Usher is wrong, ain't no love in these night clubs

I recently went to a nightclub. Of course, it was purely out of anthropological curiosity, to conduct some social research on what kind of men frequent nightclubs.

The DJ was a famous radio man and his play list consisted of anthems from the 1980s to the present, so I could tell that we were in for an interesting night on the dance floor.

There is something about the pulsing strobe lights in a club. Call it an aphrodisiac of sorts. And of course the flowing drinks help quite a lot to set the scene, but by midnight most of the people remaining in the club were gay.

This is when you witness all the alter egos stepping out of the shadows. The fangs and the claws come out and dramatic characters present their performances like an episode on Telemundo.

Also at this hour, those who were wearing the façade of shyness metamorphose into Michael Jackson on the dance floor.

The one next to me was wearing a blue suit and looked like a JSE investment banker until a song catapulted him off his seat. He said it was a hit from his varsity days and you could see in his eyes that the track took him straight back to a happy time.

I would never have thought by looking at his strait-laced demeanour earlier that he was a majaivana (dancer) but man, did he dance.

He started off by paying homage to his youth and then didn't stop dancing until the wee hours of the morning when sweat dripped from his brow and his white shirt was soaked from the exertion. I appreciated that he was a clean dancer and not a wannabe groper.

In clubs there are men whose part-time job on the dance floor is to legally grope women, if such a thing exists.

Because dancing is a social activity, these men zone in on the dancing queen on the dance floor and get into her personal space without invitation. Then they find any excuse to grope her in the name of dance.

The best remedy for this is to unleash an elbow on them - disguised as a dance move of course - to discourage them from taking liberties.

There were girls in the club who I could swear should have been asked to produce their ID books. They looked like teenagers.

All three of them were paired up with malumes (uncles) old enough to be their grandfathers with big imikhaba (pot bellies) and all.

Love in the club is more like being on a land-free cruise liner where ordinary rules do not apply.

It is a place where your mother and father will not see you misbehave.

A place that gives you licence to throw in some debauchery for the night as those shameless malumes were doing. These young girls were throwing back bottomless cocktails and Champagne and twerking suggestively to their dates. That can only unfold in a club.

These old men, probably chasing the fountain of youth by dating young girls, would not be caught dead in the middle of the day taking the same girls out for lunch at a restaurant.

I also spotted a few men who, summoning up Dutch courage, started the prowl for a mate on the dance floor. Why do these men wait for the witching hour to start looking for a girl in a club?

Around 10pm abo manyonyoba (people who sneak up on you) hardly socialise but come 2am they flirt with countless women, as if they are ticking off numbers on a lotto ticket in a bid to hit the jackpot.

The kinds of characters I encountered at the club truly contradict Usher's hit song Love in this Club. I would not advise anyone to look for love in the club.

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