Please Don't Touch Me: A Neurotic's Six-Part Guide to Club Etiquette

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Please Don't Touch Me: A Neurotic's Six-Part Guide to Club Etiquette

Treat everyone on the dancefloor as if they've been diagnosed with Ebola and are bleeding out of every orifice.

Let's be honest: nightclubs are nightmares, especially if you're a neurotic. A dark and sweaty room packed to capacity with drunk, gyrating bodies is a torture chamber for people like us. You arrive feeling like a newborn baby fresh out of the womb. You leave feeling like a corpse that just went through a washing machine cycle, covered in an assortment of undisclosed fluids and stenches.

I like to believe that the world-renowned verse from Next's "Too Close"—"Oh, you're dancing real close, you're making it hard for me"—is less about a raging boner, and more about a group of dancers circling closer and closer into your personal space. Yes, you're making it extremely hard for me, because your armpit hair is brushing up against my upper lip, and you're blowing a whistle directly into my inner ear.

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I prepare for a night out the same way a boxer prepares for a fight: my friends hype me up, pat my back, and tell me I can do it. Invariably, though, I end up getting knocked out by a glass of watered-down vodka soda flung at me by someone's elbow.

Here are six essential nightclub etiquette tips that should be deeply embedded into your brain, just like the Pledge of Allegiance or the no-camera policy at Berghain. Remember, a stranger in life is still a stranger on the dancefloor.

1. Don't touch me.

Dance circles are, undoubtedly, the worst thing to happen to this planet. If I had a dollar for every time I've faced a near-death blow to the head because an Oscar G fan decided to spastically throw his leg into the air screaming "WEPA," I still wouldn't be able to afford a water bottle at a club in Manhattan. People who take part in these rings of death are oxygen thieves, much like the people who form a Macarena line to push closer to the DJ. I don't care how tall, beautiful, or famous you are—say "Excuse Me." Everybody should treat the people around them like they'd treat Giorgio Moroder if he got a colonoscopy: with tender love and care.

Or even better: treat everyone as if they've been diagnosed with Ebola and are bleeding out of every orifice. In other words, just don't touch them at all. Unless someone is wearing a sign that says "free hugs," do not wrap your arms around my torso or press your lips against his or her face. In what world is greeting someone by transferring germs from your mouth to their cheeks and leaving them drenched in your sticky saliva acceptable? Refrain from touching anybody's face or body under any circumstance, unless they're choking on six ecstasy pills and need immediate CPR.

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2. Assume you smell like shit.

Being waterboarded is less painful than being smothered by the stench of fermented sweat wafting off the person next to you on the dancefloor. Every year when I blow out my birthday candles, I wish for the reduced guest list to vanish and for more people to take advantage of deodorant. Think you have enough deodorant on? You do not, for there is never enough.

Before leaving your apartment, along with asking yourself if you have your keys, wallet, and phone, please add, "Do my armpits like a ten-day-old rotting diaper that was just plucked out of a sewer?" If yes, grab your nearest Old Spice or cucumber-scented Dove and lather that shit on, baby. You're the Belgian waffle, and the deodorant is the maple syrup trying to find its way into your odorous nooks and crannies.

Pro tip: when you stick your nose into your shirt, it should not smell like the taint of an unwashed Lightning in a Bottle hippie who has been hula-hooping for three days straight.

3. Keep your ass out of the DJ's space.

If you use the flash on your camera when taking a pointless picture of the DJ's face, you are a sociopath no better than Ted Bundy. If your phone dies, only an insane person would sneak into the DJ booth to try and charge it—for fucks sake, just buy a portable charger. Do not sidle up to the DJ during their set to beg for high-fives, or interrupt them with a boring story about that time you met their significant other in the artist lounge at a festival in Europe. Ever notice how DJs give you insincere nod and don't take their headphones off while you're talking to them? That means get away from me. If you're a trainspotter hovering by the booth so you can scream the name of the track they're playing into my ear, you are the worst kind of asshole. The other night, I shit you not, somebody held up their phone and said, "I've had this song in my email for months." This breed of human shares a special place in hell with those who don't tip their bartenders.

Photo via the author

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4. Brush your goddamn teeth.

We are lucky enough, as an advanced civilization, to have this brilliant creation called a toothbrush. You may have heard of it. Here's how you use it: first, apply toothpaste to your toothbrush, and then move your hand in circular motions throughout your mouth, and don't swallow the toothpaste. Super easy, right? Then why the fuck are most people not doing it? Your garlic breath gives me a pulmonary embolism every time you scream into my ear in the middle of a pounding techno set. At least chew a piece of gum or suck on a mint as you enter a venue; you owe it to the party people around you.

5. Keep your ugly toes in your shoes.

Under no circumstance you can remove your shoes at a nightclub. Your bare feet are not bohemian and your chipped toenails aren't cute. You're not at a deep house yoga class, gymnastics, on your couch. You know those degenerates who sit on the toilet at a warehouse party Porta-Potty, or put eyelashes on the front of their Volkswagen Beetle? You are on their level of terribleness.

You are legitimately scaring everybody around you, standing alone in the corner with your eyes glazing over and the dirty shoes you took off hours ago placed sadly next to your lifeless body. You are more of a haunted house installation than a human being. You look like a costume that I can purchase at Party City. If you're belligerently drunk, too deep in a k-hole, or can't dance anymore in your nine-inch heels, it's time to go the fuck home.

Pro-tip: Your shirt has got to stay on too; brushing up against the acne on your back from your years of steroid use à la Sound Factory is not what anyone wants to feel.

6. Stop crying—nobody cares.

There are many acceptable places to cry, and the club is not one of them—unless you brought three friends and they tell you you only have a +1. But the crying has to stop at the door. Inside the club is not the proper setting to sob over how your Burning Man wedding is on the rocks, or how you've been so busy that you haven't cleaned your Brita in six months. If the DJ starts playing your favorite Kaskade song that takes you right back to EDC Las Vegas 2010, when life was but a dream and you could get high solely from a melody (and two triple stack pills, let's be real)—fine, you can turn on the water works, but please keep it to a minimum of one tear.Follow Austin Gebbia on Twitter