Beyond the provisional gate of our I-270 outerbelt, we find Club Dance, nestled like a newborn amidst the runaway, half diseased strip mall sprawl between ghetto Whitehall and redneck Reynoldsburg. But Club Dance is no baby, having thrived here for nearly twenty years now, under a litany of names, and the same could be said for most of the strip clubs and restaurants lining this commerce laden section of Brice Road – even though it technically has a Channingway address.
Living where we do, the more prominent downtown skyscrapers visible from our front yard, and the distance out of town north a known, mentally traceable one, it’s easy to lose sight of our fair city’s heft, to downplay reports we keep hearing of its ever increasing size. But to navigate a course out here to the eastern extreme, to log the miles and chart the minutes, and only then reach the trembling lip of this outlying suburban wall, is to have these notions reduced to rubble on impact. Fleshed out months ago by our few trips to the western extreme, my earlier, grandiose pronouncements concerning this city appear horribly misguided. Flashing like cameras somewhere deep within, the lights and landmarks I’ve absorbed during this lone jaunt to Club Dance disabuse me of the thought I’ll conquer Columbus in a lifetime, or for that matter in ten of them stacked end to end. And in terms of these ends, the east to west variety, they stretch so far I can’t wrap my mind around them.
We can’t have it all, so each night we cast our chips onto the most promising square and give the wheel a spin. Weigh our options, the information based upon a continually evolving field, recalculated hourly. Nicole and September call, they tell us to meet them at this bizarre but insanely popular club, and we’ve no reason not to.
Half hip hop hot spot, half urban cowboy watering hole, these polarly exclusive elements juxtapose with minimal friction. Within the former, red brick floors and dim lighting, throbbing strobes and ribcage shattering beats entertain the baggy panted masses, while the latter houses, underneath a bank of bright white lights worthy of our sun, a gleaming wooden floor full of line dancing zealots, surrounded by a near perfect oval of passive onlookers. In each half, the corresponding disc jockey panders the preferred genre and lingo, and the always rotating hordes engender the most stimulating hybrid either of us has ever seen.
Cowgirls with amazing asses saunter past, waggling those prized possessions in pairs of impossibly tight jeans, the retroactive majesty of their tiny red boots, hair sprayed golden locks and exquisitely rendered mascara breathtaking to behold. But just then some wicked young thing in skimpy shorts wedged snug against her crotch displaces that view, chest caroming unrestrained beneath a translucent, ill fitting tank top, skin tropical island tan, as if rendered for holiday feast, and gymnast taut, body language wavering somewhere between carelessly fluid and inner city nasty. We’re expected to patrol these grounds, under these conditions, which counts also four functioning bars, a pizza joint, and a pool hall among its holdings, and somehow locate the two girls who summoned us here.
Eventually, Alan and I find them at a table above the hip hop floor, buried in relative shadow. September a few drinks into a passably cheerful mood, claiming she’s finally over Robert, even though for some odd reason she’s brought his cousin Scott along. I’ve never met this Scott kid before, a lanky youth wearing football jersey and blue jeans, though he immediately inquires whether I care for a game of pool.
Upon securing a table, Alan and Scott are paired off as partners against September and me, with Nicole, fulfilling her apparent niche in life, the smiling, passive observer. My roommate and I, new arrivals, have not yet finished our first beers and are only halfway into this initial nine ball foray when September, standing in the middle of the room, begins bawling out loud. Shielding her face, she then sprints out of the building and into the night.
Despite the extra cargo she’s carrying, Nicole is first to follow, dashing in her best friend’s footsteps. Unsure just how to proceed, we males exchange quizzical glances, sip our beers for a wit gathering moment, then set our sticks down and waltz outside as well. No sooner have our feet hit asphalt does Nicole’s car come streaking up to greet us, as she rolls down her window and instructs Scott to climb in. Then, with only a perfunctory goodbye tossed Alan’s direction, she exits the parking lot, bound for Mansfield, the last we’ll see of them.
“What the fuck?” he mutters, mystified. We debate reentry no more than a moment, before calling it a night ourselves.
By the year 2000, Club Dance is still going strong, even as the last letter on their exterior sign is gone, making it read Club Danc. It is anything but dank, however, and still draws a sizeable throng most nights. The country half, formally known as The Big Easy, also hosts national touring acts. Like Ohio’s own David Allan Coe – who seems to be here constantly – or a Merle Haggard appearance in March 2000. According to a review in The Other Paper, he was in fine form, bonded effortlessly with the crowd. Opening with Silver Wings, he also broke out the hits Mama Tried, Think I’ll Just Sit Here And Drink, The Bottle Let Me Down and Okie From Muskogee.
A few years after its heyday, we venture to the far east side for our final Club Dance foray. Much of this decline wasn’t just that the perpetually trend chasing club crowd had moved on – though also somewhat true – but also that it had begun to seem like a far seedier atmosphere. The tipping point occurs on a night where my car is broken into in their lot, as our coats, the girls’ purses, and my stereo were stolen. Actually, “broken into” is not quite the right phrase, considering that I hadn’t even locked the car. But this only drove that tonal shift home, in effect, because I wasn’t in a habit of locking my car, and had never experienced any trouble elsewhere. And until tonight, we had not trifled with Club Dance since. But an invitation from some girls we know, to check it out again, is one we cannot resist.
“Okay…where would I park if I was a car that didn’t want to be broken into?” Damon muses, as we arrive, in picking the perfect spot.
Immediately, though, for whatever reason, the place seems safer to me than it ever had, you can almost smell a different vibe before even stepping out of his truck. Hell, the cover was even lower than it had been before, $3 now compared to $5 back then.
Even though it’s now midnight, and the parking lot’s packed, The Big Easy is not all that crowded when we roll in. Tons of people, sure, but it’s such a cavernous club and so well lit that we can easily scour the premises to gauge if any of our people are on hand. As before, this place remains divided into those two distinct hemispheres – one hiphop, one country – and draws the corresponding mixed crowd that this odd conglomeration would imply.
We traipse around, looking for the girls. A first round of bottles is ordered – Miller Genuine Draft for Damon and Rolling Rock for me – and then a second round is ordered, but still so sign of them. During the course of our odyssey east, we’d said that if they didn’t show we were going to be outraged, and here it starts to look like our worst case scenario might come true. We grab seats in the middle of the walkway between the connected yet polar opposite halves and keep our eyes peeled for any familiar faces. I figured that we’d give it another round waiting on the girls, and if they didn’t show, I’d say something to him about relocating.
But then we glimpse the known commodities of Melissa, Melanie, and Amanda, who’d apparently been here all along, yet invisible to our miscalculations anyway. And aside from those three, there’s another Amanda who’d brought along the only guy in the posse, her boyfriend; Stacy, the decidedly inhospitable new president of their Alpha Delta Pi sorority; and finally Beth, this moose of a girl whose twenty-first birthday we were theoretically here to celebrate.
Then we all relocate to the dance club half, to see what kind of mischief is available to us over there. Calling the playlist strictly hip-hop or even pop, though, isn’t entirely accurate. More like modern music, as they mix in a handful of hard rock numbers too. But from the gangsta wannabees in gold chains and backwards ball caps to the thin as rail, coke fiend girlfriends the crowd is stacked to the ceiling with, there is no mistaking this as anything other than a dance club. The music is jacked loud enough to cause internal bleeding and the clientele’s excessively rude, the help only half a notch higher on the politeness scale…oh yeah, this is most certainly a dance club.
Though not exactly our calling cards, we join the ladies in gyrating – or at least vaguely moving to the beat of – this endless onslaught of jams, out here on this floor. And then we somehow wind up on this frightening wobbly ledge, a full story above everyone else, along the back wall. Accessible only by an equally rickety flight of stairs, this ledge was meant to accommodate maybe six and here we’ve crammed a dozen or more onto the damn thing.
Most of the ones up here were with us, but there’s row of three chicks along the railing that no one knows. Seizing our opportunity, Damon and I maneuver our way until we’re up against them, grinding our crotches into their backsides – and the girls never say anything, just look back at us with a smile, possibly because there was nothing they could say. We had no choice, girls, no room here to be anywhere else but up against your asses. And they understand.
Twelve of us, fifteen maybe even, are up on the wobbly, rocking platform. Surely the bar owners know what they are doing and this thing is deceptively safe…but man, I just don’t know about that. More ominous still, the song we’re all dancing to next is a ridiculously dumb anthem which still seems to play on The Blitz approximately every 15 minutes, Bodies by Drowning Pool.
Let the bodies hit the floor!
Let the bodies hit the floor!
Let the bodies hit the…flooooooooooor!
the lead screamer grunts, and it’s enough to make at least some us pray we just make it through this song alive.
“I wish the bodies would hit the floor already,” I joke to Damon, but though he laughs, I quickly realize that this is a comedic angle I need to abandon pronto. For one, it sounds like something your grandpa might say, grousing about the terrible racket that passes for modern music; for another, it’s an unintentional if direct commentary on our specific situation – up here on this rickety ledge, about the last thing I should want is for these bodies to hit that floor.
After the song ends, though, we collectively lose interest with the over saturated catwalk and dismount. Down the flight of stairs and mixed back in with the rest of the general population, even the row of girls in front of us had gotten bored and descended. Obviously, Damon and I should have kept track of them after they followed us down and went over to say hello, but like fools – doubly foolish because we’d done this a thousand times before – we let them slip away and never do spot those ladies again.
Up until this point, our night had been unexpectedly firing on all cylinders, yet the few charms this place still possesses are soon lost on us. We’ve even successfully managed to mostly ignore Stacy. We do attempt talking to a few stray women, though this goes nowhere. Everyone is this city seems so jaded of late, and if your meetings haven’t come about organically (a la, well, yes, those three girls up on the ledge) then these efforts, though admirable, are typically wasted. Or is it just we who are now jaded? It has always been a numbers game, and maybe nothing whatsoever has changed beyond our diminishing patience.
We’ve also done ourselves no favors by arriving so late. Next thing we know, time having bled away all too swiftly, clubgoers flee en masse for the exit signs and we’re right behind them, or rather somewhere in the middle, at the tail end of our own substantial posse. Not wanting to give up on the night too quickly, but also not wanting to be one those pathetic losers still milling around when the house lights come on. My last visit, yet for the first time I’m wondering about the accuracy of this Big Easy moniker: this place is quite large, yes, but nothing has come easy.
