No no, there's only one "t" in Chasity

Perhaps nowhere do I feel more out of place than at a club. I'm not a club kind of guy. I take paying just for the convenience of spending more money inside someones establishment as a personal affront to my intelligence (I can just see the owner in his office, peering over his pile of money through a double-sided mirror as the crowd shuffles in: "Holy shit! The moron just paid to get in! Muahahaha."). I don't like overpriced drinks, I don't like high-maintenance women (or men), while I see the merit in some dance and techno music I generally don't enjoy listening to it, and I don't like spending time in a place where the women are in no way attracted to guys like me and the men make me feel physically inadequate - yes, I'm happily committed, but I still like to feel good about myself.

As I'm on the edge or sounding like a bigot I should pause here to balance the above paragraph with a few more facts: I have no problem with dancing. I like dancing. I like Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga. In fact, I even enjoy Ke$ha - Yeah, I spell her name with the proper "$". Though, I like Ke$ha for same reason I like Jersey Shore. She's a train wreck, and I enjoy ridiculous idiots who take themselves seriously and seemingly don't understand that 90% of their fan base is laughing at them not with them - at least, God, I hope that's the case. Plus, it's cathartic and American to look down on people who are richer, more successful and most likely less intelligent than you are. Well, so much for my redeeming second paragraph...


The point is, with my aforementioned loathing towards the club culture, what event could possibly get me to a place called Prime Lounge - Why do all clubs have names like this? Why can't there be a super chic, super posh, super elite club named Karen's Place? - in downtown Louisville, Kentucky on a Wednesday night? Chasity's Birthday Party, that's what.


Chasity is a young woman born-and-bred in Southern Indiana, and a co-worker of mine. (Yes, Chasity. As many people had done before me, I referred to her as Chastity for the first three months I knew her -  Chastity having, you know, precedence as a name for human beings and all.) It was Chasity's birthday last Wednesday and this is how she invited me to her party (insert Indiana twang here):

Oh, you know Wednesday is my birthday, my favorite holiday of the year. Oh, I don't fuck around on my birthday. I treat it like its prom - though I never went to prom, I didn't stay in school long enough. I get up real early and hang around in my pajamas, then I get my nails done. Then I get my hair bleached and go buy a new outfit. Did I tell you about my cake? Its a big prescription pill bottle. You better be coming to my party, its at Prime Lounge. I'll be there at 10:00. They have $5 bottles of wine on Wednesday nights. Last year I made everyone give me a birthday card with their favorite "Chasity memory" in it. That's how my boyfriend found out I used to be a lesbian. This year I want everyone to bring me a mix CD with songs that, when they hear them they think of Chasity.

How the hell do I not go to that?

The funny thing is, I wasn't sure how I felt about Chasity at first. She got hired where we work the same day as me so we had an initial common ground, but even while she is exactly the type of person I had begun preparing myself to share a community with the minute "Yeah, I'll move to Louisville. Why the fuck not" came out of my mouth, I wasn't sure how to handle her. Her naivete rubbed me the wrong way, she was my age but we might as well of lived on different planets, she was quite literally addicted to Mountain Dew.

But meeting people like Chasity is all part of the beauty of traveling around the country. I've now had the privilege of living on both coasts, the biggest city in the Midwest, and now the crossroads of the Midwest and South, and I'm without a doubt the better for it. In his books and on his TV show, Anthony Bourdain repeatedly reflects that, despite all his travels over the last decade, the more he sees the less he feels he really knows. He couldn't be more right. It's an old adage, but it's stuck around for a reason.


Chasity has since become one of my closest co-workers. We don't spend time together outside of work - visiting a different planet just for some company is a long way to travel - but I certainly enjoy our conversations. Part of this is because - like Ke$ha - Chasity is, in a word, ridiculous. She's the only woman I've ever known that can say something so perverted and obscene that I can't even muster up a response - instead closing my eyes, shaking my head, laughing and walking away

She's still addicted to Mountain Dew, enjoying her first 20oz of the day with her coffee around 7am. Though to her credit, as her Doctor has explained the Dew is basically destroying her body the way alcohol kills an alcoholic's, she's tried numerous times to quit - but the headaches and stress usually knock her off the wagon within a few days. Even when she's off the Dew however, she takes enough of those energy pills one finds at gas station counters to land someone like myself in the hospital with an anxiety attack.

I won't get into details, but I don't think she'd have any problem with me saying that her home life with her live-in, aspiring rapper boyfriend tends to get a little messy at best, and her kids sound like a handful. Though, I don't know what she expected when she named one of them Maliki after the sinister kid from Children of the Corn (seriously).

So, this is what got me, hater-of-all-things-club, to Prime Lounge in Louisville, Kentucky on a Wednesday night. And there I was, sipping on a $5 bottle of Chardonnay like it was a 40oz while Chasity, looking good all dolled up in her new birthday outfit, 4-inch heels,  freshly painted nails, and newly bleached, purple-tipped faux-hawk drank her birthday Patron out of a glass, like any classy, cosmopolitan woman would do on her favorite holiday.

Who's the white trash now?