In Seattle, you can’t smoke in clubs. Even weirder, you can’t smoke weed in clubs. This stands in contrast to California venues, most of which have huge open areas due to the almost-always-perfect weather, where anything goes.
So outside of every Seattle club, you will see a gang of smokers huddled under eaves and ducked into doorways to get out of the drizzling rain, bumming cigarettes and puffing away.
Look a little farther, and you will see cars full of people parked on the side of the road, seemingly just sitting there, bass bumping. There is a strange foggy appearance to the air inside of the car, which is no longer a Corolla or a Civic, but rather a Hotbox. After approximately ten to fifteen minutes, the crew will then stumble out onto the street, a billowing cloud of pot smoke along with them. This is the 206, and this is how we roll.
One such rainy Wednesday night outside the much loved/hated Pioneer Square club Trinity, I was chilling with my friend Laurie and her boyfriend Jason, a resident of the club, in his car. Being lazy and probably already high, the three of us had left Trinity and just ducked into his car for a quick toke, not caring that it was parked right outside the front door of the club.
We roll out along with a giant cloud of steazy smoke and walk approximately ten feet to the club entrance, manned by the one jerk bouncer who everyone knows is the one jerk bouncer. Probably half the Seattle people reading this have been either kicked out of Trinity or not let into the club by him. He crosses his arms in front of us and blocks the door.
“You guys reek. What’s that smell?”
Being high and surprised at the door blockage to a club we usually waltz right into, we balked. Was this doucheface really not going to let us back in because we smelled like weed? And besides, wasn’t it fairly obvious what the stench was? How do you answer that one?
Laurie, who had been enjoying her DJ boyfriend’s supply of bar tickets and was quite sauced at this point, had the perfect answer:
“It’s our new perfuuuuuume!” she says.
“Oh yeah?” retorted the bouncer, playing along with a shit-sniffing smirk on his face. “What’s your perfume called?”
And for some reason, popping from the depths of my head to the top of my tongue, I scream:
“DANCEFEVER5000!”
We laugh, the asshole bouncer laughs, and we stumble our way into the club for a few more hours of dancing.
We never did carelessly smoke weed right in front of the club before, but for some reason that name, that perfume, that eau-du-pot stuck in my head.
And the rest is history.
All photos from the famous Wednesday night at Trinity.
…just so you know.
DANCEFEVER5000 