Here’s the first bit from a story that I imagined about Club Ugly.
Throughout history all of the most desired salons and exclusive clubs refrained from advertising. Why waste the money and threaten your cache?
People of a certain nature and a certain quality always seem to know where to find each other. The criminals hung out where they would and so the beautiful, and that was convenient, because they were often times in the same crowd.
Some of the clubs in New York just had a symbol on their door. If you knew the symbol then you knew the place. Arrogant ostentatious doormen designed to simultaneously attract and repel patrons were not needed. The cool insiders knew the symbols and were comfortable with the amount of people they mingled with.
These places had always existed.
Susan was not headed to one of those places. But, she was headed to an establishment that maintained more than a little similarity. The place was sandwiched between a bakery and a bright well-scrubbed Indian run 24-hour deli. It was a former shoe store that had an all glass front, but the current owners had painted that black giving it the impression that it was either abandoned or under construction. The only thing attractive, or the least a bit eye-catching was the ouroboros painted in gold and black squarely in the middle of the front door.
Susan had about a block to go before she reached that now familiar destination.
Every walk was a long walk for her. She preferred either the evening or simply being comfortable at home. She had decided to wear her hair down today and was regretting it as a mistake. It was long, black, and impenetrably dry, which meant that even the slightest breeze picked up the individual follicles and sent them soaring around her head. Invariably, her eyes and mouth would end up getting clogged with stabbing spears as if being attacked by her own body.
Blinking rapidly, she was forced to quickly claw at her eyes in a very unladylike fashion to remove the painful attack. She cursed the canyon-like Manhattan winter winds, and the brief thought about how much she had spent over the years on high-end hair moisturization treatments for her hair, was interrupted by the explosive burst of her coat flying open. This caused her to momentarily stumble and sent her hair into a flying rage. Through a once again matted eye, Susan noticed that almost none of the other pedestrians had been the least bit affected by the gust and all looked excellently composed like mannequins in a department store window.
Out of the corner of her eye she noticed a young business type with wavy light brown hair giving her a benevolent half smile as he stared at her belly, while rapidly passing her by. She knew what that smile was about. Despite being six-foot two, flat chested, and generally skinny all over she maintained a persistent potbelly that resisted all attempts at diet and exercise. This gave her the perpetual look of being pregnant. She had long noted, with some fascination, but the looks of scorn that she received as a teenager had mellowed into a bemused tenderness as she had gotten older.
Having had enough of the circus, she stopped in front of a health food store, fully secured her coat, and dug a large elastic band from her bag to secure her hair. Susan stared into the store trying to catch her reflection in a piece of window made dark for a joint formula multivitamin poster. In the half image provided by this semi reflective surface Susan could easily see the model-esque bone structure that lie beneath the puffy overly generous skin that had always hung on it. She knew that her jaw was a bit too long and crooked to really be a model, but hadn’t she seen some actress that used to be married to Tom Cruise who had a jaw like that? She was pretty sure.
Now fairly exhausted, she journeyed the last final steps to her new sanctuary. She chuckled to herself at the contrast between the dilapidated storefront and what lie behind that self-abusing golden snake.