She was 17, dating some punk of the same age. The punk had a short rap sheet of petty crimes and criminal acts of idiocy. Typical adolescent bad boy attraction. Rebellion against an inattentive father. Her story: they argued. He punched her three times in the face and kicked her in the gut. She ran away and got in another guy’s car.

The other guy was a 21-year-old “friend.” A chump who always saved the damsel in distress, but never got rewarded for his efforts. A sap with a tear-stained shoulder and a box of never used, never will be used condoms. Captain Save-A-Ho.

Captain Save-A-Ho drove Jail Bait off into the horizon. On the other side of the horizon was my club. They came seeking sanctuary. Save-A-Ho was a regular. I’d never seen Jail Bait around. I inspected her face and her midsection, which was exposed thanks to a skimpy tube top. No bruises. No swelling. No footprint on her gut. Not a fucking scratch. I pulled Save-A-Ho to the side: “I can’t have this jail bait in my joint. Take her to her parents.”

Save-A-Ho tried to explain to me why it would be better to stash the broad in my club. I half listened, watched the broad text messaging non-stop. She took a phone call. Jail Bait covered her mouth while speaking, kept her voice low. I heard: “Is he with her right now?” followed by, “Fucking bastard.”

Moments later, Jail Bait got off the phone, then demurely asked Save-A-Ho, “Can you drive me to the police station?” She wanted to make a report of domestic battery. Put a case on the punk.

They thanked, waved, drove away. I chuckled.

Poor Save-A-Ho. The sap was blind, unable to connect the dots: Jail Bait and Punk were on the outs. Punk found himself a new broad. Jail Bait got jealous, confronted Punk. An argument ensued. Jail Bait stormed away. Later, upon hearing that Punk was with the new chick, Jail Bait decided that revenge would be a false police report.

Facts undigested by Save-A-Ho: the hole in his back window and the lack of injuries on Jail Bait indicated that Punk, while guilty of vandalism, was innocent of battery. Save-A-Ho was an unwitting accessory to Jail Bait’s connivance. He wasn’t a hero. He was a tool.

Tags: domestic violence · nightclub · relationships

Hip hop night. Closing time. Knuckleheads who couldn’t get into the club loitered across the street. Punks without a post-club coital date turned into parking lot pimps. Idiots drunk, high or a combination of both. Dumbfucks with guns.

I stood my post at the front door. Tense. Anticipating.

Yelling and cursing in the parking lot across the street. Posturing. Two idiots “motherfucking” each other. Three gunshots silenced one motherfucker. The crowd scattered like cockroaches. Cars spilled out of the parking lot, sped towards the freeway.

One Jeep Cherokee remained in the lot, passenger door wide open, crimson puddle underneath. Groaning from inside the car.

I approached the car. A fat black man in the passenger seat bled, arm hanging limp by his side. Blood trickled from his seat, slowly made its way to the growing blood pool on the ground. I asked: “Where’d you get hit?”

“Yo man, nigga shot me in the motherfucking ass!”

I bit my tongue, tried not to laugh.

Tags: blood · hip hop · nightclub · shooting

Jack’s rap sheet was a resume of stupidity: a few petty thefts, several residential burglaries, and the occasional trespass. Highlighting his stupidity was a conviction for punching a cop while being arrested for jerking off in public. Why little Jill married a bona fide shitbird was a mystery to most, but the reason was blatantly obvious to me–she wanted to be the one dame to tame a wild bad boy.

Three years and two babies seemed to mellow Jack. But family life didn’t tame his inner punk. Jack grew resentful of the two needy children and the damage they did to Jill’s figure. He unleashed his frustrations by slapping Jill around. A black eye, several contusions and a laceration later, Jill divorced Jack.

Soon enough, Jack went back to committing petty crimes. Participated in the weekly bar brawl. Lived the life of your typical, run-of-the-mill punk.

A year passed. Jack started making veiled threats, sent cryptic messages. Told Jill in a roundabout way that he was going to kidnap the kids and take them to a non-extradition country. One night, Jack circled Jill’s place in his car, drunk dialing from various pay phones.

Jill told me her tale at the bar. Not your typical Saturday night conversation, but not unexpected for a nightclub promoter. I was a shrink at times, listening to and advising my dysfunctional club kids. I sipped my scotch, listened to the broad, recalled what she looked like before she married Jack, back when she was one of my regulars. She asked me for advice. “You oughta get a retraining order,” I told her. “He sounds like a real creep.”

“You don’t know him,” Jill replied, defensively. “He’s a good father to the boys. He’s just going through some hard times right now.”

Jill didn’t want advice. She only wanted her delusion validated. As she walked out of the club, I knew that she’d be another item on Jack’s resume of stupidity. Only time would tell whether the line would read, “Domestic Battery,” “Kidnap” or “Murder.”

Tags: divorce · domestic violence · marriage · nightclub · relationships

Ten minutes until opening time. I took my post at the front door of the nightclub. The ropes weren’t even set up yet and the line stretched down to the end of the block. A guy was sitting on the sidewalk curb in front of me, blood leaking from his head. He looked Cambodian. Maybe Vietnamese.

Turned out Bloody Guy got into a shouting match with three black guys, or so I heard later on. They put the boots to him and rang his bell with a lead pipe, knocking him out. He woke up from his nap in a puddle of blood. One of our busboys, on his way in to punch the clock, saw the guy laid out on the pavement. He felt bad and went to the kitchen to fetch a towel. That’s about the time I showed up for work.

Bloody Guy stood up, holding the soiled towel over his wound, and made some calls from a nearby pay phone. He stared at me as he conversed. Blood trails covered his face like a crimson spider web. Foreign words and red spit popped out of his mouth at machine gun pace.

I might have been a meat-headed bouncer, but I had enough sense to know that there was rarely an innocent victim of a beating in or around a nightclub. If the fight wasn’t over some broad, it was usually over something equally stupid, like mutts scrapping over alpha dog status.

A pack of pint-sized mugs appeared from across the street. One of them yelled out to Bloody Guy. It sounded like a question. Bloody Guy yelled out a response. Vietnamese. Definitely Vietnamese. The volley of questions and answers continued as the pack crossed the street like rabid, angry dogs. Bloody Guy joined his pack. All the yelling, shouting and posturing culminated into something that sounded like a battle cry.

As the pack ran off to hunt for Bloody Guy’s assailants, there were giggles and laughter from the people outside of the club. To the crowd, Bloody Guy’s cavalry looked and sounded like a bunch of ankle-biting Chihuahuas posing as Pit bulls. There was nothing menacing about adolescent-sized men.

Minutes later, a series of gunshots rang out less than a block away from the club. A couple of us bouncers and the busboy ran down the street and turned a corner in time to see Bloody Guy’s pack spilling out of an alley, tails tucked between their legs. In addition to the leaking wound already on top of his head, Bloody Guy had a couple of fresh holes in his gut. He collapsed at the mouth of the alley.

Later, a couple of cops told me that the Vietnamese guys found the black guys sitting in a car, smoking weed, pre-funking. They surrounded the car, kicking and shouting, but didn’t figure out until it was too late that the driver had a .38 in the glove box. Two out of five hits. Not bad for a doped-up knucklehead.

Me and the busboy watched as cops put up yellow tape. We stood there for a few minutes, while Bloody Guy got loaded into an ambulance, then walked back to the club. “You think he’s gonna make it, bro?” he asked. Always with stupid questions, that busboy.

“Nope,” I replied. “They might as well start digging the grave.”

The busboy looked at me in disbelief. “What about some positive energy, dude? What happened to your compassion, bro? I think he’s gonna make it, man!”

Fucking moron, I thought to myself. So what if the fool ends up in the morgue with a tag on his toe? “Five bucks says the fool is dead,” I declared, extending my right hand.

“Ten,” the busboy replied. We shook hands, sealing the bet, before he went back inside of the club to do what busboys do on a busy Saturday night.

I returned to my post at the front door. Back to work. The crowd had grown even larger. Most were too oblivious to notice the yellow tape or the flashing red and blue lights. Those who did were too preoccupied with getting into the club to care.

Tags: blood · nightclub · shooting

Closing time. I sat at the bar, sipping my scotch, waiting for security to get all the drunks out of the club. My head was somewhere up in the stale cigarette smoke, which lingered near the ceiling like fog. She approached me from behind, stood at my side and playfully nudged my shoulder with hers. “Where have you been all night?” she asked.

“If I knew you were looking for me, I woulda made myself easier to find.” I nudged her back and smiled. I had no idea she was even in the club. It had been a busy night. She didn’t come in early, otherwise I would have spotted her, which meant she came late and had to wait in line to get in. All she had to do was drop my name to bypass the crowd, but she didn’t. You had to love a dame like that. “Have a seat. Cool your heels for a while. Pick your poison.”

She scanned the rows of bottles from one end of the bar to the other, then quickly decided on a gin and tonic. I went behind the bar and mixed the drink, then placed it in front of her before returning to my seat. We clinked our glasses.

It was about three months prior that she’d walked through my doors. She wasn’t your run of the mill club chick getting wasted on a Saturday night. Nightclubs weren’t her thing. Her girlfriends were on a bar hopping campaign and she was conscripted for their mission.

When I bumped into her at the bar that night, it felt like Cupid stuck me with everything he had in his arsenal. We talked to each other as if the crowd didn’t exist. The drunks stumbled past us and the typical Saturday night drama unfolded around us, but I was too engrossed in our conversation to care.

I introduced myself late in the conversation, and before she could do the same, I was whisked away by one of my bouncers to address an emergency near the kitchen. Meanwhile, she disappeared with her girlfriends. Probably off to another one of the dozens of other gin joints in the area.

As the weeks turned into months, I started losing any hope of her wandering through my doors again. And just when I stopped hoping, there she was. We exchanged the obligatory pleasantries, then made small talk for a while. When our conversation came to a pause, she hit me with the news: “I’m moving out to New York tomorrow.”

I’m sure the smile on my face couldn’t mask my disappointment. I could sense that she also wished things could be a little different. She grabbed a cocktail napkin from the bar and a pen from her purse. After carefully writing her name and number on the napkin, she put it in my hands.

I tried reading her name, unable to pronounce it at first. She looked into my eyes, told me her name and repeated it slowly. “Don’t worry,” I told her, smiling, holding her fingers in my hands. “I won’t forget your name.”

“This number will be good for a few weeks. I know I’ll be in a different time zone, but I won’t mind staying up for your call.” She smiled, kissed my cheek, stepped back and looked at me before slowing turning around and walking out the door. I watched as she rejoined her girlfriends outside. She looked back one last time, waved and disappeared.

After turning back around on my stool, I poured myself another drink. I thought about what might happen if I dialed her number. The worst case scenario was love, which was something I couldn’t afford to fall into. Especially with a girl in a different time zone.

Maybe it was a good thing that she was moving away–it helped me to see things in Technicolor. I had business to run. A crew depending on me for work. What was I going to do? Fly back and forth across the country and play the sap for some dame I barely even knew?

I looked up at the ceiling. The fog-like mist of stale cigarette smoke was gone, and my feet were once again firmly planted to the floor. After lighting up a cigarette with a match, I watched the flickering flame for a moment before setting the cocktail napkin on fire.

Tags: love · nightclub