It was New Year's Eve and I was single and hanging out with my coupled friends. None of us had any suggestions as to where to go that evening after dinner. It was New Year's Eve and we're young. Shouldn't we be at some cool party or some nice dance club saying goodbye the events of the year and ringing in the new? One of my friends got off the phone and excitedly told us of a club that his brother's friend just opened. "Where is it at?" I questioned. "Arcadia," he replied.

If you know LA, then you ought to know that Arcadia isn't a very happening club scene. In fact, it's more of a quiet surburban currently being taken over by the Chinese and subsequent gangs.

After gobbling down our thai food, we headed on over to the club. It was around 10:00pm or so. We didn't see a line outside. We didn't see a crowd either. There were no bouncers. There wasn't anybody at all. Was it New Year's Eve? But we still decided to go in since our friend's brother was there inside.

I should have known something by the heavy purple velvet cloth draping the doorway successfully obstructing the inside view. I could hear Chinese pop music at this point -- I think it was the Grasshoppers who were blaring through the speakers. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we peered behind the heavy curtain and walked in. Thinking we would see Oz himself or perhaps Mao, we couldn't see a thing due to the enveloping darkness inside.

So we stayed close to one another...huddled in a group. We ventured further and saw the dance floor to the right hand side. It was filled with couples. All of them were wearing nice clothing and party hats. But something was odd.

All the women were relatively old and the men were pretty darn young and handsome.

Panicked, I asked my friends, "Oh god, are we in an aap dow (duck den aka gigolo club)?"

Our eyes started darting around the club. From what we can make out in the darkness, all we could see were deep dark booths recessed back into the walls and none of us could make out a thing in there. We finally saw one long table to our left filled with women dressed to the nines in sequined strappy dresses. There were about 6 of them smoking away and they were....not young. In fact, it was then we realized we were the only ones in our twenties in the entire place.

After finding our friend's brother, we settled into a dark booth at the back of a room. All of us had one thing on our mind: to get the hell out of there. It's not that anything would have happened to us, it's just that this wasn't our cup of tea...especially on a New Year's Eve -- we wanted to be in an environment that was more....our age and where the smell of sex didn't reek like a bad Rite Aid cologne. A few booths lined the wall next to ours and I glanced over to one of them to see a guy massaging this woman's breasts, in another, a guy was making out with a woman. And on the dance floor, one lady's dress slipped off her shoulders and exposed her goods while she continued to dance with her "man".

Yes, these were men for sale. They were young. They were decent looking. They were Chinese. And they were "hosts" (for a lack of a better word). You've all heard of hostess clubs but it's rare that I've been in a host club catering to the lonely and rich Chinese women in Los Angeles. And they were real.

Not wanting to spend another moment here and not wanting to burst our bladders either, E and I headed to the restrooms. We walked along a darkened wall illuminated with red bulbs and passed several men in the hallways snorting coke from the back of their hands. After safely making it to the restroom, we knew one thing: we were definitely NOT going to sit on the toilet seat.

On the way back to our table, we noticed a few of the elderly women giving us rather harsh looks. Perhaps it was because we descended on their domain and reminded them that they were no longer young and supple. It probably didn't help that their "escorts" paid more attention to us than them.

We agreed to stay for only 30 minutes and in those 30 minutes, one of my guy friends got asked to be "recruited" and I got asked if I needed "special attention" since I was the only single gal there.

At 23 and single, I shouldn't have to pay for sex. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Ah, the good ole days.

I'm out.

rew

fwd

wantlist

scribble

email