Fascist-Dogma-Nectar Overflow

Know that it’s not cool to jump off a Subway restaurant. It just isn’t. My brother was neither holy nor insane, so I can’t tell you why he did it.

“I am an IED and this Walmart life is a short fucking fizzle,” was all he kept shouting down to the security guards and latex-gloved sandwich artists waiting to catch him.

Fearing that the slip-of-tongue might cause some friction with a minor fast food butt buddy (and more importantly, a possible decline in sales in the Global Regression aisle), Walmart decided to sue the entire town for malicious suburban redundancy.

We thought we had a pretty decent case until they brought in the Disney lawyers, who immediately started handing out 10-percent-off passes to Space Mountain to the judge, the non-Hispanic members of the jury, and every third octogenarian who promised to buy a Five Dollar Foot-long. That’s when we knew they’d take everything.

Now my brother can’t go to the U2 concert next week because he doesn’t have eyes anymore. None of us do. Just old, raw sockets. It really isn’t cool.

life is a bug right now

Humor is so situational like if a waiter asks a customer and his date what they want to drink and they say "two Manhattans on the rocks!" and when he (the waiter) brings the drink ticket to the bar and says "two Manhattans on the rocks" and I say "Oooh, Manhattans on the rocks, that's my favorite drink!" the waiter, the bartender, and even the barback will inevitably bust out laughing or at least chuckle knowingly because they all know that a Manhattan (rye, sweet vermouth, Angostura bitters and garnished with a maraschino cherry) is a stirred drink that is always served up, never on the rocks, so we all know that this customer and his date are probably tourists from Cincinnati or somewhere who only ordered a "Manhattan on the rocks" because woo-hoo we're in Manhattan and it must be like, a specialty here; or, even worse, they aren't tourists and simply frequent bars that deign to sell their clientele Manhattans on the rocks, which clearly translates to "MAJORLY UNCOUTH POSER BAR" and reinforces the staff's superiority in the form of a communal laugh. It's funny right?

so, like, y'all do jaga bawmbs n champang, dog?

A few observations working the door in the West Village during the Halloween parade:

*  I can’t look at girls wearing 1920s flapper costumes without thinking about Nucky Thompson’s Gollum-like sex scene in this week’s Boardwalk Empire. Thanks for ruining Prohibition for me, Buscemi.

*  Seeing Pokey without a Gumby is a very real sadness.

*  Manhattan high schoolers are ballsy. Sorry kid awesomely dressed as MacGruber. I appreciate your ID that’s not only printed on a sheet of China-grade cardboard but also has been expired since 2006, and the $200 of your allowance you’re offering to get you and your generically slutty teeny bopper friends with no IDs in the bar. Come back when there isn’t a police blockade grilling me from across the street. You’re probably undercover cops aren’t you, little shits…

*  Being “sober” on Halloween sucks. Being sober while wearing a costume would be worse, I guess.

*  There is an inverse relationship between wearing a costume and enjoying oneself at a small, intimately lit bar where mellow jazz is being played. If you are wont to ask doormen, “Yo B, how much it cost to check out this fly downstairs club, dog?” you probably won’t have a good time. I’ll take $100 though.

*  Haven’t seen this many Impalas on two wheels since the last time I YouTubed Dr. Dre.

*  Best costume award goes to a girl wearing a parasitic twin dressed as a vampire from Twilight. I’d like to think that this is apt satire commenting on Twilight’s – and junky YA in general – suckling of America’s collective diabetic teat, but even if she’s just #TeamJacob, it’s still hilarious.

*  200-lb black lesbians dressed like Scottish warriors from Braveheart are some of the very nicest people.

*  More of a general thing, but it’s really obnoxious when people walk up to me and ask if we’re closed. Yes, because most drinking establishments employ guys to stand outside just to tell people that they aren’t open. I’m a humansignpostipede!

The Five Things That Piss Me Off The Most While Bouncing in Manhattan

To support my meager freelance earnings and non-existent literary earnings, I work at a bar where I mostly man the door. Said bar is one of downtown Manhattan’s swankiest neo-speakeasies, an underground mixology nerd’s wet dream, where bartenders slang $13 cocktails and the wait to get in is seldom less than 20 minutes on a weeknight. While “bouncer” is an accurate description of what I do, the bar’s clientele – off-duty bankers, successful creative types, NYU hipsters armed with Daddy’s PIN – aren’t usually in need of being bounced, and at a slightly out-of-shape and pasty 5’10”, I don’t cut anywhere near as intimidating a figure as my burly counterparts manning the gates of posh Meatpacking District clubs and frat-soaked yuppie-pits in Murray Hill. So I’ve tried to keep the following list of things patrons do that never fail to irk me as universal as possible, in the hopes that the city’s barflies might realize the mental anguish they enact on my brethren and me each long, tumultuous eve. Not that they’ll change, but I can still gripe. 

1. Guys Who Wait for Girls to Show Me Their IDs Before They Show Me Theirs

This may not seem like a big deal. What’s the problem with a guy trying to act courteous, it’s the same as holding a door or pulling out a chair, right? The problem is that when you see a social gesture as pointless this one again and again, it begins to gnaw at your soul in the worst way.

Real-life example:

Guy comes up to the bar with his female companion. Seeing that they are dressed business casual but are on the young side, I ask for identification. Of course the girl 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. The guy 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 character 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 I just crapped jelly beans out of my nose. “It’s called being a gentleman.”

“Oh?”

Girl: “Yeah! He’s a gentleman!” Makes loopy flutter-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 girl finally finds her ah, NEW JERSEY driver’s license. The guy, who’s been grilling me like I’m some kind of ingrate for longer than I like, gracefully allows his stiletto-heeled plunder to saunter down the stairs. He nods at me grotesquely, follows. I finally close the door behind them, stretch my arm, and that’s it.

So a guy waited for his girlfriend so she could give me her ID first. 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. 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 on the night in question) and to escort his lady as quickly and as safely as possible. Unless you consider bouncers to be somewhat less than human, which seems to be a fairly common opinion.

2. Talking

The cold, misanthropic door guy is a pervasive stereotype, and a valid one. If every bouncer you encounter seems more content to keep his arms crossed and stare into space or constantly check fantasy football stats on his phone than strike up a conversation, it’s because of what those conversations will inevitably entail. 75 percent of the time when guys in line interrupt me from my mobile Drudge Report, it starts well enough: “Hey man, how’s your night going? What drinks do you recommend? You don’t look like a bouncer, what do you really want to do?” And that’s cool, until the real reason for bothering me rears its douchey head: “So, like, I’m trying to come here next week with a girl. Will we, you know, have to wait in line? I mean, we’re practically best friends, I know you’ll remember me. Just in case, give me your number and I’ll call you so you won’t forget. Thanks so much, bro!” Bouncers, and especially those who work at places where there’s a wait to get in, don’t want to make friends. We want to survive a drama-free shift, avoid tranny crackheads on the 4am subway and watch re-runs of Ancient Aliens until sunrise. Giving us a hefty bro-pat will not help to differentiate you from the hundreds of obnoxious faces we cringe at on a nightly basis. You won’t be receiving the James Franco treatment, or even the Paul Giamatti treatment.

And ladies, I’m not stupid. I know what you’re trying to do every time you gush about how crazy it is that we both went to boarding school in Connecticut (OMFG!), how I could be a stand-in for Pick-Any-Conventionally-White-Movie-Star-of-the-Past-Decade, how you think it’s so noble that I freeze and/or sweat my ass off outside a bar for seven hours at a time to support my, like, TOT-ALLLLLY interesting artistic endeavors. Not to say that I don’t find the cleavage-pops, the pouty faces and the inappropriate touching at least a little amusing, but it still won’t help you get in.

Advice to both genders: Save your vocal chords for your actual friends. Quiet and respectful always trumps faux-friendly douchebaggery. Unless you’re familiar with the Ben Franklin Handshake. Provide one of these and not only will you get in immediately, but we can also discuss the latest advances in biomedical engineering or how much you hate the new Facebook for as long as you want.

3. Checking Women’s IDs

This is your classic no-win situation. If I ask a group of women for proof of age, they will most always roll their eyes while digging through their heinously large bags and mutter something about how they haven’t been carded in, like, for-EV-errrrrrr! If, however, I decide to be generous and save these same women the trouble of rummaging through godknowswhat and let them in sans IDs, I’ll get the same eye roll tinged with more than a hint of utter desperation: “But, but…I feel so old! Do I really look that old?? I’ve never not been carded, wah, wah, wah…” It’s not flattering for anyone involved. Also, failing to acknowledge that it’s a woman’s birthday (And why anyone would want to celebrate any birthday after age 21 is beyond me) is apparently equivalent to hoarding child porn. Hint: We only look at the year on your ID, as in, we don’t care.

On a side note, my friends always ask me how I fail to pick up more women at work. Valid question. I let any number of gorgeous girls pass me by with nary a nod. I’ve already explained why I avoid talking to women. Seriously, if a young lady wearing shoes that cost more than my monthly salary and wielding a monstrous piece of stow-away luggage also known as a “purse” rolls up with older dudes, suited or otherwise, who are all clearly balling, I doubt she’s on the prowl for some side bouncer action. That may sound defeatist, but what else do I really have to offer? My MFA degree? Ooooh, those are really sexy, and profitable! If a woman is genuinely interested in me she should probably stop drinking outrageously expensive vodka tonics because she’s going to have to support my writing struggles for the next, well, until I stop writing.

4. Europeans

The bar where I work gets a lot of tourists. The majority of these are from Western Europe. I don’t know what they write in NYC guidebooks, but I do know that these books are in desperate need of some editing. To my friends from across the sea (especially the French, Italians, Germans, hell, everyone), let me simplify things. 1. In America, we card. I don’t care if you just got off a plane, if you left your passport in the hotel, if “In my country we do not do this,” if your accent is in fact pretty sexy, I still need to see your ID or you’re not getting in. 2. “But what is this line you speak of? In my country we do not…” Stop right there. You understand the concept of a line. Tribesmen in Indonesia who have never had the pleasure of going through airport customs understand the concept of a line. You should be so lucky. 3. Loud soccer chants are unacceptable. Chanting of any kind is generally discouraged. 4. I know the Euro has taken a hit recently, but if you leave less than $5 on a $91 tab, the bartender will send me pissed off texts with frowny faces and chances are you won’t be receiving the same quality of service upon your next visit, because if I recognize you, we’re going to magically be at capacity the rest of the night. 5. Not all Americans, especially New Yorkers, are monolingual heathens. If you’re two feet away talking shit about me in French or relatively coherent Spanish, you’re going to be sober for a long time. ¿Comprende?

5. “Is this a line, or are these people just…”

I know we’re all oblivious to what’s going on around us most of the time. You’re cruising down 7th Avenue, earbuds blasting Katy Perry just loud enough for no one else to hear, hoping your boss doesn’t email you with any extra work, wondering whether the Gchat your OkCupid date sent you an hour ago contains kinky undertones (why all the barfing emoticons??), hoping your date loves swigging Old Fashioneds as much as you do, I get it. There’s a lot going on up there to distract from the here and now. But when you approach your drinking destination and fail to notice the 20 people neatly lined up double-file against the side of the building, all glaring at a guy in a suit in front of the entrance ignoring them and playing Brick Breaker on his Droid, it’s obvious what’s going on. I can’t count how many times I’ve had a person saunter past me and reach for the door, only for me to explain that all these people currently stabbing him or her with their eyes are waiting to get in and that he or she needs to promptly take a position at the back of the, what’s it called? Oh yes, the line. The once-dead eyes light up with indignation. “But, but…I thought all these people were smoking.” No one is smoking. “I thought all these people were standing around.” Yes, because people in New York love to stand in an organized fashion observing the bricks on the side of an otherwise nondescript building! Then there’s my favorite: “Oh, I didn’t see the line.” Granted, these responses could just be covering up for failing at a rather stupid ploy to gain early admittance, in which case, congratulations, you now look stupider than if you had just gone to the back of the line. And if you really are that oblivious to your immediate surroundings, you’ve got much bigger problems than having to wait in line for a drink. In fact, you should probably quit drinking and never bother me again. Have a GRRRREEEAT evening!

Honorable Mentions

6. Using the word “cheers” for anything besides toasting

7. Using the word “queue” for any reason

8. Name-dropping

9. Asking how long the wait is going to be

10. Australians

*If my bosses read this, just kidding about the Ben Franklin Handshake

Anatomy of a DOOSH Part 2: The Southern Doosh

                        Dooshy image from southernandpreppy.blogspot.com

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.

What You Got In That Bag, Girrrl?????

One of my resolutions this year is to try to stay positive and to be more "compassionate", whatever that vaguely defined state of mind means. Besides a few notable lapses, I think I've done a pretty decent job, but women/girls-with-unnecessarily-and-inexplicably-large-handbags, you aren't helping matters at all. In fact, you're making them much, much worse.

As a doorman, my night generally consists of: dealing with rich knuckleheads who NEVER have to wait in line, and continually remind me of this fact as they WAIT in line for an hour; stopping girls from running into the bathroom five at a time to stuff lines up their noses; and endlessly explaining to packs of Italian tourists what "we're at capacity" and "stop singing retarded soccer chants at full volume or I'm throwing you the fuck out" mean. And, yes, all this I can handle. I even catch a few laughs (mostly at the stupid Euros).

But then the inevitable happens. Then it happens again, and again. One, or perhaps several classily dressed (in business cash, maybe a lovely evening dress) ladies will approach the bar, cheerfully oblivious, BlackBerries ablaze, handbags big enough to fit my laundry pile, mouths watering at the prospect of LIKE, A VODKA TONNN-IC!! that is, until I ask the first one for her ID. There's the look of shock, of disbelief, then the eye roll and the angry grunt, like we're THE ONLY BAR IN THE WORLD that cards people. Then comes my favorite part - the lengthy (at least 2-3 minutes) awkward silence while I strain to hold open the door and while the woman shuffles through the numerous contents of her bulging luxury-brand sack, hopelessly flinging around god-knows-what while giving me the same devil stare and while her friends/boyfriend/fuck buddy look on sheepishly until she finally finds the golden ticket buried at the bottom of her treasure stash. She has now wasted a significant chunk of my life (that I could have spent staring at girls who are actually attractive in line), and more importantly her own, and will be too pissed off at me to enjoy her VODKA TONNNIC and her boyfriend probably won't get laid. True story.

Listen, I know it's a lot easier for guys to simply open their wallets for age verification purposes. And I'm not going to ask the obvious (and naive) question, i.e., "Why the fuck do you feel the need to carry such a monstrous load around with you?" I decided a long time ago that whatever stuff women lug around (gum, gym clothes, cell phone with glitter case, walk-of-shame clothes, tampons, various other mystery items) are somehow inextricably and symbiotically linked to the women themselves, sort of like the bionic implants fused to members of the Borg race on Star Trek. Even the most callow rookie knows that to separate a woman from her bag can have disastrous, if not deadly consequences.

All I'm humbly suggesting, ladies, is that before you go out, just put your wallet (or other weird piece of card-carrying luggage) near the top of all the "stuff" in your bag, or at least put your ID in one of the many magical pockets of your accessory where you'll remember it. That will save you a lot of time, provide you with more time for Vodka tonics, and will make every doorman you come across not hate you or hate themselves and their horrible lonely lives even more than they already do. And the last thing you want is an angry doorman Muahahahaha!!... Just kidding - unless you're really attractive, or have other really big, ah, accessories, we'll probably forget all about you and your freakishly large "purse". After a while, you all look the same.


P.S. One of my coworkers told me last night that she read an article that conclusively linked handbag size to sluttiness. Just some food for thought the next time you're on Canal St. about to pick up some knock-off Luis.