The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (2 page)

U
NDOUBTEDLY, WHEREVER YOU
go in the world, the nightclub doorman has been both feared and loathed; even the term “bouncer” ominously refers to being “bounced” out of a nightclub for some misdemeanour or other – or maybe for nothing at all. However, it must be said that over the past few years the role of the doorman, especially in the UK, has changed significantly and that doormen are no longer represented as muscled, tattooed hard bastards standing menacingly on the doors, intimidating and bullying, but as fully trained and licensed security “supervisors” with defined roles and responsibilities. But before training, security licensing and accountability, “old-school” doormen were a select, elite and isolated bunch of hard men living on the fringes of “normal” society, who kept themselves to themselves, who trained hard in the gym or the dojo during the day in order to equip
themselves
for the frequently violent and often criminal world of
nightclubs
, bars and discotheques at night. No one became a bouncer by applying for a job in the newspaper or employment centre; bouncers were almost always referred or recommended by other bouncers, often because of their awesome reputation and their ability to fight and frighten. Old-school doormen were undeniably hard men and they certainly didn’t come much harder than the first of several phenomenally tough doormen I feature in this book; former nightclub bouncer now BAFTA award-winning writer Geoff Thompson.

Although Geoff Thompson now spends the majority of his time in his calm and sedate world behind his computer desk writing
best-sellers
, film scripts and self-help books, he was – and probably still is – very much one of the toughest men in the United Kingdom and deserves his place at the head of this book with this compelling and powerful story describing some of the events that ultimately led him away from his life as a bouncer.

Geoff Thompson was born in Coventry, England, in 1960, where he has lived for most of his life. Now one of the highest-ranking martial arts instructors in Britain, until the age of thirty he worked through a number of menial jobs, from glass-collector in a bar to a floor-sweeper at a factory. He then spent almost a decade working on the doors in Coventry, undeniably one of the toughest cities in the United Kingdom.

Once polled by
Black Belt
magazine (USA) as the number one self-defence instructor in the world and voted by the same magazine as the “Number One” self-defence author in the world, Geoff was twice invited to teach for the well-known actor and martial artist Chuck Norris in Las Vegas, USA. He originally began his training by learning the more traditional martial arts, including karate and kung fu, but, as a nightclub doorman, he soon realized that these were pretty much inadequate and ineffectual in the harsh, hard and often violent world on Coventry’s club doors. He veered his training towards more practical, full-contact, street-style martial arts and combat sports including boxing, kick-boxing, judo and freestyle wrestling, where he most definitely excelled.

Geoff eventually turned instructor and currently holds the
highest-level
coaching awards for wrestling, the Amateur Boxing Association instructor’s certificate, as well as a first dan in judo and sixth dan in Shotokan karate.

It was always Geoff’s ambition to write and, proving that not all bouncers are uneducated, illiterate and ignorant, Geoff finally left the world of the doors and became a full-time writer. He has so far written over thirty published books and was on the
Sunday Times
bestseller list with his autobiography,
Watch My Back,
about his years working as a nightclub doorman.

His first film,
Bouncer
, a ten-minute short for the UK Film Council starring Ray Winstone, was nominated for a BAFTA in the 2003 awards.
Bouncer
was also nominated at the Edinburgh Film Festival in the best short category and it was also highly commended at the Raindance Festival. On top of all that,
Bouncer
was also chosen by the British Council to be part of the Britspotting tour; it was screened worldwide and shown in Birmingham, England, prior to every screening of David Cronenberg’s
Spider.
Due to its success, Ray Winstone agreed to executive produce Geoff’s second short film, called
Brown Paper Bag
, which was nominated for a RTS Award, invited to film festivals in the USA and Europe, and won the BAFTA 2004 for best short film.

Geoff’s first feature film for cinema,
Clubbed,
based on his book
Watch My Back,
was released in 2009 to worldwide acclaim. In this utterly compelling, funny yet ultimately moving film Geoff chronicles his mad and violent life on the doors and what finally took him away from this aggressive, brutal world to follow his dream of becoming a full-time, professional writer. Geoff was certainly one of the hardest and toughest doormen and martial artists of his generation.

“Where’s Johnny Steen? I’ve come for my ear!”

The man at the nightclub door had a bandana of crêpe wrapped around his head and a face etched in pain. Blood issued through the bandage at the point where his right ear should have been but patently was not.

“Johnny’s not in. Hasn’t been here all night.” I replied, trying not to stare at his injury.

“He bit my ear off.” He continued, fingers dabbing tentatively around the wound as though checking his ear had really gone.

He wandered off to the next club in search of his missing body part.

Grapevine gossips later informed me that the missing ear – bitten off in a grudge fight at the local park – had been harpooned by its new owner to a dartboard in a busy pub and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The ear of a name fighter was quite a trophy in Coventry’s lower echelons.

The seller got twenty quid and the buyer got to wear his prize on a key ring – a grotesque talking point.

In my former incarnation as a nightclub bouncer I had my life threatened more times than I care to remember. I was shot at, stabbed, glassed, punched, kicked, scratched, bitten, spat on, vomited over and trampled. I fought in pub bars, car parks, chip shops, restaurants and once at a friend’s christening: he’d asked me to have a word with a rowdy relative not realizing that his
interpretation
of “a word” was entirely different to mine.

Three friends were murdered during a decade of madness and mayhem. Another, depressed and grossly over-exposed to violence, tried to end his life – alone in a ditch – by swallowing a bottle of bleach. Many more were sent to jail, and a few ended up on the psychiatrist’s couch. Nearly all – myself included – found the divorce courts before salvation found us.

Ironically, I only took the job to face down my fears. I became a bouncer in the late 1980s because I’d inherited my mum’s nerves and as a consequence was plagued by debilitating depressions and irrational fears. Standing on a nightclub door was little more than a pragmatic experiment in growing courage.

Bouncing was not my first course of action; it was a last chance saloon.

The first port of call – the doctor’s surgery – left me disappointed. Medicine had not evolved much, it would seem: I hoped that working as a bouncer might prove a little more inspiring than a sympathetic smile and a course of Prozac.

It did, but the price was high.

Friedrich Nietzsche said that we should be careful when hunting the dragon not to become the dragon. It was a prophetic warning, one I wish I’d heeded sooner.

The Coventry club scene dished out violence as thick as it did fast. It was mostly unsolicited and it was always heinous. But for a lad looking to quieten his fears with a heavy dose of desensitization there was no better place to be.

I only intended to stay in the job for a short while: ten years and many broken bones later I was still there. My fears had been trounced and the depressions a distant memory, but the reflection in my bathroom mirror was no longer of a man I immediately
recognized
or particularly liked. The soft youth of yesteryear had become a hard man who used violence as a problem-solving tool. Those that stepped into my world looking for a little contact were dealt with quickly, brutally and always without demur.

Not surprisingly this placed me on bad terms with the law, but then policemen and bouncers have always shared an unholy alliance. We loved to hate them and they loved to lock us up at any given opportunity. Silly, really, when you consider the fact that we were both trying to do the same job: protect the good majority from the bad minority and the indifferent from themselves. That is not to say there were no exceptions. When it suited them the police could be very accommodating. After separating a local hard man from his teeth and his consciousness I found myself in a police cell facing a charge of Section 18 Wounding With Intent, which carried a possible five years in prison. My immediate future was looking pretty bleak until it was discovered that the man in hospital had a long list of previous convictions for police assault. In light of the new information the arresting officer found a sudden and healthy respect for me; he dropped all charges, leaving me with a clean record and an unofficial pat on the back.

The police look after their own.

The camaraderie on the door was equally strong. We had our own rules and those that broke them did so at their peril. Anyone who attacked a doorman or a member of staff was taken – usually dragged – somewhere quiet and taught the error of their ways. Our reasoning was simple enough; you have to slaughter a chicken to train a monkey. Brutal perhaps, but then standing over the open coffin of a workmate who had paid the ultimate price was no picnic. Noel was one of the three friends who found their young names in the obituary column. One took a baseball bat over the head on a Saturday night and died on the Tuesday. Another upset a local gangster with Manchester connections and paid with a bullet in the head as he sat in his car. The third – Noel – forgot the Musashi (Samurai) code that all bouncers live or die by; after the battle tighten your helmet straps. He was attacked as he left the nightclub at three in the morning, a vulnerable time when most doormen switch off as they head for home. He was stabbed through the heart by a man with a head full of grudge and a skin full of strong lager. He was dead before his head hit the pavement. Noel was a
wonderful
man who didn’t read the signs. And there are always signs. The rituals of attack. The pre-fight twitches of men with bad intentions and no fear of consequence.

Knives may be the tool of choice for the career criminal but I found to my cost that people are nothing if not inventive when it comes to finding and using expedient weapons to bash, slash and pound each other. A man called Granite Jaw once tried to demolish a concrete dustbin using the top of my head; I had to bite the end of his finger off before he’d let me go.

Doormen regularly face a multiple of offensive weapons in the course of duty; guns, coshes, bats, bars, crutches, craft knives, carpet cutters and cars – a maniac called Tank once drove a Ford Cortina through the front doors of a busy Coventry club to enact his revenge after being barred by the doormen. On another occasion a troublesome youth who threatened that he was going to “shoot you bastards!” was gambolled from the club with a bitch-slap and a challenge; “Go’n fetch your gun.” Of course we never thought he would. Five minutes later he was back in a white Merc with a
rifle – trained on us – poking through a gap in driver’s side window. Before he could fire, myself and three other “brave” doormen hit the deck and scurried – on our hands and knees – for the safety of the club.

Even people can be used as implements of pain when an equalizer is called for. An infamous 290-pound doorman and former wrestler called Bert Assarati found himself before a judge after hospitalizing several men, one of whom was in a particularly bad way, outside a London nightclub. The judge asked Assarati, “What did you hit him with?” Assarati deadpanned, “His mate.” Apparently he’d picked one man up above his head and used him to bludgeon the other.

Given the chance, people will even attack you with their bodily fluids: blood, sick, spit, shit – nothing is sacred. One drunk and incapable man was so angry when I asked him to leave the club that he unzipped and pissed all over my trousers. It was very
embarrassing.
I could smell the vapour for days. Another man who I’d caught stealing cash from the bar till smashed his own nose on a table edge and machine-gunned me with a gob full of blood; he later told the police that I had beaten him up for nothing and invented the whole robbery story just to cover my tracks – and the police believed him!

Without question the most dangerous weapon by far was the one handed to every customer that stepped across our welcome mat; a beer glass. Even the uninitiated in a second of drunken madness can end a life with the speared edges of a broken glass. And the girls were often the worst offenders. Especially when another female stood between them and their man. I had to administer first aid to a
beautiful
twenty-something after a love rival cracked a wine glass on the edge of the bar and rammed it into her face. She hit her with such force that two inches of the glass stayed buried beneath her
cheekbone
. It took six hours of reconstruction to fix her face. The
psychological
damage would take more to repair than a surgeon’s stitches.

Dealing with women was not always so violent, but it was often tricky. I had my fair share of sexual come-ons from scantily clad beauties with a penchant for large men in tuxedo suits. The door is a seductive trade offering local celebrity, free beer and loose women to those with a weak will and a strong libido. I was married at the time so I should have abstained, and most of the time I did, but I can’t say that I didn’t occasionally succumb. In my defence – and to my shame – my indulgences were infrequent and never without a post-coital dose of guilt and remorse. Personally, I found more profit in light flirtations than full-on promiscuity. For instance, an off-the-cuff compliment about the splendid condition of a
customer
’s bottom once earned me months of pleasure. The lady in question thanked me by lifting her skirt and flashing a frilly pair of pink knickers that clung Kylie Minogue-tight to the neatest little bottom I have ever set eyes on. I was the envy of every man in the club. It became a Saturday night ritual that never failed to please. Sadly, it ended the night she turned up on the arm of a man with a face like ten boxers. I don’t think he would have appreciated her generous spirit. Still, it was good while it lasted.

Some women wanted more for their money than a bit of sexually charged banter. For several weeks I complimented Lala on how nice she was looking. I mentioned her hair, her shoes (girls like that) and how nice her perfume was. I badly misread the situation. What had been an innocent flirt for me was patently a red-hot come-on for her. I realized my folly the night she wedged me – using her ample bust – into a dark corner of a busy nightclub and whispered in my ear, “I’d love to take you home with me, I’d massage your whole body in baby oil, then I’d get Victor out.” I raised an eyebrow into a question-mark and asked, terrified, “Victor?” She made a yummy smile, snaked her hand seductively down my chest and said, “Victor the vibrator.” I made a few hasty excuses and spent the rest of the night hiding in a cloakroom.

Not all of the women I encountered were so enamoured by me. A rather irate lady once tried to decapitate me with the stiletto end of her right shoe while I wrestled her boyfriend from the club. He’d ordered drinks and refused to pay for them so he had to go. She was having none of it. Each time her shoe bounced off my head she screamed, “Violence is not the answer!” Hypocrisy, it would seem, holds no bounds.

I was lucky. Another doorman was stabbed in the ribs by a maniacal mother with a pair of nail scissors when he tried to stop her daughter – the bride-to-be – from having live sex with a
hen-night
strip-o-gram.

Personally, when dealing with women, I always recommend restraint. There is rarely cause to be physical. A keen eye and a quick wit is often all you need. The mere mention of large bottoms, flaccid bosoms and a hairy upper-lip are usually enough to send a body-conscious female scurrying for safety. We refused a rather large lady entry to a club one night because she was violently drunk and scaring the other customers (and the doormen). She wasn’t happy. Intimating that she would return to the club with a bit of canine back-up, she bragged, “I breed Rottweilers.” My mate Tony, a master of observational put-downs replied, “Well, love, you’ve definitely got the hips for it.”

Violent men and frightening women are bad enough, but at least you know where you stand with them. It is when the gender is ambiguous that confusion can trigger sheer terror. Tuesdays at Busters nightclub was alternative night, which meant a culture dish of gays, geeks, goths, punks and trannies. Nothing too bad in that, you might think. I felt the same way until the night a pretty little girl who had given me the eye on the way into the club followed me into the gents’ toilets, hitched up her plaid skirt, took out her manhood, smiled and then proceeded to relieve herself in the urinal next to mine.

Nightclub toilets were also the favoured hidey-hole for criminals and vagabonds. Bag thieves used toilet cisterns to dump stolen and fleeced handbags, whilst muggers regularly attacked and robbed their unwitting victims when they were at their most vulnerable; unzipped at the urinal or de-bagged on the can. Messy but effective. And it was the doormen who had to clean up afterwards. Equally unpleasant was the mess left when too much partying resulted in a vomit fest.

Escorting the ill and the infirm from the premises without getting a jacket full of sick yourself was tricky, if not impossible. It was
definitely
my least favourite task. Some people at least had the courtesy to wait until they’d vacated the building before shouting “Hughy!” One gent retched and heaved his way out of the club, sat down by a wall, threw up again and then proceeded to pass out. Whilst he lay unconscious in a pillow of regurgitated chicken korma I propped a sign by his head that read: “I bet he drinks Carling Black Label.”

Druggies, similarly, used the multi-purpose space of the club loo to inject, roll, swallow, sniff and deal chemical highs. Occasionally, and disappointingly, those on the make were the doormen
themselves
, though, despite suggestions to the contrary – and certainly from my experience – this scenario is rare. A good door team would not be seen dead dealing drugs. They are constantly on the lookout for dealers and users, both of whom get short shrift and a fast exit from the club if they are caught. No moral crusade, I can assure you, just part of the job description.

People are fixated by the evils of drugs and there is little doubt that for those who deal and those that take there can be no
undamaged
escape. But as an empiricist I would argue that if drugs are evil then alcohol is the devil incarnate. Not only is it more damaging and deadly than Class A drugs – it kills and ravages tens of
thousands
more per capita than any other substance – it is legal, socially acceptable and it doesn’t even carry a government warning. And the deadly trilogy of stress, booze and nightclub ambience is all the ingredients you need to turn even the nicest people into despicable creatures.