Sweet Transvestite

I’ve previously told some barely fictional accounts of my misspent youth in the 90s in Pittsburgh. For the previous two installments check out I Put A Spell On You and Baron Munchausen, the Shaggy Dog, and the Little Green Men. As stated elsewhere, this is a fictionalized version of events that I lived through. Some of them may be stripped down, some may be elaborated upon for effect, and some of them may have happened in a different order and timeframe than what I’m laying down here, but all of them happened, or rather I recall all of them happening. I put that disclaimer on because I spent most of the 90s in a bit of a haze of marijuana, various psychedelics, a handful of uppers, and a whole lot of beer and whiskey. I’m still missing about eight months in 1996. Anyway, enough preamble. Let’s take you to a nice little karaoke pub in Superior, Wisconsin where your humble narrator is huddled over a drink at the bar.

Oh, hey. How ya doin’ kid? I ain’t seen you since the night you asked me about the aliens. No, I never forget a face, doesn’t matter that I was blue-blind paralytic shithammered. I can’t remember your name, not even fuckin’ sure you told me. But I never forget a face, and yours reminds me of someone I knew a long time ago. Way back before I moved to this frozen shithole. You know, there’s times when I wonder why I decided to settle down in a place that’s not only uncomfortably cold seventy percent of the year but actively hostile to human life…

There I go rambling again. So yeah… the guy you remind me of. Well, I say ‘guy’ but…

Robin “Bob” Lawrence wasn’t a big man. He was about my height, maybe a little taller than my 5’6 3/4”. Yes, the three quarters is important. I know I’m short. I’ll take every little bit I can get. But we ain’t talkin’ about me, we’re talkin’ about Bob. He was a skinny little gink. I know I’m carrying a bit of a spare tire, but that comes to everyone when you’re lookin’ at the wrong side of fifty; back then the fat wasn’t there and I was still a big guy. When? Why, summer of ‘96 of course. Yes, the summer I spent higher than giraffe pussy. Do you want me to go over that old story again or do you wanna hear this one? Jesus, some people’s kids…

I say you remind me of Bob, and that’s because you’ve got similar facial features. Narrow angular face, little bitty button nose, big eyes, and a kinda small mouth. Yes I said that about your nose. Look in a fuckin’ mirror. What the Japanese would call Bishōnen, sort of like David Bowie. His hair was a little longer than yours, but hell, it was the ‘90s. Bob wasn’t one of the guys I dropped out of Pitt with; I met him later. Think it was when I was doing Rocky.

I know there’s nothing like it around here, so let me explain a bit about the Rocky Horror phenomenon. When the movie was released it was a complete flop. People weren’t ready for it. If Richard O’Brien released it now, it’d break box office records, but the western world was anything but ‘woke’ when it came out. Same year I was born. ‘75. See, the portrayal of crossdressers and homosexuals shocked the fuck out of the normies, and when it bombed on its initial run (half of the initial test audience walked out) 20th Century Fox had no idea what to do with it. Well studio execs hate wasting money as much as Donald Trump hates poor people, so coming up about $400 large short of the movie’s budget ($1.4 million, or less than Tim Curry would make for three speaking lines today) in its first year they decided to put it out to pasture on the midnight circuit.

Let’s just say it worked, cause back then the counter-culture was pretty hardcore and regardless of how campy it was, or maybe even because of it, the midnight showings drew out all the freaks and oddballs and pretty soon people were showing up every Saturday night to watch. Then they started talking back to the movie. At first it started as a way for a couple people to make each other laugh but it caught on with all the regulars, and soon everyone was doing callbacks. Then people started showing up in costume, which eventually led to a group in costume acting out the film on stage in front of the screen. One theater doing midnight showings became fifty, which became 280, and the numbers kept growing. In 1975 the film made $1.2 million between the US and overseas. In 1976 it made $14.7 million. That seems like small potatoes today when movies are bringing more than that in on opening weekend, but then you adjust for inflation. Today, that second year (which if it were released now would never have even happened) would be worth just north of $83 million. On top of that, the film has literally never been out of circulation, and technically is still in its initial limited release to this day. This movie has been running continuously in theaters for fifty fucking years, and has netted, after adjusting for inflation, over $620 million dollars. And now that I’ve given you a history lesson that you didn’t ask for and didn’t want, let me get back to the story.