The night it all kicked off and nearly – almost, did and then didn’t - went to shit. Part 3 - Aftermath
No one came forward with information on the men wielding the machetes – yes, two men, TWO machetes! But that wasn’t surprising, no police came to take statements from us either.
The staff at the fast food place across the road, those that had warned Pete about the ambush outside the door said the men had set themselves up as a macabre honour guard – similar to the kind you see at some weddings – one either side the door, machete upraised, waiting for someone to poke their head out. I dread to think what would have happened if Pete had gone out. I like to think they were there just to scare him, but I’m not certain.
After that night, things were tense. Security raised, everyone checked and searched for weapons as they came in, the works.
Paradoxically, because there were queues outside, more people wanted to come in, so the queue got longer, tempers became frayed and bouncers and customers alike seemed to take it out on the receptionist – me.
Customers arrived suffering from exposure to the weather – of course it was my fault that they were out on the piss with no coat or umbrella and more sensible people would be bundled up in oilcloth coats and sou’westers.
I was my usual cheerful self despite the belligerent attitude and snarky comments.
“It’s cold out there you know!”
“Is it? It’s only torrential rain out there, who would have thought you’d need a coat on.”
“You’re all right in there, I bet you’ve got a heater to keep you warm!”
“No, no heater, just my natural sunny disposition… and my coat of course.”
“We’ve been queueing outside for ages!”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realise. I’d have worked faster if I’d known.”
Same conversations, repeated in rote. I wonder if any of them detected the sarcasm in my voice?
Then you get the ones who have been into the bigger nightclubs in the city. They always know how everything works.
“Am I on the guest list?”
“The what-now?”
One particularly memorable evening a group came in spoiling for a fight. You’ve probably seen the type – just out of Uni where they signed up for every protest group imaginable. A small group of city-clubbers, consisting of no more than eight or ten. They had one of our promotional flyers in hand – Free entry for females – and oh boy! Did that fly in the face of equality!
I knew they were going to be trouble from the get-go.
“This isn’t very fair, is it? The guys have to pay to get in and we’re somehow special.”
“Problem?” I asked.
“Yeah, actually, I do have a problem,” the lead protest-instigator said as she approached my door. “Why is it that the guys have to pay?”
“That’s the promotion for this evening. It’s designed to bring more girls in so the boys will follow,” I explained. I’m a straight-talker usually, there wasn’t much more to say on the matter.
“Well I don’t think it’s very fair,” she said.
“You took the flyer, it’s self-explanatory. If you didn’t think it was fair, why are you here?”
“We want to come in,” she said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Right, so the guys pay their money and you go on up with them,” says I.
“No! Why do they have to pay and we don’t?”
“Tell you what, because this is so obviously upsetting you, I’ll let you all in for the same price.”
Her face brightened with the offer of such a deal.
“Half price each for all of you. Forget that silly flyer,” I said and took the flyer from her hand.
So for the same price as they would have all paid anyway, the group paid up cheerfully and moved on to harass the bouncer standing at the foot of the stairs.
The woman’s argumentative mood had changed up a gear as she approached him. Knowing a male bouncer couldn’t possibly search any of the females, she decided to put him in an awkward position.
She lifted her arms as though offering herself up for a search. “So who’s going to frisk me then?”
I leaned out of the door, through the hatch and in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone, I said, “That’ll be me. If you really want to waste your friends’ time by being searched, I’ll search all the girls and then he’ll search all the boys.”
“Oh,” she said in a deflated tone.
“Off you go,” I said.
And off they went.
As they came back out at the end of the night, she stopped by my door.
“Sorry for earlier,” she said. “I was in a bit of a mood.”
“I noticed,” I said with a smile. “You happier now?”
“Oh yeah! It’s been a great night, we really enjoyed it. We’re coming back next week!”
“Well don’t upset my doormen when you do,” I said. “Goodnight.”
She laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t upset them again.”
They did come back the next week and the group became regular customers. She never asked to be searched again though.
There were some, however, who always seemed cheerful and pleased to see me. A group of guys could brighten up the most tedious evening. Even a group of bubbly, excitable girls gave cause for smiles. Flirting outrageously with all the bouncers in turn and then giving me some banter worked wonders. Women have a way of uplifting each other if we’ve a mind to do so and once lifted, it’s difficult for anyone to bring it down again.
On occasion, however, a known drug dealer or user would come in and a hint of a nod from Dingo meant for me to lock up reception behind me as I came out to search the girlfriend’s belongings and person if necessary.
If you’ve seen how prison officers conduct a search on a prisoner, you’ll have an idea of how it goes – apart from the person being searched is not instructed to get naked of course.
A cursory pat-down on the head, any hat removed and searched by another member of the team, both hands carefully search around the back of the neck, inside the collar. The collar is manipulated to see if there’s anything stashed there. Stashes hidden there can include razor blades, used in case of such a search, the hidden blades cause damage and the dealer can make his get-away while the searcher is otherwise occupied trying to staunch bleeding fingers.
Armpits, bra straps, underwear are all hiding places, so the pat-down continues across the shoulders, down the spine and around, across the back. Waistbands delicately manipulated for the same reasons as the collar – hidden booby-traps.
Once the purse/handbag is looked in, if there is no sign of contraband, yet the feeling is that there should be something, a customer would be asked to take off her boots and/or roll up her trouser legs (out of sight of other customers of course).
Even then, we can still have doubts and admittance is not guaranteed. As agents of the management, a door supervisor is entitled to turn away anyone they like, for any reason.
Perhaps on this particular night, more dubious customers should have been turned away.
There was a tense, nervous feel to the night as it wore on and if I could have found an excuse to leave early, I would have.
People with serious agendas written all over their body language were coming in, in ones and twos – never in groups – and the tension mounted.
Usually the DJ could control the mood and start the wind-down towards the end of the night so that when he played the cheesy tracks when the lights were due to go up, everyone had already mentally made the move to get ready to leave.
The DJ hadn’t had time to get to that point. At around 01:30 it kicked off!
The shout went up over the radio that there was fighting at the main bar. Three of the four downstairs bouncers went off up the stairs and were all bundled back down. Someone had barricaded the stairs to divide the door team.
Eventually the lads got past the chairs and tables and the instigators were bundled down the fire-escape – with extreme prejudice. From the accounts I heard later, the fact that no one died is nothing short of a miracle.
A staircase in a home is around 13 steps – this fire escape staircase was 25 or 30 metal steps that would have hurt if a person fell or was pushed down them. At least half a dozen people ‘fell’ down those steps that night.
There was also a running battle for the stairs and my reception area was again under siege. I grabbed the broken brush handle and made preparations to defend myself and my territory.
The fighting spilled out onto the pavement outside and eventually the police were called.
One of our lads and a number of customers needed hospital treatment and the club closed early.
Crowds milled around outside and the staff were escorted to cars amid frightening scenes of threatening crowds looming in.
As we got to my sister’s car, (she was taking me home) a group of lads recognised me from reception and cut me off from the safety of the car. I looked at my sister and shook my head so she wouldn’t get out to help me.
I looked into the eyes of the guy standing at the front of the crowd. He’d set himself up as their leader by the looks of his position at their head and I addressed him and only him. I ignored the rest of the people and concentrated my attention.
He spoke first and though there was a lot of background noise, I heard his words clearly.
“I’m gonna take you round there,” he growled, nodding his head back towards an alley swathed in shadow. “An’ I’m gonna fuck ya. After I’m done with ya, these are gonna fuck ya.”
If you can imagine a surly, filthy, inbred-looking teenager with more gaps than teeth in his mouth, threatening gang-rape, you’ve got a similar image to my memory.
Later, probably sometime the next day I expect, when I thought about how things had gone and how things could have gone, my nerve went and my legs turned to jelly. But right there, right then, at that moment in time, my nerve held firm.
“If you’re going to do it, get it done. I’m going nowhere, big man, but if you think it’ll be easy, without a fight, you’ve got another think coming. Get it done then!” I didn’t say the words, I snarled them. Believe me or not, I don’t mind. That was how it went down and he stood there with his mouth open because I refused to be intimidated and I refused to beg him not to.
The next moment, a hand gripped my arm and I was pulled back towards my sister’s car, bundled in and the hand pressed the lock and closed the door.
Who had pulled me away?
You’ll never guess.
Paul.
We couldn’t drive off, there were too many people milling about. We sat and watched as the fight that had started upstairs in Harveys, a little more than a week ago exploded into a mass brawl.
Fists, feet, missiles of every description flew in every direction. We saw a dustbin sail over the width of the road and people punching and kicking each other. It was utter mayhem.
At the end of the fighting, when people had run or been dragged away or had had enough and were standing watching, there were two men in the middle of the road. One was Paul and the other was the lad he had pulled down the stairs from his barstool. The bouncers kept everyone back on one side and I assume it was the other guy’s friends that did the same on their side.
The ‘fight’ didn’t last long at all, Paul may not be a big man, but he was strong and had a depth of martial arts knowledge. It didn’t take long at all before Paul had the other guy in a head-lock, or ‘sleeper’ hold and he slumped forward, apparently lifeless. We watched and waited.
Paul seemed to hit the guy on the back of his head, punching him five, six, seven times. He pushed the guy away from him and he struggled to get up, but he still had some fight left in him. He went for Paul again. Paul twisted him around back into the ‘sleeper’ hold. Once more, he bashed him at the back of his head and pushed him to the ground. The guy again struggled to get up, and Paul went back to finish the job off but Dingo pulled him off.
Sirens could be heard in the distance and blue lights flashed across the bottom of the street at an emergency vehicle approached.
We took off for home.
I got the news the next day that we weren’t needed for work that evening – every window in the Horse and Jockey pub and a fair number of the upstairs were smashed. They had to be replaced before they could re-open.
A day or so later, I found out exactly what had happened, because the police called the staff of Harveys in for interviews.
Paul had put the guy in a sleeper hold and had used a keyring-weapon – a four or five-inch metal column used as a keyring to disguise its true purpose. Held in one fist, the blunt object had been ‘stabbed’ down hard on the guy’s head, and the pain of the attack had ‘woken’ him up – twice.
He had been taken to hospital and as he was waiting to be seen (busy Saturday night, a lot of other people waiting to be seen by the emergency staff), he had been assaulted again! Paul and Dingo had gone to the hospital to finish what he’d started, unfortunately, they were caught on camera.
That is why the police were interested in getting statements from the staff, they had to do something about the assault on hospital grounds. They weren’t really interested in bouncers and customers brawling in the streets, but when the violence adjourned to the hospital, they had to do something.
Paul was charged and he would be going to court, possibly prison.