Swing It, Girl!

Rumors about a “swing girl” have lured me to the still newish Club Four (410 Main, 713-228-1444). While she’s not exactly the stripper-meets-trapeze-artist of my imagination (she’s actually just a petite young woman who sits in a large padded swing above the bar, swinging and writhing to the music throughout the night), the swing girl is still pretty cool.

Oddly enough, no one seems to notice her. Everyone is milling around with hardly an upwards glance. I can’t explain the lack of reaction by most of the other bar patrons. Maybe it’s just unhip to react to blatant absurdity. I, however, am fascinated.

It occurs to me that whoever sits on the swing has to be pretty short; a long-legged woman would constantly be poking people in the eye with the toe of her shoe.

I strike up a chat with Mia (pronounced Maya), the heavy-handed bartender. She doesn’t seem to notice the girl above our heads either. While I watch the woman swinging, Mia tells me a long story about how she intended to sign up for an internship in northern California but somehow inexplicably chose Houston, in part because of a head injury she suffered while mountain biking, when a literally half-blind 16-year-old hit her with his truck. I’m not drunk enough to follow all that. Instead, I’m mentally writing a job description for the swing girl: One, keep your legs up. Two, don’t hit the customers in the head with your high-heeled foot. Three…what could three possibly be?

I ask Mia to introduce me to the swing girl. There are two, she tells me — newcomer Lisa, who is on the swing now, and veteran swinger Roksi, who is helping out behind the bar a few feet away. I head over to Roksi, who, at just under five feet tall, is the entertainment maven and head swinger at Club Four. Besides booking dancers and tending bar, she was apparently born to swing. I ask her how this tradition came to Club Four.

“We didn’t have swing girls, at first,” Roksi tells me. “The swing was just up there, and customers always wanted to swing, which is a huge liability for the bar, so we decided to put someone up there.”

“So, having a woman sitting on a swing in the middle of a bar is actually something of a public service?” I ask. Roksi has moved away to tend to a customer and doesn’t hear me. I sop my drink and silently applaud Club Four’s Customer Protection Plan while I watch Lisa — a second-time swinger — sail back and forth over the bar, her slim silhouette gliding through the spotlight projected onto the brick wall behind the bar. I wonder how many lives had been saved because of Lisa and Roksi. I wonder, too, how many other problems could be solved with petite dancers in fishnet stockings.

My concentration is broken by a well-dressed, bald-headed patron ducking under Lisa to order a drink. The drinks at Club Four are certainly mighty, but they’re hardly worth a heel in the skull.

Roksi is back. “You can’t see anything when you’re swinging,” she tells me. “The lights are blinding. It’s tough to manage.”

“Well, how’s Lisa doing so far?” I ask.

“I think she’s doing great,” Roksi says, gazing up at Lisa, who is thoroughly lost in her swinging, shrugging her shoulders with the bass, her eyes closed and her hands gripped tightly around the swing’s chains.

With Lisa’s shadow quite literally looming over our heads, I wonder aloud if Roksi is concerned about job security.

“But you’re still the main swing girl, right?”

Roksi puts her palms flat on the bar and leans forward.

“Let me tell you something…That?” she says, pointing at the swing and smirking. “That belongs to me.”