October 18 - A hideout

The club was quiet for the moment, or, comparatively quiet, just the loud speakers blasting, but no musicians rocking out on stage, no amplifiers amplifying or guitars flooding the black-walled, black-floored, black-ceilinged space with however many megahertz of sound. She was sitting at the bar, looking incongruous and out of place. She was dressed up in a velvet blazer and neat black pants, a sharp contrast to the rocker tees and leather around her, and she sipped red wine with her pinkie out, while everyone around her ordered shots and plastic cans of PBR. And she was alone; everyone else had come in the company of twos, threes, more.

“You come here often?” I asked. I hated the stale line; it never really worked, as a pick up line, but it was an opener none the less.

She turned to look at me with flat eyes, then nodded. “All the time,” she said, as though at confessional.

“It’s a great place to have fun,” I tried. Her stare, if anything, grew flatter.

“It’s my hideout.”

I laughed. “A strange place to hide,” I noted, gesturing at the press of bodies that made it difficult to hear, see the stage, breathe. “Hundreds of people who could notice you here.” She shrugged.

“Depends who you’re hiding from.”

I was hooked. I squeezed into the narrow opening between her stool and the next without waiting for the invitation. She looked startled a moment, then went back to sipping red wine.

“Forgive me for saying it,” I continued. “But you don’t look like you belong here.” Both eyebrows shot upwards, nearly to hairline.

“Don’t I?” she asked. “And you assume you know who I am after only three seconds of conversation?”

“I-” I began.

“You,” she cut me off. “If you claim to know so much about me, tell me this. Everyone in my family would be horrified to find me in a place like this.” Her vague wave took in everything from the beer on the floor to the dust in the corners to the hipsters in leather jackets. She wasn’t just talking about the bar, I gathered, but everything within a ten block radius and a lifestyle to go with it. “I grew up one way,” she continued, “and over the past five years, I have steadily tamped down every desire that springs from those days. Call it my work to reject every bit of what that childhood meant. So how do you know whether or not I belong in this place?”

“I-”

“You don’t. See what you don’t know is, my parents waited five days after I left for college before they divorced,” she pressed on. “Five days, because they didn’t know what to do with themselves once they had the option of being loud when they fucked at night. They grew up where it wasn’t polite to use the word fuck, understand?”

I thought I understood.

“I’ve been fucked a hundred ways,” she said, then arched a brow, “and don’t think I mean that literally. And don’t think I don’t. So does that mean I’ve rejected who I am? I have money at my fingertips but I live in a loft in this neighborhood because it makes me feel more comfortable in my skin, understand? And at the same time, I have the luxury of not working because I come from that money, and I wake up to guilt every morning. So does that make me a farce or a reality? Or a contradiction or both? What if I said I’m a feminist but I’m submissive in bed, or that I loathe buying material goods but can’t resist shopping endlessly for gourmet food? Would you pigeon-hole me then? Do these contradictions mean I’ve rejected who I am? If I skip the jack o’lantern carving and WASP-y traditions of my youth, does it mean they’re still not indelibly etched into my skin?” She scratched at her wrist and I noticed a tattoo of a lily twining about her slender bone.

She paused for her first breath.

“And you think you know whether or not I belong in this place.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. This was not a pick up as I had intended. I liked a pretty face and I liked the clothes that hugged her body, but her mind was going about fifteen times faster than probably anyone else’s in the joint. Didn’t people come to clubs like this to have fun? She read my thought.

“Sometimes I feel I’m too pensive for the rest of the world,” she said, sipping from her red wine. Pinkie out again. “No; that’s wrong. I know I am. So tell me this; am I manic if I can’t tell you how many times today I’ve been back and forth between never wanting to stop living and thinking that I truly cannot take it for another minute?”

I was too afraid to tell her yes, but I shook my head no.

“So yes, this is my hideout. Maybe what you don’t get is that I’m not hiding from my past or my future or my present. Maybe I just need a place to hide from my own brain.”

She turned; it signaled an end. I backed gratefully into the anonymous crowd, sipped a PBR that tasted bitter and stale, but heck, it was what one was supposed to drink in a place like this. I watched her sitting in her bubble at the bar, eyes on the paint-speckled curtain, shut for now, the scuffling of the next band’s shoes audible every once in a while, a practice tap or two on the drums, a heavy guitar chord thrumming through the dense air. When the curtain parted, she would metamorphose again, stop sitting daintily at that stool, start to dance at the front of the stage with her hair whipping back and forth and her wine sloshing unnoticed over her hand until she lifted it up to her mouth to suction it off like she was sucking off blood. No, I admitted to myself; I didn’t understand.