Welcome to My Nightmare

This entry has been rated NC-17 due to extreme language and mature content. Those of you with delicate constitutions are advised to seek entertainment elsewhere on the Internet, because you’ll probably be offended and not very entertained. (And yes, Mom, this includes you….)

I have come to the realization that, for the most part, Monday entries are not going to be happy entries. I swear, that’s not how this one started. In fact, when most of the situations occurred, I was laughing about them.

It all started Thursday night. I had gone to Uno’s after work to get dinner and a beer and to see if my favorite bartender had returned from his vacation to London. (He had, but was not back to work yet.) I finished my pizza, settled up my bill, and started to head to my car in the parking garage a few blocks away.

It was pretty late at this point – about 11:30 pm – and the streets were mostly deserted. Downtown Cincinnati pretty much rolls up the sidewalks at dark, with the exception of the bars, especially on weeknights. At this point, the only people on the street besides me was a group of four African-American men, all appearing to be in their late teens or early twenties. I moved to the side of the pavement to allow them to pass, and the one walking nearest me did the same.

As the group passed me, the one nearest me called out, “Let me suck your pussy, baby. Please, let me suck your pussy.”

I suppose he was trying to shock me, or send me into some sort of panic. He’d probably made the assumption that since I was alone, female, and conservatively dressed (I was still in my corporate clothes), a comment like that would traumatize me. Sorry, fella, it didn’t. I rolled my eyes and continued walking to my car.

By the time I’d reached my car, my reaction to the run-in had changed. I still wasn’t shocked; I was more irritated than anything else. What a rude individual! Did his little comment towards me make him tougher in his companions’ eyes? Would he have said the same thing to me if I’d been dressed in my leather jacket and combat boots? What would his reaction have been if I’d said something back to him? Does he actually have any success with that pick up line? The more I thought about it, the more it grated on my nerves.

I stopped off at Warehouse on my way home to simmer down. It was the kickoff night for the new Thursday night format (post-punk), and unfortunately the turnout didn’t look all that great. (Part of it was due to lack of advertising, but the owner had made the coincidental mistake of debuting the new night on the same evening as some big Backbeat hoo-haa at Vertigo.) As it turned out, there were less than 20 people in the club (including the staff), but they were all fun people. Tomm, Hippie, Rosencrantz, SchizOphelia Jones, and Gunter were all working, and Diamond Doug had stopped by for a Foster’s. I filled everyone in on my little face-off, which was met with a round of “whatevers.”

“See, I would’ve said something to them,” Rosencrantz commented. “I would’ve turned around and said ‘OK, let’s go. Right here. Right now. On your knees!’ In my experience, men usually turn and run when you turn the tables on them like that.” She proceeded to tell a story about a guy flashing her at Sudsy’s (the local laundromat/bar) whom she completely humiliated. (She announced loudly to Mr. Exhibitionist Guy, “Omigod! Did you just show me your dick? Are you going to show everyone else here?” Mr. Exhibitionist Guy turned 37 shades of red, finished folding his clothes, and ducked out the back exit.)

The crowd never got any bigger at the Warehouse that night, but we didn’t care. It was nice to have the place to ourselves. Gunter played anything we wanted to hear, and we danced all night like it was 1987 all over again. At some point I decided the whole evening was one big John Hughes movie and I was channelling an older, even more jaded version of Molly Ringwald. And it was good to hear the Clash in a dance club again. The previous comment outside Uno’s was forgotten for a while, at least.

The comment didn’t go away, though. It was filed away in the back of my head, biding its time, waiting for its moment to strike.

Friday was just a bad day. Work sucked, Rosencrantz was helping JohnnyB do the last minute packing of his worldy belongings, and I realized I wasn’t going to get to see him before he left. I ended up at Roger Mexico’s (as usual) for late night movies and beer.

My cousin came into town for the week, and we went out Saturday night for dinner (Kaldi’s) and dancing. Since I am not a huge fan of the Saturday night crowd at Warehouse and I wasn’t sure what kind of music she liked, we opted for the mainstream scene on Main Street. (I hereby relinquish my fishnets and boots for the week, and begrudgingly accept my 100 anti-cool points.) We ended up at Electra, which was packed, and not as horrible as I expected. Yeah, the crowd was cheesy. Yeah, the music was so-so. I didn’t care; we danced for the majority of the night.

At 1:45, the DJ announced last call, and the mood in the club changed. Desperation has a particularly acrid smell, and suddenly any previous reticent behavior by the male populance was abandoned in hopes of hooking up with someone, anyone. One minute I was dancing alone, the next minute I was fending off a sweaty moron whose idea of getting to know me was grinding on me to the Vengaboys. Charming. I moved away, didn’t make eye contact, nudged them away with a firmly cocked elbow, ready to up the ante if none of my retreating moves worked.

It had been a long time since I’d dealt with a crowd where surgically attaching oneself to another person was the modus operandi for meeting a possible romantic interest. For some reason, the kids that populate the clubs on the nights I usually attend are a bit more refined than that. They talk to people, they have a few drinks, and if they do dance with someone, it’s generally not a heavy petting session set to music. (But the drunken frat boys on Main Street are the “normal” people, and the polite guys on Wednesday nights are considered freaks because they’re wearing all black rather than Abercrombie and Fitch. But I digress. I will save my “stop picking on the goth kids” diatribe for another day.)

On the way home, my cousin and I laughed about how glad we were to be out of that scene, and how ridiculous and annoying the intoxicated yuppie boys were. I went home, went to bed, and forgot about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, the Thursday night run-in teamed up with the Saturday night last call experience, and launched a bit of an attack on my mind Sunday night. I’d been laying around the apartment watching TV and rehashing the past couple of days, and I started thinking too much about the situation. About the general level of intoxication in the club the night before. About how many people were leaving with people they didn’t know. About how many people were going to end up as statistics after that night. Drunk driving. Sexual abuse. Date rape.

This is what these people did for a good time. Every weekend. And way back when, I played along with the game just like they did. I told myself I was having a good time and that the guys I met weren’t all that bad, and they’d call. Really they would.

(Signpost up ahead: NOW ENTERING MYOPIC’S UGLY PAST. ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. LAST CHANCE. I MEAN IT.)

I’d been lucky, for the most part. But between me and other people I knew, the experiences of drunken trysts gone bad were buried in pretty shallow graves. There’d been tales of roofies, one night stands, acquaintance rapes, and other movie-of-the-week situations. Painful personal memories that I thought I’d left far behind, not realizing they ‘d been following close behind, hiding in the shadows. The more I tried to put them out of my mind, the more they persisted.

It was at this point I realized it was after midnight and there was no chance I’d be sleeping anytime soon, and I was in this personal hell by myself for the rest of the night. It was too late to call anyone, and everyone was busy with their own lives anyway.

Before any of you who have actually read this far start planning an intervention, let me reassure you. I’m OK. A bit exhausted, but OK. For the most part I can handle my personal demons, but every once in a while they become overpowering, and I have to hold on for dear life and ride out the storm. It always passes, and I always survive.

I guess what bothers me the most is that this kind of behavior goes on unchecked. Everyone I know has become a statistic of some kind or another, a case study, and the resulting trauma is considered a worst case scenario of having a good time. I shouldn’t know people that have been found in dumpsters hours after the club closed. I shouldn’t have had to be an escort for friends that had to visit the surgical side of Planned Parenthood. I shouldn’t know people that have tried to mentally block out their entire Spring Break because a group of guys from another college attempted to gang rape them. I shouldn’t know people that are afraid to go out by themselves because they’re afraid of running into some guy they met at a bar the previous week that won’t leave them alone.

And yet I can say I know someone that fits every one of those descriptions. And somehow I get the feeling that I’m not the only one.

And this is someone’s idea of fun.