A Few Short Stories from the Past

A few years ago at another bar, when we closed up shop at night and were finally done cleaning, stacking chairs and tables and doing all the things we needed to do in order to lock up, we would do a final "walk through", just to make sure doors were locked, lights were off, and everything was in order.

Well, on this particular night, apparently the walk through never was completed, because I was awakened several hours later by an angry phone call from the manager, who informed me that the closing manager (who was not me, by the way) had failed to remember that we had a passed out friend who was waiting for a ride home in a booth on the second floor. Apparently, the passed out kid had awoken several hours later to a darkened, empty & quiet bar. Understandably confused, he walked downstairs to see where the hell everyone was and tripped the motion sensor on the alarm, thereby summoning the police who took him down at gunpoint until the manager arrived to explain the situation.

Good times.

Another time we caught a guy, literally, with his hand in the cookie jar. Only, it wasn't a cookie jar. It was one of our tip jars. Filled with money. Filled with our money. Which is a huge, huge mistake in a bar. Or anywhere, for that matter. While I helped to catch him, I wasn't privy to what happened when several employees took the frightened thief into the back alley to "talk things over with him" as they put it.

As I understand it, his pockets were emptied of all cash he had on him and he was subsequently locked out back, left to make the long walk back around to the front door where he was promptly denied entry. While I'm glad that I caught the little fucker, I'm also glad that I wasn't an accessory to a strong armed robbery. Which is what I'm pretty sure what they did is called. Lesson to be learned? Keep your grubby little hands off of and out of things that aren't yours, like the employees money. Especially the employees money. He's lucky they didn't beat the living shit out of him and leave him lying in his own blood in a dark, empty alleyway.

Another time, we were informed of a fight going on upstairs (this was a two level bar that I worked at the time) so myself and two other floor guys jumped into bouncer fight action and started running in the general direction. I was first the in the line of three, so little did I know that the guy in the back tripped & faceplanted on the stairs, knocking him out cold. We were down to two men to break up the fight, which isn't a great ratio, but it's better than one. Only, nobody knew it at the time.

The pool tables were located near the top of the stairs, and in order to make it to the two guys who were fighting - who at that point we had spotted and were pretty big - we had to zigzag in between a maze of pool tables. Unfortunately, the guy behind me hit a wet spot going around a corner and fell, hitting his head and sliding underneath a pool table, completely out of sight and out of action. I myself also fell, but took it in stride and got back up running and jumped on the first guy I got to, expecting my two coworkers to jump in immediately and help me do the whole seperate, restrain and eject manevuer. It took a few seconds for me to realize I was the only one hanging onto the back of anyones neck before I looked around and saw that I was desperately alone, and the guy who I had in a headlock - bigger than I was, by the way - wasn't taking my actions kindly because now he was, more or less, being doubleteamed.

Let's just say it took some finessing on my part to 1) get him out of the bar and 2) do so without having a knock-down, drag-out fight with him one on one since my coworkers couldn't keep on their feet and stay conscious.

Just another night, I suppose...