13) Bouncers

There is a 93.7% chance that if you've ever visited a club, you've come across a bouncer you didn't like.

There are only two types of people who like bouncers.

• The people who hire them
• The people who they allow into clubs despite their being age/clothes/guestlist or reservation challenged

We can safely assume that the two groups above form the minority of club-goers. Otherwise you relinquish the need for a large meathead guarding a door to a free-for-all. This makes the majority of people in the world either:

• not really care for bouncers
• despise bouncers to within an inch of their lives

This post is for the second half of that group.

I tried to work out what it is that makes up a bouncer. Is there a school for bouncers somewhere? Did someone have to do an aptitude test to be guided to this job? Has any kid ever answered the question of ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ with ‘A bouncer?’ and did their parents jump for joy? Can you imagine getting a test result back from an aptitude test saying that you’re a prime candidate for a cross between a thug and a doorman with an inferiority complex and a penchant for talking down at people who contribute to your salary. Not encouraging news.

To top it off, a bouncer's job title makes them sound like something an inflated rubber bladder does. You’re a fat and round human being that pings people out of clubs. And you get to wear a suit and an earpiece so you feel like a CIA agent…for a nightclub. Bouncers are the masters and commanders of the velvet rope, with a finger tensely on the button of social exclusivity and interaction. Sort of like the login prompt for Facebook. Except the login prompt on Facebook doesn’t ever hope for sex or cash as recompense.

So what is a bouncer? They’re not security guards or policemen. They’re not professional wrestlers, despite a pressing need to eat and act like them. They certainly aren’t military. They’re more like disgruntled ex-military, perhaps missing the hey-days of action where picking on people smaller and weaker than them was the job description – except this time they have a legal purview to bully women and children too.

And how do they train?  Do they have velvet ropes at home, doing reps of opening and closing them several times a day?  Do they psyche themselves up by looking in the mirror, uttering the lines, 'You can come in...you can't come in...are you on the guestlist?' a 100 times before they leave the house?  Do they have a method for bouncing, standing outside other nightclubs, watching how the masters at Pacha and Fabric do it? Intriguing.

Bouncers do have some common characteristics though. They have a unique manner of stumbling through clubs with a frown, like they’ve lost something in the crowd, and the only way of finding it is to barge through tightly-knit groups, walking like unrelenting poles and looking pointlessly stern. They also have the job of breaking up fights or tossing out troublemakers, like some sort of qualified referees for the drunk. And they tell people when its time to leave, and to finish up their drinks, repeatedly. Like alarm clocks you can't smash against a wall.

Most strikingly, bouncers lord over access to places where patrons gather to drink, dance and usually couple up. Sort of like what eunuchs did at the time of the Pharaohs. Except that the Pharaohs got the equation right. In putting large and monstrous human beings in charge of accessways to their harems, they put into practice a vetting procedure that made them more amiable and less likely to become aggravated. They eliminated two little articles from the doorman that frustrated the little peas in their heads, steering their control centre through seas of despair and unremitting self-importance. If Pharaohs owned nightclubs, most bouncers might actually be likeable. At least they’d lose the attitude and the urge to stamp their authority on people, willy-nilly. (Tee-hee).

I have a dream – that every club or bar upgrades their door access management tools. In this day and age, it’s kind of perverse having a human doing a turnstile’s job. Turnstiles are cost efficient, programmeable, upgradeable, even-tempered, can withstand all sorts of weather and can discriminate between who gets in or out based on fair and standard criteria, without the aggravating conversation. Pretty much everything most bouncers aren't.

PS - So I turn on the television this morning and the BBC reports something about a manhunt for a killer in the UK. Oddly enough, they report his previous job as being that of a nightclub bouncer. Spooky...check the last line...


http://www.metro.co.uk/news/834294-raoul-moat-letter-names-targets-as-manhunt-continues