Flying High Now
As the next Rocky installment nears, a teenager remembers the experience of the original
My biggest fear was that I'd spoil it for him.
Deprive him, my best friend, of what I had undergone not days ago, that conversion from placidity to excitement, that validation of our working-class lives, the sheer exhilaration from this idea that the film suggested: that not only were nobodies like us worthy of movie-screen sized attention, but that we might very well be the stuff of urban fairy tales.
I couldn't do it. And yet, I owed the man. Big time. After all, he had adopted me...
...me, anonymous me - strategically anonymous, in order to spare myself the undue attention of school bullies...by him, the athlete, the role model, the guy at ease with both the tough guys and the rest. Why he selected me I still don't know; the instinct to protect, I guess - as much a part of him as of the title character in the newly opened film I was about to describe to him, Rocky.
What had gotten me into this pickle? Girls. Two of them - neither of which I had ever met. He was seeing both of them; had told the first, before a date with the second, that he was going to the movies with me. Therefore, in order to cover his behind...
I started, slowly, like the film itself. Then, continuing to convey its rhythm, I kept building, building, building...
My description of the movie to him was a revelation to me. As he sat there on that worn couch in that under lit apartment - in rooms very much like those in the movie, rooms the two of us had known all our lives - I described every scene not only in order, but in detail, with sample after sample of the film's dialogue. I had only seen it once but here I was, recounting it as if I, and not star Sylvester Stallone, had conceived the entire thing.
I had no idea that movies could get under my skin like that; that I could absorb them the way the tape on Rocky's hands absorbed cow's blood; that I could spit them back out again with the zeal and emphasis with which his trainer, Burgess Meredith's Mickey, spat out words of wisdom.
When I finished, I too, like Adrian's comforting embrace, received a reward: my friend's recitation of everything that I had said. So alive was my account that he was able to breathe it in in the same sure way, through me as fully as I did through the screen.
Some time later, dutifully, he recounted the story of the movie to the girl, who bought, as a consequence, that he'd been out with me. How could she not?
A part of me, a big part, would have rather that he incurred her wrath, that he suffered her nails to his face rather than to miss out on the first-hand experience of this movie. To my movie-loving mind, he getting mauled as badly as Rocky, as much as I cared for him, would have been the smallest of prices.
A few days later, I received the phone call. "Danny!," he shouted, "I saw it! I saw it!" He didn't have to add more. I knew by his excited tone exactly what he was referring to - and that this movie was so good that nothing, not even the intense passion of a movie-lover let loose, could spoil it for anyone.
