Show No Fear: A Bouncer's Diary (5 page)

Another incident involved three skinheads who decided to throw their weight around. Basically they began to have a go at some Asian fella and his wife, now this fella was as wide as he was tall and his wife’s language would have put Bernard Manning to shame, nice couple. The Asian fella starts to lose his temper, shouting and screaming at the skinheads and they are doing the same back to him and his wife is giving them a good volley of verbal as well, and I am in the middle. I manage to calm the Asian bloke down a bit and escort him and his wife to the front doors. The skinheads are trying to cause more trouble and start shouting some more abuse; we get the couple outside where the two other lads deal with them. Pete and I go in to find the three skinheads laughing at the thought that they had gotten the Asian fella thrown out. I go to what seemed to be the ringleader and ask him to put his drink down and leave. He laughs and tells me to fuck off. As soon as he says that my right hand is on his throat and my left hand grabs his right hand, which is still holding a pint glass. There was no point in trying to appeal to their good nature they had deliberately come here to cause trouble and no amount of good intentioned talking was going to make any difference.
Once you have made the decision to eject someone you have got to go in hard and be totally committed, a half-hearted effort will only give your adversary the opportunity to counter attack and then you will be on the receiving end. If you go in 50% committed you will probably get 100% battered. I start to push him backward towards the front doors, halfway there he struggles and digs his heels in and we come to a halt. A knee strike to his stomach gets him going backwards again, I manoeuvre him over to the doors and his mate tries to attack me with a broken beer glass. Pete grapples with him and then his other mate comes from the other side to attack me. I switch my grip from this fella’s throat to a headlock and at the same time I get his mate in the same hold so basically I now have both of them in headlocks. I manage to get them outside and throw them out onto the pavement. Pete gets the other one out and the ringleader is thrown to the ground, he sat on the floor and started to rant and rave about how he is going to come back and sort us out. What he actually said was that he would be coming back to-
“Stick a big fucking knife through your head.” Quote un quote, pointing at me whilst he said it.
Joyce has a discreet word with me later on and says well done for dealing with those guys. If at any time you wanted to take someone down into the cellar to give them a good hiding feel free to do so, to look at her you would think butter wouldn’t melt…I liked Joyce.
The Asian fella and his wife turn up at around closing time; they are both very drunk and very loud. And they start to have a heated argument just outside the entrance to the club; the fella grabs his wife by the lapel and raises his fist. It doesn’t look as if this is the first time that they have had this type of altercation, she then smashes a beer bottle on the railings and threatens him with it promising that if he doesn’t back off he will be sorry. Joyce was watching what was happening and says that she wants these two barred.

Two weeks on now…
Pete offers to go and get the drinks from next door, and leaves his position up on the little stage area next to the D J, which was incidentally the best place to scrutinize the crumpet from. I am now alone on the front door. Just as Pete disappears the Asian guy turns up with three of his pals. As he approaches the entrance I tell him that he’s barred and will have to drink somewhere else tonight. Which shouldn’t have been a problem as there must be at least 20 pubs in the area. Mind you he’s probably barred at most of them.
“Why am I fucking barred then”? He says in an aggressive tone.
I explain that it was because of the argument he had with his wife a couple of weeks ago.
“I’m going in to see if my Wife is in there”
You’re not going in and she’s not in there any way, I say to him.
“How do you fucking know that then”?
By now my patients are beginning to wear a little thin. Because she’s barred as well was my reply. With that he started to lose his temper and shaped up as if he wanted to have a go. His friends take hold of him by the arms in an effort to restrain him. A while back I had seen him involved in a brawl and from what I could see as we passed by in the car he gave a pretty good account of himself. Having had enough of his insults and threats by now I say to his companions to release him if he wants to have a go? I knew exactly which technique I was going to use against him. He wasn’t all that tall, probably about five nine. I was standing on the step so the moment he steps into the exclusion zone the first thing he’s going to get is a size eleven-toe punt right under the chin, basically a front kick to the face. Luckily his friends pull him away. At that moment the tea boy arrives.

New Year’s Eve, this year seems to have flown by, it never really bothered me working at this particular time of year, we always had a good laugh and there was very little serious trouble to deal with. Most people were just pleasantly pissed and happy and the atmosphere was generally good. Everyone was having a good time and the place was decked out with balloons and streamers; the music was so loud that you could actually see the windows vibrating. We get a shout from one of the barmaids that some fella has passed out on the dance area. I go in to find a big fat bloke lying there with his shirt off, he was covered in tattoos lying flat on his back right in the middle of the dance floor. He’s a really big lump and must be weighing in at twenty stone or more so I call for Pete to give me a hand. We manage to drag him part of the way, not an easy thing to do with the place absolutely heaving, he starts to come around and staggers to his feet, he then gets a little aggressive so I give him a good shove towards the door. He stumbles through the door backwards just as Joyce the manager is trying to enter. Joyce is met by his huge arse and is pinned to the wall outside; we come to her rescue and fatty wanders off into the middle of the road where he decides to have a kip. The drivers must have thought a new mini roundabout had been built. Joyce thought it was amusing and at the end of the night she bought us all a few drinks, just as we were leaving bearing in mind that this is about five hours later I notice a pair of feet sticking out from behind the fruit machines. It was the fat bloke; he was bedded down for the night God knows how he got back in. Joyce beats a hasty retreat behind the bar and fatty is thrown out for the second and last time hopefully.
Happy New Year!
A few months on now….
Just an ordinary Friday evening and Pete and I turn up as usual and assume our positions either side of the front doors; the head bar man comes over and asks if he can have a quiet word. I don’t like the looks of this I thought to myself; he goes on to say that he has some sad news… Joyce had died whilst she was on holiday.
She was young fit and healthy and full of life just a week ago, dead? We couldn’t believe it. The place was never quite the same again; it definitely went downhill after that.
The last time I saw her she was happy and singing along to a song with a couple of her friends, so that’s how I will remember her. A succession of manager’s come and go but then a permanent manager is given the licence. Her name was Jo she was a very attractive young thing, slim blonde and in her mid to late twenties, she was also an ex copper. Fuck me that’s all we need. She would often remind me that she still had her uniform and hand cuffs upstairs; she was a fruity little devil on the quiet. Actually her being ex old bill was an advantage for us; she would often have a word on our behalf, when the police turned up to the occasional altercation, she spoke up for me and the lads many times even when there was more than reasonable force being applied to our attackers. I liked Jo; she was very shrewd but quite shy and vulnerable really, a good hearted person as well. We had a few laughs with Jo and she would all ways sort us out with a couple of beers at the end of the night.
A number of different guys are sent down to work with us, some good some bad and
some ugly. Paul was one of the new recruits, he was mean looking with his close cropped hair and close shaven beard, he also had a cut running the entire width of his forehead, apparently caused by someone slashing him with a Stanley knife.
I remember one night a very well-known male dancer was walking past, I had seen him walk past quite a few times on his way to the train station which was nearby. I think he was performing at the theatre, which was just around the corner, he had a big bunch of flowers with him, Paul walks over to him and says-
“Have you bought those for me”?
He frightened the life out of him, he did a quick couple of side steps and was away, and I never saw him again, he must have taken the scenic route and by passed the club from then on. Paul had that effect on some people. He stayed with us for about six weeks and that was the quietest period I’d ever had at the club, maybe it had something to do with him.
We used to get a few old dossers mooching about, and every Friday night without fail the same one used to turn up and try to get in. He was a small old Scots guy; he wore a battered old straw trillby hat with tufts of red hair protruding from underneath the brim. He had elastic bands around his shoes to keep the soles on (he was literally on his uppers) and a filthy old jacket and trousers. As he came closer to me I could see the dirt and filth on his shirt, well it wasn’t like dirt it was probably more like topsoil. It was also a warm night and he was beginning to chuck up big time. He turns to me and says…
“I'm coming in who's going to stop me”? Hic! Burp! Fart!
I turned and pointed in the direction of Paul.
“He will” I said.
“HIM!…………… he should be in a fucking cage”
He marched up the high street mumbling and shaking his head and I never saw him again.
Paul was asked to take over the door at another venue.
We now have a new member of the team, a tall fair-haired good-looking young fella, with an eye for the ladies. He was called John; we had a slight problem though with John, he was smaller in stature than Pete and me and so when we had to ask someone to leave they almost always turned around and vented their anger against him. Which was a big mistake because he could handle himself quite well, coupled with his hot temper made him quite a handful. And so there was me Pete and John, it stayed that way for just over a year.
One of the good things about having John with us was that he had a motor, Pete and I were used to getting the night bus, that bus was murder, everyone was pissed, belching, farting and fighting…and the blokes were just as bad. The other problem you would sometimes encounter was that there was a good chance you would be sitting next to the arsehole you had clumped and thrown out earlier that night.

It was a nice cool spring Saturday evening Pete had gone next door to get our usual free coffee or tea from the burger bar. The manager used to sort us out with free drinks and towards the end of the evening she would often bring us out something to eat. I helped her out one night when she was having some trouble with a couple of young lads who decided to start to smash the place up. They did employ a security guard; he was a young Indian fella, some nights we spent as much time in the restaurant helping him as we did in the club. He was a nice guy and so we couldn’t just stand by and leave him in the shit. After that we were sorted. John was inside doing an internal patrol and I was on the main entrance. Pete has arrived back with two coffees and I had my usual cup of strong tea. Pete goes in to give John a shout. He leaves the drinks on the windowsill and goes inside to find him.
After about three or four minutes no sign of either of them, I look into the bar towards the dance floor area, the smoke machine was making it difficult to see clearly but I could just about see Pete moving around. I got the feeling things were not quite right. As I push my way through the crowd I hear the telltale signs of trouble, glasses and bottles being smashed accompanied by muffled shouts and high pitched screams.
At about twenty feet away Pete was being confronted by two young fellas both armed with bottles, he grabs one guy and dislodges the bottle from his hand and throws the fella to the floor. John is exchanging punches with some other fella, he stops fighting and delivers a perfectly timed roundhouse kick to the other guys face which knocks him out cold, luckily for Pete, the guy was about to bounce a bottle off the back of his skull. John then continues to swap punches with the other fella; just as I get there he draws back his right hand and sends it smashing into the guy’s jaw. Everything seems to be in slow motion, that familiar tingling sensation in the pit of your stomach starts to kick in followed by icy cold shots of adrenaline racing through your veins. A pint glass came flying out of the crowd heading in my direction; it just misses my face and smashes against the wall in front of me sending shards of glass into the air, which are being picked out by the strobe lighting. I didn’t see who threw it but sometimes when things kick off other people who are unconnected decide to join in just for fun. John’s right hand punch was now becoming a regular visitor to the guy’s face delivering stinging painful blows. This fella was getting a right pasting. He must have received at least half a dozen unanswered punches. I move in on him and put him into the old faithful strangle hold.
As soon as I lock it on he’s got no chance, his right hand is searching for a bottle to use against me, he picks up the bottle but with a quick squeeze on his carotid arteries the bottle falls to the floor…he is history.
Dragging him backwards through the crowd I manage to manoeuvre him over to the main entrance, John is right beside me and Pete is now back with us. I turn and face the door and push him outside into the street. Just as I release the hold on him John delivers a perfect right cross which connects on the guy’s jaw. The impact sends a thin stream of blood and snot exiting through his mouth and nostrils, which splatters on the wall next to me. Once we were outside I could see the damage that had been inflicted on him.
One side of his face had not been touched while the other side was a real mess and damaged past recognition. A very painful experience and he won’t be entering any beauty contests for while. I went into the gents to clean the blood from my jacket, when I had put the guy into the strangle hold a fair amount of claret from a bad cut over his eye had leaked out onto my sleeve. I make my way back through the crowd to the front doors to find two Police cars and an Ambulance on the scene; three of them are taken to the nearest casualty department. The one that Pete had thrown to the floor had landed heavily on his shoulder, one had a bad nosebleed courtesy of John’s boot and the other one that John was dealing with was definitely in need of medical attention. John was totally unscathed and there was not a mark on him so he disappears as the police arrive, and goes into the gents and decides to head but the wall with full force in order to obtain some form of battle scar. John is arrested shortly after and is taken to the nearest cell for the night.