on the cast, and that night I happened to be playing Eddie. Throughout my time there I rotated between Brad (Asshole!), Rocky (Bullwinkle!), and Eddie (Like a bat out of hell, a greaser from the freezer!), depending on other cast mates availability. All three roles had their advantages as far as I could see… as Brad I got to kiss whoever was Janet (usually Cindy managed to get herself that slot when I was) and get groped by Frank (one night Casey actually motorboated my balls intentionally just to get my reaction, and I like to think was pleasantly surprised by what came up). As Rocky I got to carry around and grope Frank (I got Casey back by fingering her) and paw at Janet’s boobs (again, usually Cindy, but Rebecca sometimes took the role and that was nice too because she really liked the size of my hands). And as Eddie… well as Eddie I got to dance and make out with Columbia (ALL the girls liked when I was Eddie because I was the only guy who could actually do the lifts during the dance number; I’ve always been pretty strong). To say that the cast paid very little attention to propriety on Saturday nights would be a bit of an understatement. I guess what I’m trying to say is that while the cast was mostly made up of nominally cis-het trad couples and a handful of sundry freaks, somehow the magic of the performance got all our blood up and we let our late teen/early twenties hormones run wild. It was a rush like nothing I’ve felt since, and the music and the movie still get my engine running (when Duluth Playhouse did a Halloween screening, I ended up taking my wife home and fucking her **** afterwards). So anyway, I was playing Eddie.

Eddie is a short part. One dance number and a brief run during another song, so I had a shitload of downtime. So after I finished sloppily making out with Rebecca (in front of her boyfriend, who swore he actually enjoyed it) and getting brutally murdered by Casey (while her boyfriend stood there in a pair of gold lamé boxers), I dragged Big T outside with me. T was another of my housemates (there were four of us living in that two bedroom apartment, because we hadn’t acquired Nick yet). T is an entire story on his own, but for now there are three things you need to know about him. The first is that he had a rare congenital connective tissue disorder called Marfan Syndrome. This meant that he was basically living on borrowed time, and generally lived the most hedonistic lifestyle that he could. The second thing is that he and a couple other guys (including half-Asian Steve, who I’ve spoken about previously) worked security for the show. The third thing is that he always had the best weed. So he sparks up a J and we smoke up pretty good. Pot has always bored me as far as getting high goes but pills had never been my bag, I wouldn’t be legal to drink for another few months and I’d sworn off speed four years prior when it almost killed me. Tripping was my primary choice most of the time, but LSD is a whole experience that takes up a full day, so pot it was.

So we’re getting blazed and I sort of off-handedly mention the hot chick dressed as Columbia. Dude breaks into the giggles, which wasn’t all that strange when he was high, and tells me that this is an Aerosmith moment.

“The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

He keeps giggling. Lemme tell ya, seeing a scruffy looking guy over six foot eight giggling like a lunatic when you yourself are high enough to hunt ducks with a rake is about the most hilarious thing in the world. Eventually he chills out enough to say, “Dude looks like a lady.” Then he bursts into more peals of laughter.

Now I’m pretty well baked at this point, so my brain is working on dream logic more than anything else. “Doesn’t matter to me. Still hot.”

So he concedes that point. T is bi, but he tends to swing more toward bears than twinks. He even made a couple passes at me but he’s so far from my type that it was never gonna happen, and we both knew it. Most of the time when a friend hits on you it sort of changes the dynamic, but that never really happened with us. At that point I considered myself a solid 2 on the Kinsey Scale (which is to say I preferred women), but at that point I’d only seen a few non-Queen crossdressers and seeing someone who had actually put in the effort and not gone over the top with full camp drag was a novelty for me. Dude really did look like a lady. And a pretty one at that. So, high enough to fold the dishes, I decided to see what would happen if I approached them (we’d also never heard the term nonbinary in any context other than hypothetical computers, and ‘they/them’ pronouns weren’t really a thing then. Shit, I’m so ADD my pronouns are ‘where’ and ‘what’).

By that point I was really fuckin’ high (T really did get the best weed), and I’d learned by that point that if I shot my shot that night it’d go down in flames. Despite the initial fire in my pants I held back in a rare case of self-awareness. Fuck, I didn’t even get a name that night. While I’ve had a number of drunken one-night stands over the years, I have never successfully hooked up with someone while blazed, and I was absolutely certain that I wanted a piece of that. No, that’d have to wait a week. Instead I went home and round about three AM I wound up taking advantage of myself, stroking to the idea of that nicely rounded bottom in gold sequins.