We walked into a club we had never been to before, like new born animals in the jungle. There is a hierarchy in the animal kingdom where only the wildest and strongest of animals can survive, and when I say animals, I mean college-aged party animals. We had no clue what kind of oversexed jungle we were walking into. Four of us walked into this techno club downtown, mostly occupied by college students who reeked of sweat, booze and other fluids that said how good of a night some of them were really having.
The crowd at this venue had so many different dimensions to it. At the entrance were the untamed party girls who danced on the platform that rose a few feet off the ground to distinguish themselves as VIPs. They grinded their pelvises on the wet, black, metal bars that separated them and their Very Important Person-ness from the rest of the people in the club who I assume were considered important since we, unlike them, could not look above the heads of other dancing, sweating, grinding bodies. This was one of the advantages of being a VIP I suppose. They were like the giraffes in this jungle, able to stretch their necks and look above all of the other party animals that were lucky enough to party in the same place.
As I danced my way toward the middle of the club, I could hardly ignore the pack of Italian guidos sucking face with girls sporting oversized hairdos and bright red lips. These people do exist in real life, I thought. It almost felt like a scene replicated from ‘Jersey Shore,” with at least 10 Snookis running around in too short sequined dresses and shiny white heels. The guys walked around with their spiky, gelled hair, their orange spray-tanned skin glowing under their skin tight T-shirts and their oversized muscles that screamed steroid injections.
There was one type of person in the club that vaguely gave me flashbacks of the popular NBC show ‘To Catch a Predator,” that creeps attempting to make their sick fantasies a reality. I’d consider these guys to be the tigers in this jungle. They would slowly creep up on barely legal, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, college girls, and once they were able to build up the courage they had been trying to gather for about an hour from across the room, they would pounce on their target.
These animalistic men saw what they liked, creeped up on it and moved quickly and strategically to the bar to grab her a cup of her favorite drink.
They sure did know the way to that pretty little thing’s heart. Whisper to her a few sweet nothings, let her know you’re about 15 years younger than you really are and buy her a few good rounds (or eight) of her favorite drink, and he’s good to go. Good to go right back to whichever cheap hotel he may have rented out for the night, just in case a moment like this was to come his way. In this jungle, they’re the ones you have to look out for.
In this instance, the creep came in the form of an older white man, probably in his mid-40s. He wore a tight-fitting New York Yankees cap, an oversized coat, a smile that said ‘Hello pretty girl, want to come home with me?” and a sketchy habit of sticking close to the corners of the club and coming out when he’d seen someone he took interest in.
And there the four of us were. Comparable to the zebras in the jungle, we effortlessly stood out, but tried our hardest to blend in. We danced for an hour or so and I was dared to grind up on the old man whose wife, I was convinced, was at home waiting for him as he rubbed up against these college girls. The night was slow, but in this jungle, things happen fast before we knew it, the night was gone. There we were walking back to the car, not regretting that we had just stumbled into an oversexed, techno joint smack dab in the middle of the jungle that downtown Rochester becomes on a Saturday night.
Cooper is a member of the class of 2012.
