Don't Dream It - Be It (Rocky Horror Picture Show)

I watched as Dennis drove off in the jeep with his wife into the Florida night. He headed straight for Kelly Road just like he told me he would do. That was the street known for prostitutes.

“Well cunts, it’s just me and you,” I smiled and held up the handcuff keys. We were a good distance away from the theater and would have to walk about a hundred feet before we got there.

“Brian, will you please un-handcuff us?”

“Oh, you can do better.”

They both sighed. Lori made a sound with her lips that people make when they don’t feel like doing something. “It’s been a long day! Can’t we just enjoy Rocky Horror picture show without playing dirty games?”

I removed my pistol and told Lori to open her mouth. She rolled her eyes and opened her mouth very wide for me. I put the pistol to her mouth. I reached up and grabbed her tongue. I pulled it out and close to me. Then I aimed for her tonsils and gave her three sprays.

Rachel was the first to beg the pretty-please rhyme in a baby voice so that I’d unlock her. She shrugged it off and reminded Lori she was the one who wanted to go to Rocky Horror picture show on a family weekend. I uncuffed Rachel and put her handcuffs in my paper sack.

Lori gritted her teeth and begged me to uncuff her. I made her get down on her knees and beg me again in the parking lot in front of McDonalds. I think a few people saw her.

“Okay, Brian! You’ve made your point. We will obey you and I promise I’ll fuck you right in half when we get home! Just let us sing and enjoy the movie?”

“Sure,” I agreed as I took the handcuffs off of her and put them in my sack. I thought a lot about how she promised to ‘fuck me in half’ and wondered why I was so curious what that ride would be like.

The Marquee in front of the theater read “Rock Whorrer Picture Sho Sat Midnite”. Plastic letters had been hastily placed on the sign. It was literally the only advertising anywhere around the theater that this was even happening.

“How would anyone know this is even happening?”

“Rich weirdos always find out,” the girls replied. I didn’t get that reference. They enjoyed making lots of strange references to the movie that you’d only understand if you had seen the movie enough times. The fact that you only got those references if you were a big fan made it appeal to them even more.

They also told me there is always a light over at the Frankenstein place and that would somehow lead us there.

I liked it when the girls were a little silly. They seemed so happy and loose now that we were here. Lori really entered her element when we walked around the to the side of the theater. During the day this was a sleepy alley way that service trucks used to drop off merchandise.

It was a scene from a drawing you might see in Sunday School of the wickedness and perversion of Sodom and Gomorrah when we went around the corner. At least, that was my first impression.

There were approximately thirty people all wearing corsets, panties, dog collars, high heels and other strange accessories. There were men dressed as women, and women dressed as men.

There were two different boys who had black hair that was teased up like Robert Smith from the cure. They both wore dark eyeshadow and had pale skins. One wore all black and sat alone. The other wore a vintage army jacket and sat alone. They were both brooding and looking off in the distance.

“They should probably go sit together. They have a lot to brood about together.”

Rachel actually laughed at my joke.

Most of the people recognized Lori immediately. They all seemed very glad to see her and almost every one of them asked where Brad was.

“This is Brad,” she’d point to me.

They would look at me and shout “ASSHOLE!”

Then they would go back to talking to Lori like they didn’t mean anything by it at all. She’d end up explaining that her brother was out doing something else. They’d say something about him being the best Rocky they ever had in the cast and then they’d reminisce about old times.

Even though they were dressed in corsets and panties, they didn’t do anything sexual or outrageous. They talked, laughed, and walked around to be seen just like the people at the Football game had done.

They were a different clique than the preppies, the rednecks, the surfers and the jocks. They WERE a clique, and like all cliques, they didn’t accept me right away simply because I was there and dressed like them.

They were standoffish to me. No one talked to Rachel either. That suited her just fine. She was more than happy to squire around with Rachel and stand off to the side alone.

“Aren’t you having fun?”

“Loads,” she replied with a dead pan expression that made it hard to tell if she was serious or being sarcastic.

I began to surmise that Rachel liked to people watch. There were a lot of people to watch. Most of them wore outlandish make-up, and outfits. Other than that, they seemed like any typical group of people.

There was a main clique made up of about twenty people that formed the nucleus of the social circle. These people orbited around each other. Some of them seemed to be role-playing a cast member, some were laughing and talking, and some were roleplaying a character while laughing and talking.

I didn’t know what “Cosplay” was and that term might not have even existed back then – that’s what that role-playing was. People dressing up and talking as their favorite characters in a public setting.

There was a secondary clique of about eight people. They either didn’t want to mingle with the larger clique or were ostracized from the larger clique. They tended to congregate in tighter-knit circles of two or three people. They’d clam up if anyone from the larger clique came over to them and tried to engage with them about anything.

Then there were the outliers. These were people who were there but doing their own thing. The two brooding Robert Smith wanna-bes were a classic example. I was puzzled why someone would intentionally come early to the movie and congregate with everyone else only to isolate themselves and sit alone.

I was further puzzled why at least five other people stood on the outside looking in at everyone else.

I realize that I was doing that. I was standing next to Rachel though and I was new. These other outliers were obviously regulars to this fan group.

The other thing I picked up on was that for people who seemed to be so intent on being different and unusual they had so many things in common with another Lori called them “unconventional conventionalists” and that actually seemed to fit.

Speaking of Lori, she was holding court in the center of the main nucleus of fans waiting for the show to begin. People were crowding around her and some were literally waiting to get her attention so that she could talk to them when it was their turn. Lori had a natural charisma and it really shined when she was at RHPS.

I couldn’t hear what she was talking about. All I could tell was that whatever it was – it was funny and interesting because everyone seemed to hang on her every word and people frequently laughed when she talked.

I didn’t believe she was giving a second thought to Family Weekend or her promise to obey me or ask my permission to do things. I would have felt embarrassed if I came up and interrupted her to tell her to do something. People probably would have looked at me like I was an, well, an asshole.

Speaking of which, there was one other guy dressed as Brad Majors and everyone called him an asshole too. I didn’t feel so bad or singled out after that. He seemed to like it. He’d walk up to people like a dork, stick his hand out to shake and declare “Put her there!”

Then the person he approached would call him an asshole and walk away without shaking his hand. I wasn’t sure if he was an idiot, a glutton for humiliation like Rachel and Lori, or doing some scene from the movie.

I also came to realize that the fans often considered themselves “Rich Weirdos” because I heard that reference from time to time. At the time, I hadn’t seen the movie and I had no idea what anyone was talking about.

Someone would say “Oh, it’s probably some kind of hunting lodge for rich weirdos!”

Then another person would respond with “YAY! RICH WEIRDOS!

We had been standing together for about ten minutes staring at the crowd but she had said nothing. Despite her father giving me authority over Rachel, I was still painfully shy and I had not chosen to initiate conversation with her.

I kept theorizing about what these people were like in real life. Did they take off their make-off at home or did they dress this way all the time?

Did any of them practice family weekends as well? What if the entire world was practicing family weekends and nobody told me?

At some point, Rachel decided to talk to me. I wasn’t sure if she was just shy as well or she had simply been waiting for me to initiate conversation.

“You see that girl over there?” Rachel asked discreetly. She chided me for looking and making it too obvious. She indicated a girl around our age.

“That’s Turtle,” she said. Turtle was short and a little round and chubby. She had really brown hair that she had teased out so that it looked like she was wearing a saucer on the top of her head. She wore HUGE hoop earrings. They had to weigh a half-pound each. She wore so much make-up she looked clownish. She was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with pins from various punk bans. She didn’t have a shirt on underneath. She didn’t show her tits though. She was wearing skin-tight jeans that showed off her rather plump butt. She also had on super high heels.

Turtle was talking to a freakishly tall kid who was probably about Lori’s age. He could have easily been 6’9. He was thin and gaunt. His face looked a little like a hatchet to me because he had a very arched nose. He was wearing a tuxedo with tails like he was dressed up to go to the Opera. It looked raggedy though like he might have worn it every day of his life.

“That’s Lurch,” she said.

I laughed. That was a character on the Addams Family! She was right, he looked a lot like the creepy doorman.

“They are brother and sister, but they get it on,” she said it like it was common knowledge.

“How do you know?”

“Look at how she keeps playing with his coat and smiling at him. They get it on,” she nodded with confidence.

I didn’t really care if that was true or not. I was just happy that Rachel was talking to me and confiding in me.

“What about that girl over there?” I nodded in the direction of a girl wearing a green dress with a red triangle patch on the front. She was wearing an even bigger pearl necklace than the one Lori had on and rubber gloves. She looked like Pat Benatar.

“She’s a poser. She goes to our school. That’s Jenny Goodman.

Jenny Goodman looked nothing like this girl. “She’s got black hair! And Jenny Goodman has blonde hair.”

“That’s a wig, Brian,” she told me.

I still couldn’t see it because Jenny’s make-up was way too thick. It made her look like a clownishly wicked bitch just like Lori. “Are you worried that she’ll tell people at school you were here?”

“Then she’d have to tell people she was here,” Rachel shrugged and added “I am not embarrassed to like Rocky.”

“Yeah, but what if I make you do naughty things?”

“That’s why I didn’t want to come on Family Weekend. We’ve never done that before,” she made a face that genuinely told me she just wanted to enjoy the experience in peace.

She’d done so much during the day and licked that turd and everything that I felt pretty bad for her. I was just happy to people watch with her. We stood around quietly talking about people and theorizing about them. She knew most of the regulars.

We saw a couple girls arrive in pink dresses, carrying white purses around the same time. They both looked like scared little rabbits. When they walked into the alley, they saw each other and immediately called each other out for wearing the same thing as one another. They called each other sluts and then carried on like they were great friends after that.

I saw a woman wearing a French maid costume. At least, I think it was a woman. It could have quite easily been a man. She had on ghastly make-up that made her look really unattractive. She was wearing a very short black skirt and a white apron. She bent over a few times and showed her panties to the crowd.

A few people seemed amused, but no one really batted an eye or seemed surprised at all. I was planning on making Rachel and Lori show their asses at some point at these little shin-dig in the alley, but I put that plan on hold. It wouldn’t have shocked anyone.

“Fuck, I should have come as Columbia. There are no Columbias here,” she scanned the crowd for the character she originally wanted to dress as.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Lori made me come as Janet.” Rachel said. She had a feather boa in her hand. She squeezed it like she was angry or disappointed.

I wanted to remind her that Lori didn’t force her to dress this way, but I felt like I might be wrong. I didn’t fully understand their dynamic.