Rarely does it happen that you’re in the right place when something happens. I mean something big, something fun, and something that makes a fantastic cocktail party story. It’s never like, “I was having a drink at the bar, and in walks Bill Murray and he bought everyone a round of drinks.” That just doesn’t happen. At least not to me.
Usually, it’s more like a recent lunch when I convinced my husband that we should go for seafood rather than Mexican food. Later, I discovered Harrison Ford—the man whose image is on a full-sized cardboard cutout that sits next to my desk, the man whose role as Han Solo I loved so much that I dressed up as him for Halloween—that man, randomly had lunch that day at a Mexican restaurant we frequent. Those near misses, those are the kinds of things that happen to me.
So when my husband and I discovered that we had unknowingly been somewhere when something big happened, it wasn’t surprising that we would milk it for all its worth—by telling it to every couple that dares to have a drink with us.
We discovered what would be our future favorite story to tell while we happened to be watching a documentary on Netflix about a nightclub owner. We were only half-interested until we saw pictures of a familiar club. It’s called the Tunnel, in New York City, and it was footage of a police bust happening there on the day we had visited nearly two decades earlier.
Discovering that we were there during a raid worthy of a Neflix documentary was a story we began to tell at get-togethers with others over wine—because honestly it makes us feel a little trendier than constantly talking about our dog, our kids, or the latest project we’re tackling on our house. And it’s become a story we tell in such a synchronized way, each one of us knowing when to deliver our lines, as if it was rehearsed.
In reality though, the story is only cool in hindsight, because for all these years we were oblivious to what even was going on around us that night. It goes like this: We were visiting with friends in New York City. After a night at Phantom of the Opera—during which we all ashamedly fell heavy-headed, lightly snoring asleep, I announced I wanted to go dancing. “Clubbing?” our East Coast friend asked. Yeah, sure, I’d been to clubs in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, I thought. So I agreed.
We arrived at the Tunnel among scantily clad women (or maybe they were men) in cages, feather boas wrapped around the necks of fabulous people, and neon body paint everywhere. My husband knew it wasn’t what I had in mind but I wasn’t getting it. He grabbed my shoulders and looked me in the eyes, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I watched as a girl in moon boots, glitter, and antennae walked passed us. That’s about when our buddy approached us and said, “It’s done, we’re in.”
He had just paid $20 apiece for the four of us to get in. Twenty years ago, a $20 cover charge was a lot of money so there was no turning back.
And then there is the line I uttered that day that has become my husband’s favorite punch line to this story. When he asked me to dance, I considered the pounding electronic beat for a second. It sounded like the needle was stuck on the record, and I said, “I’ll wait for another song.” The incredulous reply I received was “This is the song.”
It wasn’t the people draped in leather and chains we saw as we walked passed the bondage-themed room; it wasn’t the ’70s garb of the disco room; it wasn’t the unisex bathroom with the bar in the center; it wasn’t even the openly traded, ahem, party favors, that were floating around us. It was the music. For whatever reason, knowing that what was supposed to be dance music was a pulsating rhythm on repeat was the moment it sunk it: This wasn’t the Central Coast. It wasn’t even anything like any of the LA bars I’d been to; I was way out of my element.
Luckily, I didn’t have time to process how far from the norm we actually were at the moment. The weirdness was soon interrupted when our friend grabbed our arms and told us we needed to leave. He hustled us out of the club and onto the street where club kids were gathering and fighting over taxicabs. We didn’t know why everyone was leaving and never thought to ask. I guess we assumed it was closing time.
In reality, the club was notorious for having a free and open drug culture and the police had finally built up a case to shut it down along with another club owned by the same man somewhere else in the city that night.
And with that Ron and I—a California couple whose biggest excitement now comes when a big swell rolls through our favorite beach, or maybe from trying the latest Bien Nacido Vineyard wine—now have a story to tell that makes us seem like we were hip because we were somewhere when something like that was happening at some point in time.
Editor Shelly Cone’s friends are kind enough to put up with her club story and laugh at the details. Tell her she’s still hip at scone@santamariasun.com
This article appears in Mar 17-24, 2016.