1

Watching a livestream of Sukhumvit Road, Na knew she’d feel like a fish out of water...

Bangkok ... The lights, the traffic, the faces, streets brimming, floods of activity...

One single city block had more people in its radius than Na had ever seen in her entire life, coming from a small rice farming village in Nowhere, Nakhon Phanom...

Bangkok, Krung Thep, the metropolis, had so many foreigners, too, or, as the Thais called them: “farangs.”

Not that she’d never seen foreigners, in person; she’d seen a few farangs, sure, but only a handful, usually graying, overweight, with far younger Thai wives, often Thai wives who’d been single mothers.

Such as one of her neighbors, Bu...

Bu had found and hooked a German online, a man missing an arm, and eventually disappeared to Berlin to join him, with her child in tow.

Ecstatic, Bu had gushed and told anyone who’d listen that she’d finally see snow...

Another young single mother, Mod, in a nearby village, had met a vacationing Norwegian, and the 60ish, tall, leathery-skinned, lanky, mustached chap had married her, stayed in the village, and built Mod and her family a sizable 4-bedroom baby blue house; the house rising above all others; its portico, stucco roof and small swimming pool out back the aspiration and envy of the entire block...

To top it off, the Scandinavian had also bought a black Hilux pickup truck that Mod hosed down, meticulously, every day, in their Bougainvillea-lined asphalt driveway...

Na envied Bu and Mod’s good fortune, particularly since her luck had always been so horrible...

It was only last year that her deadbeat father, rarely seen, returned home one rainy night, crashing in, on an angry motorbike with the tail of a comet.

Her wild-eyed father, in a cataleptic fit of meth-induced rage, had robbed, beaten, chased and slashed her mother’s legs with a kitchen knife, and then disappeared, probably back to his hometown, on the jungle border with Laos...

Na’s elder brother, had bullied, molested, and raped her, pimped her out to his friends, and later, after drinking and smoking ganja and falling off a buffalo he and his friends were attempting to joyride, her brother, the bucktoothed sadist, declared he’d found redemption in a pile of buffalo dung and thus had had a religious awakening and left home, became a monk, hitchhiking to a monastery near Chiang Mai.

Worse yet, at 18, Na had fallen pregnant. With whom, she didn’t know. Possibly her brother, one of his friends, or the older boy in school who’d forced his way up her dress behind a storage shed.

Her baby was healthy, chubby, and beautiful, though; the only perfect thing in her life.

And her mother, aunts, and female cousins, neighbors took turns, breaks from rice farming, animal husbandry, and all chipped in to care for the infant, the round little giggle-machine, while Na returned to finish high school.

Na’s options after graduation were limited.

Her grades were satisfactory for university applications, but not for full scholarships, and she lacked the necessary funds for tuition.

(Perhaps if she’d studied more sedulously, spent less time on her phone, she lamented!)

She could take out student loans and be burdened with debt for years, but she didn’t want that, not for her, her mother, or her baby, and, really, she didn’t enjoy school that much anyway...

Her only other options were to work at 7-Eleven as a cashier, toil in the scalding tropical sun as a farmer, for even less money, or work at a bar, karaoke joint or massage parlor in Phuket, Pattaya, or Bangkok...

One of her former high school classmates, Pear, a light-skinned, doe-eyed lovely, a year older than Na, had been working in Bangkok and was making $2000 or more per month, sending most of it home to her family, who’d been able to buy a Hilux truck and whose father could be seen flashing a shiny new gold necklace with a glittery malachite Buddha pendant.

Pear and Na were friends on LINE and Pear inveigled Na to join her at Pear’s bar in Nana Plaza, promising that it was easy work, far more lucrative than rice farming or 7-Eleven...

Na, being an observant Buddhist, had her reservations, but decided the remuneration was too good to pass up, and, now being 19, her window of time was limited, so, she took the job offer...

Although upon arrival in Bangkok, she’d need to pass an interview first...

Officially no one under 20 is allowed in Thai bars, but fake IDs are easy to get, and Na purchased one online and it arrived the next day.

(Many of the bars in Bangkok, Pattaya, Phuket had 18, 19-year-olds in them, but not too many, as there’d been more and more crackdowns on underagers, anyone under 20 in recent times, often undertaken in cooperation with international NGOs... )

((Pear said that, like herself, Na would have an edge with her youth, because most of the girls at the bar were early to late 20s.))

(((About 28 or 29, ID age, was the general “retirement” age for bargirls. At that point most of the ladies who wished to remain in the skin trade, offering certain special services, would switch to massage parlors or freelance.)))

Na rode a red-eye, all-night bus to Bangkok, arriving at the Ekkamai bus terminal in the late morning, waking up to Bangkok’s smoggy downtown skyline, in awe of her surroundings.

She’d never seen such colossal buildings, so many cars on the streets, so many people, so many different types of people everywhere.

Sundries of Thais in business suits and surgical masks. Farangs in cargo shorts. Arab women in abayas, dark facial veils.

And oh, the traffic, never had she seen so many cars, motorbikes, buses, such big buses, windowless buses farting tornado clouds of black smoke, and there was every type of truck imaginable, all packed, bumper to bumper, flooding and jamming the narrow roads!

Stepping out of the bus, gazing upwards at the concrete jungle, the thicket of skyscrapers, she marveled at the ivory white, sleek skytrain as it snaked by, like something from a futuristic sci-fi film.

She’d wanted to spend the day seeing the sights of Bangkok, most of all to visit the Royal Palace and pray at the many sacred temples.

But there was to be none of that. Not on this day.

In the antechamber of the bus station waited her receiver, her recruiter/interviewer who Pear had only referred to as “H”. He held up a white A4 paper with Na’s full name scrawled on it in neat Thai handwriting.

Surprisingly, the man turned out to be a middle-aged Japanese (!), a rather odd looking fellow, a short (155 cm) man with a scorpion’s face and unsightly sloped head pleated with a shock of thinning coal black hair combed to the left, clumped in a heavily gelled, greasy quincuncial grid...

Despite his unpleasant physical appearance, the man wore expensive, designer clothes- a pink button-down shirt and perfectly creased, tailored black slacks, brown leather wingtips.

Na waied respectfully, and the man, in fluent but broken English, asked her for a quick self-introduction, in English, which Na rattled off with ease and alacrity...

(Na spoke quite fluent, albeit grammatically imprecise English, having taken a liking to American movies, TV shows, and it being her favorite subject in school, since they’d often been able to watch American TV, usually episodes of “Friends”, during lessons. She’d also played mobile phone games popular with foreigners and used her English online to chat with gamers from around the globe.)

((Her English proficiency a big reason why Pear recruited her. For Nana bargirls, English ability, at least an intermediate level is a must, a prerequisite for employment. Very few foreigners, especially tourists, speak Thai.))

The Japanese man listened attentively and provided no flummery, just nodded, grunted, and whisked her into his black Mercedes S-Class, onward into Khlong Toei...

Na figured she’d passed the first round of the interview...

2

They arrived at a tall, glitzy, cobalt-blue glass condo tower, and a pair of valets in brown liveries, golden epaulets, received them, opened the car doors, waied and ferried the car off to the building’s underground garage.

Na had never been in a building this luxurious; its massive lobby with a lotus pond, sky high ceilings, ornate crystal chandeliers, Carrara marble floors, and jade chimera sculpture near the elevators.

They ascended in the silver elevator up to his suite, and entered the 200 square meter condo, Na stunned by its panorama windows, 180-degree, vista views of the metropolis.

Na wasn’t quite sure what she was doing there. Her Japanese receiver, hadn’t spoken to her during the ride, instead listening to loud 80s hair metal throughout the journey.

Once the door closed behind them, he finally spoke.

“My name Haruki...”

“Ka...”

“You must provide demonstration.”

“Demonstration?”

“Erm...” Haruki grunted, and unhooked his Gucci black leather belt and dropped trou.

His naked lower body was covered in tattoos, and his smallish uncircumcised penis hung limp in the chilly air-conditioning...

Na understood what he meant, grinned and gamboled over, knelt in obeyance before him, and took his flaccid penis in her mouth. It grew, rapidly, becoming far larger than she anticipated.

Haruki held her by the temples as she suckled him, for a minute or two, and pushed her head away, sat down on the chamois U-shaped sectional sofa and pointed to his erect member.

Na slid down her white cotton panties, peeled off her tight gray Tiger beer t-shirt, and undid, flung off her red Lycra, padded bra, letting Haruki see her small, A-Cup tits, her quarter sized nipples stiff in the condo’s chilly air-conditioned breeze.

She twisted off her Thai college girl style, knee length, solid black skirt, and approached Haruki, who inspected her body, from chest to stomach, peering in between her satiny legs, at her shaven cunt, tracing his index finger along her soft, dark pink pussy slit, slipping his finger inside, in and out, two or three times, and turning her around, squeezing and patting her firm little ass.

Then he twisted her back around, facing him again, and with his right hand, motioned her to mount him.

Suddenly Na remembered something imperative that Pear had told her. Something she wished she’d understood better earlier in life.

“Condom?” Na asked, grabbing ahold of Haruki’s cock, stroking it gently...

Haruki smiled, pointed to a nearby coffee table with a drawer underneath it.

Na reached into the drawer and saw it filled to the brim with Japanese brand condoms.

Taking one out, she ripped open the wrapper, dropped to her knees, and, with her mouth, sucked it onto Haruki.

Na sprung up, took hold of his cock, straddled him, and pointed his phallus at her vaginal opening, slipped his dick inside her.

Her eyes shut, and she rode him, as she’d done with her brother, his friends, when ordered, and as she’d seen in the porn her brother had forced her to view...

She gyrated, moaned loudly, ground her bare muff into him, and bounced up and down on his cock, vigorously, for a good few minutes until he tapped her on the butt, indicating apotheosis; his toothy smile and enthusiastic nod a confirmation she passed the second stage of the interview.

She then passed the third stage, coming up clean for STDs at a nearby clinic Haruki brought her to afterwards...

3

Haruki booked Na a Grab taxi to the apartment where she’d live for the time being.

During the taxi ride over, in the plodding Bangkok traffic, the midday sky opened, and thunder roared; the busy city streets awash in a torrent of neon green rain...

Everything she saw was glowing uranium-like, bright green, terrifying Na, and she asked the surgical mask wearing, shiny bald-headed driver if this was normal, to which he ignored her by turning up his radio, blasting and humming along to the thumping Thai pop...

Arriving at the apartment, the neon rain slowly shifted to seafoam and suddenly ceased, all color vanishing, and the midday sun returned to its corona...

Na got out of the car, gathered her belongings, and made her way towards the screenshot address copied in her phone.

The apartment was in a run-down, brutalist style, pastel pink building, with an A-shaped corrugated brown roof, on the far end of a soi not too far from Nana Plaza.

A homeless man, with a scabrous face and no legs, slept rough in the adjacent alley...

In the building’s vestibule was a corpulent old man, his aura phosphorous. The old man was watching a soccer match on his phone, and he sneered at Na, with bloodshot, concave eyes, and she hurriedly climbed the stairs, to the apartment, a 4th floor walk-up in a 6 storey building...

The place was to be shared with two other bargirls, who Pear said were nice, one named Karen from Chiang Mai, and the other Jem, a Khmer from Loei...

The girls, both dark-skinned, slightly older, shorter than Na, and heavily tattooed, were asleep, on bamboo mats on the floor, and a vacant mat, with a fluffy heart-shaped pillow and folded white sheets, waited for Na; the vacant mat nearest to the apartment’s tiny bathroom, which consisted of a squat toilet, toilet hose, small washbasin and showerhead...

(The floor drain in the bathroom with a most malodorous, fecal, sewer stench that even potpourri couldn’t mask, so the door was kept closed at all times, a handwritten sign on the door commanding it so... )

The apartment was a most humble, cold-water, studio flat with no window, no fridge or TV or stove, and no furnishings aside from 3 plastic stools, and a faux wood folding table.

While neither girl appeared happy to be awoken by Na knocking on the door, they treated her kindly, but shrugged off her questions, panic about the neon green rain, man in the vestibule, and, to Na’s shock, both girls said they didn’t know Pear or that any girl called “Pear” (or her Thai name) worked at the bar.

The girls yawned, stretched, washed up, dressed and welcomed Na to join them for an afternoon breakfast of shrimp noodles at a roadside restaurant occupying a stretch of sidewalk nearby...

As the girls slid on their clothes, both in matching, mint green t-shirts, Na texted Pear and scoured through her LINE timeline.

Pear’s last two posts were from yesterday, one a selfie from Terminal 21 in Bangkok, with a live parakeet on her finger, and another a link to an article by a famous (but controversial) monk, warning of the doomsday asteroid “Apophis.”

Together the girls descended the stairwell, and, exiting the building, the phosphorous man was nowhere to be seen in the vestibule, and Na calmed down a bit...

Sitting on pink plastic stools, twirling the piping hot noodles with wooden chopsticks, sipping silver metal mugs of ice water, the girls gave Na the lowdown, a catechism, really, on the job, the essentials, how they got paid, how to act with the customers, etcetera...

Always laugh at their jokes, they told her, and always smile ... If he’s shy, take the lead. If he’s talkative, let him blabber on, nod and pretend to care...

Nice about the job, they said, was that they didn’t have to be with, even talk to, any man they didn’t like.

Karen said she preferred older guys because they paid better and didn’t last as long in bed. The shorter they lasted in the sack, the quicker she could be back in the bar to find her next customer...

Jem was the same but would go with younger guys if they looked rich.

Neither generally, ultimately cared much about the customers’ appearances. Karen said they “all look handsome with your eyes closed...”

Jem said she’d pretend they were K-Pop boyband stars or famous actors...

Karen said she’d think of the money and that often made her cum, and all three had a hearty chuckle.

They advised Na to trust her instinct and not go with anyone she got the creeps from.

And always have your phone nearby, text the mamasan the address if you go outside or which room you’re in if you use one of the hourly “short time” hotels upstairs, near the bar.

The girls told Na there were a few bargirls who didn’t even sleep with customers, at least not often, just danced, made money off the inflated price “lady” drinks the customers could buy the girls...

A bargirl got a commission from each lady drink the customer bought her...

Always make the customer buy you one or two drinks. You’ll make friends with the other girls quicker if you invite the customer to also buy them drinks, too, but careful the customer doesn’t pay for that girl, pay that girl’s “bar fine” (the fee to take her out) and not yours...

Most girls were respectful of each other’s customers, though, and rarely, at their bar, would a girl try to steal your customer. First come, first serve, territory marked.

Some girls had regulars. Guys sending them money from abroad. Some girls had local foreigners who’d traipse in once or twice a month, for drinks and/or fun.

Then there were regulars, bargirl addicts, who’d bar fine every single bargirl who’d let him, and then move on to the next bar.

Often those were local expats, semi-fluent, fully fluent in Thai, English teachers, retirees, or those flush with cash, possibly ill-gotten gains like the Israeli gunrunner, a burly fellow with a mohawk, a frequenter of Karen’s, who’d been arrested and jailed recently.

Karen, tittering and blushing, passed her phone to Na. On it was a screenshot of the gunrunner, from a news article, the gunrunner seated, handcuffed, his head bowed, face redacted, and a cache of guns, ammunition stacked on the table in front of him; cops in bulletproof vests, holding shotguns, pointing, posing, preening for the cameras...

The girls told Na to avoid drugs, drinking too much. Your lady drinks can be soda or even water, seltzer, just tell the mamasan.

Bangkok is expensive, so eat at the bar when possible; they’d get free food there, and they told Na the best local food vendors, restaurants, cheap local markets.

Neither girl did much shopping, saved most everything, sent the funds home, invested, and lived a most abstemious lifestyle, were monomaniacal about putting away cash...

Both had plans to open small businesses. Both were already married. One had a 2-year-old son.

Karen had plans to retire in the next year, and guffawing, with her big crescent-shaped gummy smile, she told how she’d gotten this divorced, hugely fat Swiss guy to propose to her, send her money to buy a house in Chiang Mai.

After the transfer went through, and he was unable to send any more money, she’d ghosted him, and figured she’d have enough money soon to quit this line of work...

Jem had 3 former customers sending her bits of money, but no proposals or houses. Yet.

Make sure to get their Facebook, keep in touch with the customers, the best you can, they told her. Tell them things like “I love you. I miss you.” Farangs like hearing that, they said...

It was inevitable there’d be lonely farangs falling in love with her, they told Na, and the girls gave her suggestions, sample pleas for succor, such as moving to a new apartment that’s unfurnished and needing to buy furniture, a broken motorbike, a sudden illness or a sick relative...

Those were their personal favorites, and they forwarded her a website for more ideas...

Na wondered about some of the farangs she’d seen in her village, those with Thai wives. Did they meet in bars? She’d recalled the couples never looking happy, sitting wordlessly quiet at restaurants, the women only happy or smiling while staring at their phones, or when the farang pulled out his wallet to pay for things.

Jem said she pitied the farangs. She’d always see them alone. In the bars, drinking alone. At restaurants, eating alone. Even at movies, sitting alone.

And she’d always see in the news how they wind up dead in Thailand, all the time.

Every day, another dead farang, usually found dead in a hotel room or dead by committing suicide, jumping off buildings, balconies of tall buildings, sometimes farangs doing swan dives in shopping malls, one Finnish farang the other day jumping from the sixth floor in Suvarnabhumi Airport...

“The ones who come here to visit, I can understand; maybe they have an unhappy marriage, can’t find a girlfriend, just want the excitement. Men are men. Men everywhere are pretty much the same.”

“But the farangs who live here, die here, I don’t understand ... Why leave a rich country? In movies, TV I see them in big beautiful farang houses, big fancy cars ... Why leave that? Why live here? Bangkok is so hot, polluted, dirty, traffic so terrible. The farangs living here must be criminals, or running from something, or crazy...”

“They must have demons ... Ghosts...”

“I think most of the farangs are just buffalos...” Karen said. (“Buffalo” being a derogatory Thai slang word for stupid person.)

“They’re big, with big buffalo penises, and usually fat and stupid like a buffalo.”

“They’re walking ATM machines...”

“They’re butterflies, flying from girl to girl, bar to bar, massage parlor to massage parlor...”

“Flying buffalos...”

“The good farangs, mostly, like from movies, TV, they don’t come here ... The farangs here are so old and fat, missing teeth...”

“And now the heaps of Chinese coming. They’re always spitting and chain-smoking. Can’t speak English or Thai, never tipping...”

“The Arabs and Indians can be trouble too. They grab your pussy. That’s why I wear two pairs of panties...”

“Only go with the rich Arabs and Indians. And rich Chinese. The Chinese from Shanghai are the best...”

“I had a customer from Shanghai. He was young, tall, handsome and nice.”

“Japanese are my favorite customers ... So polite and well-mannered. And they tip if you ask them...”

“Koreans, too, I like; dicks not too big, sometimes give generous tips...”

“Koreans? They’re doing the plastic surgery, penis extensions, silicone dicks, one last month, as big as a buffalo! I had to leave work early that night. My pussy was sore for days!”

“The Africans usually have the biggest dicks, and they fuck you sadistically. I charge them 10,000 baht for the ‘boom boom’...” Jem winced, as if having PTSD. “But I like the black Americans. The rapper guys, with the jewels, diamonds. They’re sexy and rich...”

“I like the handsome young Korean boys who come to the bar ... They’re so pretty!”

“Occasionally a young, handsome farang, too, comes, but not many.”

“And the handsome farangs these days are coming with their farang girlfriends...”

“Farang girlfriends?” Na asked, perplexed there’d be farang females anywhere near Nana Plaza.

“Many young couples, coming to the bars as tourists, just to watch us, drink. Post about it online. One took a girl for a 3-some, but that’s not too common.”

“Most are backpackers, young, not much money. They have a drink or two and leave. Every now and then the girls will stuff good tips down our bras, though. One pretty blond girl, hammered, French-kissed me and gave me 6000 baht.”

The girls told Na that the bar would pay them extra to do dance performances, often involving kissing or simulated lesbian sex.

Most bars aren’t allowed to have actual live, full nude, girl on girl, oral sex shows anymore. Most don’t have the infamous “ping pong” ball shows, either, anymore, where they’d have girls shoot ping pong balls out of their snatches (and sometimes into another girl’s or customers’ mouths!).

Typically it’s pretty boring, they told her.

“Our bar doesn’t make us be nude, won’t let us, on stage, take off our panties ... You can be topless, but it’s optional. So generally you’re just standing there, topless, or in your underwear, trying to make eye contact with a customer who looks to have cash and might like you.”

“It’s boring, mostly. Lots of nights, no customers buy you drinks or bar fine you. Sometimes you’ll have 3 or 4 customers a night bar fine you. It can be tedious or exhausting. It varies wildly ... High tourist season is better, for sure, but even then, you never know...”

“But it sure beats the rice fields.”

“And 7-Eleven...”

“Ka...”

4

Na didn’t wish to waste time, especially after paying the majority of her life’s savings on her bus ticket and first month’s rent, so her very first night in Bangkok, she accompanied her roommates to work at the bar...

Entering Nana Plaza’s vicinity, Na was on tenterhooks, experiencing sensory overload...

Despite seeing pictures, video, actually being at Nana, in person, whiffing its miasma, she felt not only queasy but also had a presentiment of disaster...

Bangkok smelled different at night. Sour, acrid. And Bangkok looked different at night. The ribs, lights of the skyscrapers seemed malevolent, phallic. The skyscrapers evil, imposing penises sprouting, ripping from the city streets...

The whole place was ugly, like a festering ulcer; a prodrome; the pavement to Nana a promontory into an ocean of decadence, an abyss of the absurd...

The din of roaring engines, music and language beat at her eardrums, giving Na tinnitus; the streets a chaotic séance, an orgy of light and movements making her feel as if she were a ghost at a banquet...

In front of the plaza she saw scores of pretty young ladies, a platoon of them, in tight-fitting attire, lining the sidewalk outside...

“Who are they?” Na whispered to Karen, as they lifted up from the backseat of their motorcycle taxi, and Na gave a 10-baht coin to a humpback old lady beggar, who had the gait of a crab...

“Those,” Karen contorted her face and grimaced, “the streetwalkers?”

“Streetwalkers?”

Karen shook her head at Na’s echolalia and naivety...

“The streetwalkers there ... See the ones nearest to the front? Those are mostly former bargirls; maybe they stole from the bar, a customer, or are too old to work; a lot of them have STDs.”

“The ones there,” she nodded towards the further end of the block, “are crooks, gangs, many ladyboys. They go after drunk farangs stumbling out of the bars. They’ll offer super-low prices, drug and rob the farangs, steal what they can from his hotel room ... Some ladyboys gang up and beat the farangs, too, mug them ... Phi Song Nang...”

Na’s expression was discomfited, and she looked at the streetwalkers with a mix of pity and shame. To Na they were a cortege, a lane of bones. Walking dead...

“Pay no mind to it, Na. It’s karma, both for them and the farang ... Perhaps the next life will treat them better...”

Behind the streetwalkers, Na noticed a pale young farang in camouflage army fatigues.

The farang appeared to be crying tears of blood. Na gasped, spun away and grabbed Karen’s arm, followed her roommates into the complex...

The 3 went through the police-manned security checkpoint and weren’t searched, as the patrons were. To the bargirls the policemen were like scarecrows...

At the front of the “World’s Largest Adult Playground” were several open-air bars, filled with a rowdy mix of regulars and tourists, motley crews of Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Malay, a few Arabs, upper-caste Indians, but mostly the clientele was white- Europeans, Brits, Americans, Australians ... Farangs.

The first bar on the right had a Filipino band singing classic rock songs, currently a brutal rendition of “Hotel California”, and they were a couple pool tables in there, with a group of bald, overweight 50ish farangs in tank tops, rugby jerseys, camo shorts, and flip flops.

The farangs were guzzling beers, laughing, yelling and cursing at each other playfully as they bent and angled, caromed their pool cues...

Na felt dizzy, seeing the endless open bowl of bars on each level of the 3 storey plaza.

There were gaggles of scantily clad young Thai girls and gorgeous, leggy ladyboys everywhere, holding up signs for beer specials, cajoling, cooing, and caterwauling at the passing bar-goers roaming the quadrangle.

Every customer she saw was male. They ranged in age from 20ish to 60ish; most of the farangs in tank tops and cargo shorts, the Asians generally slightly better dressed, in slacks, golf shirts, dress shirts.

Every one of Nana Plaza’s visitors, the men, to Na were monolith, the same creatures, atavistic votaries of genitourinary vice, divided and united in their hunt for pleasure, tits, ass, and cunt...

But to Na none of the men seemed real, none seemed human, exactly. They were more akin to cartoons, effigies...

At the far end of the U-shaped plaza, when walking up the back stairs to the bar, Na noticed Nana Plaza followed traditional Thai customs and had its own Spirit House and a couple bargirls were praying, making offerings of fruits and juice to it. Buddha could only imagine the ghosts that dwelt in there...

It was still early, so the bar wasn’t very crowded, at all, as they entered ... Only a few scattered spectators and three somnolent girls on the dais, standing around, bored, as the DJ blasted Van Halen’s “Jump”.