China Club 1992 D. Greene   © Copyright 2022 by D. Greene

Photo by Michael Discenza  at Unsplash.

Sitting in the China Club. New York City. I came here with Sarah, my roommate and theater school classmate. The place is packed when we get there. I always feel uncomfortable the first couple of minutes we’re there – I think everyone is looking at me like I don’t belong. I want them to think I’m “someone”, but I always feel like I’m an imposter.

We walk around, Sarah knows all these people and I say hi to them, I feel like the tag-along friend. I AM the tag-along friend.

We make fun of people half-heartedly to see if they bite. I see three guys making fun of us. We don’t bite. Some guy (later we find out his name is Zion) and his friend start talking to Sarah. I see an absolutely gorgeous guy that looks like Bobby, a guy I met there a few weeks ago. Bobby is a pirate, he tells me. A Pittsburgh Pirate, that is. He’s newly drafted. Waiting for his shot. Sarah introduces Zion’s friend to me. He looks disappointed. He’s nice enough to me, but is clearly interested in her.

I sit on the couch, waiting for Sarah to use the restroom. She’s gone for a long time. Two girls from the group of strippers that are there come and sit next to me, men talk to them, look at me like I’m taking up too much couch space. Two older men that looks as thought they’re in the mob, or day traders, come and stand by me, unusual to see someone of that age here. They are in the mob; I’m convinced. Or day traders exploring the night life with zeal, looking for a way to spend their dough. They have a young guy who’s a runner, he talks to people, reports back to them. Are they recruiting?

One of the older men asks me what I’m thinking of…well, I’m pretending not to hear their conversation, that’s for sure. I say I’m “just letting my mind wander as I wait for my friend in the restroom.” He tells me (friendly) that I shouldn’t think too hard. He asks where my boyfriend is. I tell him I left him at home, it’s girls’ night out. There is no boyfriend at home. We both know that.

Sarah comes back. He asks us if we’ve ever heard of this other club, ______(redacted for security purposes).

I say no, Sarah says yes—it’s amazing that we moved here at the same time, yet she knows far more about the club scene and its’ inhabitants than I do.

He talks about the club as I grapple with my social knowledge inadequacies. Sarah tells him we’re waiting for a friend. He says “Did I ask you to go with me?” Then turns and asks me if I’d like to go to the club with him. Figures, the only guy that hits on me all night is over sixty years old. I say sorry, waiting for that friend. I’m twenty-one.

Zion joins us again, talks to Sarah to the side, I’m not included in the conversation. Stuart, a guy who was the sports all-star everything in my high school, who now lives here and whom I’ve gone out to dinner with once (enough to learn he was a snob, no matter how homesick I am I refuse to go out with him again), is there. Later, Sarah, Zion, his friend and I are at a table and he keeps walking by. I go and talk to him more to escape Zion and friend than to be nice. I can’t believe he’s such a loser now, in high school (when I was a freshman and he was a senior) he was a God!

Zion’s friend takes off because I’m talking to Stuart. He was nice, but nothing exciting. I’m sure that’s what guys say about me all the time. And so it goes.

I leave about 3 a.m., after having given poor Stuart the brush off for what I hope is the last time. Zion is all over Sarah.

Sarah doesn’t come home that night, she left town with a bunch of guys and girls, spent the night in some wildly exotic place north of Manhattan and comes home late the next day.

I feel like the ugly step-sister.

Sarah becomes a single mother at age twenty-four. Stuart escapes the collapse of Tower Two World Trade Center by running for his life, his high school athletic training carried him like the wind, he said. We touch base occasionally. He’s tolerable with the span of the country between his coast and mine.

I graduate, leave the city, move to Hollywood and become the ugly step-sister you see in all the movies.

The ‘someone’ whose name no one can remember.