Why Do I Go to Nightclubs?
I'm standing on the dance floor, hating every moment
The air is thick and hot, like wandering into a sauna. The pleasant banality of replaceable EDM songs syncopates with the shimmering blue and pink lights with assembly-line precision. There’s enough cologne wafting around to make this place smell like an Abercrombie outlet. Being sardined in the middle of the dark and haunted dance floor makes you appreciate the value of personal space, especially after the ninth or 10th time you’re involuntarily grinded on by some glistening troglodyte looking for something to validate their manhood.
There’s no shortage of nameless, faceless Miami Vice wannabes tonight. Glazed and squinting, donned in redundant floral button-downs they probably copped from an Urban Outfitters discount rack, they bump, grind, and shout rehearsed pickup lines with the fleeting hope that one unlucky female will reciprocate something vaguely approximating consent.
“HEY, YOU’RE CUTE,” his lips move inaudibly as the thumping bass renders him mute. “WHA — ?” she replies, confused, before he tongue-jousts her face. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that every dance remix sounds like a Transformer robot going “full Weinstein” on a Shop-Vac.
In a normal functioning society, every one of these godforsaken shitholes would’ve been designated a #MeToo quarantine zone right around the time of Roe v. Wade. But, like a cockroach who survives a nuclear apocalypse, these institutions chug along with a demented Livestrong persistence. Maybe these selfie-snapping documentarians of all things LIT AF are subconsciously seeking a reprieve from the entropy of late-stage capitalism. Maybe they’re chasing the bright ding of Instagram pseudo-pleasure. Regardless, they keep coming back — insistent on subjecting themselves to mutually assured low self-esteem and $15 vodka crans, telling themselves this night will be different for whatever reason.
And yet, here I find myself standing awkwardly in solitude, shoulders slumped and sandwiched between the two couples who dragged me along to this hellscape of mad sounds, wishing I spent the night alone in my boxers binging Game of Thrones and getting ratchet with a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. I feel like less of a fifth wheel and more like a useless appendage waiting to be severed off and discarded to the wolves. It was probably the promise of free key bumps in the bathroom stall that lured me in, but sometimes even drugs aren’t sufficient enough justification for your judgmental shortcomings.
We’re all bored and delirious and looking to shake off our lunar alienation. The nightcrawlers glam up, mask it all with pretend memories, and dance like someone’s watching — because they are.
It’s like everything about nightclubs was specifically designed for assholes.
The pair to my right resembles the prototypical modern crypto-couple. They stand feet first over a cliff, facing a murky morass that’s not quite lovey-dovey, but also not dysfunctional enough to venture out into the world of lonely singledom. In the meantime, the sex is passable enough to fill the void that exists outside the 9-to-5. I have the impression that the guy thinks he has this girl wrapped around his finger, but according to my other two compadres, he’s the latest cheap fling in her Rolodex of Bumble matches, and she’ll dispose of him like a burner phone at her earliest convenience.
For now, though, he is cradling her hips with both hands, gently pulling her rear to rub against his crotch. His dance moves completely lack grace and swing, leaving him as a gangling fool, twitching like roadkill. He resembles a high-school memelord that overdosed on Pixie Sticks while alternately fancying himself as a fake, musty Elvis, a self-aggrandizing sex god, though he’s flailing somewhere in that pimply sweet spot. He’s a rough draft of a man, a sketch of a mangled skeleton without any crucial details: social intelligence, empathy, decorum, sexual discretion, or any of the hundred other indicators used to gauge whether there’s any traffic in someone’s cerebral cortex. This would explain why he lifted his index finger to tap away at my shoulder like the needle of a sewing machine, beckoning me to direct my attention toward an adjacent woman whose back is completely turned to me.
“Bro, she totally wants you,” he says over the music, his tongue protruding, face slobbering, head shaking, looking like he was clubbed over the head with a cartoon peacock. “YOU NEED TO FUCK HER! TONIGHT! FOR! ME!” I’ve descended into an endless indiscrete present tense that rewards self-interest but not self-awareness. His neanderthal grunt is loud enough to distinguish itself over the blaring music to grab her attention. She turns to me, brow furrowed, lips resting at a perfect flatline, an expression of something that occupies the space between deadpan and disgust. She might’ve been interested in me in the same way that Tom Brady is interested in eating strawberries, but she immediately drifts in the opposite direction, and I’m left with a trail of unsatiated curiosity.
For a while now, the booming backing track has been operating as a life preserver. Then, the DJ is met with simian glee when he announces, with modest, four-cylinder strength, that tonight’s party is “OFFICIALLY ON!” — essentially code for, “I’m going to play Spotify’s ‘Get Turnt’ playlist instead of ‘RapCaviar’ now.” Everyone in this retro-futurist backdrop rockets up, the dancing turning into a bloody contact sport. For a brief moment, there’s a palpable fear of being stampeded to death. Staying here would signal a death wish all but guaranteeing my burial in a race car-shaped coffin plastered with Post Malone’s face and the Rockstar energy drink logo.
I took it as my cue to wander upstairs to safely survey the calamity below. The shitshow horror comprised a gallery of pasty faces as if I was looking at a corporate leadership page of a company that can’t even follow its own DE&I practices, and everyone’s complexions resemble the pallor of cured ham. I lean back against the rail and puff out my chest, trying to resemble the kind of confident body language men are told is guaranteed to attract women.
Loitering next to me is a slender vixen with a straw jammed into something tropical, looking like she could be amused by some witty sleaze. With half-baked suave plugged into my skull, I muster the courage to sputter something charming, only to be interrupted by some Patagonia-vested chad. Sipping from a rocks glass, he began slurring, “The way you’re wearing your hair makes you look like a slut,” his voice like bubbling bong water. His casual misogyny seemed grafted straight from a Red Pill subreddit. Dead-eyed and astonishingly dull, this greasy, discarded barbecue wrapper seems like someone who blows lines of pre-workout before jerking off to himself in a locker-room mirror.
After observing his witless imitation of The Game, I had some serious reservations as to how he had never realized that women caught on to the concept of “negging” about 15 years ago, roughly five minutes after it became a thing. Anyway, I’d love to get a peek inside his head if only to follow his short bus logic right up to the point where he concludes: Yup, this is the line that’s getting me laid tonight. I’m not much of a betting man, but I’d wager three months’ rent that he’s the type who rapid-fires unsolicited dick pics while envisioning the unfortunate recipient thinking to herself: What a magnificent dong… I absolutely needed this in my life!
The official Snickers tagline reads: “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” I think someone should film a PSA that states: “You’re a total jabroni when you’re thirsty.” Think of it as a corporate social responsibility initiative for incels-in-denial. I can’t totally blame this gormless choad, though, when everything about clubs incentivizes creepiness. They’re dark, dingy, and ominous, and the obnoxiously loud music kills any hope of a coherent conversation outside of shouting sentence fragments directly into someone’s eardrum. If all else fails and you’re that desperate for a lay, your only other option is to dress up like a pug and dry hump a woman’s leg until she chases you around with a spade, threatening to neuter you. All things considered, if you legitimately enjoy frequenting these places, I’m convinced you enjoy lighting puppies on fire in your free time.
Fortunately, for social Darwinism’s sake, this particular woman rolled her eyes and turned away from him and back to me with a simple “What’s up?” It’s the conversational form of disaster relief, a means of rescuing herself from that BP oil spill of an interaction. I’m fairly certain this is the moment where guy meets manic pixie dream girl. Roughly 90% of the words emanating from her mouth are completely unintelligible, but she seems swell. It’s like we’re falling in love in a hopeless place — which, for many of these peanut brains, happens to be everywhere, and for me, also happens to be everywhere.
She reaches out to stroke my shoulder and glides her hand down my arm until she clenches my palm. Flashing a seductive glance, she asks, “Do you want to dance?”
What a proposition! Let me think…
“Yeah, sure.”
This took me back 20 years or more, and I hated every second.
*The official Snickers tagline reads: “You’re not you when you’re hungry.”*
Perfect.
I haunted a lot of these, mostly because I was in a circle that could do bad flips. It took me a while to notice I’d met more of my dates playing pinball. And I don’t play pinball.
The ex I met there (a nightclub, not pinball) was nice, but we didn’t have much in common beyond Jagermeister. She, like all proper adults, outgrew Jagermeister.