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If
you really want to hear about it the first thing you'll probably want
to know is that a bar isn't a place of sacrifice … surrender, solitude,
cirrhosis, sure, but not sacrifice. Unless you are the bouncer. I'm the
bouncer. And being the bouncer is a lot like being the designated driver
at a raging house party. It is part drug intervention and part animal
planet. The difference is that most interventions are well-planned,
emotionally sensitive ordeals, and say what you want about the late
Steve Irwin, but at least the wild animals he was pissing off were
sober.
I don't know how I got this fucking job. Well, that's not true, but I
do honestly have to ask myself what the hell I am doing in this line of
work from time to time. Right about now I should mention that I am
roughly five foot seven, and a hundred forty-five pounds. Normally, a
person of my size would not be employed in this type of profession
because I don't look like some Cro-Magnon-gorilla-Frankenstein-manbeast
with tattoos on my neck and a head the size of an industrial-grade
microwave. But I am a martial arts instructor, and the head teacher of
my dojo referred my services to the bar owner.
I want to make it clear that while I do sometimes enjoy physically
harming people, I would never actively pursue a situation where that
sort of thing could happen, without very good reason. Years ago I
dedicated my life to the study/teaching of my discipline, and though
that sounds very romantic and all, the brass tax of the matter is that
working a second job is the only way to sustain this dedication. The
dojo, though formidable, is a small establishment and working there
alone cannot fully financially support me. I make about one
hundred-fifty dollars a night while bouncing, and for only this reason, I
hold this vocation. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make for the
love of something that kept me alive.
My theory on dreams, lifestyles, achievements, goals, etc, is that to reach them, something will be sacrificed, regardless- and it is always better to choose what it is that will be
sacrificed, rather than allow the natural process of stress and
striving to choose for me. The later is how things and people get
neglected, pawned, and/or unnecessarily damaged.
There are many other things I could be doing with my life as an
able-bodied educated single young man in the heyday of my late twenties.
My mother often chooses to remind me of this, and how she gave up
smoking, drinking, contact sports, recreational narcotics, roller
coasters, and any aspect of joy in efforts to bring me safely into this
world. One of the other things she loves to remind me of is the master's
degree I hold in literature, which was paid for in full via
scholarship, and which hangs above the old fencing trophies in my
childhood room at her house, collecting dust. Why I am not standing at
the front of a college lecture room in a collared shirt and Oxfords,
teaching Dostoevsky to hung-over twenty-year olds while collecting a
professor's salary, is beyond her. That being said, the irony of putting
my body on the line in a seedy bar, to humbly sustain a way of life
that is devoted to a refined mastery of the body, is something I choose
not to think about - unless I am drunk. And I don't get drunk a lot, it
hinders my job requirements.
Usually there isn't much trouble. The place I work for is a hick-bar in
a folksy college town. The locals are kind, and the drinks are strong.
The University's football stadium is located about three blocks from the
establishment, so the only real ruckus that occurs takes place in the
Fall season- when home games get out. During such occasions, the bar
permits me to call in an extra man, just in case. I always call in Haoa,
a displaced Hawaiian local boy who also happens to be another
instructor at my dojo. He is about one inch and ten pounds heavier than
me, arms covered in beautiful Japanese-style tattoos of black bamboo
chutes. Before he came to the dojo we work at, he'd left Hawaii to
become a successful tournament fighter in Thailand. His fighting career
was skyrocketing, as he was one of the only foreigners to consistently
hold and defend the championship belt. But the higher up you go in the
tournament bracket, the dirtier the game gets on account of the
gambling. His last fight there, Haoa was given a large sum of money by a
collective of gamblers and told to throw the fight. It was his latest
title defense - he hadn't lost to anyone in years. But instead of doing
as the gamblers had paid him to, Haoa knocked his opponent out in the
first round. As a result, he had to flee the country, or face
potentially life-threatening retaliation at the hands of that gambling
collective. He has a hard time explaining exactly why he didn't throw
the fight, but I understood. We were kindred spirits of some sort, and
the fact that our dojo's head instructor often paired us together on
weeknights to teach the intermediate students strengthened our
friendship. The only time we ever talked about what happened to him in
Thailand, he simply said "Some tings bra, you no can give."
Football season was over, but it was January and apparently the
University's basketball team was undefeated, going into a huge game
against their biggest rival. It was a weeknight, which was weird in
terms of bouncing but the bar was expecting a heavy turn out once the
game ended. I'd been deeply depressed all day after learning that J.D.
Salinger had just died. I wasn't really in the mood to work, but hey,
when you live hand to mouth on a shoestring budget, one hundred fifty
bucks sounds good all the time - no matter who dies. When I got the
phone call, I was cleaning the mats in the dojo with Haoa. We barely had
time to go home, shower, change, and grab a mouthpiece. As a bouncer
you always carry a mouthpiece. You carry it in your front pocket and you
make sure that nothing else is in that front pocket but the mouthpiece.
You also wear a protective cup, because people like to think they can
end a fight quickly by kicking you in the scrotum. This is not the case
when one uses such foresight.
By the time we got to the bar, the game was almost finished and given
that the home team was losing by a landslide, there were a great deal of
fans who'd already forsaken the court side contest and begun to drown
their disappointment. The whole joint was filling up fast.
My own morose demeanor was difficult to contain, and in an
uncharacteristic show of angst I took my shift drink within twenty
minutes of being there. A bouncer gets only one shift drink, meaning
that he can obtain a beverage of his choice, on the house, once, while
he is working. I usually wait until my shift is over to take mine, if I
take it at all. But goddamn it, J.D. Salinger was dead, and I couldn't
fucking deal with it. The man wroteCatcher in the Rye! He had
been at D-Day and survived the Battle of the Bulge! He'd given up fame
and notoriety to disappear into seclusion and write stories that he
refused to show to anyone and kept locked away in a safe (so it was
rumored, it is also rumored that he burned them all). He was a legend to
me, the last of the old foul dudes, and part of the reason I fell in
love with literature at a young age. Now I would be forced to place him
in the ranks of my posthumous pantheon - with Bukowski, Hunter Thompson,
and Fitzgerald. All of my heroes were dead. Some part of me inside was
being siphoned away, slowly.
The fact that I was thinking of literature at a time when I should have
been scanning the bar for potential threats, irked me. Taking the
burning double shot of Crown Royal whiskey and chasing it down with a
beer-back of Heineken was my protest against this lack of discipline.
The bar was loud, rowdy and growing like the reaching leaves of some
wind-ripped jungle; Haoa was on the outdoor porch near the other exit
staring at me strangely. He motioned with his thumb to my left, and it
was then I realized that there was a small troop of college kids waiting
in line with their I.D. cards in various forms of presentation.
Startled out of my distant state, I did my job - carefully inspecting
driver's licenses hailing from all over the country. Most of the line
consisted of girls, but towards the back of that entering group were
some very drunk, very large young men.
I've found that the average person, when presented with a situation
that does not coincide with their perception of the world and its
workings, will receive this disconnect with caution. There is usually a
moment when they realize that there is something very strange about the
circumstance they've just encountered. In my world, it goes something
like this:
Me: Hey can I check your ID please?
Patron: Sure.
And then there is the inner monologue that goes on during the period of
time when I am using a small handheld flashlight to check birth dates
on shiny plastic rectangles. I imagine it sounds a bit like:
Patron: (The
little man here, who is paid to beat me up and drag me out if I get too
drunk, doesn't look like any of the other men who are usually paid to
do this … either this bar is laid back, or this man is very dangerous.
There is something unnerving about how calm he is and it makes me feel
strange inside. Avoid eye contact.)
Most folk act accordingly and my night goes on without incident. But
alcohol is a powerful drug, and when mixed with the type of unabashed
personality that enjoys vocalized self-expression, problems manifest
instantly. On that night, the night J.D. Salinger died, when Haoa and I
were working the place, the very large, very drunk men who stumbled in
were of the former disposition.
"Hey can I see your ID please?"
"You're the bouncer?"
"Yes sir, can I check your ID?"
"Shit, I could toss you clear across the room if I wanted to!" he
laughs to his friend behind him while reaching into his back pocket to
produce his wallet/ID etc.
"Well, it's unfortunate you feel that way, sir, you have yourself a
good night." I said, waving him through and handing his ID back to him.
Right then I knew the evening would end with violence. Haoa came over
and asked me about the interaction. I told him to keep an eye on that
guy and his friend. The game was over and the place was getting about as
full as it usually did during the Fall when football fever was in
effect. I continued to visually check in with Phoebe and Jess, the
bartenders - this is another one of those things particular to the job
of bouncing. Paying attention to the bartenders and who they cut off.
Phoebe has seniority back there and it is her that I take my cues from.
It is a subtle sort of affair. Last weekend, some jerk tried to reach
across the bar and slip his index finger down her exposed cleavage - I
didn't see this, and it wasn't a game night so Haoa wasn't there. Phoebe
slapped this guy across the face, with a smile on hers, then reached
into the register and removed a crisp green bill.
"Hey I'll give you twenty bucks if you go start a fight with that
little guy sitting by the door over there." She said, pointing at me.
And naturally, with signature alpha male bravado, the guy takes the
twenty and comes over to where I am sitting at my post.
It was fast and ugly and this was mostly because the guy wound up to
punch me from about three feet away. This made it easy to see the blow
coming. I elected to jump in and head-butt him while he lumbered at me
with his fist cocked back, trying to throw his punch like he was hurling
a baseball. And yeah, it hurt. Slamming the top of your forehead into
the bridge of a man's nose is not a painless process for anyone involved
in the matter. But it is here that my theory on dreams, goals,
achievements, etc, directly corresponds to my theory on bar fighting.
Something willbe sacrificed, one way or another- bones, blood,
teeth, pride, chairs, tables, cue sticks. Better to choose what will be
sacrificed than have this thing be chosen for you- in the above case, I
chose my forehead, because it is hard and I don't have to use it the way
I have to use my other body parts throughout the course of the day …
try eating breakfast with a broken hand. Anyway, this is a good example
of what I am sometimes required to do when some jerk steps across the
line of civility in that particular establishment. And this was about to
happen again, the night Salinger died.
Phoebe was pouring drinks like a champion, working the requests from
all angles of the crowded bar counter. Jess was doing her part too,
wandering the floor and collecting orders from the tables full of
drunken fans. Sweet Home Alabama came through the jukebox
speakers again, murdering the airspace for the fourth time that night,
and I was swearing under my breath at this awful reality. There was no
one coming in the door, and so I took my hourly stroll through the
place, eyes darting back and forth while collecting empty pint glasses
off the tables for Phoebe and Jess. When I started to walk the glasses
I'd collected over to the bar, I heard the telltale sound of an angry
Hawaiian.
Though I myself am of Blackxican descent, I feel comfortable speaking
for my Hawaiian associate and his people in this one regard - you don't
mess with an angry Hawaiian. They are warriors. It is customary for
young men of the islands to engage in street-fights as nonchalantly as
we on 'the mainland' attend a movie theater - ask any Kaneohe local boy.
Drive-bys, shootings, stabbings, these things do not often occur on the
islands- but rather an old-school code of conduct concerning
confrontation is upheld…picture S.E. Hinton's Rumble Fish with
less white boys and no switchblades. That is the cloth from which Haoa
is cut. He is an inherently reserved and gentle young man until a
certain point of contention is reached.
"What, you boys like jump? Come then, you fuckaz!" he barked, his voice raised above the general noise and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The dispute involved one of the young men who'd entered with the large
group I'd carded earlier. His sour-faced friend with an opinion of how
far he could throw me was there at his side. It was near the bathrooms, a
narrow space crowded by vending machines and an ATM. The women's
bathroom was full but the men's was not. A young woman, who had to
relieve herself urgently, asked Haoa if he would guard the door while
she ran into the men's room to take care of business. He agreed to do
so, as this is a common occurrence at the bar. The young men from the
big group who came in earlier seemed to take issue with this, and even
though the young lady had finished up and come out, the guys insisted on
making an issue of it. Why? I don't know. I will never understand why
people will exacerbate any minor occurrence into an excuse to fight. Why
not just tell someone that you want to fight them if that's what you
really want to do? Why the posturing? Just be yourself. The arguing was
escalating even as other people came in and out of either restroom.
I put my mouthpiece in and surveyed that this was going to be more
difficult than usual, on account of the confined quarters in the highly
trafficked passageway. Haoa and I met eyes only briefly as he returned
his gaze to the aggressors. His mouthpiece was in and I could see the
black rubber covering his upper teeth while he yelled. The rest happened
very quickly. Decisions were made and more terrible things happened.
Haoa snaked his neck, dodging the first punch and then dropping the guy
who threw it with a perfectly timed punch of his own. I heard the crack
of flesh and knuckles, accentuated by the flopping thud of a body
hitting the ground. At that point, another guy who apparently happened
to be friends with the now horizontal man's group, popped out of the
men's bathroom. I saw him eye Haoa, who was engaging with the
unconscious man's buddy, and I knew what had to happen. All of these
guys were big, wide and thick, like two-legged bears. Haoa and I, though
muscular, are slender and wiry, we had the advantage of movement - we
could slip past each other and the soon to be flailing bodies with
greater ease than our opponents. The vending machine, the ATM, and the
bathroom doors would be impartial friends/foes, depending on where the
rest of the fighting spilled. I jumped over the downed man and dove at
the guy exiting the restroom who had already extended his arms to grab
Haoa. Stuffing him back through the swinging door of the bathroom, we
fell onto the white tile together. The fall knocked the wind out of his
lungs and I was on top of him. My first punch hit him where I intended
it to, in the throat. He coughed loudly and I rained punches down into
his face until his teeth cut his lips and his eyes went dull. His blood
was all over my hands and wrists; some of it had splashed up onto my
face. Jumping up, I turned and ran back through the swinging bathroom
door only to find a very similar situation. Haoa was attempting to put
the mouthy young man I'd spoken with earlier face first into the vending
machine. This was not a martial arts technique, but this was his second
try, and he was using the cowl of the man's hooded sweatshirt to
accomplish this feat. The awful sound of cheaply reinforced glass being
smacked loudly was met with a series of shouts and calls from
surrounding bystanders. But Haoa didn't see the other two young men
coming at him from behind. He couldn't have, he was invested, in the
Hawaiian sense of the word.
I slipped past Haoa and the downed man behind him who was rolling over
onto his stomach and clutching his lower jaw. The first guy tried to
punch me with a somewhat educated form. He'd probably been a boxer. His
jab landed on the right side of my face and it stung, but I was ready
for his right hand which I broke using the tip of my elbow. I knew it
was broken because his hand and my elbow met at full force, him coming
at me and me going at him. He stumbled off to the left, clutching his
hand and swearing profusely. I kicked him in the liver to make sure that
he would not return to the fight. He slammed into a table and his head
hit the wood on the way down. I finished this just in time to gain
bearing on the second man, who was running towards me with his eyes
focused on Haoa. Raised over his head with both hands was a freshly
removed dartboard. No darts, but still, a dartboard. He blew past me and
it was then that I knew that I was going to eat shit. Not for a bad
reason, for my friend. But nevertheless, eating a heavy blow and knowing
it is coming is never a pleasant understanding. I did as I knew I must,
it was the only way to save Haoa from receiving all that momentum and
that entire dartboard. Were he to take a hit of that magnitude in the
back of the head, he could have been severely injured. It was a calm
decision, thought out quickly and peacefully resigned to.
My left hand shot out behind me and grabbed the back of the attacking
man's jacket, pulling him off balance and stopping his forward
progression. There was no way I'd be able to get a punch off in time, I
knew this, but tried anyway. Then the man with the dartboard wheeled
around and brought it down on my head. The world went away in a single
black snatching, I felt my legs buckle as my face met the floor. I went
down with a grunt of pain, and a half groaned swear word, hoping I'd
given Haoa enough time to finish it all.
When I woke up the bar was mostly empty. It was darker than usual, as
the house lights had been completely shut off and only the stale white
light of the kitchen illuminated things. My head felt awful and my first
thought upon realizing that I wasn't dreaming was that the world would
never be the same again because J.D. Salinger was dead. Goddamn it.
"Can I get my shift drink?" I murmured to no one.
Phoebe
was sweeping a pile of broken glass from the shattered frontage of the
vending machine, and Jess dropping a bag of ice onto the counter in
front of me snapped me to attention.
"Did it go okay?" I asked Jess.
"What do you mean did it go okay? Look at you!"
Haoa was outside the front door talking to the cops. When he came back
in the bar, he was all smiles and slapped me on the back. "Oh bra, I
heard you took one fada team huh?"
"Did you get him?"
"Yesi bredren!" he laughed, nodding his head in the direction of the
shattered vending machine. I could see the flashing lights of the squad
cars blaring in through the windows.
"I oughta charge people to watch you guys do this shit!" Phoebe spoke
from the corner while she used a dustpan to collect the fragmented
glass. "It would turn a profit and cover damages!"
I came in and out of consciousness a few more times there at the bar
counter. Tiny dancing lights, purple and gray in color, circled my field
of vision. Jess slid a small bottle of hand sanitizer towards me and I
took the tiny thing and squeezed the gel-like liquid into my palm.
Rubbing it over my knuckles, I felt the familiar burn where skin used to
be. Hitting people in the mouth always sucks, because in the mouth
exist teeth, and teeth by default are meant to cut and tear. I was
caught in a drifting blackout, and at the same time determined to drink
myself back to life. Someone placed my pay wage of hundred and fifty
dollars down on the counter in front of me and I asked for a shot of
Crown. I shoved my arm forwards slowly and palmed the wad of bills. My
head kept pulsing, that dartboard had been heavier than it looked. For
some stupid reason, I couldn't get Holden Caulfield out of my mind.
"Goddamn money, it always ends up making you blue as hell." I said. And
I kept hearing his words splintering through my wrecked brain. Someone,
I think Haoa, fed me the shot of Crown and when the throbbing in my
head went away, I started to remember pieces of the fight. They were
obscured by my thoughts on Salinger and how perhaps it would be more
appropriate to take some stupid job at a high school or college rather
than potentially eat dart boards to the face while fighting large drunk
men in efforts to make monthly ends meet. At least then I could assign
the books of all my heroes to a new generation who would otherwise never
know of them.
"J.D. fucking Salinger died! Someone bring me another drink!" I
bellowed, thinking the stupid thoughts I only think when drunk. Thoughts
about why I still insist on living the way I do as opposed to listening
to my mother and not risking my physical health. I slid the clean
pressed bills into my pocket with a raw scabbing hand.
"Who?" Jess asked, wiping down the counter and taking the now melted bloodstained bag of ice from in front of me.
"He wrote Catcher in the Rye! Nine Stories! Franny andmotherfucking Zooey!
Didn't you people go to school?" Blunt force trauma to the head and
alcohol produce a certain type of belligerence that I was richly
exuding.
"No, why, you like teach us bra?" Haoa asked, laughing and tossing an
onion ring at me from across the bar where he was pouring himself a
beer.
"No!" I shouted out, taking the shot that Jess put in front of me and
letting it fall into the back of my throat. And I didn't want to explain
any of it - literature, heroes, starving martial-artistry in the name
of selfhood. Some explanations you shouldn't give. Sometimes it's better
if you just don't ever tell anybody anything.
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