Ava Collopy ~ An Early Rite of Passage

The taxi dropped him off and he walked over to where there was a short line to get into Dahlia’s Club. It was 10:20 p.m. and the show was about to start. On the street he could hear the music they were playing over the loud speakers.

After the three people in front of him had gone through he stepped up to the bouncer, a tall and heavyset man, showed him his I.D. and skipped a heartbeat hoping he wouldn’t recognize it was fake. “It’s $6 cover,” was all the bouncer said. Darian paid it then walked through the doorway, stepping into a rite of passage a year early as he walked past the “NO MINORS ALLOWED” sign that was glued to the front door.

He looked inside the club to see a dimly lit spacious room with high ceilings crowded with people. There were two bars on opposite sides of the room and on the far end of the room was the stage; a platform that was roughly five feet tall and had a pole in the center of it. The music being played over the loud speakers hit his eardrums with a pounding base line, piercing synthesized treble, and singing that sounded like an escaped mental patient screaming into a microphone. He looked around through the dim lights and saw that the floor was dingy and most of the club-goers were dressed casually in sneakers, jeans, and warm jackets.

He approached the bar to his left since the one on the right seemed more crowded at that moment. He tried to order a beer and found that to be heard over the music he almost had to shout right into the ear of the bartender. He ordered a Guinness then he walked closer to the stage, leaned against one of the support beams near the center of the room, and sipped on his beer. It tasted disgusting to him as it tingled and almost burned its way down his throat. He watched young women dressed in red underwear and knee-high boots climb up metal ladders to reach the two small platforms near to the ceiling where they proceeded to sway and hump to the beat of the music. Then the lighting became even dimmer and a man dressed ironically in a pressed suit walked onto the stage and began his introduction for their Sunday cabaret show.

Shortly after that a man came on in tight black leather pants, black boots, and no shirt and did a long, sensual, sexy dance routine while wielding fire sticks and ropes with balls of fire at the ends. It was altogether alluring to most of the women in the room, if off-putting to most of the men. After that a three-woman act came on stage and stripped topless in unison while playing with fire, teasing it against their skin, barely avoiding burning themselves.

Moving through the thick crowd wasn’t easy and he felt awkward and self-conscious in the club then assumed that everyone in there was drinking so much that they’d never be able to tell he was uncomfortable so it didn’t really matter.

When he reached the bar counter he turned to his left to see a short Latina with shoulder-length curly jet black hair, a warm round face, and beautiful brown eyes sitting on one of the bar stools and sipping what looked like a vodka drink. They locked eyes and smiled at each other. He stepped up to her and leaned into her ear.

“May I buy you a drink?!” he shouted over the music.

“Sure thing!” she said into his ear. “Another gin and tonic please!”

“Okay!” he said into her ear, then turned to the bartender to say. “Sir, two gin and tonics please!!”

The bartender mixed the drinks lightning-quick. Darian handed one glass to the lady, who took a sip, grabbed his arm, and almost instantly they were swaying on the dance floor while lapping up their drinks.

“I’m Rosa by the way!” she said after a while.

“I’m Darian!”

Darian found the gin went down smoother than the beer and the tonic had a delightful flavor, the swaying was hypnotic and tantalizing, the music hurt his eardrums, and he had no idea how the fire dancers kept from getting burned.

Roughly half an hour and two more gin and tonics later he was comfortably numb and smiling. Rosa was getting giggly from the drinks. Rosa leaned into his ear, “Come on I want you to meet a friend of mine!”

“Okay!”

She led him across the crowded room. He was so numb and aroused by then that she pretty much could have led him into a burning car.

Across the room, in the corner, was the coat check. There stood a tall, slim woman with long black hair standing there checking in coats while a few men stood around buying her drinks and hitting on her. She maintained a cool reserve while teasing them with the idea that she might just go home with one of them.

Rosa walked past the men to her and Darian soon followed. “Buy you a drink?” he said over the noise.

“Sure!”

“What would you like?!”

“Water!” she replied. Then she leaned away from him. One guy tapped him on the shoulder.

“She tell you she likes water?!”

“Yes!”

“Same thing she told me!”

“Yeah, me too!” one of the other guys said.

Darian stood back from the group and looked around; there was an untouched gin and tonic, some sort of cocktail, and a couple of beers on a shelf next to her. He turned and went to the nearest bar, got a glass of water, and returned with it. Faith smiled and she and Rosa shared a knowing look.

Darian and Rosa returned to the dance floor and kept going till closing, when Faith would get off work. After a couple more hours Darian tired of drinking but Rosa was still downing them. The new dancers on stage had many piercings and were covered almost from head to toe in tattoos and he found it very off-putting. It was making their otherwise beautiful womanly bodies carry a repulsive aura. They all looked so dirty, and not the good kind of dirty. It was all too much.

He watched two bouncers remove a tall, big man from the dance floor because the man had been coming onto women way too strongly. This place was not safe.

Rosa distracted him from thinking. They danced all night. Danced till Faith would get off work, at closing, when the music stopped♫. The show was over. The bouncers herded people out while the bartenders finally got a drink. The sultry waitresses with perky tits took off their heels, put on sneakers, and grabbed mops for the floor and the bathroom.

Darian, Rosa, and Faith all got drinks then filed outside and flagged down a cab. “Where to?” the driver said. They looked to Faith. “Go to outer northeast Portland. 126th and Siskiyou.” They began kissing on the way. Soon they arrived at a perfectly unassuming one-story house. On the inside the house was sloppy with clothes, CD’s, and bric-a-brac lying here or there and furniture that didn’t match. Darian was a little repelled by it but forgot to be bothered when Rosa and Faith started kissing. Before he knew it they were all on the couch, naked, pulling out condoms, and slumping drunkenly to the floor, where at least the mess of clothes cushioned the fall.

In the morning Darian awoke to the sound of Rosa and Faith bickering, though he couldn’t quite tell what about. Soon Rosa was yelling in Spanish then Faith ran off and slammed a door. He could here hear vomiting then Rosa banging on the door.

“Is everything okay?” he said.

“Esta bien,” Rosa said as she stomped off down the hallway. She came back into the room, naked, eating a bowl of cheerios, checked her phone, then left the room.

He sat up in bed feeling confused by the situation but for the moment he was too hungry to contemplate it so he got up and assessed that the house wasn’t cool anymore so he walked to the kitchen without getting dressed.

In the kitchen Rosa was eating some Quaker energy bars with a glass of milk. Darian looked around the kitchen to see there were dirty dishes everywhere. He looked in the fridge then the cupboards and found that the place was sparsely filled with food. He looked across the room at Rosa out of the corner of his eye and saw how unattractive she looked just sitting at the kitchen table eating. Her breasts still looked plump and beautiful but he didn’t feel compelled to go over there and kiss her when she was just eating chalky energy bars and choking them down with milk. The morning was spoiling his exciting adventure and he was beginning to see the three of them as nothing more than cattle; mating, sleeping, drinking, eating.

He decided to make himself some eggs since the frying pan was about the only thing in the kitchen that wasn’t dirty. He fried some eggs and realized there were no clean plates. He washed off a fork and ate them straight from the pan. When he was done he put the fork in the sink, looked at the mess, then turned to leave.

Between the bedroom, the hallway, and the front room he found his clothes and pieced them back on. His wallet, phone, keys, all safely intact, except that he had no clue what he’d spent on alcohol the night before. He knew his head was pounding.

“Well, I’m off, bye guys,” Faith said as she rushed out the door. He heard some dishes get dropped into the sink. “I’ve gotta’ shower,” Rosa said and walked off down the hall. Darian looked around for a second then walked out the front door.

Outside the sun was painfully bright, the nearby freeway unbelievably loud. He held onto the fence to steady himself then found his feet and tried to walk in a straight line along the sidewalk. He looked around for street signs to tell him where the hell he was; some part of the city he rarely thought of and never visited. When he saw the street signs he called a cab. It arrived quickly and he returned home. He immediately ran upstairs to shower off his disgusting adventure, yet he still felt oddly proud.

Ava Collopy is published in Adrift, Brilliant Flash Fiction (contest shortlist), Down in the Dirt, Sunlight in the Sanctuary, and others. Her home towns are Dublin, Ireland and Portland, Oregon. Her website is Ava Collopy Books.

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