The Executive and the Gelandangan

I just discovered that I was a shy girl.

It’s Friday. Yay! Rina and I had a plan to go dugem tonight. Arief called Rina for this outing. He was interested in checking out the cool Canadian band we’d been fussing about.

I went to Shangri-La directly from the office. Veve and Nyo dropped me at Karang Menjangan Hospital and I took a taxi from there.

I arrived in the hotel first. I marched to the toilet and fix my make up. Actually I didn’t wear any make up from the office, so it wasn’t really fixing. Rina came about half an hour later and off we went to Desperados, our favourite club. Arief, unsurprisingly, called Rina, just a moment before she left for the club, that he wasn’t feeling good. Yeah yeah..

As usual, she ordered a glass of coke and me some small Bintang beer. We sat in a dim corner, a strategic place to watch the band and spy on some couples, and scanned the people in our first hour there and started to analyse them. There was this one group of four business people look-like near the bar. They consisted of one neat handsome guy, later to be called the executive and three old men. Then I started to make a story of my own.

“That guy in dark blue, the young one, must be an heir of a very big successful company. He’s on his way learning the system of the company and those three old men must be the ‘important’ people he needs to socialize with. He can be one of the best candidates, for you, Rin. Young, rich, responsible.. Whatelse can you expect from a man?”

One of the female singers climbed the bar, out of the blue, and stood before the executive. She sang while dancing hotly, shaking her ass covered by some piece of mini skirt. The executive didn’t take any interest in her. Not even stopped to look at her butt.

I exclaimed, “Oh my God, he’s gay!”

Rina laughed.

Standing across us were a group of vain women with full thick makeup and a metrosexual gayish guy in whites. They danced all the time and kissed every male greeting them. You can guess who they are. Nevertheless it was fun to watch them.

The homo guy in whites seemed to pull this thin guy over him. He was OKAY in look, not too extraordinary. He, later to be called gelandangan, wore some semi dark T-shirt and jeans and always held a glass or a bottle of drink in his hand. Once in a while he danced with one of those girls and the other girls in the bar. The gay seemingly wanted to dance with him but I couldn’t catch a glimpse if he really managed to dance with him. But since the guy in whites seemed to always cling to him, I decided that they were gays. Hihihi..

We heard the band sing our song and we were down to the dance floor to move our body and get some exercise. It was funnnnn! It seemed ages since we last danced. I stomped my feet hard on the dance floor happily and made little jumps sometimes to follow the music. Then the gelandangan started to dance with me.

We smiled and danced. Once in every other time we switched partners, but back danced together. When Rina and I went back to our chairs, I told her he was cool. He looked “empty”, which reminded me of someone and his dance was quite weird, but I had a feeling to say that he was cool. Then we compared him with the executive again. Hehe..

We danced again. When I was back to my chair to take my bag and the plastic bag of important documents of my students' score Rina brought for me, one of the waiters asked me what it was in the plastic bag. When I explained to him what it was, he laughed and said, "You're a teacher?!?! Oh, my God. How are your students like if the teacher is like this."

"They're good lucky students to have a teacher like me," I smiled.
Oh Indonesian perception... If being a teacher means I can't have fun, I'd better not be a teacher at all. :P

We danced till our legs hurt, till the band finished their whole session, till the bar almost closed and till we remembered that we had to wake up early tomorrow morning.

We got out of the club and sat for a while on some chairs in the ground-floor lobby, checking the documents Rina brought for me. In the mean time, the gelandangan came towards us with his two other friends, one of whom I suspect to be one of the "payable" women, and almost jumpingly he greeted us, "Goodbye, Ladies," while smiling very widely.

We replied. And once again, I thought, he was cool. Too bad he was gay.

We stood outside and waited for our taxi. The gelandangan was beside me. He looked at me (or us, I'm not sure) and smiled. I smiled back to him.
He and his friends then got in their taxi, but he didn't come inside yet when he gave this either "Come with me" or "Bye bye" gesture. I thought it was the first one for I saw his fingers moving to his chest. But I replied it with a bye bye gesture. He kept doing that for some seconds and I didn't really get what he wanted.

Just when Rina and I were in our taxi, I told her, "Maybe he is not gay at all."

Rina said, "He is not. He seems to be much interested in you than that gay in white."

My heart sank.

Rina's version.