Some social gestures are so pointless I want to stab myself. Self-mutilation is a little extreme, I know. OK, so I'll stick to stabbing the perpetrators. Not really, but I want to. I work at this bar downtown, see. Where I sometimes work the door. Yeah, most of the time I work the door. I'm not a bouncer. I don't bounce anyone. I just tell them to wait in line because the bar's usually full or to leave when they go from the wow-that-guy-just-pounded-four-cocktails-but-hes-ZackGalifiniakis-funny to everyone-wants-to-murder-him-or-escape-GaryBusey-drunk. Other than that, it's pretty mellow. So instead of being stressed by patrons trying to shank each other, I spend my nights analyzing the ever-expanding schemes people devise to make my life much more miserable than it has to be. The inevitable transformation from man to DOOSH[1].
More often than not, said Dooshes will be oblivious to how douchey they're actually being. Sometimes they are so enveloped in the lipglossy-summers-in-Nantucket bat shit smothering their brains[2] that they are virtually unaware of, and unable to empathize with any foreign perspective. Although this is really, really annoying, it’s somewhat understandable. Getting yelled at by your boss all week and letting all that entitlement flow out of you like elephant piss on Saturday nights, I get it. What pisses me off is when people act douchey and try to justify it in an equally if not more douchey way. You know, the old “I own every Thai-Congolese fusion restaurant in a 3-mile radius, I know everyone that works here and I’ve been coming here the second this bar opened so you have to let me cut everyone in line,” line, or, “I’m the female lead of the now-defunct Spider-Man film franchise but I haven’t done a good movie since Jumanji and I’m a notoriously drunken shitstorm who looks like a troll on her best days. You HAVE to let me in.” Gross.
Those are obviously obvious examples. Most violations of my sanity would be imperceptible to the untrained eye. One such incident occurred last night and was perpetrated by a creature I’ll call the Southern Doosh.
Very generally speaking, there are two kinds of people that come into the bar. There is the Artsy/hipster/celeb/fedora-friendly Doosh, who, though occasionally snarky and possessed of a certain shit-don’t-stink, are usually good peoples. And then there’s the all-pervasive Suited Doosh, bane of my humble nightlife existence. The Suited Doosh (SD) may not actually be wearing a suit (especially the female variety, the FSD), but it’s safe to say that he/she has lived in Murray Hill, does live in the Upper East Side or whatever trendy new neighborhood he/she read about in GQ (which is totally not gay), and spends a significant amount of time vacantly staring out of office windows downtown or in the east 50s and is more than proficient at all those little keyboard tricks on Excel. Not so much Patrick Bateman as Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. There are a variety of theories as to why the SD and/or FSD is generally the dooshiest entity in any given location, but as far as I’m concerned, there can’t ever be one answer. Also, I’m speaking in rampant generalizations. Every corporate employee is not an SD/FSD, and every organic flaxseed blogger from Brooklyn isn’t a hipster. Well…
Anyway, back to the Southern Doosh from last night. Some background: The Southern Doosh is a variation of the SD where the suit jacket is replaced by a corduroy Izod jacket. Add a salmon-colored Ralph shirt, a half-ironic Bass Pro Shops cammo hat, and Crocs (for sunglasses) featuring an SEC football team’s logo. Instead of an MBA from Tufts, he went to UVA. Not a big difference. Going to school in Virginia with many of these characters, I can safely say that on the scale of DOOSH, these guys are toward the bottom of the list. The one thing they do that pisses me off is that they try to perpetuate this façade of being “true gentlemen,” that they are somehow the standard bearers of some nearly forgotten ancient code of morals. Like sounding like sleazy Matthew McConaughey adds a level of chivalry to your persona. Fuck that. I’ve seen enough drunk sorority girls get tricked by these gentlemen into consuming enough dip-spit and other bodily secretions under the pretense that it’s dark beer or lemon-lime Gatorade to have my doubts.
So this Southern Doosh comes up to the bar last night with his female companion. Seeing that they are on the young side, I ask for identification. Of course the girl, who appears to be an FSD, is the proud owner of a monstrous satchel whose ideal purpose seems to be transporting large human body parts. While she scours through the expanse of fabric, I am dutifully holding the door (a super heavy old-school metal door) open for my customers. The Southern Doosh has his ID out but for some reason is declining to give it to me. After 45 seconds of me extending my hand to this SD like a mongoloid and his girl still digging around, I say to him, “You know, I can see your ID now.”
“I’ll wait.”
Uh. More digging.
“So why don’t you just show me your ID now.” (Still holding the door, arm getting sore)
He looks at me like just shit jelly beans out of my nose. “It’s a Southern thing.”
“Oh?”
“It’s being a GENTLEMAN.”
FSD: “Yeah! He’s a gentleman!” (Makes retarded googly eyes that make me want to expell jelly beans out of multiple orifices)
Fast-forward through way too many seconds of my life and the FSD finally finds her ah, NEW JERSEY driver’s license. The Southern Doosh (from Charlotte, NC), who’s been grilling me like I’m some kind of Yankee ingrate for longer than I like, gracefully allows his reverse carpet-bagged plunder to saunter down the stairs[3]. He nods at me dooshily, follows. I finally close the door behind them, stretch my arm, and that’s it.
So you’re wondering what the big deal is? The significance? So a guy waited for his girlfriend so she could give me her ID first. No big deal, brah. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if his reasoning had been different. Because as I see it, part of what defines a gentleman is a combination of courtesy and tact, shown not only toward the objet d’heure (the insipid and unremarkable Jersey girl), but to all rational souls he encounters[4]. Considering myself to be rational for the most part, I find it a little ungentlemanly that someone would want to make me hold a heavy door like an idiot for any unnecessary amount of time. It would seem more gentlemanly to make the process as efficient as possible for all parties involved (especially given the fact that it was cold and rainy last night) and to escort his lady as quickly and as safely as possible (which, if you read footnote 3, you’ll see that this attempt resulted in failure, albeit a common mistake).
This post may seem nothing more than an overblown diatribe from a second-rate misanthrope, but believe me, when you spend 7 hours standing in roughly the same place constantly fending off unappealing hipsters and all manner of Dooshes, all the little annoyances quickly amplify. “It’s the little things that kill,” sang Gavin Rossdale in the mid-90s, and it’s hard to deny that he was writing from the perspective of someone in the service industry.
As you’d imagine, the opposite is also true. If you’re polite, unobtrusive, and can hold a conversation without resorting to weak office-speak sarcasm, then I love you dearly. You are a burst of hope in a vapid, soul-sucking blackness. But the more I think about it, it’s not even worth exerting any energy trying to become the latter type of individual I’ve just described. The bottom line is that some people (probably in the service industry, and especially disgruntled doormen at swanky cocktail bars) are going to hate you, no matter what you do, even if you think you’re not doing anything. The best you can hope for is that they’ll let you into the bar.
[1] I prefer this spelling of the word when talking about people. Douches perform a welcome cleaning service, whereas dealing with Dooshes makes me feel anything but clean.
[2] For instance, I wrote about women who carry inordinately large bags with them while watching me card everyone in front of them, only to give me stink eyes for the next 10 minutes as they search through the black hole at the bottom of said bags for their own IDs.
[3] Common sense and traditional courtesy indicates that when a couple is about to walk down a staircase, the man should go first, in order to verify the safety of the stairs and to be there to protect his lady in case she trips on one of her obnoxious Gucci heels he used up half of his monthly paycheck to buy her. Granted there are very few establishments one enters where one must descend a set of treacherous stairs. I could care less whether this practice is observed, the point is that a “real” gentleman should be aware of the appropriate protocol.
[4] It would seem to me that such a display of common decency would help to win the affection of aforementioned FSD. But what do I know? I’m just a doorman from the emotionally frigid Northeast. My bad.
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