Confessions of a Transylvanian (6 page)

I could
n’
t just stare at the walls, but…what to do? Simple: I listened to the album. Again. By then, of course, I could sing along to every song from beginning to end and I did
n’
t even have to think about them anymore. In fact, the only ones I didn
’
t know letter-perfect were the songs where the lyrics are completely unintelligible.

“Hot Patootie” is a great example of this. Meatloaf sings the hell out of the song, but it was months before I knew what in the world he was saying. A sample of one of these indecipherable lyrics goes, in reality, like this:

My head used to swim from the perfume I smelled,

My hands kind of fumbled with her white plastic belt
.

I’
d taste her baby pink lipstick and tha
t’
s when
I’
d melt
.

She whispered in my ear tonight she really was mi-ine
.

However, it is sung at a machine-gun pace, so I could
n’
t possibly catch the real words. To me, it was more like:

My hair kinda stank from the purseful of smelt

My pants had a rumble, i
t’
s a wide jazzy belt
.

I’
d tape on Mr
.
Mxyzptlk and tha
t’
s when I felt

She weetzie beanie pixie stick, she really was fi-ine
.

Hell, I did
n’
t get ANY of it.

Most of the songbook, though, I had down cold. Frigid, baby. I was ready. Sharp set. Le
t’
s go.

But now the album was over and showtime was still
hours
away.

I killed time. Watched TV. Dressed up in my Transylvanian outfit. Took it off again. I was fidgety. Restless. Bored as shit.

Finally, as the time to leave approached, I realized I had a conundrum: Do I change into the Transylvanian outfit here at the house and walk over to the theater
in costume
or...do I bring my clothes to the theater and change there? It was a real puzzle. My concern was that I would arrive in full regalia and be the only one all dressed up. Nothing like starting off your first day looking like a total tool. Equally upsetting was the idea that I would be the only one to show up
without
my outfit and...
I’
d look like an equally humungous tool.

I decided to split the difference.
I’
d wear my black pants and white shirt to the theater but carry the Transylvanian jacket in a bag. This seemed the wisest move, as pedestrians wandering about at night on the South Florida streets might not cotton to guys strolling down the sidewalk wearing buttons on their lapels asking, “If I Said You Had a Great Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?”

Incognito seemed the way to go.

Even walking as slowly as I possibly could, I got to the theater twenty minutes earlier than my 11:00 call time. The main feature at the movie house had
n’
t even let out yet. The current movie playing at the Ultravision was the dark comedy “Neighbors,” starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. I had seen it the previous week. Meh. Not much to it.

With time to kill (and not wanting to be the first one to arrive for the show), I wandered over to the taco joint situated on the north side of the movie theater parking lot. The restaurant had a big window, which allowed me to sit and watch for the cast to arrive from a safe distance and not look too anxious.

I nibbled a quesadilla and watched the clock. The minute hand was torturing me, appearing not to move at all. Finally, I noticed that feature had let out. People streamed out the exit doors and drifted to their cars. They piled in. Pulled away. All typical, Friday night, nothing-to-see-here behavior.

And then...the Rocky people started to arrive.

You could tell exactly who they were. They did
n’
t wear cotton print dresses and polo shirts. No sensible shoes, oversized purses and gold necklaces on these people. No, that was how the folks getting in their cars and
leaving
were dressed.

The Rocky folks, the ones getting
out
of their cars, wore tight leather pants and leopard-print shirts. They sported feathered roach clips as hair accessories. They wore too much eye makeup, blasted “Bat Out of Hell” from their car windows and talked way too loud.

And they
all
smoked.

The regular folks, the ones pulling out of the lot after a lovely evening at the movies, looked pretty much done-in for the day. They looked like they wanted nothing more than to get home, crawl into bed and conk-out for the night.

They were done. Spent. Their evening was finished.

But the people they left behind in the lot?
My
people?

They looked
ready
.

3

In The Velvet Darkness

A
fter about a dozen or so of the Rocky folks had arrived in the parking lot, I figured it was safe to drift over and begin to mingle with the crowd. I grabbed my bag and headed toward the theater, strolling as casually as I could.

The closer I got, the more gun-shy I became about simply walking up and introducing myself to someone. Luckily, I saw that Donny had also arrived (it was hard to miss him) and, despite his fearsome appearance, I felt the most comfortable approaching him. The two of us, at least, had conversed before.

As I neared the cast, I tried to take them in and absorb every detail about them. Theoretically, assuming things worked out, this was to be my new crowd. The sooner I got to know them, the better.

It was a mixed bunch, age-wise. All the girls and most of the boys looked to be in their teens, but there were guys who were clearly in their early 20s here, too. One of them looked to be pushing 30 by my reckoning, and there was one old man. (By old, I mean he was in his 50s. A coot.)

I skirted the main crowd and sort of sidled up to Donny.

“Hey,” I said. I really know how to kick off a conversation.

“Hey yourself,” he said, looking me over. “You here to join up?”

At this,
I’
ll admit, I was a little disappointed. He clearly did
n’
t remember me at all from the previous week. Then it occurred to me: Why should he? He ran a thirty-person cast that probably featured a revolving door of young punks like me drifting in and out of the show. Add to this the fact that, in our one and only encounter, we had talked for about ten seconds, max, and it made perfect sense. In actuality, it would have been pretty damned impressive if he
had
remembered me.

“Yeah, I am. Should I get a ticket, or...?”

“No, no. If yo
u’
re in the cast, yo
u’
re in for free. Do
n’
t worry about it.”

There was an awkward moment. I struggled to fill the void. “You said to bring five bucks...?” I offered.

“Oh, right. Tha
t’
s just your initiation fee. One time only. We also have cast dues, but i
t’
s only a buck a week. Wha
t’
s your name again?”

“
I’
m Jack.” Man, it felt good saying that.
Jack
.

“Right, Jack.
I’
m Donny,” he waved a massive arm toward the small crowd. “Yo
u’
ll get to know everyone eventually, if you stick around long enough.”

“Great.” Donny took a pull on a long cigarette, relaxed.

I was antsy. “So, can I help with the setup or anything?”

“In a minute, yeah,” said Donny, then he called out, “Hey, Doc!” The older guy jerked his head around. He was barrel-chested with a gray-white crew cut and a Hemingway beard. It was 11 at night and the guy sported tinted shades and a military bearing.

Donny motioned to me. “Got a new kid. Have him help you with the props and shit, okay?”

“Sure,” the guy looked me over and stuck out a meaty paw. “
I’
m Doc.”

I shook. “Jack.” Now it was official. Two people knew my new name.

Doc glanced at his watch. “Better get a move on, I guess. The theater should be empty by now.” Doc looked over to this younger, good-looking kid with hair down to his shoulders and said, “Go in with Don and open the door.
I’
ll get the stuff.”

The young kid nodded and drifted off with Donny and the rest of the cast as they moved toward the front of the theater. Doc motioned to me.

“This way, kid. We got storage around back.” He tapped another young guy on the shoulder, a shiny-faced kid with dark hair and big eyes, just a little older than me. “You too. Come on.”

As the young kid and I followed Doc around to the back of the theater, he stuck out a hand.

“
I’
m Steve.”

“Jack. Good to meet you.”

“You too. Your first night?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Yup. I saw it last week and thought
I’
d give it a try.”

“Same with me. Looks like a lot of fun, huh?”

“Yeah,” he looked a little edgy. “I hope so.” He lowered his voice so that Doc could
n’
t hear. “
I’
m a little freaked out.”

“Yeah, tha
t’
s going around.”

Arriving at the rear of the building, Doc produced a ring of keys and opened up an outside door built into the enormous curved wall that loomed above us. We were at the very north end of the Ultravision where they apparently kept their storage closet. Doc yanked the door open, snapped on a light inside and cocked his head for us to follow him in. We squeezed through the door.

Inside, there was a lot of janitorial stuff. Soap, paper towels, mops and buckets, everything a theater owner needed to keep a movie house spick and span. But in one corner (which seemed to be cleared of everything custodial) was a huge collection of what seemed like random, albeit bizarre, junk.

There was, for example, a large wooden coffin with a clock-face carved out of the front and the face of a skeleton peeking out. You do
n’
t see that every day. Next to that were a couple of wheelchairs stacked high with props and necessities, each of which was odder than the last. These included a steering wheel, a feather duster, an electric carving knife, a five-foot tall candelabra, some stray costumes (a white tux jacket, and the “space suits” worn by Riff Raff and Magenta at the end of the film) and, to cap things off, a pitchfork-shaped ray gun (if you do
n’
t know, do
n’
t ask).

There was also a tall, crudely fashioned wall unit leaning against the shelves in the back of the room that had the words “Sonic Oscillator” scrawled across the front. I remembered this piece from the previous wee
k’
s show and remembered thinking, at the time, that it was a pretty impressive piece of stagecraft. From fifty feet away, it looked just like it did in the film— futuristic, slick and amazingly accurate.

Up close, though, it looked ragged as hell. It was really nothing more than a bunch of plastic one-inch PVC pipes glued together in a rickety little display. It had a circular handle at the bottom for Riff to turn during the “birth of Rocky” scene, a fake TV screen for when Frank and Riff watch Dr. Scott on the monitor, and a few other recognizable dials and switches, but it was a cheap little gadget, really. I could hardly believe how fantastic this piece of crap looked from out in the house.

The magic of theater.

From the look of the pile of junk they had assembled, props apparently came and went, were built, broken, discarded, improved upon, abandoned, intentionally destroyed, stolen, borrowed, rented, sold or, in some cases, recycled. And there seemed to be a hell of a lot of them, stacked randomly atop one another.

Doc directed Steve and me to each man a wheelchair and begin hauling the stuff to the rear exit door of the theater. Someone was supposed to meet us there. We pushed the chairs full of teetering props to the back door and then went back for a second load, clumsily maneuvering the various items out of the storage area and through the lot. We waited for about a minute before the metal doors finally popped open and the young guy with long hair stuck his head out.

“In here. Come on.”

I pushed my wheelchair full of props into the theater, looked up and suddenly found myself standing on the stage of the Deerfield Ultravision for the first time.

It was, in word, breathtaking.

A few words about the Ultravision Theatre before we proceed.

Remember, this was in the early 1980s; in the days
before
the mega-plexes and maxi-houses. Before movie theaters started getting packaged six, eight or nineteen at a time and the screens shrank to no larger than a big-screen TV set.

The Ultravision was an old-school auditorium movie house, the kind the I-Max theaters are now trying, unsuccessfully, to mimic.

The screens at the Ultravision were simply enormous, stretching well over a hundred feet across and over thirty feet high, surrounded on all sides by a set of lush, red curtains that encircled the entire room.

The sound system was something else, too. These speakers did
n’
t simply squeak out the score of the film on some tinny little low-rent system; these babies blasted you right out of your fucking seat. If you saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark” at the Ultravision (which I did, five times), you knew what a true movie-going experience was supposed to be like: The sound hit you in the chest like a sledgehammer and the screen pinned your eyes open wide, filling your entire periphery, making it feel, at times, as if Indiana Jones was kicking
your
ass.

Another distinctive feature of the Ultravision was that it was its own building. It was
n’
t connected to a mall or attached to some corporate complex. This entire structure—this huge, sprawling edifice—was built to be nothing more than a
place to show movies
. That was it. End of story.

And, apparently, no expense had been spared.

From the bir
d’
s-eye view, the building itself must have looked a lot like the Mickey Mouse logo if Mickey had ears twice the size of his head. If you can picture it, the head-part would be the lobby and the ears represented the twin theaters. We did the Rocky show in the north ear, if that makes sense. It should. Tha
t’
s about as clear as I can make it.

When you entered through the front door by the ticket booth, yo
u’
d cross the big, circular lobby past the concession stand, hang a right and walk through these huge double doors, after which you either had to turn right or left to actually get into the auditorium.

Her
e’
s what it was like once you got inside:

Imagine yo
u’
re standing in a gigantic round room, fifty feet high and 300 feet across. Just a
colossal
seating area, okay? As you strolled past the door, yo
u’
d find yourself in a gently curving aisle on the outer perimeter of the theater. The seats themselves stretched across the entire width of the circle with no center aisle, so the rows are forty, fifty, sixty seats across. And there are dozens of rows.

The seats are big and comfy; old fashioned movie-house seats with plush cushions that actually rock back and forth. Not the sterile, plastic-hard, immobile seats w
e’
ve got nowadays. These were practically lounge chairs.

If you continued along the perimeter of this circular room, you would eventually arrive at the front of the theater where, in the space between the seats and the movie screen, there was a huge playing space for the actors. This was unusual. Normally, movie theaters liked to pack in as many seats as possible so that the patrons are forced to sit cheek by jowl.

Not at the Ultravision. I suppose the designers took a look at the 600 or so seats they had already crammed into the joint and thought, “Tha
t’
s good enough.” Besides, put the seats any closer to the screen and the patrons would have to lean back in their chairs and look
up
just to see anything.

In addition to the large playing area in front of the audience, there was also a giant ramp that rose up from the floor to meet the bottom edge of the movie screen. It was a gentle slope that ran at about a 15-degree angle up to about four feet high, where it leveled off onto a small, eighteen-inch ledge. Sit on this ledge and your back was against the screen, which rose straight up thirty feet behind you. This little ledge at the top of the ramp made for a perfect playing area, if you chose to actually perform anything there.

Which they did.

So there you have it: a stage that ran almost 125 feet from side to side, a raked playing area—almost as wide—that rose up to the base of the screen and a perch at the very top to play from. And this was a
movie
house. Most professional theaters did
n’
t have a stage as accommodating as this one.

If you did
n’
t know better, yo
u’
d have sworn they built the Ultravision with the Rocky show in mind.