I Worked as a Bouncer – 3

How the pub and club worked for my team was this:

We started work a little before 8 – that’s when the crowds started coming in, town was usually void of drinkers before then. Little by little, the pub became more crowded. Sometimes, if there was a stripper on (male OR female) there were more people at the pub which meant a busier time for the bar staff.

I would leave the bar at around 21:45-22:00 to get changed into more suitable ‘receptionist’ attire.
The rest of the team finished work a little after 23:30. They usually went home. Dingo didn’t like his girlfriend hanging around while he was working, she ‘distracted’ him.

One night I found out why Dingo had so many ex-girlfriends AND why he made me promise ‘what happens at the club stays at the club’.

Dingo usually stuck around at the reception for a couple of hours or so to combat the influx of punters coming into the club after the pubs had closed. Then he’d go upstairs to oversee the punters up there. One night he went up quite early – a little after 23:30, just after the pub staff had left.

Dingo’s current girlfriend, Becca had just popped in to say bye and she’d received a lot of attention from the Bouncers and punters that had just been in the pub next door. Some recognised her as the bar staff serving in the pub, others fancied their chances with a beautiful young woman.
She blushed in the right places, made a comment or two and weathered cat-calls directed at Dingo with diplomacy.
Dingo laughed at the comments along the lines of: “How did you get a stunner like her, you ugly bastard?”, “You’re stuck here all night, do you think she’s going home on her own?” and the classic: “I’ll just be half an hour, I just have to nip off home for a bit…” hinting that the home he was going to would be Dingo’s, not his own.

I wouldn’t like to speculate on whether that clouded Dingo’s state of mind as he went upstairs to the club, but I knew Dingo long before his current friends and colleagues knew him. I’d seen his jaw muscles tighten at every compliment towards Becca and I saw his eyes narrow at the hint that his friend would be following his girlfriend home while he was stuck at work. Even though he was laughing, I could see in his eyes that he was imagining tearing off the bloke’s head and shitting down his neck-hole.

Becca was tall, slim and elegant. Long blonde hair, with perfect, but understated make-up. I was surprised she wasn’t a model.
The woman Dingo led down the stairs not half an hour after Becca had gone home was the exact opposite to Becca. The woman was shorter than Becca by half a foot. Her dyed-black hair piled on top of her head in a beehive long before Amy Winehouse took the style as her own. Though the woman was pretty and stylish in her own way, she didn’t have the same classic beauty as Becca. I was serving punters and could only watch horrified as he led the woman through reception.

Once the group of punters had gone up the stairs, I rushed out of the reception box and outside, but his car, usually parked around the side, was gone.

Who should I run into when I got back inside, but Paul. Always eager to get a dig in, he laughed. “That’s not like Dingo to bring one through the front, he usually takes them out through the fire escape,” he said.

I looked at Paul as though I’d just scraped him off the bottom of my shoe and he laughed again. “Didn’t you know?”

To be honest, I suppose I did know. Dingo was a good-looking bloke. He stood out from the crowd even when he wasn’t head doorman. The fact that he had a beautiful girlfriend made the dalliances more exciting. When the stakes are high, the gamble tastes sweeter if it results in a win.

I was furious. Livid that he’d deliberately challenged my loyalty to him by bringing his latest conquest right past me, but more angry with myself for not seeing it sooner. The fact that Paul had had chance to point it out to me and laugh about it all didn’t help.

When Dingo and the woman came back, he no longer led her by the hand, he walked ahead of her through reception. She tottered on high-heels and tried to follow him up the stairs but he must have given a signal because Paul stopped her from following him. Paul pointed at me and spoke quietly to the woman. He made the woman pay to get in – she’d already paid once. How humiliating.
She muttered something about having lost her ticket when she went outside to get some air, but her smeared lipstick told a different tale.

She tottered up the stairs again to find her friends and possibly to confront Dingo. She didn’t find him. I know that for a fact, because if she had found him and confronted him, he would have escorted her out.

Dingo came back down stairs once, saw the look on my face, turned around and went back up to the club.

Half an hour before we usually locked up and left, Dingo came down and spoke to me. “Tell Trev that I’ll take you home tonight,” he said and went back upstairs.
I was in two minds whether to do as he said or just pack up and quit, but I finally rang my husband and told him Dingo was bringing me home.

When everyone had left, punters, staff and bouncers, and the manager had locked up and gone, we got in Dingo’s car and he took me home.

The conversation didn’t go well for him. I unleashed my fury at him for going on the same self-destructive path that had split him and another friend of mine up.

“I can’t help it. If it’s offered on a plate, I can’t say ‘no,” he said.

“I’ve noticed. You don’t even go for the stunning women; it seems to me that you can do better. Fuck it! You HAVE done better! You’ve got Becca waiting at home for you and you go off fucking anyone that offers it?”

“I didn’t fuck her,” he said sheepishly. “She gave me a blow-job.”

“Oh well that makes it all right then!” I said, in a scathing tone.
He winced and I knew he knew I was right.

“It’s not just that you’re cheating on Becca, you deliberately led her past me so I couldn’t ignore it. You’ve deliberately implicated me and I know why you did that.”

“You do?”

“Of course I fucking do! You’re testing my loyalty. You want to know if I’ll tell Becca or not.”
We arrived at my house just then and he assumed I would allow him to go home with his conscience salved and assurances that I wouldn’t tell Becca.
He wasn’t getting off that lightly.

“Oh no, you’re not going home just yet, I’ve got plenty more to tell you,” I said and went inside.

He followed, said hello to a bemused Trev and we sat down in the living room.

Dingo looked at me, worried what I was going to say.

I stood by the window, too wound-up to sit down. Trev made us a coffee and I didn’t say anything until he came back in from the kitchen.

“I’ll not tell Becca about tonight, but you’d better not herd any more women past me or I’ll ring her from the club.”

“You wouldn’t…” he said, but his body language and his expression said that he knew I would.

“I like Becca, she’s lovely. She’s beautiful and far too good for you,” I said. He started to protest but I glared at him and he shut up and sipped his coffee.
“She’s too good for you and she deserves better treatment. I’m telling you now, if you cheat on her again and I find out, I will tell her, even if that means she stops being my friend. I won’t have it on my conscience.”

“I don’t know why I took her past reception,” he said.

“I do. You either thought I wouldn’t say anything because of our friendship or you thought I’d have no choice because of the promise I made.”

He looked up at me and thought. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“And you know me better than that. If I have something to say, I’ll say it. I can’t be bothered with pissing about, I don’t like liars and once upon a time, neither did you.”

Dingo surprised me then. He blushed and hung his head.

“Don’t do it again,” I said in a quiet voice.

“I won’t, she wasn’t worth this shit.”

“No, she wasn’t, but Becca is.”

The moral of this story is not ‘never date a doorman’, it’s actually, ‘NEVER date a bouncer’. They are very similar in most aspects but entirely different in the important ones.