The bright side of being trapped in a virtual circus was that it was easy to find people who were normal. They usually came in with trepidation, looked horrified, and left within fifteen minutes.
“Is it always like this?” An Australian guy shouted in my ear as he looked around the room, mentally clutching on to his sense of dignity.
“I don’t know, but it gets worse the farther back you go,” I shouted back.
While the harmless drunks and weirdos save Motown House from being completely awful, the bar is still exceedingly creepy. For about ten minutes, a group of us kept our eyes resolutely fixed on different spots in the bar while a guy that looked like Michael Moore crossed with John Wayne Gacy stood next to our table and stared at us. On my way out of the bathroom, a South Asian guy stroked the back of my head. A drunk Japanese guy simply stood six inches behind one of our friends for about an hour.
“I work for the CIA,” a white-haired, American guy in a suit tried to tell my sister.
“No, you don’t,” she said flatly, “if you did, you wouldn’t tell me that.”
“Okay,” he conceded, lamely, “I work for the U.S. Embassy.”
“Yeah?” My sister said, sensing another lie, “what do you do there?”