Few moments exemplify the difference between Kass and I than the one time we went to a club and she went absolutely feral while I chilled on the sidelines reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs on a backlit Kindle. She likes loud noises, aggressive dancing, and scream-crying Selena songs. I enjoy pigeon coos, calm walks, and whispering about the pitfalls of car-dependent infrastructure. It’s a beautiful dichotomy.
As clubs weren’t really something I talked about much, I didn’t have ‘antro’, the Spanish word for ‘club’ (specifically, a seedy, dive-type place, but meant affectionately), in my vocabulary. I’d always overhear Kass making plans with friends, and understand that they were headed to ‘antro’.
Alas, I perceived ‘antro’ as the name of a club, not the word for ‘club’. It has that sort of cool-sounding, two-syllable, slightly futuristic vibe about it that club names often have, y’know? Like Orbit, or Pulsar.
I’d see Kass’ social posts from these nightclubs, each time assuming they were all from a single spot: Antro. Which is funny, because, like, the whole aesthetic, lighting setup, and layout of Antro would change every time I saw it. I built this non-existent venue in my head — a hodgepodge amalgamation of everything I’d see from Kass’ videos. An AI-generated nightclub, essentially, but without the ethical quandaries of art theft.
As my Spanish comprehension grew, I clocked it. Kass was sharing a story about a friend of ours almost getting kicked out of a club for swearing at an overbearing security guard, and my brain latched onto the fact that she was saying ‘el antro’, ‘un antro’ — ‘the club’, ‘a club’.
“Babe, what does ‘antro’ mean?”
“Nightclub.”
Just like that, Antro, the nightclub I’d conjured in my mind, was no more. The impossible dancefloor, gone. The bar, where light from cocktail sparklers cast shadows in curious directions, dissolved. Hallways plucked from an Escher sketch, where clubbers would take selfies in mirrors that didn’t reflect reality quite exactly, folded in on themselves and vanished from view.
I don’t like going to nightclubs much — I’ll go a few times each year, when the friend roster begets quality chisme and the DJ line-up minimises the risk of a Drake needle-drop — but knowing Antro never existed makes me want to go. Somehow, I regret never spending a night there. Maybe Antro is where we go when we die. An eternity of glancing up from urbanism books to see Kass losing her shit on the dancefloor doesn’t sound too bad.