It’s 3:30am and I’m looking outside of the uber car, letting the tall buildings flick in front of my eyes. Without even looking at me, my colleague reacts to one of my rather random comments:
“No, Michal, you can’t possibly use ‘lovely’ in that context.”
“I firmly believe I can use any word in any context I want.”
“What do you want to say anyway?”
“I mean that the sadness itself, the sadness in itself was lovely. You have seen it as well – the absolute void of smiles. The plasticky feeling. Yes, I might be wrong, but it really felt like nobody was having fun. Nobody, not even a bit of fun! In a place like that, isn’t that lovely?”
“You don’t know if they were sad or not. Plus you still can’t use lovely to describe all that.”
After a while, she adds, with a notably slower, sadder voice: “I still hope they weren’t sad though.”
I decide not to react to the rather normative comments. Two of my colleagues and I have just spent the last 3 hours in one of the most posh clubs in Dubai and the intensity of memories is still reverberating in my head.
We get out of the car. I look at my watch and see that we are coming just in time – it will be midnight soon, which means that the bar still won’t be full and we can find good spots.
The front entrance has a typical fancy club feeling – red carpet, bouncer in a white T-shirt with a black jacket, few people waiting for something to happen.
I’ll be honest – I have very limited experience with “deluxe” clubs and due to a reason (which for a lack of more suitable expressions I can’t call nothing else than “innate disrespect for poshness”), I walk up to the bouncer, smile like an idiot, and say with the dazzling charm of a semi-retarded teenager:
“Hey, so we wanna go in, how do we do this?”
The guy raises one eyebrow, but stays calm and professional. He dryly tells me that the minimum spending on the bar is 500 AED and 2000 AED at the table. I start asking him about the entry requirements, when I see my colleagues just walking by and pulling me by my jacket to go with them. I have absolutely no idea what they did, but I smile at the bouncer, say bye, and enter the club.
The interior feels like made by a person with a slight fetish for chandeliers and bad lighting. The club is half empty. First, it seem that the bartenders outweigh the number of clients, but after squinting into the darker corners of the space, I see more people. Well, more females, that is. Most of them are nicely dressed ladies with candy lips and décolletage that would make Saudi movie censors flip out in rage (so far I haven’t seen one single episode of Big Bang Theory that would omit applying a blurry mosaic at least somewhere around Penny’s character).
Oh my, I could only imagine what would the Saudi movie censors do when they would come here and see what I could see.
Except for the fact that most of the Saudi movie censors are most probably either Filipinos or Pakistanis who would just order a drink at the bar and enjoy watching how the prostitutes were waiting for clients.
Anyway, this is Dubai, one of the more liberal Emirates, and certain forms of entertainment are permitted.
We order drinks (a combination of whisky and gintonics) and my Swedish and French colleagues start discussing the beach policies in Dubai. After few minutes of discussion I start to focus on something else. I feel as I’m starting to get enthralled by the dynamics of the club patrons.
I like people-watching, but this is the first time I have a chance to experience prostitute-watching.
A slightly overweight man in black jeans, black square-tipped shoes, and a black crew neck tee approaches one of the ladies. He closes in with an elegance of a drunken elephant, but his taste in women is surprisingly good. The lady is in her late 30s with short hair colored light brown. With her slender petite body, dressed in a little black dress and with YSL high heels, compared to the overweight man she felt almost as antimatter.
She looks at him and produces a highly controlled, light smile. He sits next to her, and lays his large hand on her slim thigh.
He doesn’t smile.
She doesn’t move, but looks at him, smiles again, and together they start to watch the dance floor. As it’s barely past midnight and literally nothing is happening on the dance floor, the scene is quite awkward.
After a while of touching her thigh he leans to her ear and tells her something. She stands up and starts to move to the rhythm of the music. Goddamn she knows how to move to the rhythm of the music. The song ends and she sits back to her place, next to the bar patron. They talk a bit more, and after 5 minutes, the guy stands up and leaves.
I join my colleagues and we decide to slowly move to the dance floor in the middle of the club.
The VIP tables are slowly starting to fill up with a variety of people – Asian serious businessmen, Arabic serious businessmen, European serious businessmen, and a mix of girls in sexy dresses.
Occasionally, a businessman orders champagne for his table which leads to 6 waiters bringing 6 bottles with 6 firecrackers.
They move the bottles lightly up and down in the rhythm of music and pour the champagne in prepared glasses.
Nobody is smiling. Nobody is laughing.
I flick through the menu and see that a bottle starts at EUR 1k.
Not even a hint of enjoyment.
The music improves. Some people start to move. I join the crowd and start to move to the music. A girl suddenly bumps into me, and says sorry. I turn to her, smile, and say that’s OK. Then I see a guy behind her that is dancing with her. His gaze pierces me through. I give zero fucks, smile at him, close my eyes, and continue dancing.
The whole thing just feels… void. But thanks to our early start at 7pm and quite few drinks, I’m giving zero fucks and continue dancing for the next 2 hours in the midst of serious businessmen, serious prostitutes, and serious waiters. With the Dubai curfew slowly approaching, my colleagues and I decide to exit this place and fetch a taxi back home.
It’s 3:29am and I’m looking outside of the uber car, letting the tall buildings flick in front of my eyes.
Without turning to my colleague, I murmur half to myself, half to her:
“I don’t know why, but with all those expensive champagnes, fancy prostitutes, and sad people, this whole evening felt somehow… lovely.”