As far as the line extended down Southwest Second Avenue,
I could only see tight Gap jeans.
I was wearing a leopard-print skirt.
I like to think my 21 years have given me a firm grip on
the etiquette of the adult clubbing world; showing up looking
out of place often warrants some thinly veiled disapproval
or a chuckle from the bouncer. Not so at the Quest. Sitting
in the car, collecting my nerve, I knew without a doubt
that every teenage girl who had ever shopped at the Gap
was outside just waiting to smash my fragile confidence
with her glittery, cheerleading sledgehammer.
The Quest is my 16-year-old sister's favorite place to
hang out. As often as possible, she and about 400 other
girls make the two-hour pilgrimage up the highway from Albany,
smacking their gum and shrieking Backstreet Boys lyrics
out the window. Whenever I ask for details about what goes
on there, she's responds vaguely: "Oh, you know. Just stuff."
Curious, I decided to check things out myself. I'd be lying
if I didn't admit that, in the back of my mind, I thought
that a night out among teeny-boppers would provide a mind-blowing
ego boost: 17-year-old boys shyly blushing from across the
room, girls begging me to do their hair for them and so
on.
I was wrong.
Entering the Quest is kind of like stepping inside a fluorescent
MTV disco hosted by Britney Spears. As I walked through
the doors that night, a group of 16-year-olds suddenly gained
more influence over my life than my liberal-arts education,
my boyfriend of two years and my morning coffee. Basically,
I felt really, really dumb.
Whenever my sister comes to me for advice about surviving
teendom, I end up serving her the same old tired clichés
about "being herself." But this is her philosophy: "The
kids who don't fit in--I just really don't think they will
ever, ever have good lives. They're sort of like aliens:
They'll probably never get married, never have a job and
end up golfing their whole life."
It is a foolish, doomed and tragic club hopper who thinks
an "all-ages club" is interchangeable with an "underage
club." I've been to all-ages clubs before. I've raved the
night away at the Womb and slumped in the corner at 17 Nautical
Miles while indie-rock droned on. Compared with the Quest,
these all-ages places are like a support group for people
with low self-esteem. One simple rule makes the Quest stand
alone: Those who enter must be between the ages of 16 and
21. "We organize it this way because, well, we find that
16-year-olds don't really speak the same language as 25-year-olds,"
says co-owner Dan Lanzen. Indeed. Besides their youth, what
the Quest kids have in common is that they represent the
middle of the mainstream and demand conformity in a way
that would be shunned at the Womb and 17 Nautical Miles.
Once I survived the Gap-jeans nightmare, I stumbled through
the door and found a small, dark corner with a table tall
enough to hide the leopard print. As I surveyed the dance
floor, I dreamed of my safe Southeast bars like the Lutz.
I forced myself to stay because, as uncomfortable as I was,
I had to demystify the Quest.
The dance floor, sparkling with red, blue and green flashing
lights, resembles a darkened, cement tennis court. Sunken
steps are flanked by tables and black velour chairs. Even
from my corner perch, I was eye-to-eye with couples groping
and grappling like WWF wrestlers.
Wandering over to the all-boy section, I decided to stand
in the middle of the crowd just to see what would happen.
Clearly, this action was the equivalent of flashing the
Pope, but since I had already been reduced to some kind
of bacterial growth on the hip food chain, I decided I didn't
have much to lose. Ricky was the first to notice, asking,
"Hey, uh, do you have a pen I can borrow?" Ricky was wearing
the male equivalent of the Gap-girl uniform: baggy pants,
white shirt and baseball hat, perfectly bent. I felt special
having been spoken to and wanted nothing more than Ricky
to be my new best friend.
"So, um..." I stuttered the old stand by, sure that he
wasn't listening. "So, do you come here often?" To my incredulous
surprise, Ricky actually looked at me and smiled a toothy,
boy grin. For just one minute, the ridiculousness of my
situation flashed through my mind. Here I am, a senior at
a nationally known college, a student who gobbled up Feminist
Studies 101 and 501, and I was letting a 17-year-old
boy intimidate me. I quickly abandoned this thought for
the small prospect that Ricky would continue to talk to
me. "I don't really come to dance," Ricky told me, matter-of-factly.
"I just sit here and usually wait for, you know, the eye.
Why else would someone come here?" Enchanted and perhaps
a little jealous, I asked him about it. Ricky explained
that once he gets the eye, he asks for numbers. "Well, once
I get the numbers I don't actually call them," he
confessed. "I just, you know--I just get the numbers."
As I watched his hat disappear into the sea of others,
I noticed him (or was it someone who looked just like him?)
approach girl after girl, chat for a few minutes and scribble
down her number. I clearly hadn't warranted a number request,
but I didn't feel bad--at least I came away with a little
bit of knowledge about the Quest's social current.
Still mystified, I moved on to a pack of soda-drinking
girls. I just didn't have the courage to stand in the middle
of the girl section. It was then that I met Jenny. Red lips
the color of her shirt, a rhinestone somehow stuck to her
forehead, Jenny juggled a bottle of red soda and her cigarette,
casually balancing on her heels and making it clear she
was not with me. Disdainfully, she cast her eyes down on
me. "Is this your first time here?" she asked, not really
making eye contact. "Uh, yes," I muttered. "Well, I know,
like, half the people here," she told me, black-outlined
eyes scanning the floor. "And everyone knows, you don't
come on Thursdays," she continued. I nodded, submissive.
Just before she wandered off, Jenny told me, "But don't
worry, if you come on Saturday, I'll talk to you."
In fact, I did go back on Saturday, wearing a brand-new
pair of Gap jeans, eagerly looking for Jenny. The first
thing I noticed as I joined the kids in line was row after
row of short, black skirts. Denim was, apparently, dead.
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 21, 1999
|
