by Bill Carson
Sean’s shirt disappeared in a flash: suddenly he found himself half-naked and at the mercy of a sex-starved Sumo in knickers. He was quickly put into a half nelson and placed face down over a table where she now went to work on him. Her strong, chubby digits were prodding, poking and rubbing him all over. She looked over at me while still working on poor old Sean.
“You’re next, big boy,” she said to me.
I decided that a tactical withdrawal might be a good idea. I was out that door like a fucking rocket.
Sean decided to part company with us. He decided to set up his own customer relations business (that’s a joke, by the way). It was something to do with wheel clamping I think and the best of luck to him.
I missed working with him. He’d backed us up without fail every time when things kicked off. He was one of the most fearless guys I know. Like me, he had the mind-set that to go down fighting was preferable to any other option. He was a little crazy sometimes, but also immensely likeable and would always be there right beside you and would get right into the thick of things. He’d be trading blows without much of an invitation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A DESCENT INTO VIOLENCE
May 1995
Our new recruit was a big lad and about twenty years old – a bit too young for this game really, but we would try and look after him. Mind you, he didn’t look as if he needed looking after as he was built like a brick shit house. He had a shaven head with tattoos all over the place, but you can’t judge by appearances, now can you?
After a few months we were all getting on quite well. Simon was a really likeable guy and was always laughing and joking around. However, he did have a bit of a flaw to his character: he had a really violent temper, which I think might get him into serious trouble one day. I tried to show him the finer points of door etiquette – the diplomatic ways in which you could escort a difficult punter off the premises without resorting to fisticuffs. His way was to engage the transgressor in a very short verbal exchange combined with a head butt between the eyes.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
The office rang me and asked if Pete and I would look after a club down in Greenford. The boss said that one of the supervisors would run us down there. Halfway through the journey, Steve, the supervisor, said he was glad he hadn’t been asked to look after the place as he thought it was a bit dodgy.
“Why? Where are you going, then?” I asked.
“I’m going to look after a pub in the East End later on tonight,” he said.
Apparently that pub was a popular underworld haunt. He didn’t fancy a night in Greenford, but had no problem working in the East End for some well-known gangsters. He clearly knew something we didn’t. I asked him what the SP in Greenford was. Steve told us that the doormen who used to work there were not best pleased in losing their venue and that there was talk of reprisals against anyone who took over the door. Guess what, this was the first night of us new doormen working there.
Fuck ‘em, if they try anything they’ll come unstuck, I thought
We eventually arrived at the place and Steve didn’t hang around, waving to us as he shot out of the car park with wheels spinning and disappearing in a cloud of dust.
It was a big venue with a largely Irish clientele. Two huge front doors led into a porch area, which was where we positioned ourselves for the evening. We had a CCTV monitor just inside the door: it had a quartered split screen, giving us an all-round view of the place. Inside was a long straight bar with six or seven very busy staff rushing about behind it. There was a large stage to the rear, and in front of that about a hundred chairs had been set out.
As the live band was setting up, the manager came out to give us the once-over. I asked him what the previous door staff were like. He said that they were three very arrogant young Asian lads. One in particular would occasionally demonstrate his dexterity with a butterfly knife, spinning it around in his hand in full view of the punters. Amateurs, thought I.
One of the barmen was asked by the manager to stay with us and point out any undesirables. He also had to stay there and collect the entrance fee.
The place was starting to fill quite rapidly. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits and all were acting perfectly normally. As the band started to play their first number, some fella got up onto the stage and started crawling about. We went in, and to the cheers of the crowd picked the guy up by his arms and deposited him back into his seat.
It was all very light-hearted and the band started to play on, but two minutes later he was up again, this time trying to give his own rendition of ‘My Way’. He’s got to go this time, I thought, as we dragged him off the stage. There was loud applause as we dumped him outside on the pavement.
He got up off his arse and started to argue a bit and then the manager came over to intervene. He told the guy he could come back in if he agreed to behave himself. I suggested that he let us deal with him; clearly he’d had way too much to drink and was only going to get worse. But the manager said he’d give him one last chance to behave and so he went back in and almost immediately was up on the stage giving an Elvis impression. It was quite amusing, but he was going out for good this time. We dragged him off the stage and threw him outside. I stayed inside the door with the barman and Pete was on the outside, keeping an eye on him as he walked up the road.
“What’s that bloke doing now, mate?” I asked.
“He’s getting into a rubbish skip.”
“You what?”
A few minutes later:
“What’s he doing now?” I said
“He’s getting out of the skip and he’s got a big lump of wood,” Pete said
“What’s he doing now?”
“He’s swinging it around his head and he’s coming back towards the pub!”
I didn’t see the barman leg it – I just felt the wind as he went past disappearing into the back of the beer garden, some fifty yards away.
As the guy got closer to the venue I went out to face him while Pete moved off to one side. He looked at me and then at Pete – we were now on either side of him. We got a closer look at the lump of wood he had taken out of the skip: it was a four foot piece of three by two with two or three large crooked nails sticking out of one end.
Nasty little bastard, I thought.
He had it in a two-handed baseball bat grip. But before he had time to think about who he was going to whack first, I moved forward, which distracted him for a second. Pete then quickly nipped in from the side and snatched the weapon out of his hands. The longer the delay in this type of scenario, the worse it becomes. The aggressor will begin to gain in confidence, so always move in hard and fast. Ordinarily, in this type of dangerous confrontation, once we’d disarmed him we would have given him a right pasting, but he was a pretty pathetic character so all he got was a hard slap across the chops and boot up the arse from Pete.
We also let him know that if he came anywhere near the place again tonight that he would most definitely be feeling the worse for wear in the morning. I looked at my watch: we had only been at the place an hour.
There were no more incidents that night. It turned out to be one of the best nights that we’d ever done. The bar staff supplied a steady supply of soft drinks (we never had more than two halves of lager each whilst we were working on the door). After yes, during no: that was part of our unwritten code. The band dedicated their last number to the two lads on the door. It was called Black Velvet; the very attractive lead singer did an excellent rendition. She was looking at me all through the song – well, that’s what I told Pete anyway. We were paid some very fine compliments that night by staff and punters who thought we had done a very professional job.
All that stuff about the previous doormen coming back to sort us out? Well, that was the usual load of old bollocks.
The next venue we were going to look after was a large place in Ealing, which was a large very busy bar by the green. There were four or sometimes fi
ve of us on that door. We’d worked there before a couple of times so we knew the routine.
Pete and I worked inside and let the regular team sort out the front. They knew all the faces that weren’t welcome. There wouldn’t have been much point us being on the front doors as we might have let in punters who’d been barred.
There was one large staircase where one of us would stand and the other one would be positioned above at some distance, away on a high balcony which overlooked the whole of the ground floor area. Communication was the problem in this place as the deafening music put the block on using radios so we acquired a small flashlight each and worked out a couple of signals. Two flashes stood for assistance needed: keeping it simple was the name of the game.
I was standing on the large staircase, my feet being at head height of the customers sitting below me. I suddenly felt a hand slowly creeping up the inside of my trouser leg. I was a bit worried about looking down. I just hope that’s a woman’s hand, I thought, as there are some very funny people about, you know. I looked down and was relieved to see a very pretty young woman attached to the other end. She was a regular from the other club having a bit of laugh with her mates.
We only had one idiot to deal with. This guy decided that he didn’t want to leave at closing time and that he was going to finish the two pints he had left. And there was no way he was leaving before he had done so. We left him to it, hoping that he’d get the message as the place emptied. We had the place cleared, apart from the arsehole who by now was just starting on his second pint. He’d totally disregarded the polite manner in which we’d asked him to leave. I’ve had enough of this – we’ll be here all night with this bloke, I thought as I approached him once more. I asked him one last time to put his drink down and leave the premises.
“Fuck off, I’m finishing my drink.”
An attitude adjustment was immediately required and this is my way of achieving it. As soon as someone responds like that, as far as I’m concerned he leaves me with very little choice: a left handed slap down and grab onto his right wrist with an immediate right-handed grip onto the throat. Now I have control. You have to do it really quick and with power, otherwise you’ll lose the initial momentum. This guy was a big lad, about six two and roughly fifteen stone, but once you have the momentum going, it’s not too difficult to get them were you want them to go. Pushing him backward towards the exit with Pete going in front to open the doors, we managed, with a bit of a struggle, to throw him outside. We passed the manager who was looking a little concerned at what was happening.
“That was a bit rough,” the young podgy manager said as I came back in.
“I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to pour a pint beer, now would I?” I said.
It wasn’t rough at all, although to the untrained eye it may have seemed so. It was actually a very controlled exhibition of a perfectly executed ejection technique.
Look, at the end of the day, the guy was drunk and was just starting to get a little aggressive. Who knows, that last pint he wanted to finish may have been enough to tip him over the edge and become violent. You can’t have the punter dictating to you: aren’t we supposed to be giving zee orders around here? I dealt with him before it got nasty and he was thrown out suffering an injury only to his pride. My guess is that the manager was probably fairly new to this game and had rarely seen a punter being treated in this manner.
As we were leaving, the guy who’d been thrown out was waiting outside with his mate and engaged us with a few choice words as we went by. I’d heard it all before and decided to ignore it. They were just a pair of pissed-up pricks looking for trouble – young men who got their courage from the bottom of a beer glass.
As we walked, Pete noticed that they had begun to follow us.
“Ok, Pete we’ll go this way across the green and head into the dark. If they want to have a go, we’ll choose when and where,” I said.
We took a slight detour and led them unsuspectingly into the middle of the green. They continued to follow and were still shouting abuse. They were getting braver and braver as they got closer. We slowed our pace down a little and then came to a sudden halt in a nice dark area. They were now close behind us and walked straight into the trap – and into the shit.
We allowed them to get a little closer and then turned and confronted our pursuers. They were surprised to see us turn around and face them, turning the tables as it were. The hunters now becoming the hunted. The fear had visibly gripped them.
I gave the guy who had all the mouth a hard shove into the chest. Pete challenged the other guy, who ran away, leaving his mate alone.
The shove in the chest was intended to do two things: the first was to get him to launch his attack there by suckering him into a powerful back kick to the stomach, which he definitely deserved after the amount of abuse and threats he was dishing out. The push away also gave me the right distance to execute the technique which I had practised a thousand times in the little gym; it’s an extremely effective strike and a definite finisher when done correctly. Fortunately for him, I didn’t have to use it. His bottle went completely and he backed off and decided to run, shouting as he went that if we touched him he would go to the police.
This type of altercation is a prime example of the weekend warrior mentality. When it came down to it, he knew that all he could do was talk like a hard man. You have to be ready though: encounters with these types of characters can be very unpredictable and sometimes your challenge will be accepted. Remember, never underestimate anyone. I had a feeling that I might run into these two fellas again one day.
Pete and I were back at our usual venue the next week. We had decided that we were only going to work here from now on as our particular way of working was not being appreciated elsewhere.
Jo, the manager, was really pleased, if not relieved, to see our return. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, so they say, and I think she was quite fond of yours truly. She told me that there had been trouble at the club during the past couple of weeks and she was more than a bit concerned with what was happening. She told me that she wasn’t impressed with Simon’s unique brand of door supervising. He had adopted the ‘nut first and ask questions later’ technique.
I had to admit there were a few undesirable characters in the club and definitely some that I had barred in the past. It was time for a bit of scumbag cleansing.
One guy was a dealer that I’d barred two years ago. He must have been waiting for me to have a night off so he could practice his trade again. He was a strange character, black and of medium build, and he looked like he was trapped in a 1970s time warp. He wore flared trousers and a large brimmed hat, plus shades, of course. I remembered a while back he tried all kinds of variations on what he was wearing to gain access to his once fertile and lucrative market place. It was all part of his false persona – it was all a front to ingratiate himself. He tried to act and look cool and therefore trick the young, gullible punters into thinking that what he was selling was cool as well. He was very compliant though and left immediately: he knew we were not going to fuck around with him.
I have no time for drug dealers. They are near the lowest of the low, right down there with the absolute dregs of society as far as I’m concerned.
An hour later, Jo came out to the front doors and informed us that a new dealer had been spotted on the premises. She said that someone from the drugs squad was coming down to have a word with him. I think he was the other dealer’s mate and they were working as a team. However, a bit later Jo got a call from the drugs squad saying that they were too busy and would pick him up another time, but meanwhile they wanted us to leave him alone and we were not to touch him. Yeah right, I thought.
Pete and I looked at each other and, without a word, made our way over to our friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. He was a small, thin black guy with shoulder length dreadlocks, which contained a variety of small coloured beads. He wasn’t alone and he had three associates with him:
two large black fellas, who were both about the same size as me, and a young cocky white guy who thought he was the daddy.
We waited for the right moment and then managed to separate the dealer from his companions. We shoved him into the gents’ toilets where we told him that he was leaving. He was more than a little nervous now that he had been separated from his minders. He was visibly shaking as Pete put his size twelve boot to the bottom of the door to stop anyone coming in. I purposely put the frighteners on him. He seemed to think we were going to give him a kicking, I don’t know why. Perhaps it was the way I was squeezing his throat that gave him the idea. But we didn’t touch him: we figured that he knew we weren’t pissing around. All we wanted to do was to get the scumbags out of our club. I pushed him over to the urinal trough and told him that we didn’t want shit like him on the premises.