So, I live next to a gay sex club. Not a bar, but a sex club. Men go in and come out all night, occasionally sitting outside and smoking, trying their best not to make eye contact with passersby. I have walked past this place for almost a year, and one Saturday at about 3:30 in the morning, my curiosity (and the Red Bull vodka) gets to me, and I decide to finally check it out. Due to my shyness around new crowds, and that whole not being gay thing, I’m pretty shaky before I walk in. My heart’s racing, my neck’s hot, and even though I decide there’s no turning back, I have to wipe the sweat from my forehead before I open the front door.
I walk in and I’m immediately in a small rectangular room filled with mirrors and a ticket booth, like the ones at theaters or carnivals. The plexiglass window is vacant just long enough for me to catch my breath, when a chewed husk of a man saunters up. His skin is pruned like he just got out of a bathtub he’d soaked in for a week and his thinned hair is puffed into a translucent buzz-cut. I try to maintain a cool, calm demeanor but I’m pretty sure the door guy for a gay sex club is going to take about one second to realize the kid with a baby face and jittery eyes probably isn’t a regular. He takes my driver’s license and gives me the basic rate, which at 22 dollars for a 6 month membership and a locker seems kind of steep. It’s not like I’m going to need a locker, I think. He tells me that’s the cheapest he has, and he hasn’t smiled once, so I grudgingly hand him the money before he presses a secret button and the steel door to the right starts buzzing. After just a few minutes being stuck in purgatory between these two worlds, I decide that I’m ready to dive in.
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