What else did you observe in terms of human social biology?
Why are dance clubs and bars so loud? Are strip clubs too? I get that people like music, especially in dance clubs, but why is it so loud that people have to yell into each others’ ears to understand each other? Isn’t there a market for music that’s loud enough to be heard as a backdrop but not drown out speech?
How prevalent is ‘Let’s keep black patrons to a minimum’ within the industry?
I ask because this just popped up again.
http://www.racialicious.com/2012/06/21/grad-students-story-leads-to-protest-against-north-carolina-bar/
Another memorable incident was being summoned to VIP for a “nodder” - someone who is unconscious, or on the verge. There are couches in some VIP areas in clubs, and the rather annoying babysitting type duty of whoever is covering VIP is having to make sure nobody is sleeping, dancing, or having sex on the couches. So I went up to the couch area, and an absolutely stunning young lady in a silky Armani dress is sitting alone doing a slow falling-asleep type nod while the raucous party is raging all around her. I tapped her on the shoulder - no response. I shook her gently by her shoulders - no response. Light knuckle pressure on her upper sternum - she batted at my hand, then drooped again and started to drool. Looking around, there was no evidence of any friends or date that was going to take care of her. I flashed 2 lights at the main dancefloor guy and got ready to pick her up and carry her downstairs. Just then, she gave an even bigger jerking nod which terminated in a massive glut of vomit right into her own lap. I recoiled in horror, while the watching crowd laughed hysterically. A few moments later, the floor guy arrived, and we put on gloves and started shifting her off the couch, getting ready to carry her out. Suddenly she came wide awake and started shouting, “What the fuck!!! Get your hands off me!!”
I said, “We’ve gotta take you outside to take care of you.”
“Why? I’m fine! Don’t fucking touch me!” she shouted. And the crazy thing was, she was suddenly completely alert and aware.
The other bouncer looked at me, then back at her. Both of us just stood and pointed at the large pile of coagulating vomit in her lap, which she hadn’t noticed yet. She looked down, shrieked, and jumped up. The sudden position change was enough to make her pass out again, which she did, right onto the floor. the other bouncer carried her downstairs for EMS, and I went (sigh) to get the mop.
I’ve worked in places where the owner wouldn’t come out and say it, but he would hint pretty hard.
That said, as a club DJ, the bouncers were my friends. I had a signal if someone was being obnoxious and they would take care of it (usually just them walking over took care of it). I used to get freebies from visiting radio stations and believe it or not, strippers (free passes ;)). I would pass these on to the bouncers for being my “friend.”
Most of the time, incidents would be handled quietly as mufatango described, but it was amazing how these things could escalate in seconds. Someone pushes someone else, the bouncer gets involved, gets pushed into a group of guys who retaliate against the bouncer, the other bouncers join in and now there are like 25 people going at it. This was rare, and the goal was to drag everyone out the closest door.
One of the bouncers’ duties was to clean the lot after the club closed. One night some guys were hanging out, giving them a hard time. The bouncers come in saying “we’re going to kick those drunk mofo’s asses.” The owner stops them and says “guys…let’s remember who got them drunk!”
A friend of mine linked me to this thread, probably because it sounded similar to an advice blog that a friend and I have been writting for a couple of years called Ask a Bouncer and a Blonde.
After reading through, I have to say that Mufatango’s responses seem really spot on.
What I found interesting was the comments about letting people cut the line, because I feel absolutely no remorse when someone who is known or a VIP cuts the line of people waiting. In fact, people slipping us money to cut the line is one of the main ways we’d make money at busy club, because base pay is pretty crappy.
But then I thought back to when I first started, and realized that I initially felt bad just like Mufatango described. Somewhere along the line I guess I lost that, which leads to my question.
I’m not sure how long you did the job, but did you find that over time, you became less compassionate overall and maybe more indifferent and even uncaring towards people? And if so, did it worry you?
At risk of sounding repetitive, everything depends on the management of the establishment. I worked for one club with a cokehead manager who would periodically come out and let every girl in line into the club, grinning and sniffing maniacally. Or he would see me in an argument with someone who I had turned away for no ID, come out and castigate me, then let the person in. At another much more mellow bar, the manager was a paranoiac Red Bull and steroid junkie who was convinced that every other patron was ATF undercover. He had us card everybody, even >40 year olds, check the ID book (images/codes for out-of-state IDs) and turn away anyone without ID. The guy who worked door before me got fired for letting someone in without ID. People would shout at me, “Look at my grey hair!!” I would agree with the absurdity, but tell them there was nothing I could do.
I never tried to settle anyone down with free drinks. I understand the impetus - if you let someone think they have “won” a confrontation, they are much more likely to settle down. But truthfully, the stay-or-go decision is either made before you get to someone, or it depends on how they comport themselves. Someone who is drunk or belligerent enough to seem ready to fight is going outside, either to calm down or to go home. If they were drunk/angry enough to try to pick a fight with me, giving them another drink seems like a surefire way to merely forestall the inevitable.
Working at the door, people would try to bribe their way out of showing ID (nope), jumping the line (5 dollars? Are you kidding?), or being refused admission for dress code.
Most establishments that need a bouncer are going to be loud. Too loud for comfortable conversation. This includes strip clubs.
I think there are a bunch of reasons, none of which is entirely rational. Personally, I don’t enjoy loud clubs or bars much.
I honestly believe the main reason for ridiculous loudness of clubs is to make them seem more exciting. Louder bars and clubs seem more lively from the street, promoting a sense of excitement and “benign chaos.” It promotes a sense of the surreal, of temporarily dimming the senses, giving up a modicum of control. The same thing that makes getting tipsy, riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, or going through the Funhouse fun.
Also, when people can’t talk, they either dance or drink, which usually makes them thirsty, ergo, more drinking.
It may purely be sound scientific economic strategy for bar management. From The Daily Beast: “a study completed in the summer of 2008 in France found that when music was played at 72 decibels, men consumed an average of 2.6 drinks at a rate of one drink per 14.51 minutes. When the sound level was cranked up to 88 decibels, the numbers spiked to an average of 3.4 drinks, with one consumed every 11.47 minutes.”
I would just shrug and go about my business.
In one fight that took the entire security staff of a large dance club over twenty minutes to control, I saw the entire progression from start to finish. The inciting event was a girl bumping into another girl, who reacted by pushing back and calling the first girl a bitch. Their respective boyfriends immediately faced off and began exchanging words. By this time I was off my “perch” and flashing as I pushed through the crowd. I saw the first punch thrown, and it was by someone totally uninvolved! Apparently someone had a latent beef with one of the boyfriends and took advantage of the situation to… just… obliterate him with an undefended sucker-punch from his side.
As I was getting to the site of the altercation, I saw the two women lock into a hair-pulling clench, the first boyfriend staring, utterly dumbfounded, at the now-supine-and-unconscious guy he was about to fight, and then someone tackled the deliverer of the sucker-punch as he attempted to melt back into the crowd. Someone threw a drink on one of the bouncers that was pushing through the crowd, and he turned to confront them, opening another epicenter. Suddenly it seemed like everyone was fighting everyone! Mass hysteria! Cats and dogs! At least five times, I ran in, picked up a swinging or struggling person, and ran carrying them into the entry hall and threw them out the door. The DJ stopped the music and turned the house lights on. The final pair to be separated were a guy from VIP and a guy who had been drinking at the bar with a group of friends from work. Totally unrelated to the original incident - how (and why) they ended up trying to kill each other I have no idea.
This is one example of what I mean about human behavior manifesting in these situations. I doubt if any of the people involved in the fight would proudly admit to starting or participating in a club brawl, any more than someone involved in a road rage incident would describe themselves as a road-rager. Yet, in the actual moment, people act with amygdala-driven behavior in a seemingly contagious fashion. (Of course there is some prior selection bias towards young, high-testosterone males with alcohol-inhibited prefrontal cortices…)
Thanks for your answer to my last question. Any insight on dating co-workers especially strippers? Is it different dynamic than any other place of business?
Move 'em in, keep 'em from fighting, move 'em out.
I worked bouncing jobs during school and summers for 6 years. 2 years working all kinds of different nightclubs and dance clubs overlapping with 2 years at a strip club, 3 years working for bars only.
One of the many reasons I stopped working at big dance clubs was how I found myself starting to slip routinely into a mode of putting on a sort of mask, maintaining a serious disconnect from the patrons. It’s very easy to start seeing everyone that goes in the club as a drunk, a douchebag, or a tramp when your lowest possible expectations of people’s behavior are fulfilled night after night. And this is only in a single setting! (I honestly don’t know how police that deal routinely and repeatedly with sociopaths in all sorts of different settings keep from suspecting and loathing everyone.) So, yeah, it worried me a lot - that’s not the way I want to be.
An essay that really hit home around the time I was really dwelling on this stuff and getting ready to quit was David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech. He talked about how easy it is to get sucked into your default setting, to expect the ugly, inconsiderate, selfishness of other people. How you have to force yourself to consider other possibilities, to try to feel some kind of common ground or fellowship with the people you deal with in mundane or frustrating contexts. Hard to do at a nightclub full of drunk, coked, X-ed, horny, aggressive people. So, I stopped doing that type of job and think about it now as an education of sorts.
I was never interested in justice, only peace. The places I worked were not at all upscale, exclusive, or discerning. We had regulars, who were who they were. Glad you had the leisure to pick fly shit out of pepper.
What glamour or excitement there is about a strip club wears off entirely by the second or third day working there, especially when you are charged with enforcing rules (Bouncers at most strip clubs are in charge of keeping customers in line, but also keeping the dancers in line. It’s an awful, thankless authority position, like being a babysitter for a bunch of bratty, catty ten-year-old girls having a slumber party and determined to wreak havoc. Dancers will try to do drugs with patrons, get real drinks from the bartenders (when you buy a stripper a $10 drink, they are served either an extremely diluted drink or a special glass with only about 25 mL in it - one of their jobs is to get customers to buy them some minimum amount of drinks per night), lie about how many drinks they sold to try to keep the entire price instead of their percentage, have sex with patrons, poach another dancer’s rich customer, sabotage another dancer’s clothes, shoes, or cosmetics, get customers drunk enough to steal their wallets, and on and on… when there is a conflict between dancers, they will either start fighting or come and get the bouncer to settle it. At my club, the manager had absolutely no interest in these mundane, small issues, and left the decisions totally up to security. My first night on the job, I fired a dancer for dealing ecstasy and suspended two more for fighting.
There are a lot of dancers who work only at one or two clubs, but the way that most clubs have established their rules, dancers can be suspended, fined, punished by being put on “floor only” duty (no stage dancing, just mingling and selling drinks, which makes them less money), or just plain fired. In practice, this leads to a whole subset of dancers that basically rotate through area clubs, staying until they get in trouble for something or have a serious conflict with management or other employees, then repeating the cycle. If you know the management or security of other clubs, you learn why the new employee left their last job, and what to watch out for.
Short answer: I never dated any strippers, nor would I recommend it. I’m sure there are honest, good women who are actually doing the job just for the money, who take their job and family seriously, who are worthy of trust (I knew exactly one the whole time I bounced - she became a very successful real estate investor and got married), but the odds are stacked dangerously high against any trust being validated.
So … “Roadhouse” was not a documentary? Say it ain’t so!
Every Swayze movie was a documentary–don’t worry.
Thanks for the great responses!
Two questions -
In my area almost every black dance nightclub that has started up has closed down (or been closed down) in year of two due to the extraordinary amount of fights and violence in the parking lots. Some of it lethal. Is this deadly violence characteristic of black nightclubs in other areas or are we just having a string of bad luck?
The head of security of one of the aforesaid clubs, whom I knew casually, said by far the greatest number of fights were instigated by women and then the men got involved and everything went to hell. Is this true in non-black nightclubs as well?
Do you do a pat-down of guests? If you do, what do you do if you actually find a knife or sidearm?
I’ve worked the late/night shift in hotels for five years so I can relate to your experience with de-escalation, but fortunately my experience with having to get physical is limited to people who my old boss described as “combat ineffective.” 