Half a dozen men in space suits were walking down the street. It was about 9 p.m. and there weren’t many people out on the streets in the business district. At first, we thought they were hazmat suits. Given that it was September 10th and we were about two blocks from Ground Zero, we were worried something terrible might have just happened. But they weren’t hurried or really doing anything. They were just kind of sauntering along. Men in space suits with bubble helmets were just walking down the street. That’s New York. And it was just the first of many out-of-this-world scenes we would witness that night.
Five of us had driven to New York for a girls weekend – a chance for some moms to get away from the 24/7 cycle of parenting to let loose and have fun. We did.
We got in really late after a mistake with the GPS led us through Manhattan (past the men in space suits) and into a tunnel that took us to the far, far reaches of Brooklyn. I’m not talking about hip fun up-and-coming neighborhoods in Brooklyn either. I’m talking about decaying roads lined with abandoned warehouses, strip clubs and junkies. We held painfully full bladders to avoid puling over, laughingly mocking-up headlines that would follow our certain demise if we did stop. “Five Virginia women found slaughtered at strip club.” “Country girls didn’t last 30 minutes in the city.” “Volvo SUV found in the Hudson – women still missing.”
The unfortunate detour delayed our arrival, but it also got our adrenalin pumping enough to rally for an 11 p.m. dinner. It was civilized, with wine and friendly banter with the waiter. We sat outside for dessert, enviously eyeing 20-somethings across the street. They had outrageously high-heeled shoes strapped to outrageously toned legs that were barely covered by outrageously short skirts. We mocked our own outfits, previously judged by one another and deemed to have been NYC-worthy. A few hours in the city had changed our outlook. We sucked in our stomaches as we voiced worries for our tween daughters who would aspire to those same fashion standards all too soon.
We stopped couples passing by to ask about neighborhood hotspots. We teased about how late it was and shouldn’t people be headed home to bed? We learned that everyone stays out until 3 or 4 and that there were lots of fun places just steps away where we too could be convinced that 1 a.m. was really just a starting point. So, we chugged back our drinks and soldiered on out of respect for our newfound role models.
We decided to check out the rooftop bar scene across the street. Watching all the comings and goings had already been thoroughly entertaining, so it could only get better inside. But, there was a scuffle at the door, where a scrawny swami-looking guy with a ponytail wrapped into a bun on top of his head was screaming at a clearly drunk guy who wanted desperately to get back in. Swami was the worst bouncer on earth, but he was backed by a huge black guy who didn’t need to raise his voice to command respect. Drunk Guy was pleading with him about how it was really his friend who had been the asshole and that he (drunk as he was) was really cool and absolutely needed to get back in.
Our feeling of superiority to Drunk Guy evaporated when Swami denied us entry as well, saying that the club was full. He claimed that 1 a.m. was late (despite what everyone on the streets had told us) and offered, “You ladies should come back tomorrow at lunchtime and check out the view.” He had eyed us up and immediately pegged us as “ladies” who were better suited for lunching than late-night dancing. WTF?! We’d show him! We trotted off to find the hottest, happeningest place we could.
We found just that in a club called “Tonic”. Outside was a Hummer limo where a couple was getting down and dirty with each other thinking the windows were tinted, which they weren’t. People clearly noticed, but no one (other than us) seemed phased or even amused by the scene. There was a roped-off waiting line to get into the club, but my friends cut the line and marched through the door to escape the curbside peep show. They didn’t dare turn us away here. It was all about attitude, and we had it.
Inside, re-mixed 80s music videos blaring on large screen tvs signaled to us that this place was indeed our destiny. We ordered beers, grabbed a table and checked out the scene. We saw more short skirts and tippity shoes, but also sports jerseys and plaid shirts. It was a sports bar. Or maybe it was a dance club. It was a meat market.
We stood out like the 40-year-old housewives that we were. To break us into the scene, one friend challenged us to play Truth or Dare. I was dared to dance with an exotic young girl who was in a crowd near the bar. Encouraged by squeals and a group “whoooo”, I jumped up and went for it. I whispered to the girl that it was my friend’s birthday and they had dared me to dance with them. She and her friends were eager to play along, so they circled with me and we got our jiggy on.
That was it. That was all the young men in the bar needed to feel comfortable approaching us. The sequins blouse on one friend and the glamour-girl shimmer tank on another didn’t hurt. But it wasn’t just one or two – we must have met 30 guys that night. We laughed that if our husbands ever cheated on us, we’d know where to go for immediate revenge. But we were more than a little surprised at how easy it would have been, despite our expanding waistlines. We were new to the cougar world where 20-something boys are completely comfortable with the idea of hooking-up with someone that could be their mother. We were 40-year-old Virgin Cougars, and they liked it!
We treated them like our nephews, grilling them about why they were out so late. We complained that young people today are too free with their sexuality – pointing to the extracurricular activities in the Hummer outside. We asked with genuine concern about how they could afford to live in Manhattan and if they used protection. We consoled the guy who had been stood up earlier that night. We sloughed off any attempts to really dance with us, pulling in others from our group for a collective dance party instead. We were very good girls and we had a blast rocking out to everything from A-Ha to Flo-Rid-A.
A couple of people pulled up stools and acted like they were our friends, even if just for that night. There was the guy who claimed to have tried out for Dancing with the Stars. His “Rubik’s Cube” move clearly didn’t impress their judges any more than it had us. Then there was the brother and sister dynamic duo that we never did figure out. She spent most of the night jumping up and down and clapping like a seal (dancing?) to get the attention of the bartender. Every now and then, her “brother” (dressed in a suit and tie) would swoop in and lift her up, and she would straddle him for her little bounce, bounce. No matter how much we scolded them for this routine, they didn’t see what was wrong with it.
The fun and games started to crash and burn a bit when one guy got really pissed at my friend when she told him he was wasting his time. He claimed that we had violated some unwritten rules of this bar where dancing with your girlfriends was a direct come-on to any guy within eyeshot. We gave him the finger (flashing the wedding bands too) and went back to dancing, celebrating that we had made it to 3 a.m.
As last call approached, more and more people were pairing up for the night and we turned our attention to critiquing their choices. He was way t0o cute for that sleaze ball. She was way too young to be at the bar. She didn’t stand a shot with the cute bartender. That guy should not be dancing with his sister like that! Maybe she wasn’t really his sister? Couldn’t be.
The final signal to leave was when two friends went to the ladies room. Inside they found a guy we had danced with to LaBamba earlier. Only now, he had his pants around his ankles, granting access to one of the clearly underage girls. My friends were stunned, shocked and far too descriptive with their accounts of what they saw. This was no longer harmless fun – it was sad and gross and we were mothers, for God’s sake!
Our conversations moved to why girls let themselves be victimized that way and how do you ever have enough conversations with your daughter so that never happens to her? How to you impress on your son that that kind of behavior is never ok? When is the sex talk in school? Is that this year? Are we ready? What were we doing there?
Just as we had given up completely on this lost generation, some seemingly normal kids approached us and started up a conversation. We were pretty sure the cute guy who claimed to have his PhD was gay. The girl was preppy and funny and never would have found herself in that bathroom scene. The tall guy was buzzed but not obnoxious. They were laughing at the bar closing scene as well and were just as judgmental about the blatant obscenities and desperate attempts to hook-up surrounding us. They were more like how we hoped out kids would grow up. They invited us to join them at someone’s apartment on the East Side. A couple of us, refreshed at meeting normal people, were seriously thinking about it. What harm could come of it?
Fortunately, someone in our group was a grown-up and told the cabbie to take us home rather than to the East Side where who knows what additional horrors of the city would have unfolded in front of us. It was, after all, already 5 a.m., and why would those “normal” kids want to hang out with a bunch of 40-year-old housewives? We congratulated ourselves for making it home alive. We took off our ridiculous shoes and tended to our blisters. We were awakened a few hours later by calls from our sweet kids, and we were thankful that the meat market scene was just a tourist stop for us rather than a real part of our lives.
We giggled over coffee and checked our cameras. No photos had truly captured the essence of what we had witnessed. Maybe the guys in space suits had wiped our memory cards clean of any proof of that alien world.
Confessions of a Target Mom 