Something I Wrote Somewhere Else

I pretty much spent all my free time this week writing this for my good friends Dave Tate, Jim Wendler and Joe DeFranco at Elite Fitness Systems -- the single greatest training and fitness resource in the world.

I'm not getting paid to constantly plug this website. I once had an issue with a $20 equipment order, and Dave treated me like the most important customer he'd ever had. That, my friends, is how you gain a customer for life. If ever you need anything fitness related, use them. Trust me on this one.

Have a nice weekend, everyone. Back to regular posting next week.

Update

Been busy putting finishing touches on the book, so I haven't had time to post anything.

In summary, bouncing is easy and Guidos still suck. And please stop sending me "Gino the Ginny" videos. I've seen them all several hundred times, and they get less funny the more you watch them.

Thank you for your patience.

Update Two

I had to take care of some shit this week, so I haven't had much time to post anything here. I did, however, manage to take in a movie, and I have a question:

When they were filming 300 - also known as The Juicehead Army - did it not occur to anyone that they were blatantly ripping off Gladiator with the wheat field scenes near the end?

I wasn't the biggest Gladiator fan in the world, but when Maximus rubs dirt from the battlefield on his hands in that movie, it trumps anything 300 has to offer.

Back next week. Thanks for your patience.

Update

Had some personal shit to take care of the past few days. Posting will resume shortly.

I spent St. Patrick's Day sober, working and in the presence of a few thousand Guidos. That should tell you what sort of mood I was in on Saturday night. I won't dignify the experience with a blog entry.

Thank you.

Reason

There’s a Catch-22 deal involved with bouncing, and I think it holds true for everyone who’s ever stood on a box or worked a door. On the one hand, a bouncer initially looks for work because he’s not making enough money working just one job. Something went wrong for him somewhere along the line. He didn’t get enough education, or he knocked up his girlfriend or incurred a debt, and now he has to supplement his income with hired thuggery. Fuck me sideways, but I know some of those feelings all too well – sans sonogram, of course. At least that I’m aware of, in any case.

So when you bounce, you’re working with people whose lives haven’t always gone exactly as planned. Mine sure as hell hasn’t. I’ve made more than my share of shitbag decisions over the years, all of which, when coupled with a particularly rueful glance at my bank statement back in 2003, eventually led me to look for work at “the club.”

Here’s the thing, though, and it’s where the Catch-22 comes into play: if it wasn’t for bouncing, I honestly don’t think I’d have written anything, ever. I wouldn’t have started a blog. I wouldn’t have written a book. I wouldn’t have done shit.

This has nothing to do with the subject matter, either. Yes, bouncing gave me something to write about, and yes, it’s something about which people seem to enjoy reading. That’s great. You wouldn’t believe how fucking happy I am that things have worked out like this. Subject matter isn’t what I’m getting at here, though. I’m talking about sharing an experience with a group of people whose aims are nearly identical to your own.

Believe it or not, “the club” is the most positive environment in which I’ve ever worked. This is because I’m surrounded by competitive people who are trying their best to get ahead in a place – New York, if you haven’t been paying attention - where getting ahead is the only thing that counts. You don’t take a second job doing the sort of shit we do unless you have some degree of belief in yourself and your future. If you don’t have hope that you can take control of your situation and make things better, you don’t put yourself through this nonsense.

Set aside all the bullshit you believe about bouncers for a while, okay? Since starting this blog three years ago, I’ve heard every theory under the sun, and they’re all a crock of shit. We become bouncers because we’re bullies. Because we’re criminals. We like to intimidate people. We think it’s a job that can get us laid. We like to beat up the helpless and the weak.

I don’t know about you, but I look for jobs based on how much money I can make. I’ve never enjoyed the financial freedom to take a job solely because it satisfies my innermost emotional needs. Mostly, I’m trying to pay my bills. I wasn’t sitting around living a life of leisure when I decided to make calls looking for work. I was sitting at my kitchen table, going over my bills, and coming to the realization that I wasn’t making enough money. And just so you know, I’ve gotten laid exponentially more as a “writer” than I ever have as a bouncer. Thanks for asking.

Taking this job was a proactive step. Instead of continuing to tread water three years ago, I decided that working more – and therefore getting paid more – would help make things a little easier. Instead of constantly pissing and moaning about my situation, I added twenty-plus hours onto my workweek and brought my finances back to square – and above, eventually – the “old school” way. This is not the strategy of a bully, a criminal or a sexual predator. It’s the strategy of a guy who believed in himself and his ability to better himself and create possibilities for the future by dint of a little bit of work and a lot of lost sleep.

I work with almost thirty such people on a nightly basis down at the club. We’re all in the same boat. We’re not there to engage in authoritarian fantasies using you as our unwitting victims. Most of us, anyway. We’re there because we have some fucking hope for something better. If you’re one of our customers, you’ll likely appreciate irony in all of this: that “something better” means hoping for something a hell of a lot better than having to deal with the likes of you.

Mouth

“Who’s the kid’s father?” I asked with a big, fat fucking smirk on my face, ready for some bullshit.

“Some kinda big deal out in Suffolk,” said Ray.

“That enough to keep them from collarin’ his ass?”

“I dunno. Prob’ly. All them Suffolk guys are ex-NYPD, anyways. They come down, they drop a couple of names, and somebody makes the shit disappear.”

I took two steps up the sidewalk and spit in the gutter. “And then the little fuck gets to go home and sleep in his own house, when he should be cuffed to a fuckin’ bench thinkin’ about what a piece of shit he is.”

“I’m sure his pops is gonna tell him all about it on the ride home, especially after the fuckin’ scene he just made.”

“Maybe not.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Because I think the problem is exactly the opposite. I think the kid acts like such a cocksucker because his old man never told him not to be like that. You only get to thinking you can curse somebody up and down in public if they’ve let you do it in private. I hate these fuckin’ cops’ kids, man, comin’ in here and droppin’ names like nothin’s gonna happen to them no matter what the fuck they do.”

“You’re a cop’s kid.”

“Yeah,” I said, sneering. “I’m just like these Long Island shitbags. Are you fucking kidding me, Ray? You think I’d have ever had the balls to drop my dad’s name outside a fucking nightclub? He would’ve come down and got me, maybe, but that man would’ve shot me fifteen minutes later.”

“Really?”

“Oh, fuck yeah. Wake him up in the middle of the night ‘cause I’m drunk and just got myself jammed up with the fuckin’ cops? Are you shittin’ me? You got one chance with that motherfucker, and I think I used mine up when I was about three years old, man.”

Ray considered this for a minute. “Lemme ask you somethin’, then. How old were you when you first thought you could talk back to your father?”

“What do you mean by talkin’ back?”

“I’m talkin’ about when you thought you were big enough or tough enough to tell him to go fuck himself if he said something you didn’t like.”

“I never got the chance,” I said, “‘cause I really never thought I was at that level while he was alive.”

“How old were you when he kicked off?”

“Twenty or so.”

“What about now?” he asked. “You think you could get in his face now as an adult?”

“I dunno, man. The guy was seriously out of his fucking mind. Like, sick out of his fucking mind. I mean, physically I know I’d fuck him up at this point, but I don’t have his head for that kind of shit. If I’d have beat him up, I would’ve had to move pretty far away to avoid gettin’ a bullet in my head.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was two different people. At home, he seemed like an angry old man even when I was a little kid. I only saw it a couple of times, but when he wasn’t around his family, he was a different guy and it was kinda fucked up, like when you see old guys actin’ like sick fucks and hittin’ guys with bats in mob movies, you know what I mean? It was like he got old but he never stopped doin’ the shit he did when he was in his twenties.”

“What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“You ever talk back to her growin’ up?” he asked.

“Not really. Sometimes, but nothing serious. Whenever I got in an argument with my mother, it was about something stupid like bringin’ mud in the house or something, and if I had anything to say, I usually got smacked anyways.”

“Yeah, same with me.”

I waited for a group of customers to leave before I went on. “Now that I’m older, I don’t say shit to my mom. Not a word. I’ll roll my eyes if she starts goin’ off on me about something, which is rare these days, but I keep my mouth shut around her out of respect, you know?”

“That’s the best way to be. I’m like that with both my parents now.”

“What’s the point of getting into anything with them as an adult? The hard part’s fuckin’ over for them as far as we’re concerned. Now everybody’s just gotta worry about gettin’ old.”

“I never trust a guy that yells at his mother, anyway,” he said.

“Why’s that?”

“Think about it. You really gonna trust somebody who talks bad to his mother? If a guy can turn on his mother, what the fuck you think he’s gonna do to you?”

Caring

I’m okay with the gays, if you’ve ever wondered. I know I addressed this to some extent when I wrote about the whole John Amaechi affair, but that was more in terms of channeling my familiarity with alpha-male-dominated environments in a half-assed attempt to offer the reality-based treatment I thought the situation deserved after the NBA’s Tim Hardaway nerve was so “shockingly” exposed.

Really, though, homosexuality is fine. It’s fine because I’m completely unfamiliar with it. To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know any gay people. I mean, I can name two that might recognize me walking down the street, but I haven’t seen either in years. Other than them – and my gay cousin who died back in the eighties – I couldn’t tell you the name of a single homosexual, male or female, that I know personally. Of course, there could be someone I don’t know about, but that’s the point here. I don’t know, so I can’t say.

I’m sure there are a handful where I work, but nobody’s “out” – at least not that I’m aware of - and I couldn’t give two shits anyway.

That said, I’m not about to dispute the “ten percent” theory, I have no idea whether homosexuality is biologically determined, and I doubt I’ll be hosting a gay wedding in my backyard anytime soon. It’s not my problem, quite frankly. If one of my friends told me he was gay, I wouldn’t care. This isn’t because I’m particularly tolerant or enlightened, mind you. In reality, it’s because I honestly don’t give a flying crap what my friends do with their spare time. Unless someone owes me a large sum of money and is refusing to pay, I’m not big on the whole hatred thing when it comes to people for whom I’ve developed some modicum of respect.

Homophobia, it’s not. I’m too busy working for a living to worry about this shit. Homolassitude is more my speed. It’s simply not a part of my sphere. Still, I was taken somewhat aback by the conversation that ensued following a “favor” I did – unpaid, I might add – for a pair of customers I found wandering around in an area of the club where they weren’t supposed to be. They’d slipped through the door leading to an off-limits hallway – attempting to blend with a group of VIPs of which they weren’t a part – and were making their way to one of the club’s employee bathrooms.

“Hey,” I called. “You guys aren’t supposed to be in here.”

The girl, petite and sandy-haired, turned around in apparent surprise at having been discovered. The guy, a thin Hispanic wearing a black blazer and sunglasses, slowed somewhat but kept moving toward the bathroom. I walked down the hallway after them, waving to the ceiling cameras to show whomever was watching – someone’s always watching - that I intended to take care of the problem.

“This isn’t part of the club,” I said, addressing them both. “You gotta go back up front.”

“The guy up front said we could come back here and use the bathroom,” said the girl.

“Which guy?”

“The bouncer outside the door.”

“I’m the bouncer outside that door,” I said, “and I didn’t send anyone back here. And when we send people back here, two things happen. First, they pay, because this is our bathroom, not yours. And second, if a bouncer tells you it’s okay to come back here, he has to come with you.”

“Can we just go use it really quick, then?”

I glanced at the man, who was pacing in tight circles with his hands in his pockets. “I’ll let you use it on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“I need you to just admit that you’re full of shit and that you snuck through the door, and that you blatantly lied to me.”

“Lied about what?” she asked, extending her arm and pointing to her male friend. “He’s gay.”

“So? What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t lie in front of gay guys? Gay guys don’t lie? What?”

“Honey, he’s gay. We’re not coming back here to have sex.”

I smiled. When I did, she smiled back. “I didn’t think you were,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t know what the hell you were just talking about.”

“It’s okay,” she said, rubbing my forearm up and down in consolation.

“Still doesn’t change the fact that you tried to sneak past me.”

“So what do you need?”

“You know what?” I asked. “All I really want is a thank you. That’s all. Just some kind of acknowledgement that I’m not a piece of furniture.”

With that, she put her hands on my shoulders and jumped, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, then proceeded to engage in a rather vigorous round of dry-humping with my belt buckle. She then kissed me on the cheek and slid back down. “Thanks, baby.”

The man took a step toward me, but I motioned for him to stop. He stood with his hands on his hips.

“You,” I said, grinning, “don’t get a turn.”

My Friends

These people are my "friends" on MySpace. I turn down a lot of people on MySpace. This is counterproductive, but I do it anyway because I am a self-sabotaging jackass most of the time, as evidenced by my performance in most, if not all, relationships with women. In any case, these people somehow became my "friends."

I'm taking a blog entry to list these people because this site is in the business of entertaining you. I'm also doing this because these people are guilty of something I can't understand, no matter how hard I've tried: They incessantly send "bulletins," throughout the day and night, in what seems like fifteen minute intervals. I don't know what the purpose of these bulletins is, because I don't read them. Actually, that's bullshit. I read some of them. I'm admitting I read some of them because the things this guy sends out are occasionally very funny. He sends me pictures like this and this.

This guy claims to be an "author," but hasn't sent out a grammatically coherent bulletin since I added him. Once, after a night of drinking, I came home to find four straight bulletins from him, each more disjointed than the last. I wrote and told him that beating him up would make me feel good. He never wrote back. Make sure you check out the video on his page. I could devote an entire post to him. Here is an example of his work, from a bulletin he sent out at least a half-dozen times last night:

"Actors and actresses who don’t follow instruction have lost chances to be cast in ‘SECRETS KEPT’ the movie… Send faceshot & resume to this address to be consider for ‘SECRETS KEPT’ the movie. If I think you are right for the part, I’ll fight for you. NO PROMISES BUT I’M THE CREATOR OF THE STORY…. Too cheap to waste postage then you are too cheap to be in the movie…"

This girl's pictures are rather disturbing, as are her frequent life updates. I don't mind having people like her as "friends." I just with they'd stop sending me so many bulletins.

There are many more, but I haven't time for this right now.

My Summer Plans

Sometimes life doesn’t move in a straight line. We set out to follow some segment of something from Point A to Point B, but our finger can’t trace it cleanly across the page because there’s a disconnect. A break in the line. When your eye traverses the distance to Point B, you’ll see that part of the segment – the other side of the break – leads right where you originally thought it’d lead, but you can’t, for the life of you, figure out how it ended up there.

You can’t figure this out because what happened, after the line went off course, is too confusing. Someone came along and tried to tidy the thing, but the pencil they’d used had an eraser worn down to the metal ferrule – chewed into a pair of sharp points – and what should’ve been revelatory whitespace is now merely a hole through which you can see the mahogany veneer of your desk and nothing more.

I’m referring, here, to the inexplicable progression of the New York Guido – where Point A finds him bench pressing, injecting Winstrol, fighting, groping, cursing and driving his Escalade (provided he’s deriving his income from something illegal), yet Point B finds him doing this:

What, my friends, happens after the break in the line? Therein lies the key to my heart.

Midstream

The problem with most people who work in nightclubs is, they don’t want anyone to make any money. Anyone but them, that is. Your typical non-bouncer nightclub employee thinks every dime that hasn’t already been “routed” – spent on cover charges, or on the actual cost of a bottle or a single drink – should somehow find its way into his or her pocket by the end of the night. If this money – these gratuities, bribes and shakedowns – doesn’t end up where it’s “supposed” to be, something unconscionable has happened, and that something needs to be rectified right away.

By rectified, of course, I mean “ratted on.” In nightclub logic, these jerkoffs look at the moneymaking process like this: If you’re making as much money as I am, you’re stealing it from me. This wording probably doesn’t make any sense to you. I know it sure as hell doesn’t make any sense to me. The reason it doesn’t make sense is that it’s an utterly insane notion, motivated by a level of greed that you wouldn’t fucking believe unless you’ve actually worked in a New York nightclub and seen the process in action for yourself.

See, certain things happen when the wrong people start making money. The right people get jealous. If there’s a thousand dollars in the cash pool, these cocksuckers aren’t satisfied unless they’re walking out the door with the entire grand, and you end up working for free. When you come out holding some portion of the cut, however miniscule, there’s something amiss. The planets have slipped out of alignment, and somebody has to pay – preferably, if he’s a bouncer, with his job. The way these greedy motherfuckers accomplish this is by ratting on their coworkers. They do this by accusing us of “stealing.”

This sort of ratting will occur even if there’s no theft involved. In club parlance, even the legitimate making of money can be construed as stealing – and labeled as such in “the meetings upstairs” – if the wrong employee (usually a bartender) believes a bouncer (usually one the bartender doesn’t know) is taking home anything over and above his base shift pay.

This is unfortunate, because these same bartenders rarely think twice about summoning a bouncer to corral a customer who’s trying to skip out on a tab, or to toss a customer who’s threatening them because they’ve made a shitty drink. This is how it works. When someone tries to bail on a thousand dollar tab – with a twenty percent gratuity tacked on, naturally – and I make them come back and pay, do you think I’m ever shown any gratitude?

“You complaining little pussy,” you’re saying. “That’s what your paycheck is for. Your employer doesn’t have to explicitly thank you, because he’s doing that when he pays you, so shut the fuck up, go to the bank, and be thankful you even have a job, you no-talent piece of…”

Fine. I understand that. In fact, nobody understands the realities of the nightclub business any better than I do, because I’m on the “limited” end of things - being, as I am, a charter member of the decidedly unbeautifuls.

Still, the unmitigated greed on display here in New York can be stunning at times. Like on Friday night, when a bartender tried to have a bouncer fired for shaking down one of the bartender’s friends outside the club’s VIP entrance. What happens at the VIP ropes, if you’re not on the list and you want to get in, is you have to pay. Nothing new there. If you’re a friend of an “important” bartender, however, you can go tell your bartender pal that the VIP bouncer tried to charge you. Your bartender friend will then make sure you get into the VIP room without having to pay. The VIP bouncer, who was me for about six months in 2005, will simply say, “No problem,” and he’ll move the ropes. It’s all a simple misunderstanding, albeit one that could’ve been avoided had your bartender friend been responsible enough to put you on the VIP list before you tried to get in without paying.

Problem is, this isn’t where it stops. It has now come to the attention of a bartender that a member of the bouncing staff is making extra cash. The way bartenders think, this cash doesn’t belong to this bouncer. He hasn’t any right to it, because cash belongs in a tip cup and not in a bouncer’s pocket. This sets off a series of events that can only end badly for the bouncer in question.

What happens next is, the bartender can’t leave well enough alone. He can’t simply go back to his important work of pouring drinks for Guidos and let the bouncing staff do its job. No. That fifty dollars that this bouncer tried to extort is gnawing away at his consciousness to the point of distracting him from the essential societal function of pouring drinks for Guidos, and that can’t ever be allowed to happen to pretty guys with bad haircuts.

So, he rats the bouncer out. The first chance he gets, our bartender friend finds a manager – preferably one who’s known for being protective of the club’s cash flow – and tells him that the VIP bouncer is “stealing.” Forget the fact that no money actually changed hands during the original incident. That’s not important. What’s important is that this bouncer may have been doing this (making money) all night, and could potentially continue doing it (making money) in the future if he is not immediately terminated. Disregard, as well, the notion that the customers who were asked for money would likely continue to hemorrhage cash in the VIP rooms regardless, meaning the club itself wouldn’t be losing a fucking cent. That’s not important either.

What is important here is that someone other than a bartender was caught trying to get his hands on some of the customers’ money, and bouncer aggression of that sort will not stand.

My reaction? Another dick makes my list. Good luck finding a bouncer the next time you have a problem, my friend. Something tells me we’ll be a tad scarce.