GET CREAMED

It's 3:46 a.m. on a chilly Saturday in early April, and the crowd outside Bloomington's newest nightspot has snaked out of the double plate-glass doors and spilled onto Walnut Street, where stragglers from 21-and-over joints are munching Taco Bell gorditas and attempting to hitch rides home. The beats thumping inside Club Cream, the brainchild of Indiana University junior Carl Franklin, lures an inebriated few across Seventh Street and into the 18-and-up club, where the gossip of gaggles of girls clustered around carpeted stairwells lined with white lights commingle with the guttural grunts of bouncers -- "You're in, man. Go on upstairs."\nFranklin, a native of East Chicago, Ind., noticed the downtown property was vacant in January, after the now-defunct After Hours topless club went under. He says he was interested in figuring out what else the Bloomington bar scene needed.\n"I sat down with some close friends and was trying to see if we could make something happen here," Franklin says. "I was thinking we could bring something the town might be missing, and at the same time I'm thinking what could I get by having a part in this."\nIt didn't take long for Franklin and his buddies to figure that out. Though now 21, Franklin remembers having "nothing at all to do" on weekends as an underage student, and the entrepreneurs settled on an 18-and-older club to cater to the younger student set. \n"We figured that was the smartest thing to do -- even a lot of the athletes aren't 21," he says, noting IU basketball player Bracey Wright frequents the club since its opening. "They can't go to the bars, but they've been here every night."\nThe underage crowd flocks to Club Cream's 18-and-older dance floor (21-and-olders have to keep drinks in a special downstairs section of the venue) so much that this weekend alone packed in more than 700 bodies each night. It's a diverse crowd, composed of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities, and three DJs spin tracks on an elevated platform in a darkened corner. Even though the downstairs bar closes at 2:30 a.m., the floor above keeps pumping until 5 a.m.\nThe club's music, which is non-conventional bar fare indeed, drew Butler University student Laura Hacker to Club Cream last Saturday. She's a friend of a friend of Franklin's, and says she thinks the club has definite potential.\n"I really do like the stuff they're playing -- you don't usually hear it at a bar," Hacker says of the club's mix of cutting-edge and up-and-coming hip-hop. "And it could be so much better if people just start turning out downstairs. It's a good place to be."\nAnd for senior Bryan Chatfield, Club Cream offers IU's African-American population a chance to fraternize in a club setting atypical of Bloomington's traditional bar scene.\n"It's good to have a club where blacks can get together," Chatfield says, though Franklin is quick to note Club Cream packs in diverse crowds representative of IU's student population. "African-Americans don't really have that opportunity or many clubs like this in the area. I really enjoy being out here."\nFranklin's dedication to the project is evident in his aggressive marketing of the venue, which busses on-campus students in from residence halls on weekends and advertises itself to Greek houses as an ideal third-party vendor. He's also sunk considerable cash into the endeavor, along with business partner and junior Ryan Bell -- a figure he estimates totals around $10,000.\n"We sat down and took our money we had saved up between us and put it into the club," Franklin says. "We paid the first month's deposit, planned our grand opening and went all out."\nThe first night brought B97's Pam Thrash to the DJ booth, and Franklin and his cohorts handed long-stemmed red roses to the ladies, all of whom entered for free of course. \n"We let that be our best commercial, how we treated our customers that first night," Franklin says. "Since then, the response has been great. It's a diverse crowd -- you won't believe it."\nFranklin and Bell's team is currently working on bringing Petey Pablo to the club for the Little 500 celebratory weekend, and their promotion team is working double overtime to ensure the plans come off without a hitch. \nAnd somewhere in the midst of all this, Franklin and Bell -- as well as most of their young staff -- are students. Franklin's typical day consists of attending class from 8 a.m. to noon before heading to the club to clean up from the previous night. He checks his e-mails and returns phone calls from a small office upstairs, checks the club's post office box and pays the bills. He might run home for a quick bite, but once the evening rolls around, he's at Cream until the wee hours. \n"I do what I gotta do," he says. "It's like a family atmosphere. It's not as large as we want it to be yet as far as financial gain, but it's a close atmosphere and we all are working to make it better"