Dangerous games

What is the meaning of life, anyway?

You can go down roads that bring happiness for a while but ultimately everything loses excitement again. So what brings lasting contentment?

I can really only advise my own sex on that. Lasting happiness can only come from two sources: God or girls. Since I've never really known the former, I've always relied on the latter.

Anyway, I wanted to take Janelle to the under 21 club that night. But again and again, I'd called her cell phone and had gotten no answer.

Eventually, I decided to leave and go to the club alone. This was a rather risky prospect for me because I'd found that more than half the time I went to clubs alone, no girls wanted to dance with me.

Naturally, this was a waste of money and self esteem. But I had very little to do that Friday night and reckoned it didn't matter much.

Around 7:30, I drove up to the club in my battered brown LeBaron. I walked up to the club door but saw it was empty. The sign on the door said open so, I strolled in.

Strangely, the lights were off and nobody was there. I was just leaving when two teen guys, a Mexican and a white guy with a large silver chain, walked in.

"What's going on?" one of them asked me.

"I don't know. It's empty," I said.

I was pretty sure from their expressions that they were trying to go to the club, too. Don't ask me why but we all walked back in.

It was dumb but innocent enough. We just wanted to confirm that the club was really empty and no employees were there. I called out, "Is anybody there?" No answer. We were walking out when the alarm went off.

"Shit," we all thought simultaneously. I started to stroll back to my car to drive off but one of the teen guys said, "I'm gonna wait for the cops."

"Okay. I'll wait, too. We didn't do anything wrong. We can't get in trouble," I said.

And so for about ten minutes, we sat outside this club chatting. Though we had nothing in common, we talked like friends. There may not be honor among criminals but there certainly is camaraderie.

The alarm was blaring but cars were driving by and nobody seemed to care. I began to think the cops weren't coming.

The Mexican kid said, "Shit, I'm not waiting here till they come. It's too cold."

And so we started to walk off. We'd gotten about a block when we saw two cop cars, sirens blaring, come speeding up the street.

We walked back to the club and I waved a cop car down as it pulled up to the club. A cop got out, looking at us inquisitively.

"We're the ones who set off the alarm," I told him.

"The sign says open and the door was unlocked. We just walked in and the alarm went off." I said all this with a calm sense of leadership.

I was raised in an intellectual, wealthy family and had learned how to present myself.

The cop was a tall white man with short black hair. He was just slightly chubby. He looked us over smugly, stopping to glare contemptuously at me.

I figured it was because I was wearing a leather jacket and a black safari hat with two metal spikes coming out the front. He was a typical pig if you ask me.

"Come over here", he said and he led us over to the club.

He asked for all of our id's. I was the only one who had one. Another cop got out of the car and for a few minutes they sat around asking us rude questions like,