JUST BACK FROM
IT WAS ABOUT the time the six-foot-nine professional
basketball player and his posse nudged past me and into the VIP
bowling room that I realized I’d come to the right place. I’d come to Charlotte,
North Carolina -- the Queen City; the best city to live in in
America, according to one survey -- to see what happens when a fast-growing wunderkind village meets the global economic meltdown. Does the partying stop? Do people walk around their shiny, new metropolis moping, feeling sad for themselves and their fellow man and their fellow man’s Lexus? The answer could be found, I’d hoped, in this banking-center boomtown.
I had arrived just a few hours before and had then met two friends and asked them to show me how Charlotte’s finest were dealing with the uncertainty of economic life in this turbulent year. One friend, a commercial-real-estate guy, had just laughed, saying, “You want to see if we’re dancing on the
Titanic, huh?”
Exactly.
So, to see if that were the case, we went to the many bars and clubs and lofts and restaurants of the EpiCentre, the enormous $200 million mixed-use extravaganza that recently opened in Uptown, which is what most people would call downtown (don’t ask -- it’s confusing). It was a rebuke to the notion that the party could ever end, the perfect place to see if Charlotte’s heartbeat was still strong.
From the looks of things at StrikeCity, the shoulder-to-shoulder nightclub-cum–bowling alley at the EpiCentre’s center, the answer was a resounding yes. The place was packed with youthful, free-spending revelers, many of whom had just left the Charlotte Bobcats’ late-season basketball contest -- including, I was told, Bobcats themselves.
We were first alerted to the presence of said professional-sports stars by the intense stare from a pride of middle-aged females to our right. I followed their gaze and saw a lonely man standing by a door in the back of the club. We sauntered over to the doorman, who, it turned out, was also part bouncer for the back room with the two private lanes. He kindly but firmly told us he couldn’t let us into the VIP area. At that point, a power forward from the team, which had just lost a heartbreaking game down the street at the
Time Warner Cable Arena, walked in and joined the other very important bowlers.
“You understand, don’t you?” the doorman asked us when my friends tried to name-drop to gain access. (Note to readers: “In-flight-magazine back-page writer” is not as impressive a sobriquet as you might imagine.) “I’d do the same thing if you guys paid for the room.” It was good to know that my colleague
Carlton Stowers wouldn’t be allowed to crash my party in Char-town.
Where to next? We had already gorged like kings at the EpiCentre steak house Fleming’s. Of course, we’d eaten the choicest cuts. And of course, my friend, a big-shot developer in town, had been sent a bottle of wine by the manager -- people who build big, beautiful buildings are rock stars in Charlotte. It’s a bootstrap city, made flush by land deals and the banking industry. Musician, actor, TV personality … pffft. Have they ever gotten 30 percent return on a downtown parking lot? Dinner had been just more proof that here, in the words of noted songwriter/economist Robert Earl Keen, the road may indeed go on forever and the party certainly never ends.
To work the marbling out of our fat and happy buns, we decided dancing was in order. We wandered over to Mez, the EpiCentre’s dance club for Charlotte’s beautiful people. Inside, it was pure 2004: well-dressed young men smirking and posing, barely dressed young women gyrating and lip-synching, neither expressing a care in the world other than for exploring their appreciation of apple- bottom jeans and boots with the fur, if T-Pain’s lyrics can be taken literally.
Truth be told, it was impossible not to get swept up in the joie de vivre on display this night in Charlotte. The streets of the large city’s urban core were filled with bustling people, even past midnight. Their faces were diverse and glowing. The streets were clean. There was an energy present that at once felt recently manufactured (because it was; Charlotte is a very
new city, if nothing else) and yet somehow organic, incongruous as that may seem.
Then we were swept up literally; it was like a wave took us onto the dance floor. Although we drove the club’s median age up just by entering the door, that didn’t stop us from feeling welcome among the undulating group of beautiful, young Charlotte denizens. We spent the last hours of the early morning among them, imbibing responsibly, altering our standard fox-trot moves to better complement the impressive backside gyrations popular among today’s Fred and Ginger wannabes. For a night, it looked and felt like all things were possible, like America was going to be just fine, and like the tilt in our ship would surely right itself by daylight.