I started clubbing in high school and had the awesome opportunity to sharpen my skills overseas in Cambridge, England. It was the summer after junior year and I was out at Rich Kids Camp – a truly life-changing experience, lemme tell ya – surrounded by trust fund babies who are now probably working at Fortune 500 companies and were the inspiration for socialites before disasters like Paris and Kim came along. (On an aside, I have a fatty crush on Kim.)

Classic example of Rich Kid Camp potential.
One kid was entering his junior year (of high school, mind you) and had an Aston Martin, his own house in Connecticut, and access to a pad in Manhattan. He, like most of the other kids at Rich Kids Camp, was shuttled off to boarding school as soon as he was old enough to be kicked out of the house (which was probably 9, in his case), so at least I knew that in the face of all his material luxuries, his parents didn’t love him. I don’t mind saying such a statement because he was a total prick and it’s absolutely true. I really pissed him off once when I made a remark about his “White boy dancing!” The next day in class (Global Economics, if you’re interested.), he shared with us how his mother is from “new money” and made a brush-away motion with his hand. What a douche.

I didn’t hang out with those kids.
So anyway, the girls I was hanging out with were awesome. We were all upperclasswomen in high school and I liked them because they were all humble. They weren’t like Douchey White Boy in any way except that they came from ridiculous loads of money, and it showed. None of us had boyfriends (Well, actually, I sort of did but it was the quintessential frivolous high school relationship and I decided, while abroad, that I was going to break up with him once I got home anyway. I actually sent him a letter that just said “We need to talk.” He received it after I had returned home and broken up with him. It was pretty awesome, high school…), and as the days wound down, we planned a Girls Night Out to wrap up the delicious package of being away from our parents in another country that had lower drinking and smoking age requirements.

It should be no surprise that we decided we should go clubbing. We couldn’t leave this as a simple “Oh, we went out and danced” type of thing. We had to spice it up somehow. For all the weeks that we had been running around in Cambridge, in and out of Sainsbury’s and Boots, someone always seemed to come back with a story about this thing they saw on sale at the makeup and perfume aisle – PHEROMONES.

Is there anything more enticing to a high school girl who’s out to live the wild life? We weren’t promiscuous, but I’ll be damned if we weren’t interested in attracting other men and having some newsworthy (minimal) degree of a foreign affair. “Oh, yeah, I spent the summer in Cambridge. Mhm. I went out to a pub one night and I met this punter. We met up the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that…”

For those who don’t know, pheromones are chemicals that trigger physical responses from other members of the same species. In the case of the British Drugstore Pheromone Phenomenon, the pheromones we’re dealing with in this story are sex pheromones – That is to say they are chemicals that are supposed to make other people look at you with Sexy Eyes. For all those cases where a heterosexual girl can’t find her way to a heterosexual guy’s heart via his stomach, this pheromone solution shone like an auspicious beacon of light. These bottles of pheromones contained lightly scented perfumes with Sexy Eye chemicals lurking inside. Just think of it: Every spritz. Sexy Eyes.

It seemed like a great way to waste £6. We all bought our own bottles. High School Boyfriend Who?

Remember this forever: Punani. NOT the same as “panini.“
One of us had allegedly got in good with a guy who worked at a local nightclub called Pu Na Na. Yeah, you can’t fucking write better fiction. It was imperative that we had the hookup before we headed out because we actually weren’t of legal clubbing age at that time. Cambridge is not the same as London; it is very much London’s more suburban counterpart, so the nightlife wasn’t what one would expect of an international city. And so our friend’s social connection determined our targeted destination for the night. Off to Pu Na Na’s we went! (After spritzing on the pheromones and doing our makeup in a very high school single-sweep-of-eyeshadow way, of course.)

There were four of us that night, and even though it was crazy dark when we walked outside and the skies were threatening us with rain, we went out. The storm itself should have been our ominous sign that nothing good would come of this trip, but fuck, we had just dropped British pounds on Sexy Eyes serums, the Hell if we were going to give up!

So we get to Pu Na Na’s. My friend talks to the bouncer, asking about the friend who was allegedly employed there and could allegedly get us in for free without any hassle. Details for me get fuzzy here, but the end result was that we couldn’t get in. Enter 300 Pound Gorilla.

300 Pound Gorilla.
While we’re outside trying fruitlessly to get into Pu Na Na (HAHAHAHAHA), this random-ass round Black man comes up to the ropes. He really did resemble a gorilla, huge shoulders and your conventional all-black bouncer garb. He claimed to be a bouncer at a different club. He said he could get us all in for free. My friends befriended him and we introduced ourselves. I made up a name. (I think this was the first time I used the fake name, Rita! Mark that down, July 2000.) He walked us to the next club.

It was raining, it was stupid. We were following this huge stranger bouncer to some section of town we had never been to and he pretty much could have broken us all with just one swipe. Projector overlays of RAPE, in tall, red block letters, were flashing in front of my eyes. Not my wisest decision.

The Fez Club.
So we get to this club (“The Fez”) and I don’t even remember how we got in. Did he sneak us in? Did we walk in as if we looked 18? – I don’t know. We huddled around each other and moved like a small flock of penguins. Our sheer presence made us look ridiculous because the place was empty. There were probably, like, five other people in the dark club, all of them middle-aged looking. We totally had “NEWB” stamped on each of our individual foreheads, and I felt a huge flush of relief when The Gorilla excused himself to go say hi to a friend.

When he left, we quickly whispered to each other about how shady this all was. Our uncertainty was as obvious as our lack of belonging. Rounds of “Do you want to go?” hushed through the circle, but The Gorilla returned.

The Gorilla returned with our next seedy character of the night, Bald White Mugger. Remember Zidler’s bodyguard from Moulin Rouge? Bald Mugger looked like this guy except he was shorter and exuded sticky, sleazy charm. He also wore a leather jacket, something that you really just can’t trust when it’s worn indoors, and oozed his questionable intentions on us.

He extended his hand to each of us, introducing himself. My girlfriends exchanged names with him wearing plastic smiles. He took my hand and I forced out, “Rita.” I have no recollection what his name was. I just know I wanted to crawl out of my skin when he kissed the top of my hand. If it is possible for hands to vomit instead of mouths, I’m pretty sure my fingertips would have done just that: spewed disgusting, pheromone-laced muck over this guy’s dirty hands and skeezy jacket.

I don’t know how we even lasted that long, but the guys were dancing with us in our odd and awkward circle. The unfortunate thing about the Cambridge club was not just its lack of clientele, but also its absolutely horrible DJ. Everything was really, really old. Every song I ever heard in a Cambridge club since then has been really, really old. You can’t blame the British for being behind on American-marketed music, but for reals, it sucked. If you want anything current in the music industry, you go Fabric or Cirque or Ministry of Sound – You go anywhere but some random hole in Cambridge.

“Can’t pay my automobills…”
The year was 2000. The song was “Bills, Bills, Bills.” The Destiny’s Child track was written and produced in 1999. Ignoring the delayed discovery of such songs as MIA’s “Paper Planes” (Produced in 2007, released as a single in 2008.) and Savage’s “Swing” (Produced in 2005, released as a single in 2008.), the playing of “Bills” dated the club. Depending on who you talk to, a year’s age in a released single is pretty long. In The Fez’s case, “Bills” made the club archaic because it was easily the most current track on the tables that night.

We bounced along (really unhappily) to the crap DJ and I couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable.

The escape!
This whole charade was getting to be really insufferable. The gods willed upon us that we be allowed to breathe again when The Gorilla and Bald Mugger offered us drinks. We declined. I think we all knew what we had on each others’ minds. We spoke no words at all when The Gorilla and Bald Mugger headed for the bar. We bolted.

You really have to picture the scene to fully understand how scared shitless we were: Four high school girls running, literally running, through Cambridge’s rainy cobblestone streets. IT WAS RAINING AND WE WERE RUNNING IN CLUBBING CLOTHES. We were laughing because it was the only exertion of sound we could emit. Otherwise, we were dumbfounded with the situation we had just found ourselves in.

I was so freaked out I ran up a set of stairs. Because I wanted to hide. Un/fortunately, I was on the varsity track team at school and straight outran my friends within just a couple of seconds. My mind was so discombobulated that I didn’t realize that I had lost my group and had effectively hidden from them, too, and not just the potential rapists who were probably just shrugging and laughing it off back at The Fez. I was huddled and shivering at the landing of a locked door when I heard my girls running below me, saying, “Where’s Mayka?” I ran back down the steps and fell into their pace. “Oh my God! Where’d you go?” I told you this was silly.

We continued running back to campus (Jesus College. Again with the “You can’t fucking write better fiction.”) and tumbled into someone’s dorm room. We were all a heap of Bad Mistake, and the glint of the tall, red letters of RAPE were only faintly flashing in my eyes now. I think our Girls Night Out turned into a Girls Night In as we talked (shrilly) about our recent endangerment. Sometimes you have to be young and stupid, which is how I explain that evening’s disaster.

Did the pheromones work? I don’t know. I haven’t tried them since. They probably didn’t do anything for piquing the interests of men within proximity, but I will wager that they might make high school girls act stupid. Just like reality TV.

Besides, as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that the real solution for seduction starts with Al, last name Cohol.

No more 300 pound gorillas for me.

Editor’s Note: In case you wonder how I landed in Rich Kids Camp, all I can say is the economy was better then. (Do not trust the McCain.) I think I was one of five people there who attended a public high school, two of the other people being my twin brother and my next-door neighbor. It was there where I declared I would never send my children to boarding school. Ever.