Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Erotic Nightmares and Sensual Daydreams: The Raw Power of Rocky Horror

"Give yourself over to absolute pleasure/Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh
Erotic nightmares beyond any measure/And sensual daydreams to treasure forever
Can't you just see it. Whoa ho ho!/Don't dream it, be it."


     When I was young; only a precocious first grader, I was snooping around, as children tend to do, and I found this small vinyl-lined Playboy calendar in my father's old metal desk, in the back office of his restaurant.  Most likely some promotional item that would come free with a subscription to the magazine.  I somehow inherently knew it was wrong to look at it; like it just wasn't something good little girls do and that I would get in trouble for snooping around, but I also couldn't resist turning to every page and studying each one of those glamorous women.  They captivated me with their beauty and this look of innocence and purity on each of their faces, that somehow didn't seem to quite fit with their sensually naked forms.  I didn't even quite know what it was I was seeing, but it drew me in, yet not without an overwhelming sense of impurity.  But it didn't stop me from peeking at that calendar and those beguiling women every chance I could.  That is the first step I can vividly remember into my rabbit hole of sexual discovery.

 "Now all I want to know/Is how to go/I've tasted blood and I want more."

    I had terrible nightmares as a kid, still do truth be told, but as a child they were harrowing to experience.  I would run into my parent's room each night after a nightmare, and sleep on the floor in front of their TV.  So, I think in an effort to help me, and regain their privacy, the same year I discovered that Playboy calendar, they bought me a small TV for my bedroom that Christmas.  Every night, I would watch TV until I fell asleep, and when I had a nightmare, I could just turn on my own TV to soothe my mind back into some semblance of reality.  That also meant, I could watch whatever I wanted, unsupervised and unencumbered.

 "The darkness must go/Down the river of night's dreaming/Flow morphia slow
Let the sun and light come streaming/Into my life, into my life."


    It was the following Halloween night, I was in second grade by then, and I was hopped up on candy and the excitement of the high holiday.  I wasn't close to tired, but I could stay up all night and watch TV if I wanted.  So, it had to have been after midnight, and I was flipping through the limited channels, and I came upon the strangest sight.  It was this movie, clearly some kind of horror flick in honor of Halloween, but it was different somehow.  There were all these strange people and strange costumes, put together in a way I had never seen before in other movies.  And there was music, loud, fast, rock 'n roll tinged music; I was rapt.  But there was something else even, some inexplicable sensation, that at the time I didn't know had a name, but I could feel it in every bantam corner of my body.  I could feel it vibrate these electrical impulses as they danced down my back, and coursed straight through to between my skinny thighs.  Later, I would deduce that the feeling that rocked my little 8 year old mind and body to the core was sexiness. That's what this movie dripped; oozed, was sexiness.  And again, it felt innately wrong, somehow.  Which made me desire it all the more.

“It’s beyond me/Help me, Mommy/I’ll be good, you’ll see/Take this dream away
What’s this, let’s see/I feel sexy/What’s come over me?/Woo! Here it comes again.”

     And in addition to the sexiness that I saw onscreen, and the sexiness that I felt, there was more still.  There was this bizarreness to it, this level of depravity and acceptance of that depravity, that differed wildly from that Playboy calendar that allured me so, the previous year.  There wasn't this posed innocence.  Hell, there wasn't any posing at all; it was nothing but the loss of innocence.  These grotesque, lust-fueled, outre freaks writhing around the screen, recklessly indulging in their perversion to create this otherworldly cocktail of pleasure laced with defiance.  It was like a Universal gift, wrapped up and broadcast just for me.  I could barely comprehend what it was I was seeing, but I just knew it was me.

"It's so dreamy/Oh, fantasy free me/So you can't see me/No, not at all
 In another dimension/With voyeuristic intention/Well secluded, I see all

With a bit of a mind flip/You're into the time slip/And nothing can ever be the same."

     It also introduced me to a concept I was wholly unfamiliar with, the idea of androgyny, and not juts as a device or an affectation, but androgyny as desirable; androgyny as highly sexual.  Something I would later go on to explore, not only through glam and punk rock, but in my own sexual experiences, within in my lovers, and of course, within myself; the philosophical nature of what it is to be male or female, and how those lines are made to be blurred.  To say that late-night movie, which I would only come to find out later was The Rocky Horror Picture Show, changed me wouldn't be quite accurate.  It was like it unlocked, or rather, unleashed something in me, something that had already been bubbling up since conception; this nascent sexuality and burgeoning lust for sex tinged with the peculiar.  I didn't realize then of course, but I was a born fetishist.  It would take me years to fully embrace my own perversions; the sadomasochism, the domination and submission; the idea of sex as fuel, as food, and sex as power, but this was one hell of a fucking start.

"Oh, we're trapped!/It's something you'll get used to/A mental mind-fuck can be nice."

    Rocky Horror would foment my love affair with the bizarre, the carnal, the obscene; the forbidden.   From that time on, any nightmare I had, I could then sexualize, in this lascivious lucid dreaming technique my young brain concocted, to not only diminish its power, but give me a modicum of control and even a jolt of pleasure.  And the movie was at least partially responsible for forever entangling sex, rock 'n roll and kink in my impressionable mind.  I've never really stopped delighting and indulging in the filthiness and power of sex from that time on.  In myriad ways, sex has not only pushed me to the brink, but saved me from going over the edge.  For this little Creature of the Night, Rocky Horror allowed me to slip several rungs deeper into the seedy underbelly of the prurient and the arcane; the salacious depths.  It was a thrilling leap into my subconscious hedonistic desires and into the pure decadence of orgiastic smut.




                         "Now the only thing I've come to trust/Is an orgasmic rush of lust
                          Rose tints my world/And keeps me safe from my trouble and pain."








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