Different worlds

Manung and Soobin went home, but Adam invited me to a bar downtown - a friend of his was having a birthday. I went along, knowing I would not fit in. "A lot of them will be dominatrices." he told me. I was in jeans and a yellow t-shirt. "They won't be whipping each other...not at the bar anyway." he assured me. I was apprehensive. But, I thought, these people are all about non-conformity. I am not conforming to their dress sense. They'll respect that.

We met some of his friends there. All were covered with tattoos and had most of their face pierced. I ordered a whiskey on the rocks and was handed two - one for each hand.

I was introduced to people who grunted at me and looked me up and down before walking away. A large red sign on the graphitied wall read 'You vomit, you clean".

Two TVs were playing loudly. A naked woman with breasts bigger than her head was being covered in what looked like olive oil and blood. And then someone in a lab. Someone on a table, tied down. Mostly naked. Smaller breasts. Then a man in white coat.

I am watching this when I realise Adam has been talking to me. Talking about encryption, I think - computer security, viruses, web-based pornography. He talks and I try to listen and sip my whiskey. I am drinking my whiskey faster than I want to because with a glass in each hand, it keeps spilling on my clothes when people walk past me.

There is a woman sitting at the table beside us, and Adam introduces me. I tell her “Hi”, and then “Pleased to meet you." I berate myself immediately, and try to imagine what the appropriate greeting is for a person with a tattoo on their forehead of an eye-less Christ on an inverted crucifix. She looks down at my midriff, as someone would if they expect a handshake, but possibly just to mark the best spot for pushing in a knife. I apologise, “…someone gave me two drinks...” and show my two hands apologetically. She grunts and looks away.

She is dressed in torn black clothes. Her nose is connected to her ear with metal, and Christ's eyeless sockets stare at me. Looped around her hand is the end of a pink leash, with little yellow broaches running along its length. It leads to the floor, where, lying on her feet, is a perfectly groomed purebred terrier. The kind of dog that yaps and sits in the front seat of a gold Mercedes Benz.

The woman in the TV is still on the bench. So are her intestines. Blood is everywhere. The severed head of a hairy man lies in the corner watching the woman squirming and blinking when the blood splatters.

I am not listening to the conversation any more. Adam is talking with his friend about a computer conference in Vegas.

We go outside for his friend to smoke. And there we stand for an hour, talking about the potential of Identity Management as an industry. About cracking 128bit encryption. About looking for work, and about girlfriends.

Normality, like social rot, lurking underneath a demented exterior. Either that or I was not to be invited into their world: deliberately kept outside in a cocoon of normality where they assume my jeans and sneakers belong.