There’s a thing I’ve noticed about nightclubs, they tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they are polished, glass-and-steel boxes where the drinks cost more than your rent, and the music sounds like a spaceship dying, or they’re sticky-floored relics from the ‘90s where the speakers are held together with duct tape and the bartender has stories that start with, “Well, after the stabbing…”

The place I visited in Pittsburgh was firmly in the second category.

I was there doing research. Real, legitimate research, or at least as legitimate as it gets when you’re a freelance sound engineer giving guest lectures at universities and pretending you have a thesis. I’d been invited by a small college in the city to speak on room acoustics and the psychology of sound in performance venues. That’s the kind of thing that sounds impressive on a flyer, but what it really means is that I get to poke around nightclubs and concert halls with a decibel meter and a notebook, then tell a bunch of bored undergrads that reverberation matters.

The club in question was called The Fuselage, a name that was only marginally more interesting once you learned it was an old converted airplane hangar. It was located somewhere between the warehouses and the forgotten parts of the riverfront, the kind of place that looked like it might be condemned from the outside but hosted a surprisingly lively local music scene within.

I showed up early that Sunday afternoon, hoping to catch the place before it opened. I like to get a read on a space before it’s vibrating with bass and overpriced vodka. The owner, a woman named Deena with a shaved head and aviator sunglasses she wore indoors, walked me through the floor plan. She spoke quickly and smoked slowly and she clearly didn’t care about my credentials. But she did seem to care about the sound, which was more than I could say for most club owners.

“What do you think?” she asked, gesturing around the vast room filled with mismatched furniture, art deco fixtures, and a frankly alarming number of exposed wires.

“It sounds like an empty warehouse,” I replied. “Which it is. But the reflections are interesting. These corrugated steel walls—”

“Yeah, yeah. Can you fix it or do I have to hire some YouTuber with a podcast mic?”

I told her I’d give her a full report. The truth was, it wasn’t fixable without a budget she definitely didn’t have, but it had character. That’s something. It’s rare, in these days of sterile, soundproofed perfection. I took my measurements, jotted down some notes, and asked if I could come back later when the place was packed to see how the bodies changed the acoustics.

She nodded. “Sure. But you gotta wear an orange wristband if you’re coming back tonight. Fire marshal’s rule. We oversell. You don’t have the wristband, you don’t get back in.”

Sure. No problem.

I left with the wristband in my pocket and spent the afternoon at the Andy Warhol Museum, which felt appropriately surreal after being in a club that smelled like sweat and citrus floor cleaner. I walked along the Allegheny River. Ate a gyro from a food truck. By the time I came back to The Fuselage around 9:00 p.m., the place was full.

There was a local band playing, a noise-pop quartet called something like “Vapor Shovel” or “Neon Thresher.” I forget. The bass was too loud, the highs were distorted, and the mids were swimming in a pool of sonic mud. But the kids were having a good time and I was there to observe, not judge.

The orange wristband turned out to be more than a fire marshal thing. It was a kind of insurance. Anyone who hadn’t been wristbanded before 9:00 p.m. got a red one, which, I later learned, meant you could be randomly kicked out if capacity got too high. Orange was safety. Red was expendable.

“Clever,” I told Deena when I found her behind the bar, still smoking. “A literal class system, color-coded. You’ve reinvented social hierarchy using cheap plastic bands.”

She grinned. “Ain’t America great?”

I left just after midnight, ears ringing, notebook full. I didn’t think about the wristbands again. Not until the next morning.

I was having a burnt cup of coffee in the hotel lobby when a guy with bleary eyes and a Thresher T-shirt sat next to me and asked if I’d “heard about the club.” I thought he was talking about the show, maybe a fight broke out, maybe someone OD’d.

Then he showed me the article.

After I left, around 1:00 a.m., someone with a red wristband had gotten into a fight with a bouncer. It escalated. No one was seriously injured, but the police were called, and they discovered the venue was over capacity by nearly 80 people. Deena was cited. The fire marshal was reportedly furious. There was talk of temporary closure.

I texted her. No response.

In the days that followed, The Fuselage became a mini-scandal in the local papers. The orange wristbands were found on seven overdose victims. One op-ed called it “an Orwellian metaphor for how we assign value to human presence in America.” Another described it as “crowd control for the Instagram era.”

I thought about sound. How a place full of people changes the way you hear. How no matter how many measurements you take, you can never fully account for the way humans scramble every perfect equation. That includes safety.

A few weeks later, I read that The Fuselage had reopened under new ownership. Deena disappeared from the news and from my contact list. Her number went straight to voicemail.

I still have the wristband, pressed into the pages of one of my notebooks. A souvenir from yet another brush with trouble. Trouble that didn’t touch me, not directly, not really.