LetsSeeSomeID
New York, NY
Male, 33
I was a bouncer at one of the biggest sh-thole bars on the Upper East Side of Manhattan from 2005-2007. Ask me anything.
I have no ID what the rules are on this. I do know that if you had a fake ID and you were a dick about it, I was taking it. The crazy thing is: A) Most kids on the Upper East Side are huge dicks when you don’t accept their fake IDs. They actually throw temper tantrums. B) As soon as you take their IDs the first thing they do is threaten to call a cop! Because you just took their FAKE ID! To this day I do not understand the logic there. Usually if someone came up with a fake I’d say something like, “Sorry kid” and it give it back to them and send them on their way. If that wasn’t working for them and they decided to get all up in my face, I would say “All right, let me see it again.” At which point they ALWAYS gave it back to me. And then I kept it. Then they would usually throw a full blown teenage temper tantrum, right there on the sidewalk, still believing they’re somehow going to get in. When they were finished I would say “Okay, for $80 I’ll give it back to you.” They’d freak out again. Then I would explain “Hey, I know you paid $100 for this down on MacDougal Street, so technically by selling you this back, I’m saving you $20.” Economics. I was doing them a favor.
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ALL THE TIME. One thing you become acutely aware of working in the bar industry is how many creepy, freak-bag weirdoes live in New York. Towards the end of my bouncing career I worked in one of the sleazier, shitbag bars in the city, so we had extra weirdoes. After a while you get to the point where you can spot them coming in. You know exactly who to watch and they ALL always do the same things: 1) Come on very strong. 2) Initiate physical contact very quickly. Usually something possessive, like grabbing the victim’s arm or putting their arm around the victim. 3) Ignoring any and all signs that the victim isn’t interested, including when the victim says “I don’t want to talk to you anymore” and turns and gives the creeper full back. 4) Around this time they start buying drinks or shots to get the victim completely inebriated – and here’s the crazy thing: the victim almost always accepts the drink! This makes things especially difficult because the creeper takes this as a sign that his charms are working. A creeper like this is one of the hardest to kick out because they don’t believe they’re doing anything wrong and they think you’re picking on them. The scary thing in my case was that the owner of the bar was the biggest creeper of all of them.
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Trying to “get in good” never worked with me. That meant you wanted something. A lot of people like to pull that “I’m friends with the bouncer ” crap, especially when they start drinking. Then they usually want you to throw someone out because they don't like them. I didn’t want anything to do with that. Ass kissing certainly never worked. Ass kissing’s weak. Best advice is, if you plan on frequenting a place, just frequent it and don’t be an asshole. “Getting in good” with a bouncer, or anyone for that matter, should be something you have to earn. If you’re there enough and you make yourself a friendly face and not part of the problems, they’ll come around. Unless you just outright suck. Then you’re on your own.
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Bouncers get fucked up all of the time. The doorman at the first bar I worked at got stabbed on his way home with an eight-inch kitchen knife. I had a guy come to the bar after he'd just gotten out of jail -- I had to throw him out and he said he was going to come back and shoot me. I had lots of people tell me they were going to wait for me to get off shift and jump me on my way home. There’s a saying amongst bouncers that “it’s not a good night until you're home in bed.”
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I pulled a few muscles dragging people out, especially when it was cold outside. Cut up my hands a few times, though nothing too serious. The key is that if someone is going to get hurt, it’s the other guy. p.s. You know why bouncers wear black? Because blood doesn't show up on it.
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No. I never 'roughed up' a customer. The job was never a tough guy head trip for me, it was just, well, a job. If you're out to rough up customers you're in the wrong line of work. Plenty of people threaten to sue you or the bar when you throw them out. People are always threatening to sue over the dumbest things is bars, usually when they've done something wrong and want to avoid taking responsibility for it. The best is when I wouldn't let an underage kid with a fake ID in and they would threaten to sue me. I guess it says something about our culture.
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Unfortunately, yes. I worked at bar in the East Village where a bouncer threw a guy out. That guy waited till the bar closed, followed the bouncer home and stabbed him in the back a few times with an 8” kitchen knife. Bouncing doesn’t come with a health care plan so something like that can be pretty devastating. The guy got away with it, by the way. In court he said the bouncer tried to attack him and he was defending himself. The guy was from Connecticut and had rich parents with good lawyers. I’ve personally had a lot of threats. Sometimes you would throw someone out, they would threaten you and then later in the night you’d see them across the street watching the bar. There was a guy who sat in front of the bar in his car once waiting for me to come out. If we had someone really creepy like that at the end of the night we would usually escort whoever was being threatened to a cab. You never want to walk home alone if you think someone’s after you. You also have to do this sometimes for the female bartenders and waitresses – they get some real stalkery characters waiting for them outside.
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