I’m Engaging in the Chase, Part IV

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Hope springs eternal on Friday mornings. The casual dress code at work. The uncertainty that the weekend holds. It’s a stark contrast to the monotony of Monday and Tuesday, when there doesn’t seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s worse during the winter months, specifically January and February. No holidays in sight and the realization that you won’t see thawed, dewy grass until at least April. All you have is the cold reality that your job sucks more than a Panamanian hooker, you still don’t have a girlfriend, and you have no real direction at the moment. Wait, that might just be me.

At 24 years old, staying out until 6:00 a.m. might as well be a death sentence. Merely hearing someone tell me they were out until sunrise is enough to make me want vomit, but it’s exactly what I did last Friday. Imagine, if you will, all of the things I hate. Bougie nightclubs, overpriced drinks, grown men wearing sweatpants at said bougie nightclub because that’s apparently a thing now. A nightmare for yours truly. My only salvation was that everything was comp’d. I had a friend that got me into the club where we spent the better part of four hours dancing, drinking, and cavorting with girls wearing very little clothing. It was fucking fun. Had it not been free, there is no way I would have gone.

My night started out innocently enough. I had, of course, tried to get a random from Hinge to meet me for drinks that night while I was bored at work, but every text she sent me was a different version of “lol I’ll let you know! Maybe we can meet up later!!! *blushing smiley face emoji*” Like, enough with the facade. Just tell me you don’t want to see me. It’s fine, and much easier for both of us. Don’t feign interest just for the sake of feigning interest. Let’s just call this what it is. We’re both bored sitting at our desks and need something to do.

I ended up going to a popular pizza joint with several friends for a girls birthday party. It was surprisingly tame. After drinking three Two Hearted Ales and devouring some Hawaiian ‘za, I went to a friend’s apartment where I had a few whiskey-gingers and started to realize that these people were doing that awkward song and dance where everyone is just waiting for one person to leave so that they can follow suit five minutes after that. The domino effect. Nobody wants to be the first to leave, but you can tell everyone is trying to take it easy. You see, two months ago me and eight others had all bought tickets to Kygo, a tropical house music DJ whose popularity has steadily risen over the past few years. They were saving themselves for the show the next night and taking it easy.

Fuck. That. Shit.

Last week I had fallen asleep with my penis inside of a girl. I needed a Friday night out. I had called Allison Thursday night after work to apologize, but she didn’t answer so I left her a rambling, two-and-a-half minute voicemail trying to sound sincere. I told her to call me this weekend and we could have a quiet night in. Much to my surprise, I didn’t hear anything from her all day Friday, and I got out of work with one singular goal: get drunk. Kygo be damned. So my roommate showed up to the spot where I was drinking whiskey and said “Hey, John, I’ve got a birthday party at a club downtown if you want to roll. They’ve got bottle service.” I responded with a simple, yet effective, “Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of this morgue.”

We met up with the birthday entourage right around midnight, and although there was all the free booze one could possibly want or need, I was not having a lot of fun. We were stuck in one of those elevated booth/table areas that looks down on everything and there was no room to dance. Now that I think about it, there really wasn’t a designated area for dancing. Just a lot of people standing around in clusters trying to look more important than they actually were. My roommate and I stayed there for all of thirty minutes, until a mutual girlfriend of ours showed up and asked if we’d like to join her at a guy’s apartment a few blocks away for drinks. We said yes on the spot.

Inherently we knew that anyone living a few blocks from the first club that we were at was going to be loaded. No one lives in downtown Chicago unless they’ve got three grand a month to spend on rent. So we get up there and there’s probably twenty people in this apartment overlooking the city on the 50th floor. People blowing coke in the living room like Maty Mauk, girls doing body shots, the whole nine yards. There was even a Golden Tee 2011 arcade game like they have at the bar. I got on the ball almost immediately and embarrassed some chump who looked like he was Golden Tee virgin. I didn’t partake in the illegal drugs or body shots, but if you don’t think I was crushing 350 yard drives and nailing 20+ foot putts in front of all of the dorks at that apartment, you’re fooling yourself.

The two guys who lived in this place? Massive tools. The girls? Borderline special needs, but very, very hot. I didn’t care. I was having fun and as we got back into the elevator with a crew of nearly thirty people, I had serious concerns about our chances of getting in anywhere. It turns out one of the guys that lived in that ridiculous apartment knew a bouncer (of course he did) and we cut the line at a club known for hosting trust fund babies and leeches like me.

It’s not a secret that women have the upper hand. All the time. They control the game and that’s just the way it is. But dancing? Dancing is the great equalizer. I know this might sound bananas to a lot of you, but most girls go to a club or bar to have fun. And that means dancing. If you’re out on the town and trying to get laid, there is no better way to jumpstart a trip to poundtown than to start cutting a rug. It doesn’t matter how good you are at it. The sprinkler? Deadly. Rolling the dice? A classic. Literally anything you can think of. Just make sure you’re on the floor moving. Because no girl is going to give out her number to the guy standing up against a wall nursing Bud Lights and waiting for people to come to him. You know that song by Whitney Houston “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”? Pretty self-explanatory. It’s about a girl looking for someone to dance with. That’s literally all she wants, and it accurately encapsulates most women who go to a club to dance. The worst dancer in the world can bring home an 8 if he plays his cards right on the dance floor.

The music they had going in the second club was seizure-inducing. A lot of heavy bass and shit that I couldn’t singalong to. I had my iTunes library on shuffle the other night and a song by Skrillex came on. I truly don’t know how I used to listen to that garbage. You throw dubstep or EDM on around me now and it’s just going to give me a headache. And on any other night I probably would have left the club based solely on the fact that the music sucked. But I was in rare form, and so was my roommate. We were the perfect amount of drunk to be at this place.

One of my favorite parts about going into a hopping spot and taking the dance floor over is that you get eyes on you. I can usually tell when someone is staring at me. It’s something I think a lot of people can do. You just feel someone staring you down. When someone is just burning a hole in you with their eyes. I certainly felt it with a girl named Maria, who spoke broken English and told me she had just moved to Chicago from Belize. She had just completed her undergraduate studies in her home country and was studying to be a doctor here in the states. Way out of my league.

We danced for the better part of an hour, and it wasn’t long before I asked Maria for her number. She gladly gave it to me, and I promised to text her next week so we could go on a proper date. My phone died somewhere around 2:30 a.m., but I had already secured a number and the last thing on my mind was Allison. A mashup of Ja Rule’s “Livin’ It Up” and some techno bullshit played loudly in the club as me and my new friends danced the night away. When 4:00 a.m. rolled around and the lights came on in the club, I knew I didn’t want it to end. Our original crew of thirty had dwindled down to something like ten, and I invited everyone back to my apartment for a nightcap and possibly breakfast. Aside from one guy, everyone wanted to go to sleep, so I nixed that plan and my roommate and I took a cab back to our shitty apartment. I think we probably had one or two Miller Lite’s a piece when we got home, and I crashed right around 6:00 a.m.

I awoke at 2:30 on Saturday afternoon. I remembered most of my Friday, and I was pumped about the number I had gotten. I fished my wallet, keys, and dead phone out of the jacket I was wearing and plugged the phone in. While it was charging, I got a shower, printed my ticket out for Kygo then stepped out of my building to go meet my friends for a pre-game when I felt a faint buzz in my pocket. A text message.

Allison: Hey! Sorry I missed your call Thursday, I’ve been in Madison for work. Let’s do dinner when I get back. .

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Johnny D

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