- I would split the absolute worst things into three categories: fights, misogyny, and OD’s.
By far, the most awful, affecting things you see are the episodes of violence. I never saw a “good, clean fight.” Fights can be horrible and disgusting, they can be laughably absurd, they can be quick, brutal and scary. Any fight where someone inflicts serious trauma on someone else is a terrible thing to see, and hard to forget.
The worst I ever saw was between two alpha male types, a bodybuilder and an arena football player. They had gotten in a “pushy-pushy” in the club over some perceived disrespect, and had been separated. At the end of the night, the bodybuilder and his girlfriend were hanging out with the club staff for the after-closing “shift drinks” and cleanup. The head of security had actually encouraged this to keep the two men separated during the push to get everyone out of the club. After about a half hour, all the employees started to leave. The football player and his entourage had been hanging out in the parking lot across the street and in an example of spectacularly bad timing, were just getting in their Escalade to leave when the two men saw each other. Like a switch was flipped, they both got enraged again. The bodybuilder ran across the street as the football player exited his SUV and slammed the door, shouting curses. Suddenly everyone was shouting and running. I was heading over when my boss stopped me. “Not our business anymore,” he said.
I stood on the sidewalk in front of the club marquee and watched the men square off. The bodybuilder obviously knew more about fighting, since he easily stepped inside the looping punches the other guy threw, jabbed him in the face a few times, making him forget to keep his guard up, then hit him with an unprotected cross right in the temple. The football player was limp when he fell, and I remember the sound his head made when his falling body whipped it into the asphalt: “THOK!!” I remember what happened next with brutal clarity. The bodybuilder carefully hitched up his pants at the knees, knelt down beside the supine, unconscious man, and began punching him in the face repeatedly, at least 20 or 30 times, like a jackhammer. People were screaming and pulling at him, and he eventually jumped up, ran to his car and peeled out.
I made sure the manager had called 911 and went to see if the guy was alive. His friend was trying ineffectively to get him to wake up, and the crowd was screaming contradictory things about rolling him over, not moving his neck, starting CPR, etc. An off-duty paramedic stepped in and began finger-scooping huge dollops of blood and shattered teeth out of the guy’s throat and he started breathing again. All of his front teeth were spindly shards, his nose was mushed over like a wad of clay smeared onto his cheek by his ear, and his left eye socket was bulging and deformed. By far the most violent thing I have ever seen not involving weapons.
