Clublife

  Rob the Bouncer

  Clublife

  Thugs, Drugs, and Chaos at New York City’s Premier Nightclubs

  TO MY MOTHER, WHO WILL READ THIS

  AND REMAIN DISAPPOINTED, AND TO THE

  MEN WHO WORK THE DOORS

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  1 Seeds

  2 Bar Car

  3 Suffusion

  4 Swelled

  5 Carnivàle

  6 Fringe

  7 Mirages

  8 Scale

  9 The Dream

  10 Luxe

  11 Internecine

  12 Flexion

  13 Granted

  14 Envelope

  15 Scratch

  16 Shackles

  17 Tinder

  18 Tenuous

  19 Ditch

  20 Pulley System

  21 Aged

  22 Malevolence

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Clublife is a memoir of my experiences as a bouncer in New York’s West Chelsea club scene over the past three years. Certain people, places, and incidents in this book are composites—combinations of actual people, places, and incidents that I encountered in several of the clubs that I worked in. “Axis” is not an actual club, but rather an amalgam of my experiences and observations in clubs. I have changed all names to protect the identities of both the innocent and the guilty.

  1

  SEEDS

  The troubles, such as they are, begin with their eyebrows. When I started doing this—this bouncing shit—it was the eyebrows I noticed first. The way I was raised, a man wouldn’t touch his eyebrows unless he needed surgery and one of them stood in the way of the scalpel. The shaping of the eyebrows is a trap. It’s a ruse. A man, if he wants to be thought of as a man, should take pains to avoid falling victim to the shaping-of-the-eyebrows fallacy. A timely pluck with tweezers is acceptable now and again, when stray pieces begin springing out with age. Basic maintenance draws no notice.

  Club customers wax their eyebrows. They shave them and they have little Indian women tie their edges and yank them. I came to find out, involuntarily, that this process is called “threading.” The shaping and threading of the eyebrows become a problem, because they lead to disagreements with bouncers. Those finely sculpted points on the brow-ends in question are bound to bog us down somehow. They’ll bring us to sidewalk impasse—a Mexican standoff on a Saturday night in Lower Manhattan, my ability to see your side of things swept away by the absurdity of what you’ve done to the fur atop your precious sight-organs.

  It started my first night, with the eyebrows, and it’s something I still can’t get past. I won’t ever get past it, I think. It’s too much to digest for a guy who considers shaving a major hygienic sacrifice. Do this business to yourself—I’ve heard the Staten Island Mall does fine work, incidentally—and our points of view will have diverged to such an extent that should we somehow find ourselves in situation, I’ll need you gone from my presence as quickly as I can wrench you and your manicured ass-coiffure out the door.

  If you’ve never been to a nightclub in Manhattan, it’s possible you wouldn’t know such things as waxing and threading exist. You could say they exist, and claim to understand the concept of their existence, but you simply wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know about any of it, in fact—the myriad absurdities taking place on any given night in Gotham. You can live out a contented, fulfilling life in a trailer park somewhere on the outskirts of Junction City, Kansas, and the things that happen in New York’s nightclub-riddled West Chelsea and Meatpacking districts won’t fuck with your existence in any way.

  You can head out the front door of the double-wide, down the plywood gangplank, start up the Buick, drive on down to the local convenience store, and pick yourself up a case of Budweiser and a bag of Doritos. Throw in some dip while you’re at it. Sour cream and onion meshes best with nacho cheese and a hint of repeating cheap beer. Come on back home, fire up the satellite dish, plant your ass on the couch, and you’ve got the whole world at your fingertips and nobody grinding their ass into your nuts unless you’ve invited them to.

  Maybe at some point during all the fun you’re bound to have, you push open the screen door and mosey outside for a cigarette. You smoke out there because you don’t want the tobacco smell lingering in the curtains and because it’s quiet. There’s nothing in the air here on the threshold of the plain—just an endless parade of semis on the interstate and the occasional chain of Burlington Northern freight cars passing through the far side of downtown, en route to places where the rest of the world isn’t banished so readily.

  You flick your cigarette into the drainage ditch that runs beside the road they paved last year, and you glance up at the stars. You take for granted how bright they are out here—and how many of them you can see when it’s clear—but you don’t know you’re doing it because you’ve never been to a place where they can’t be seen. You turn back and move inside, leaving the night out on the plain, never considering that those same stars—the ones I can’t see from my spot on the sidewalk—are over my head tonight, too. And the world, from where I’m standing, sure as hell doesn’t seem to be at my fingertips.

  Three years ago, I stayed home and left the New York night outside my door, just like you. I went inside, turned the deadbolt, and kept it all at a comfortable distance. If you want to chase the quiet here, you can, even when you live in the middle of the city. Quiet, you see, is a relative term. If you don’t want to find yourself in Chelsea at two in the morning, with your space and your sanity no longer yours to claim, nobody’s going to force you to go. And if nobody ever forces you to go, and financial necessity doesn’t bring you to that part of town looking for work, you won’t ever need to know what it’s like.

  You’re better off that way. Trust me on this.

  Circumstances happen, though. You know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy, and one morning you wake up and find out you’re on the schedule at some club downtown, slated to stand on a box and play zookeeper for eight hours. That’s what happened to me. I didn’t know it—the “scene”—was there, either, so I went about my days and nights without ever knowing the depth and breadth of the Manhattan nightclub subculture that now seems to come to the surface every time I turn over a rock.

  I don’t know where the world keeps nightclub customers when they’re not drinking and dancing, because I don’t see people like them anywhere else but inside. Before I became a bouncer, I hadn’t seen people like that walking the streets, at least not in such overwhelming numbers. Originally, I thought maybe they all lived at the club, but now I’m sure they don’t, because I see them all leave at the end of the night. Clearing the room at closing time—four A.M. here in New York—is part of my job, so if they really did live there, I’d know. They roll out of our doors by car, by cab, by train, and on foot. They don’t all leave together, but they do eventually leave. Where they go is anyone’s guess. They don’t follow me.

  None of that matters right now, though. What matters is getting from Point A to Point B. Point A is all that quiet shit I told you about earlier—the Doritos, the satellite dish, the cigarette, and the stars. That’s the part I prefer. Point B is when you open your eyes in a room filled with three thousand drunken, sweaty, diseased, drug-addled dickheads, many of whom are threatening you, and all you want to do is close your eyes and think really hard about what went wrong to land you here.

  I DIDN’T WANT to leave my apartment. I couldn’t.

  Kate made certain I knew this was the problem right before she moved out, leaving me handcuffed—with six months remaining on a lease I never wanted in my name in the
first place—to a one-bedroom rat trap in the heart of warehouse Queens. Utilities were not included, but misanthropy was cultivated by the truckload.

  “Why would I want to come out of the fucking house around here?” I asked at the beginning of what would be the final argument of the unhealthiest relationship since Leo Tolstoy and Sophie Behrs. “So I can go outside and put up with people’s bullshit and not get paid for it? I hate these fucking people around here. What the fuck’s wrong with staying home?”

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. What’s wrong is that I’m unhappy. I’ve been unhappy for a long, long time, but you can’t seem to notice because you’re too busy being pissed off all the time.”

  Jesus, my back hurt. My entire body hurt. My shoulder twinged simply from searching for the two remotes necessary to work the television. My main problem, as I saw it, was this unification that needed to happen. Unifying my remotes. “Is this about the lady in the supermarket? ’Cause if it is…”

  “No! What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Listen,” I said, refusing to turn and face her. “I admit I was a little out of line for yelling at her like that, but was I wrong? What the fuck was she touching me for anyway? When you’re in a public place, and people are trying to get through…”

  “God, will you stop? Do you ever listen to yourself? You’ve turned into the most miserable human being I’ve ever been around. You have to fucking stop. I can’t live with this shit anymore.”

  I think she would have called me misanthropic, if she’d known what the word meant. She would have taken the word, embraced it, and dropped it on my head like the leaden safe she wished would someday fly out someone’s window and flatten me on the sidewalk. “There’s nothing out there I wanna see,” I insisted. “I’m fucking sorry if I want to sit around and relax after working all fucking day, but I’m tired, and I don’t need any of that bullshit out there.”

  “Working?” she asked, standing over me for effect. She looked more drawn than usual, probably because she’d been planning this for a while. The blond hair she’d cut short against my wishes was stringy, the way I required it to hang whenever we argued. When she said things I didn’t want to hear, I wanted her to be tired and cheap in my mind’s eye, just like this. The last thing I needed here was a conscience, which was what I’d had in those moments when her hazel eyes—the ones I’d always preferred without makeup but never got to see that way—weren’t as dull and lifeless as they were now. “You call that a job? Driving around all day in a truck delivering furniture with those people you scrape up every morning? That’s what you call a career?”

  “That’s not work? Seems like work while I’m fucking doing it.”

  “No, it’s not work. Not for you. It’s treading water, and it’s beneath you and you know it. You’re the smartest guy I’ve ever met, but you’re too lazy to make people stop treating you like shit, and so you take it out on me. I can’t deal with it anymore, you coming home and taking out all your bullshit on me. It’s not fair.”

  “Lazy? Lazy? Are you fucking kidding me? I’d like to see you haul a fucking sofa bed up a flight of stairs. You know how heavy those things are?”

  “No,” she replied. “I don’t, and that’s my point. I don’t have to know how heavy they are because unlike you, I’m not too lazy to handle my responsibilities.”

  “Again with fucking calling me lazy,” I said, laboring to sit up so I could shout her down, as usual, and make this stop. My back was starting to spasm from her screeching. “You think my life is easy?”

  “No,” she replied softly. “I know it’s not. But it’s a hell of a lot easier to show up on time every morning to some brainless job and let yourself get abused than it is to stand up for yourself and see something through to its conclusion for once in your goddamned life.”

  “Awesome. Here we fucking go again.”

  “That’s right. Here we go again. School, football, relationships, your family. All this stuff you’re always saying you’re gonna do, and nothing ever happens. Nothing ever gets done. Everything you’ve ever started, you’ve given up on. All you ever do is talk shit.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve got my reasons. And if you wanna sit and tell me all the shit I’m doing wrong, get in fucking line, because there’s a shitload of people ahead of you, believe me.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “Trust me, I know. But this is my life we’re talking about here, and there’s too much I want to do for me to allow you to make me your goddamned victim all the time. That’s what this is about.”

  “That’s not fair.” I wished she’d go to the store. Or take a shower. Something. Anything.

  “No, it’s not fair. It’s not fair what you do to me. I’ve wasted four years of my life waiting for you to come around, and I know it’s not going to happen. I have to cut my losses here. Do you not understand that?”

  “You can’t blame me for making you stick around all that time,” I said, venturing, as always, down the most inappropriate possible road. “It’s not like I had you locked in the fucking closet this whole time. You’ve always had a choice.”

  “Yes, and because of asshole comments like that, I’m making my choice and getting the fuck out of here before I get any older. I mean, you just have no idea, do you? Do you have any idea how sad this makes me? Do you have any idea how much I see in you?”

  “You’re right,” I said, and turned off the television. “You’re just so fucking right.”

  “Yeah, you mean that.”

  SO THAT WAS that. Kate had a point, of course, every goddamned word of it ringing true, but I felt cheated. It meant something that she could actually screw up the courage to move out on me. She wouldn’t yield to the learned helplessness I’d tried so hard to cultivate, and the message came through loud and clear: there was still some life in her that I hadn’t sucked out yet.

  The end of our relationship signified failure at the one thing in life I had always taken for granted: my ability to bleed people dry—emotionally, mentally, and physically. It hurt, because my capacity to do this wasn’t something I had come by easily. You don’t just wake up some random morning and decide it’s time to emotionally cripple your loved ones. No, the ability to alienate has to be cultivated through years of burying your own ambitions in the basement, estranging yourself from your family and friends, and perfecting the art of heaping abuse on anyone foolish enough to think they can help you.

  I had essentially left every task I’d ever undertaken in life unfinished, finding pleasure only in breaking down people like Kate—someone who had her life together in all the areas I didn’t. And when you’re as good at it as I’d become, any remaining spark of resistance comes as a complete surprise.

  Planning life-as-a-shithead takes time. It’s not some haphazard process. I had to put a great deal of work into receiving my official shithead certification. To disappoint everyone, I needed them to expect something out of me in the first place. With promise to spare, and potential in spades, I aced every standardized test I ever took, did just well enough in school, and excelled at sports. I gave the establishment a little taste of something it could attach itself to, which is how you get the world to believe it should make an effort to guide you along the path. My parents, in turn, took the time to teach me enough social niceties to pass as a “good kid.” People made the mistake of liking me.

  Everything was a setup. From the way I presented myself to the things I’d say to keep people hanging around, the only way I knew how to live was to hustle the world every chance I had. Problem was, my particular hustles had no coherent structure. They weren’t conceived with beneficial end results in mind—a lack of foresight that almost always left me sans payoff after cobbling together such intricately detailed mounds of bullshit.

  Even in the very beginning, back as far as high school, my entire life was a painstakingly constructed scam to get people hooked so I could set the stage for the string of disappointments to f
ollow. These orchestrated letdowns were works of master craftsmanship for someone so young, and my bullshit wouldn’t become transparent enough for people to give up on me until well into my adulthood. I had refined the art of subtle disgrace at a tender age—never quite living up to the standards of those generous enough to apply their guidance, but never exactly reaching that critical fuck-up mass that would drive them away. And the dumb bastards never even knew it was happening.

  Still, how did I get here? From slamming the door on life in the tranquility of my metaphorical trailer park to the midst of a teeming dance floor in the heart of a city I’d grow to despise—yet have as the backdrop to countless masturbatory fantasies involving my alleged “future”—and then, when all is said and done, probably ending up back where I began?

  The framework for my flameout was in place long before I ever attempted college, but once I decided to scrap the notion of higher education—or, for the purposes of accuracy, had it forcibly scrapped for me—the complexity of my plan grew in scale. I needed to target someone else, someone new, because all the people I screwed back in high school and college had caught on. Not even my family would take the bait anymore. When you’ve hit your mid-twenties without having done a damned thing to justify the space you’re taking up, the world of authority no longer feels the need to take you under its wing. Nor, it should be pointed out, will you have the resources to convince it that it should.