NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I went to the Clermont Lounge in 2016 as part of a trip to see the Atlanta Braves play their final season in Turner Field. And I mean it when I say that I haven’t reviewed the place until now because I’m still trying to rid myself of the nightmares of the place. Man, I’ve been to some shit-ass places in my life. The Clermont Lounge is the Seventh, maybe the Eighth Circle of Hell. It stretches, oftentimes literally, the norms of what a stripper could be, what a strip club should be, and, most important of all, what kind of person you truly are. Once you trundle into this basement of sin, you come face-to-face with things that’ll be burned into your brain for life. The longer you refuse to escape this place, the more willing you are to tolerate the weirdest shit you’ll ever see in an establishment that allows naked women. And if you don’t understand that that tolerance means there’s something wrong with you, that a night spent in the Clermont Lounge truly is a dark night of the soul, and that you will not walk out of that godforsaken place the same man you walked in as … well, even God can’t help you then.

One of the perks of Atlanta, a city that is too sprawling for any city’s own good, is that at night, free parking is ubiquitous. I knew I was close when I saw the Clermont Motel, the business front-end behind which lies the Lounge. There were a bunch of people, men and women, smoking and hanging around the steps leading down to the place. There even was a guy with a grill.

The party, non-strip club atmosphere is even more apparent once you pay the nominal cover (I forget what it was, but The Old Me came on a Friday night) and walk in. This is by no means a strip club in the conventional sense. It is a bar. There is, literally, a circular bar just to the right of the entrance. There is an open room just to the left, what I would imagine would be the perfect place for a band to play, if the Clermont Lounge hosts concerts, and I don’t give a fuck if they do. Continuing on the left side of the Clermont, a short wall with columns separates this smallish … room or hall. I don’t know what it is because I didn’t walk down it. Finally, in the back there is a room with a jukebox. People were hanging out back there. It looked like a frat party. Or a drug den. With a jukebox. And since this is a basement, the ceiling hangs low. It made for a cramped, almost suffocating experience for those unable to be engrossed with the drinking and dancing.