you can find me in da club with a bottle full of bub...

here's a creative nonfiction story i wrote for my sex and gender in the black diaspora class. i haven't done creative nonfiction in a while but i thought i would share anyway.


We stumble, some more gracefully than others, out of the blue black club light. Walls painted with black acoustic tile and heavy velvet blackout currents have cocooned our nascent coming, goings, and carryings on. Now we huddle on the street, yanking at skirts too short and shirts too low, hiding flesh we had been proud of in the darkness. The sweat cools on our goose pimpled skin. Some of us begin to totter softly away in the stilettos that cradle our tired feet. Our steps are slow, halting stutters of a journey, weighted down by the pretense of escape and the desire to be recognized—to be wanted once again. “We are exhausted and afraid of the passion that consoles us.” But our feet hurt too much to run, and fear doesn’t match these shoes anyway.

I have been performing all night. Playing like I have only half a brain and half a voice. Playing like I’m brave. I stepped on stage damn near the moment I stepped out of the car. For me, it always starts slow, a kind of nervousness that seeps through my body and saturates my thoughts. Sometimes it gets so overwhelming I can’t even hear the bouncer ask for my ID. He sighs as I fumble with my pockets. My girls laugh. “She’s just a little slow,” they whisper. I smile wordlessly and giggle a bit for good measure. With a mumbled apology, I shove the card into his hand. One brief gaze at the plastic and finally we’re in.

Inside the dusk of the outside plunges into a deeper dark, and something—maybe the music, maybe the heat, maybe the crush of people lining the walls—pushes my nerves into overdrive. They match the throb of the bass, pounding and pounding and POUNDing until at last it shatters into excitement.


There’s something about all these damp, pleading brown bodies in one place, dressed up and strutting. Something about the naked desire of the passing glances. Something about the dancing that whispers—or shouts—promises of sex and closeness and touch. Intoxicated, I grab my friends’ hands and pull them onto the dance floor. We dance in a huddle, swaying our hips in our own little circles. But it’s hard to lose yourself here. Men with faces thrown in shade weave between the groups of women, sliding their eyes along their silhouettes until they find the one they want. Most times they don’t speak. Just judge you, silently, briefly, before gliding by. But sometimes they wait. Stay a few feet back and rest their eyes on the small of their back. And just like that the women wind up like little toys. We wind and wind, arching our backs and shaking our hips. The boldest of us might simply bend over.

Sometimes it works. We might pull them in, convince them to replace that gaze with those hands and press their skin against ours. Sometimes it doesn’t. He moves away and a cold shiver of shame kills the fire you thought his yearning lit. But whether victory or defeat, it is only momentary. He will leave and you will straighten your back, shoo away the loneliness he left behind. You will hold your head high and pretend you’re not wondering what you did to make him leave. You will scan the room and wait for the next one.

He will move but you—you will stay.

I tire of the chase and step away to join a friend on one of the couches overlooking the dance floor. For the first time tonight, I find myself in the company of only women. There’s something wrong with all of them. The girl to my right has a bad weave. Her friend knows them cheap pleather pumps are too damn small. The chick across from me think she cute but she got a gap between her two front teeth. The girl next to her just looks busted. And the trick she’s talking to…

I pause. My jealousy is so rabid that it frightens me. I don’t know these women. I have never met them before and I will probably never see them again, so why do I care so much about them? Hell—why do I care about them at all?

Maybe it’s because we have been competing all night. There are ten of us vying for the attention of every one man, and sometimes the grinding looks less like making love and more like a war dance.

Maybe it’s because we recognize what those men don’t. That the brand of jeans hugging that fat ass cost a week of pay. That the designer purse she clutches close is the one we still have on layaway. That she just got her hair done today but she’s willing to sweat it out for the chance that you’ll remember her.

Maybe it’s because I smell on them the same mixture of fear and false confidence that seeps from my own pores, tangling itself into the scent of my perfume.

Whatever it is, it saddens me. And as I sit in the silence—we all speak only to the women we came with—I know we have all been transformed. But into who, I don’t know.

Soon it’s 3 a.m. Weary, we finally file out of the club. Another night done, another performance finished. Curtains closed.

Please, no encores.