If I know anything about myself, I know this: I am a fearless, relentless, hard-hitting journalist. If ever I catch the slightest whiff of a story in the air — no matter how daunting and dangerous it may seem — I pursue it with the bloodthirsty tenacity and unwavering vigor that one would only expect from a Messenger writer. So, obviously, when I was assigned the arduous task of exploring and exposing the scandalous secrets of Club One3One, I was thrilled by the myriad possibilities for intellectual stimulation that were being presented.

As per usual, I did some preliminary research. I found that One3One functions as your run-of the-mill sketchy nightclub six days of the week, but holds a 16-and-over night every Friday. But One3One’s website was largely unhelpful, being mostly dedicated to links to albums of countless embarrassing, red-eyed pictures of teenage girls drunkenly living it up. I clicked through about half an album; it was a nightmare of spankies and corsets and shiny pink lingerie, of protruding zebra-print thongs, pit marks, stringy hair, and smeared makeup.

Further investigation brought me to a few blogs reviewing the club, mostly favorably, but none too eloquently; one guy remarked that “the quality of the ladies is good but not very many.” On another site, someone wished that One3one would enforce a maximum age limit, having seen a sweaty, overweight middle-aged shmeagler lurking in the shadows, leering over at a gaggle of Asian schoolgirls.

Cool!

My big night — Friday, October 26, 2007 — started with a panicked phone call from two of my fellow investigators, informing me that it was Halloween Night at One3One, and we wouldn’t get in without an elaborate skanky costume. Having just painstakingly picked out an oh-so-classy dance-proof clubbing outfit, I was less than motivated to find any manner of costume. I spent a good two minutes searching my house, and was forced to settle on a garish, foul-smelling rubber pig mask from some street market in Thailand. I told myself that the mask brought kind of an understated sex appeal to my outfit, but deep down I knew that I was going to have to part with fifteen dollars and my dignity to get into this club.

I’ll skip the bit about how I forgot my ID and had to send Emily Fletcher and Jamie Li to my house to retrieve it; as well as the part about the guy in McDonald’s with his squadron of drunk skater friends who coerced me into reading “WHAT IS U R NUMBER?” from the screen of his phone, and about the manatee-shaped woman in pajamas who approached us in the parking lot to ask us, “Are you all hookers? ‘Cause you look like hookers.” The critical thing is that, eventually, all six of us — a Pippi Longstocking, a flapper girl, a Tinkerbell, a bumblebee, a ladybug, and a stupid girl in a pig mask — paid for entry, got thoroughly patted down, paid more to check all our belongings, and entered Club One3one.

It’s important to understand what we expected for our first time to an underage club. We expected the dance floor to be a roiling cesspool of groping, mouth-breathing creepers. We expected hairy forty-year-old men with lusty, bulging eyes to ask us our names and offer us drinks; we expected to catch glimpses of fleeting, anonymous hookups taking place in the particularly shadowy corners of the club, and to see innumerable unconscious teenage bodies strewn around.

But none of this was the case. It’s true that about half of the people populating the dance floor were short beady-eyed boys who didn’t speak, but just stood stoic behind girls until they agreed to dance with them. But no one tried to stick their hand anywhere inappropriate, no one tried to slip me a roofie; no one, after that McDonald’s guy, even asked for my number. And it’s not because I wasn’t looking hot, either, because I most certainly was, especially with my mask on.

In fact, we found no one who was genuinely creepy, and not for lack of trying. Many of the people who sat alone watching other people had been brought by well-meaning friends and were just shy and didn’t like to dance. This was true for Ashley, 19, who had just gotten out of a long-distance relationship and whose friends took her out to get her to meet someone new. And for Eduardo, 18, who sat glancing around shiftily —wearing skinny jeans and huge gauges in his ears — alone at a table; he had just moved here from Texas and was so soft-spoken and timid that he might as well have been a little kitten or something.

There was one person who seemed really weird; we found Alan, 20, in one of the smaller rooms giving a girl a back massage with such intensity and exuberance that his eyes were closed, his face bore an expression of great concentration, and his head was lolling around. When the girl got up abruptly and left, almost making him topple over, we got a chance to talk to him. It turned out that — aside from the fact that he didn’t know who he was just rubbing down, and his dress-to-impress attire was a black t-shirt with several neon fabric-paint bugs surrounding the word “Incest” — he was almost normal. He was from Redmond, was enrolled in some community college, and was here for the first time with some Seattle friends. Emily lost nose-goes for who had to ask him for a massage but adamantly refused, so eventually we pardoned ourselves to get a drink.

Thinking about One3one after I’d left that night; recounting it later with my Messenger research team; and even remembering it now, more than a month later — my first underage clubbing experience seems to be a collection of moments more bizarre and extraordinary than I’d ever anticipated. Alan and his shirt. The 10-foot-high pile of detergent foam made for people to dance in, which made us cough uncontrollably and made one mammoth of a seventeen-year-old yell, “That sh** is nasty; it’s got AIDS in it!” The lone bartender who sold four-dollar cans of Red Bull and Rockstar exclusively, who was dressed as a witch with booty shorts that buckled to her thigh-highs and told us she just found her outfit in the back of her closet. Those racy, racy cages — which, admittedly, are pretty fun to get up and dance in as long as you’re with enough of your friends. James, 18, from Montana, with his awkward grin and hipstery glasses, who screamed, “Partying is so much easier when you’re drunk!” as he danced, no, quivered violently to “Sexyback.”

But perhaps these moments hold the wild and wonderful thing about Club One3One; not adolescent drinking or the wily waltz of the predator and the prey. Maybe the magic that a club holds is that, for one night, you can feel the thrum of the music at the back of your throat; you can let down your facade, laugh, and dance in foam with a whole lot of people you will never see again.

And when you finally leave at 3 a.m., you can say you have lived — if only for a few hours — with exhilaration and reckless abandon; and perhaps, in some small way, you can feel fulfilled.

And on your way out you can pull a Marie and fall down the stairs in front of the entire Seattle police force.