Hookers and switchblades…
My second trip to the Dominican Republic was quite pleasant: hot sunny days (a far cry from the chill that has descended on NYC), relaxing on the beach, cultivating the best tan of my life, catching up on some good books, letting the sudden, crazy rainstorms wash over me, practicing Spanish, dancing under the stars, sipping rum, and meeting great people.
But the last night offered something very different. Please reference the title of this post…
At around 10:30 a group from the hotel, including myself and my friend Ayhan, 4 kinda ghetto-fab kids from NYC, 2 stodgy older ladies and 2 wacky French kids headed to the clubs in Sosua. We went to a small club that I had visited last time…but I was immediately surprised by the high concentration of prostitutes there, which I didn’t see last time. (This being the slow season the girls have to hit the clubs to find business….prostitution is legal in the DR.) Ayhan and I played “Can you position yourself anywhere where you are not standing next to a whore” quite unsuccessfully.
Still the music was decent (even if the DJ couldn’t beat match to save his life) and we danced and had some fun. I realized, however, that members of our group were quickly disappearing. It seems all the men were heading to a club that’s really known for prostitutes. Eventually, when it got later, we conceded that we were going to have to go get them.
The club, Club 59 if I recall correctly, was just down the block. So we walked over, went through 2 security checks, and walked into the most stiflingly hot club I’ve ever been in…full to the brim with hookers. Not exactly my scene, especially considering every time I was standing next to a guy, whether I was facing him or not (I was really dancing by myself), I got pushed out of the way by one of the girls. One of the girls from NYC started dancing with a guy from Haiti she had met earlier in the week, but the rest of us were just kind of milling about, trying to dance, being pushed to and fro or grabbed by the prostitutes, depending on our sex.
I finally had enough and felt ready to push back, so I took a step off the floor, to a slightly elevated section on the side of the club….just in time. Having walked up the steps I turned around to face the floor and saw the Haitian guy, who seemed nice enough, wringing a girl around by her hair! I was shocked…he didn’t seem the type. Security grabbed her however, and I soon saw the cause of the scuffle. The Haitian guy was gushing blood from his arm…the girl had stabbed him…badly!
He was rushed from the club as the rest of us stood around in shock. We got everyone together and exited a minute or two later and saw the Haitian guy, with his arm elevated, teeter-tottering on the back of a moped, being sped off to the hospital. It turns out the girl who stabbed him was his girlfriend and she was jealous he was dancing with another girl…very jealous apparently. Crazy girl!
We paused outside the club as the people I went with all tried to clean blood off of them (it was a pretty bad gash he had, I tell ya…his blood was on 5 of the people I went with). We finally caught a taxi back to the resort and all sat around in a bit of shock before heading to bed. No matter how good the two weeks I spent I realized I was happy to be going home…it was time to go…
Tags: Dominican Republic, Travel
LizG
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