A couple of years ago I wandered into a bondage-themed nightclub looking for some good music and walked out with a job as a dancer. My descent into the weird world of fetish would provide many solid, pith-helmeted anthropological conclusions regarding the human condition.
To wit:
- Everybody looks better in the dark.
- Being onstage makes you really attractive, even if you are really not.
- Females are very, very different from males.
- There are some seriously disturbed people walking around free in our society.
Night #1
IT WAS A DARK and stormy night. Literally. I had just moved to the Bay Area and was dead broke. I knew some people who worked the door at the Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco who told me the music they played on Wednesday nights was right up my proverbial alley and never mind that it was a bondage club–there were really cute girls with complex hair and tight, plastic clothing there. And I could get in for free. Free is good. And so off I went into a night that would change my life forever.
My first impression of the club: lots of smoke, lasers and torches. A chain-link fence surrounds the dance floor on three sides. A glance to the right shows a girl removing her top and putting her arm around a statue of a crying angel. She poses this way while a guy with alarmingly greasy hair snaps her picture. She then nonchalantly replaces her top and the two head for the dance floor.
A very petite girl sidles up to the bar next to me, alone, forcing herself to appear like she is having the time of her life, although she obviously is not. I feel sorry for her, sort of, so I try to strike up a conversation, asking her name. This quickly gets far more complicated than it really ought to be. She doesn’t speak a hell of a lot of English. After much verbal wrangling and screaming at each other over what seems to be an ever-crescendoing level of noise, it is established to some degree of clarity that her name is Yvi and she is an exchange student from Hamburg, Germany. I try to bring the dialogue to a quick close, but she has fingered me as a nice guy and wants to talk more. Our intercourse is, needless to say, somewhat problematic.
“So how long have you been in America?” I yell.
“Vhat?”
“How long have you been in America?”
God only knows what she says in reply, but I nod at her encouragingly like I hear and comprehend. She starts talking about something and seems to like whatever it is she is talking about because she keeps nodding and smiling excitedly. The truth is I can’t hear a goddamn word she is saying. But I nod every few seconds and laugh when she does. She seems to get a lot of enjoyment out of the conversation.