the crowd, just slightly, if only to go unopposed with the movement all around me. I felt myself being drawn from the margin of the dance floor slowly toward the center, and again I let myself be taken by the overall drift, for it seemed odder to force my way out than to let the situation be as it was: twirling lights, undulating women’s bodies, a high, sweet voice singing I love to love you, baby.
Then the music changed to something faster, and a cry of happiness rose from the throats of the women all around me. They danced with a wilder energy, throwing their arms about, singing along with the chorus. Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir? In the tighter press of bodies, I began to be elbowed now and again, but I thought nothing of it, as there was now a kind of abandon in the dancing, a joyousness, and I—a man amidst this happy throng of women—was surely an obstacle to their pleasures.
I tried to edge my way off the dance floor. But the crowd was now quite thick, and I had not gone two steps when I was sharply jostled. Sorry, said a woman, giving me a tight smile. She was a politico type, and after I mumbled a “sorry” of my own, it seemed to me that her girlfriend, another woman in an undershirt, threw her partner directly against me. They both laughed, then danced away; and before I could consider what had just happened, I felt an elbow to my ribs. Instinctively stepping aside, I received a jab in my back. I twisted around, and an arm flew into my neck. Oops! came a voice behind me. I tried to see where this had come from, but suddenly a foot came down upon mine: the high-heeled shoe of a blonde in a tight skirt. Sorry! she sing-songed as her partner swept her away.
The women seemed to be pressing in around me. The dance floor cannot really be as crowded as all this, I thought, as I was bumped from one side, then from the other. I tried to move away, to an area that might be more open, but I was soon stepped on again, by a businesswoman in sensible pumps, then by the combat boots of a bull dyke. A tiny Asian woman, giggling, reached out a graceful foot and pressed it upon my toes, then howled with delight, like a child at a balloon dance.
And still the women seemed to press in, to the point where I could not move, even to defend myself from the next spike heel to the instep, the flung arm that hit me in the face, the fist that landed on my throat. The heat became overwhelming. The smell of their bodies and lotions was now sickening. The feel of their bodies upon mine—the tight jam of flesh on flesh—was now causing me a kind of panic, as I was terrified that I might unintentionally touch a breast or a thigh and so bring upon myself some sort of physical retribution. I wanted desperately to leave, but no matter how I turned and turned, the women’s bodies trapped me in place, and I seemed to drift ever farther from the edge of the dance floor, from the entrance, from the red glow of the exit sign, which I watched recede into the distance as I was swept into the depths of the room. Still the music throbbed and the lights swirled and the blows fell upon me, and I could not find my way out of this mass of women, who, I saw, were laughing at me.
I was about to cry out, when a loud voice shouted from the far side of the room:
Take it easy, girls. Don’t gangbang ’im!
All the women stepped back, just an inch, and I was able to turn around and see where this voice was coming from. It was the bull dyke from the door, parting the crowd with her arms. She was laughing. Don’t gangbang ’im, girls, she kept repeating, and soon the crowd took up her laughter in a rippling wave that washed over the dance floor. Is that what they had been doing: gangbanging me? Finally the big woman reached me and put a meaty hand on my arm.
You better get outta here, mister, she said, still laughing, before these girls stomp you to death.
I moved in her wake toward the door. But still the women were gathered around