Let me preface this series of articles by stating that I am not judging any of the people that I will be writing about. That having said, I sure as hell can handle my booze better than most of the disasters that will be discussed.
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of college town bouncers are not ball-busting egomaniacs that are specifically there to rain on your booze-fueled finger-blasting festivals on the dance floor. Most of the bouncers you will cross paths with are just like you; college students who love to drink, shake our unmentionables on strangers, then try and punch that stranger’s one-way ticket to Poundtown. The only difference between you and I is that I am stone-sober.
If I had to sum up a bouncer’s job description, it’d be pretty short: make sure minors don’t get in, make sure people don’t die, and make sure people are not fighting or having sex, and especially not simultaneously. Bouncers are not there to ruin your night. They are there to make sure you don’t drink so much you get brain-damage, and to make sure you aren’t spreading some form of radical aerosol STD to surrounding people.
When I am walking around the bar, the only thing I’m looking for is if you are bothering surrounding people, or if you are putting yourself and/or others in danger. If you want to take your shirt off and dance like you just dropped two ecstasy tabs, I could really give a stuff less. When you start slipping and falling in your heels, like a deer trying to stand up on a frozen-over lake, it’s time to leave the bar.
Most of the time, the problem arises when some people don’t know when to cut their losses and head home. This leads me to my first subject and type of person that comes to college bars: the over-the-top PDA person. This subject is nearly impossible to pick out of a crowd because they are cleverly camouflaged as respectable members of the college bar crowd. I have these people broken down into an easy to understand photographic equation.
I never really have a problem with people getting wasted and making as if their plane were going down. I do however, have a problem when a guy is wrist deep inside somebody. If you want to roll that girl up into a fudgeball and take her home to violate her, that’s your business. When you are making surrounding people viscerally ill by the inserting of anything pretty much anywhere, that’s when it becomes my business.
When you are tapped on the shoulder, I am trying to eject you from the bar a little bit like a manager relieves a pitcher from his duties. I walk up calmly, whisper in your ear: “Sir, you can’t be drilling this poor girl on the dance floor. It’s time you both leave.” At this point, the patron has a choice to make: either cut your losses and walk towards the door quietly, or argue. The former is the least popular choice which I find puzzling, seeing as how the latter is definitely the more embarrassing.
Think of it this way: the manager of a baseball team doesn’t grab a megaphone from the dugout and scream into it “Hey, you frickin suck and are making us look bad. Get the fudge off the mound while we send someone with the skill and dexterity of someone not retarded!” The manager doesn’t do this because of something called tact. He doesn’t want to embarrass the pitcher, while simultaneously wanting him to get the hell off the mound. That’s what I am trying to do. While I still want to be polite, I also want you to get the fudge out of the bar. Actually, I want to embarrass you, a little bit at least. It’s an internal struggle I deal with.
The rules of the bar are simple: have a good time, but behave yourself within reason. Arguing with a bouncer is fruitless at best. At worst, you get your face caved in. If you are trying to fudge somebody on the dance floor, bathroom, DJ booth, or the bar, and give a bouncer flak about being kicked out, you’re situation’s going to turn from relatively awkward, to real awkward. Here’s a real interaction that I had:
I see a guy, standing no taller than 5’6”, making out with a girl that can only be described as “hippopotamus-like”. She stood at about 5’9” and in a similar weight class to a Mini Cooper. Now the guy had her pinned up against the wall doing some form of rain dance it looked like. I watched this whole thing go down. I watched him trail his impossibly tiny hands from her jowls down to her oddly proportioned chest (where he spent some time tweaking her nipples), down to her massive spare tire, then down to the waistband of her stretch pants. If you have a weak stomach, I’d stop reading now.
He toyed with her waistband as he looked her in her eyes. Her eyes read lust (to him anyways, they read “double cheeseburger from McDonalds” to me). Given the green light to proceed, he dove down her pants and began to finger-bang this monster with the ferocity of which I have never seen. Not even in the pornos. While I took it upon myself to stop a few people passing by and point this out, after about 10 seconds, I decided it was time for them to leave before I puked out everything I have ever eaten. I tap him on the shoulder and say:
Me: Okay, that’s enough. It’s time for you two to leave, please.
Guy: Really? Why?
It’s a strange thing looking into a person’s glossed over eyes when you can tell they honestly didn’t believe they were doing anything wrong.
Me: You were just about fisting this girl right here.
It’s at this point when I decide to take it to the next level. Seeing as though he was with some friends, I asked them to take their friend outside with his new pet Rhino because what they were doing isn’t permitted in even the most liberal bars in East Lansing. Well, frowned upon I suppose. This upset the guy because he obviously didn’t want his friends to know what he had been doing, although, he couldn’t have picked a busier part of the bar to do it.
Me: Hey, you need to get your friend collected, hand-washed, and out of this bar…please. Also, try and get a flat-bed semi to move his new girlfriend
Friends: (laughter followed by some pretty timely picture taking)
Friend 1: He has a girlfriend…that weighs a lot less than her…
The take home message here is this: if you can’t wait to get back to your apartment to sexually assault your new friend, do not argue with the bouncer because it is going to make your situation a whole lot worse. What I did was orders of magnitude more detrimental to this poor guy than dragging him and his moose out of the bar by the hair.
Next up: The Tough Guy.
