The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-Two: Bouncing

When I came home from school for the summer, my dad told me he had a great opportunity all lined up for me, summer job-wise. I oughta be thankful, he said, because one of his friends needed someone and my dad had just happened to be there and they both bent over backwards to make this work out for me. So I was thankful, before I even knew that I would be a bouncer for a nightclub in Hartford.

I never bothered trying to find out if he really thought I should be excited about working 10 PM-4 AM six nights a week or if he just owed someone a favor or something and was pulling a fast one on me. Because either way, I was still a bouncer at a nightclub in Hartford.

Orientation was my second night back into Burlington, so I didn’t really have much time to wallow in the misery of being back in the middle of nowhere for another few months, which was for the best, I suppose. The owner was named Mr. Grisetti. He led orientation himself, and he was very enthusiastic about the whole operation, which made me wary right from the start.

“Incognito is a different kind of nightclub,” he assured all of us fresh-faced new recruits. Most were bartenders. “We don’t just sell drinks and a place to dance. We project an image. And that image has to mean something to not just everyone who walks through those doors, but everyone who is aware of nightlife in Connecticut.” The kid next to me was nodding his head and started taking notes in a fat little pad he had brought. He was about three quarters of the way through it. I wondered how in the world such a bore could have filled three quarters of a fat little pad like that even if he had a million years to do it and a million pointless orientations to sit through.

“Everyone here is paid to do a job. You guys,” gesturing towards most of the room, “are here to serve drinks. You,” at an ethnic guy in the back who didn’t appear to be listening (a kindred spirit! I thought) “are here to clean dishes. You are here to dance,” waving at a crusty-looking girl who was attractive in the mathematical sense only, which probably meant she knocked them out in a darkened room with disorienting bass throbbing through people’s heads. “And you,” he went on, pointing at me, “are here to guard the door and break up fights.” Everyone in the room looked around, trying to find the big burly guy the owner must have been talking about, sitting next to that shaggy-haired toothpick towards whom he had appeared to have been gesturing. It was the first time I really thought about what a bouncer is expected to do, and I almost raised my hand and asked the guy if he knew what he was doing, and if I shouldn’t just leave.

But he just went on. “Those are your jobs, and that’s what I hired you to do, but you’re all paid to do something a little different.” He clicked a slide on his PowerPoint, without turning around, so he had no way of knowing that this had caused the computer to crash and the screen to turn blue. “You are a part of Incognito now, and you are here to project that image of fashion and style and cool and with-it-ness that is so important to our club.” I should point out two things here. I was wearing an old UConn sweatshirt and jeans that were about three sizes too big for me. That, and Mr. Grisetti was a complete dirtbag, balding at the temples, the rest of his hair greased up and slicked back, we could all see his chest hair because he hadn’t buttoned his dark magenta shirt, and he was wearing sunglasses even though we were inside and it was night. “In short, you are paid to project Incognito.” Someone started applauding, then tried to play it off like he was swatting at a fly when no one else joined in. The owner nodded and left the room. Orientation was over, we guessed, and everyone left.

And then the night after that was my first night working the door. Thank God they paired me up with someone. He was a big guy with a shaved head with muscles so imposing and natural it looked like he had popped out of the womb with them and had never had to lift a weight in his life. “I’m the brawn,” he introduced himself, “I understand you’re the brains,” even though he was smarter than me and I knew it within an hour. His name was James.

“So you went through orientation and all that?” he asked. No one was here, yet, because it was only 10. Clubgoers in Hartford, I learned that summer, show up fashionably later than anyone else in the country, perhaps, to compensate for the unfashionability of all other things Hartford and the griminess of their clubs in particular. There is no pride in being between Boston and New York when you are objectively worse than both of them. And so you do things like stay in until 12 so that other people think you have better things to do, or whatever the motivation behind that kind of behavior is.

Anyway, he had asked me if I had been through orientation, and I nodded. “Probably went nuts trying to make you proud to work at this place,” he said, and I nodded again. “Let me tell you something. Don’t care. No matter what they say, they don’t pay you to care and they don’t pay you enough to care. Do your job and deposit your checks and go home and forget all about what you did you earn them. When you get wrapped up in caring—that’s when they have you where they want you, and that’s where you lose your mind.”

It all sounded a touch anti-capitalistic to me, and I told him so. He considered it and shrugged. “It’s not capitalism I have the problem with, though I’m not wild about it. It’s the capitalists. From top to bottom, because us at the bottom—we need to watch ourselves, because we’re always just this close to being morally complicit in the worst of it.

“Do you know how many jobs I’ve had?” he went on. “Of course you don't, but neither do I, that's the point I was trying to make. I get a new one every few months. The day you start thinking of yourself as if you were a bouncer, or a cashier, or a waiter or a CEO—I don’t care what it is—that’s the very day and the very hour you quit, and not a moment later.”

I asked James how he could do that. “Don’t you need to feel like you’re a part of something?” I asked, fumbling for words, because what he said had shaken me, and made me feel like I was responsible for preserving something, whose existence I hadn't even been aware of until now.

“To have a name, and a place, and people who care about you—that is the greatest blessing a person can hope for,” he said. “But when you begin to believe that you need a title for any of that—that’s when something is awfully wrong.” He lit a cigarette and shook his head, like he was ashamed of himself for it. “You’re not Chris the bouncer. You’re Chris the person, and never let anything else take primacy over that.”

I could feel it making sense, and it made me pretty depressed, so I sulked against the wall for a few hours, checking ids when I had to without making eye contact with anyone. All night long, the stench of hair products was overwhelming.

James must have seen that his advice was having some unintended effects, because he grabbed me by the shirt and didn’t push me up against the wall exactly, in a threatening sort of way, but it was more like he placed me against the brick building, like you do to a baseball bat in your garage when you don’t want it to fall. This despite a long line of tipsy people anxious to get into Incognito.

“There was a point to all the things I said to you, and it wasn’t to make you stare at your shoes all night. People don’t understand that the world isn’t made up of—you know, things. It’s made up of other people, and the silly little things those people become. But at its base, it’s people.” The whole time pointing, like he was lecturing all six or seven billion of us. It was either brilliant or it was gibberish, and I’m not sure it wasn’t both.

But either way, I didn’t know what moral I was meant to take away from all this talk, so I asked him. He shook his head, like I was going about it all wrong. “Every second you stand here with your hands in your pockets and you don’t meet someone new or learn something new about someone you know is a second wasted.” He probably got angry at me because I just stood there and nodded, but what can you say after a thing like that? I didn’t talk to anyone for the rest of the night, but I did study the faces of all the people who walked into the club and tried to guess what they might be like at home, when it was quiet, and they didn’t have to go through the grinding motions of adult fun.

Over the next few weeks, I continued to study these strange people as I let them into the club and James became something of a friend. Which was nice, because it made the hours go by much faster. He would ask me easy questions like what did I want to study and what kind of girls did I like and what did I enjoy doing when I wasn’t working and the answer was invariably “I don’t know.” Because I thought that was the real answer. But talking with James was a kind of therapy, in a way, and a lot of those nights, I would come up with a real answer before the night was over, and it made me feel like a real fleshed-out human being instead of just an outline, or a formless cloud of concepts and morals and dysfunctions and regrets that didn’t cohere into anything and probably never would. We would take the same breaks and during that half hour the people who wanted to get in would just have to wait, and I got the idea that any chance I had at becoming a functional adult was tied up in this strange bouncer who had been a hundred other things as well and his wise counsel. He knew things I didn’t.

There was a bartender there, named Lindsay or Lynsey or something. We’ll say Lindsay. Anyway, this Lindsay girl—it was pretty clear that she took a shine to me. She was OK, I guess. We’d chat in the break room when were in there at the same time and she would try a little too hard and I would make things more difficult by not really trying at all, because I was at a point in my life where I didn’t really go out looking for anything, because I was waiting to be inspired.

James saw all this, of course, and encouraged me to ask her out sometime. I told him I didn’t think I would be doing that.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” was my answer. “Why should I?” As if his question and mine were equal propositions.

“I can’t tell you why you should. But I do know that there are about a million reasons, even if I couldn’t name them. And you’ll never know what they are either, until you actually do it. But I do know there are a million reasons to spend a night with anyone on the planet.” A woman in her thirties wearing a skirt that covered nothing was throwing up on the far side of the parking lot. A stranger stood a few feet away, waiting to escort her to his car.

“She just doesn’t interest me,” I told him.

So what interests you, if it’s not other people?”

I didn’t want to say “I don’t know” again, so I tried to come up with a stupid answer. “The infinity of the universe,” I said, even though I'd never really thought about that either, and it's kind of dull to consider, I think.

“The universe isn’t infinite,” James said matter-of-factly, “and even if it is, it doesn’t really matter because you’re stuck here on earth. The good thing is there's enough of them to make the rest of the universe entirely superfluous. Infinity is other people.”

I didn’t agree with him, though. I felt like I knew every single person in the state of Connecticut. Not personally, of course. But it was a small, insulated place, this state of three million, and there were only so many types, and I had met them all. Trot out anyone from Greenwich to Putnam and I’d met the type. No one could surprise me anymore and I’d be at a restaurant or at the gas station and I’d find myself picking out strangers and comparing them all to people I knew and I’d find a place for every one of them and I'd feel like I couldn’t breathe. I knew everyone and there were no exceptions, and I would have given anything to meet an exception.

“You’re lucky to have this job, let me tell you,” James went on. “This is exactly what you need. You need hundreds of strangers streaming past you every night so you can learn something about someone who doesn’t live in your house.”

“I don’t need to learn anything about these people, because they don’t matter to me and I don’t matter to them.”

“And you’ll never matter to any of them if you’d rather stare at your shoelaces than look another person in the eyes.” That seemed like kind of a cheap shot.

“I don’t need them to matter to me,” I muttered, and then I tried to make sense of what I said and figure out if it was what I meant.

“Oh, I know your type,” James said, as if he was just figuring it out, even though he had known everything from the beginning, I’m sure of it. “You’ve never met a person you couldn’t live without. And maybe for you it's true, and there isn't someone out there you can't live without, in the individual sense, but you can’t live without all of them, and if you don’t learn that now, you’re only going to learn it some day when you’re all alone.”

“You can’t make friends with everyone you meet,” I offered feebly, even as I was wondering, can you? Is it really that simple? All you have to do it get to know someone? I had never imagined that anyone would want to talk to me, and so this idea of James’s that all I had to do was walk up to someone and give them my name and a firm handshake and start chatting seemed absurd. I didn’t have the capacity for it. Mentally, psychologically, physically even. It was as if he had told me that if I had started flapping my arms I would start flying. “I don’t get along well with people,” I told him, which was true enough, “and it’s always my fault,” which was also true, but it didn’t seem relevant to what James was trying to tell me. “One day I’ll get along with someone, and it will be easy, and until then I'll just wait.”

“I’m not telling you that you have to go out there and become buddies with every guy on the street, and take all the girls to dinner and meet their parents. Sure, you won’t get along with everyone, but for God’s sake, you can’t be afraid of that. Your life—I can see it. You live like you’re merging onto the highway. You maintain your speed, and if someone’s next to you, you drive next to them for a little while, and then you take different exits, and that’s that and you never see that person again. You can’t live like that. You can't live without a few collisions, because that’s the only way you learn things about yourself, and that’s the only way you feel things intensely, which is the meaning of life.” The guy had the gall to tell me what the goddamn meaning of life was. And he might have really figured it out, for himself at least, which is the most important thing, and I loved him for it.

He kept telling me these things, and I kept quietly disagreeing, and he kept breaking me down and almost convincing me. It was the Fourth of July, by this point. Incognito had a special Fourth of July night. It was special because inside it was exactly the same as it always was except the cover charge was five dollars more than usual. It was the most popular night of the year, no contest. I could no longer stand it.

“These people are awful,” I told James, even as I was waving them through the doors. “Every one of them. They don’t care about anything except breasts and asses and the drinks in front of them. They come here to pair off and fuck each other and never speak to each other again. They have boring jobs and they live in boring condos in a boring city, so they compensate by driving flashy cars and wearing awful clothes, and every night I stand here I hate these people just that much more.” James was smiling, and I still don’t know if he was smiling because he was proud of me or because I was so incredibly wrong or because Mr. Grisetti was standing behind me the whole time.

“This way,” he told me. I could hear James chuckling. I didn’t think anything I had said was wrong, or that I had any reason to apologize to these people who thought nothing of me even if they had heard me, but I still felt like I wanted to die.

Mr. Grisetti brought me into his office and told me to sit down. “Just who the fuck do you think you are?” he asked. The question sounded pretty rhetorical. I was too terrified to move, so I just sat there, not blinking, like I thought he was a T. Rex and if I sat perfectly still he wouldn’t see me. “I’ll tell you who you are. You’re a pathetic little worm. You’re worth nothing to me and you mean nothing to me, and you don’t mean a goddamn thing to anyone inside that club, or anyone on this fucking planet. Were you to disappear tomorrow, no would notice. Are we clear so far?” I nodded, because the guy was talking my language. “The only reason I’m not firing you right now is because you don’t mean a shit to me, and you don’t mean a shit to anyone in this club. Were you anything more than subhuman, you would be on your way home right now without a job. As it stands right now, you’re going back out there and you’re going to continue doing your fucking job and you’re going to keep your fucking mouth shut for the rest of the summer and you’re going to thank me for being such a magnanimous fucking boss.” I jumped out of the chair and was out of his office before you could say worthless.

I started crying on my way back outside. A real indulgent cry, where I let the tears just run down my cheeks and stain everything red. I took my spot next to James and wished I could disappear into the brick wall, become a part of the building if I had to.

It wasn’t long before James noticed what kind of shape I was in, and got furious. “What the fuck did he say to you?” he whispered, homicide in his voice. I shook my head, so he grabbed my face so I had no choice but to look him directly in the eyes. “You never ever let a person talk to you like that, whatever he said. You never let a person tell you he’s worth more than you are. Do you understand me?” I sobbed a little bit. Nineteen years old, and I’m a bouncer at a nightclub and I’m sobbing. What a pitiful sight. No wonder it had such an effect.

“No job, no relationship, no amount of money is worth this. It’s not worth giving up your dignity, and it’s not worth feeling like less of a human. No fucking job—” and he stormed off towards Mr. Grisetti’s office. I followed him, because I was scared.

The door was shut, so James slammed it with his fist, maybe just to knock, but the door swung open. Grisetti had been studying something on his desk and he looked up like he knew he was going to die just then. “What the hell—” but by then James had hit him in the face. Mr. Grisetti cupped his hand up to his nose to catch the blood that was pouring out. James was already down the hall.

“That’s how you handle a situation like that,” James said. I couldn’t believe it. I was a little scared that he had done this for me, because what did it mean, that James would slug the guy who signed his checks because a fragile kid got pushed over the edge, if he wasn’t there already? Was I complicit? James was milling around, trying to decide what to do, when the police pulled up.

It surprised the both of us, because Mr. Grisetti wasn’t the type to call the police for any reason. He was more the type to hire someone to hit you with a lead pipe and flee the scene. Law enforcement didn't seem to have a place in a seedy little corner of the city like this, but there they were. The two officers walked up to us and Grisetti--who was outside by this point--pointed to James, and they took him away in handcuffs.

“I hope you learned something,” Grisetti said to James as the cops lowered him into their car. But I’m not sure that it wasn’t directed at me, and that James wasn’t the one speaking, because the way he was looking at me, I could tell that’s what he would have said had he been given the chance.

James would have wanted me to quit the job. Of course. Not because he had been thrown in jail, or not just because of it anyway. But I didn’t. I did take Lindsay out to lunch once, in August, just before I went back to school. We barely talked and I didn’t call her back.