Late at a bar and crammed in with all the others. Women barely dressed and swaying slightly to a deafening beat. Men braid around them as though they were poles, stations for massaging hard-ons. And it's totally anonymous, these fingers lacing through my fingers and finding their way to my waist and elsewhere.

But I'm there to dance and gone is the incense and the divans and the ambience. It's the weekend, baby, and it's all flesh and smoke now under a relentless and generic beat. Around the room, empty faces strobe in wan sequences. I only start to enjoy myself when I close my eyes and recline into the manhattan I drank at the bar before this one. Yeah, then it feels good. Feel the rhythm of this awful hip-hop house music and let it resonate to the tips of my limbs.

Feel the hand in my back pocket, holding the card another man left earlier in the night. This one talked with me and I'm better at talking than not; talking promises other outcomes, so he put his name there in my back pocket, his name that tastes like wine.