Bouncers and Bodyguards (6 page)

I really miss the old days. I actually bang one off thinking about them. When my cock won’t get rock hard or something, I don’t think of a bird, I think about the old days.

According to his website, ex-London gangster Dave Courtney has been shot and stabbed, had his nose bitten off and has had to kill to stay alive. He has had long-standing friendships with many notorious hard men including ‘Pretty Boy’ Roy Shaw, the late Lenny McLean and the Krays. Amongst many other things, Dave has managed nightclubs and run security and debt-collecting companies – and he has been called ‘King of the Underworld’ and the ‘most feared man in Britain’. In 1995, Dave arranged security for the funeral of Ronnie Kray.

Dave lives at Camelot Castle, south-east London, and has had number-one best-sellers with
The Ride’s Back On
,
F**k the Ride
,
Stop the Ride I Want to Get Off
,
Raving Lunacy
,
Heroes and Villains
and
Dodgy Dave’s Little Black Book
. Dave has also appeared in a few films, including
The Krays
,
Clubbing to Death
,
Six Bend Trap
and
Hell to Pay
.

Dave now does a lot of charity work for the Prince’s Trust and is a patron of the children’s ADHD charity Misunderstood.

‘Y
ou’re a bit big to be a fucking glass collector, aren’t you?’ Those were the words that led me into my 15 year love–hate affair with the door. They came from a man called Ramsey, a huge highlander who worked as the bouncer in the bar I had just got a job in. I was a 17-year-old, acne-riddled boy working in a shit hole of a bar collecting glasses at weekends, the first job that I’d managed to get since moving to Aberdeen from a small town called Thurso in the far north of Scotland.

‘What in the fuck are you doing collecting glasses, Scott?’ Ramsey said, flashing me his trademark huge grin whilst knocking back his usual pre-shift treble vodka and coke. ‘You should be on the fucking door with me!’

I couldn’t figure out what to say to him. How could I explain that I was as timid as a field mouse and that the very thought of standing at a pub doorway telling people that they couldn’t get in scared the shit out of me? How could I explain that I had no self-confidence thanks to a neglected upbringing by an alcoholic mother and that I was terrified of confrontation thanks to repeated beatings throughout my school years by older kids? I’d been working as a glass collector for a month, and it was hard enough to deal with people accusing you of stealing their drinks, even though their glasses were empty when you picked them up, or the assholes who wouldn’t move out of your way when you were trying to manoeuvre through a packed crowd with armfuls of pint and shot glasses.

Before I could tell Ramsey that there was no way I could be a bouncer, he had stormed off toward the bar, where he’d spotted the manageress. After a few minutes of arguing with her, he walked back towards me with a big grin on his face, threw me a bow tie and said, ‘You’re on the door with me tonight, lad. We’re going to have fun!’

So that was it – I was a doorman. The only good I could see in all of this was the big jump in wages, but then I didn’t think that it compensated for the fear that was pumping its way through me the first night working on the door. My voice was squeaky, making me sound like Mickey Mouse whenever a customer asked me a question. I must have run to the toilet for a terror-induced shit about five times in that first hour, and I was sweating more than Michael Jackson having a browse through Mothercare.

Ramsey, however, loved the whole situation; finally, he had a fellow highlander with him on the door – he had a deep distrust of the city ‘lowlanders’. We also discovered that our parents used to live a few doors apart in the same street, so most of our chat was all about the home country that we’d left to find work in the big city. Having Ramsey there made it easier for me to relax, and over time he helped me (unwittingly, it appeared) to develop my self-confidence and put my fears aside. No longer was I frozen stiff when speaking to people I didn’t know; no longer was I terrified of confrontation. Hell, being on the door was probably the very best therapy I could have had, and it was thanks to that big, usually drunk highlander who threw me a bow tie.

After a while, I discovered that I loved my job. I loved meeting new people and working in new venues. I loved watching the ebb and flow of a crowd as the night grew long, watching and scanning for any possible ‘hot spots’. And as much as I abhorred violence of any kind, I loved the ‘I survived that shit!’ feeling you would get as you wound down from the adrenalin surge you’d just had after you’d been in the middle of a massive ‘Battle Royale’. That’s if you managed to make it out unscathed, of course.

In my 15 years working the doors, I’ve seen too many good men and women getting seriously hurt because of the stupidity of the half-pint heroes – people who can’t go on a night out with friends and drink sensibly. I’ve seen friends go to hospital after having their face sliced open by broken bottles, being left with partial vision after being smashed in the face with a stool or chair, or having their skulls fractured by a well-placed kick when they’re down on the ground. These are people whose lives have been irrevocably changed thanks to the actions of some pissed-up bastard who thinks that it’s his God-given right to get drunk and fight, and that a night out isn’t a good one unless they come home covered in someone else’s blood or wake up in a cell covered in their own piss, vomit and shit after ‘sleeping it off’ for the night. To these vermin this is the sign of a good night out, a night out that they can boast about to their workmates the next day over the water cooler. To me it’s the sign of a deep-rooted problem with their upbringing and their psychological make-up.

I have personally suffered numerous concussions, broken fingers, broken ribs, 14 or more broken noses, several scars thanks to glasses, ashtrays or bottles being raked across me, attempted stabbings, one successful stabbing and teeth smashed out thanks to several boots to the head. But if I bloody someone’s nose in self-defence, suddenly I’m an out-of-control monster and a thug who thrives on bloodshed and bullying – or at least that’s how I’ll be portrayed in the newspapers, which will invariably carry the story in big letters on their front page the next day.

My views on the state of today’s drinking culture and my complete disdain for the weekend whisky warriors aside (and before I go completely off topic), I mentioned the elation you feel after surviving a battle in your venue. The feeling you get as you sit down with your team after your shift knowing that you’ve all had your shit on the line and you’ve survived is one of the best bonding experiences you can have. That’s a reason why I love the job and all the crap that goes with it. You have to trust that the guy beside you in the black tie can hold his shit together when the proverbial hits the fan. When he does, it builds a trust between you and your teammate that is, in my humble opinion, rarely found in any other line of work. These are men and women you are counting on to save your ass when you’re up the creek without a paddle, the very same people who through their actions demonstrate that they are to be trusted and in doing so become some of your closest friends.

I have made friends through this job that I would go to the grave for, people whom I would trust with my life – if it came to the crunch, friends I would do anything for. I’ve travelled the length and breadth of the country to help these people out. I’ve kicked down doors with my big, black Magnum boots to stop people threatening and intimidating those close to me, and I’ve lent a shoulder to those friends whose lives have crumbled and fallen around them. And never have I doubted that they would do exactly the same for me or that they would go out of their way to support and protect me. That’s what doing the doors means to me: building friendships so intense that people become family. And throughout my years of bouncing, I’ve built up a massive family.

However, on the flipside, the job also brings you into contact with people who will become your mortal enemy, the weekend whisky warriors who take you throwing their drunken ass out of a club as a personal insult and will hold that grudge against you for a very long time. In the past, I’ve had to change my mobile phone number more times than I can remember to avoid the prank calls and death threats from those I’ve thrown out of bars, sometimes for something as simple as them being too drunk to stand. These people, who take being asked to leave as a slight on their holier-than-thou character, will go out of their way to hound and harass you. Most of the time, a quiet word in their ‘shell like’ normally stops the harassment quick sharp, but at other times it goes well past the point of annoying phone calls.

I remember one time I came home to the flat I shared with a former girlfriend to find my front door loose on its hinges when I put my key in the lock and opened it. My girlfriend, who’d been home alone, came running to me and dove into my arms, sobbing uncontrollably into my chest. After a while of reassuring her, she managed to tell me that she had been lying in bed at about 1 a.m. when she had heard someone pounding at the door, shouting my name. She kept the lights off and looked out into the hallway toward the front door. Back then, most flats in the area had strengthened, frosted-glass doors, and she could see that there were at least three people outside, pounding on the door. Luckily, she had more sense than to go and answer it; instead, she sat down in the hall and watched in terror as the three figures continued shouting my name and booting at the door.

For about 15 minutes, they continued to pound on the glass, trying desperately to break their way in – all the while my ex sat on the floor, hugging her knees and sobbing quietly, terrified that they might make it into the flat and too scared to move toward the phone in case the three figures, which she guessed to be all male, noticed the movement through the frosted glass and intensified their attack on the door.

Finally, they gave up after realising that they weren’t going to get through or that there really was nobody home. It was about 15 minutes after they left until my ex finally felt that it was safe to move. She got to her feet, double checked the locks on the door were still secure and then ran to the bedroom, where she fell to the floor beside the bed and sobbed uncontrollably until I came home little over an hour later.

Initially, I was furious that someone would attack my home, although I had no idea who had done this or why. I banged on my neighbour’s door until they answered and demanded to know why they hadn’t seen fit to call the police when they could hear the commotion outside. All I got was apology after apology as the young lady I was speaking to stood crying at her door asking if my partner was OK. Sadly, this was an area of the city where incidents like that happened all the time, and the residents who weren’t drug dealers, prostitutes or junkies were too scared to report any crime in case the criminals found out it was them and targeted them next.

I was furious. Almost blind with rage, I stormed out into the street, my ex-partner pleading for me not to leave her in the flat alone. I stood in the road furious, yelling out for whoever it was that attacked my home to come and get me, but apart from curtains being twitched all along the road by concerned neighbours, nobody responded to my call. There was nothing else I could do that night except go back into the flat and reassure my partner. Over the next few days, I put out feelers all round the city trying to find out who the lads were, and it wasn’t until the following weekend that the information I wanted came my way.

One of my good friends who worked at another venue had found out that the three lads had come looking for me to give me a beating. It seemed that I had thrown one of them out of the club I worked in because he was drunk, and in doing so I had embarrassed him in front of the lady he was with. In an attempt to save face, he had orchestrated the attack on my home when he knew that I would be at work so that the two friends he’d roped in to help him out would think that he was some kind of hard bastard when they beat up on my door.

The lad had taken the simple act of me throwing him out of a bar as such an insult to his manhood that he attacked my home and terrified the woman I lived with. My good friend supplied me with the young man’s address, and he and I enjoyed a good talk over tea and biscuits. Well, that’s maybe a slight simplification of what happened, but I’ll leave you to do the colouring in.

This was one of the few times that nearly killed my love for the door and almost wiped out any fondness I had for my profession and nearly poisoned me against ever stepping foot on the door again. I can deal with a lot in my life and have a very long fuse when it comes to people attacking me either verbally or physically on the door, but when it arrives at your home it’s a different matter entirely. Luckily, with the support of those around me, I put my anger behind me and got back to doing what I love.

However, like any love, it’s constantly tested. Time can pick holes in it and start to blur the parts that encouraged your affection. Time erodes things that in the past seemed new and vibrant, and outside influences spread a cancer in the thing you love that force it to die in front of your eyes. I’ve tried looking through rose-tinted glasses as the job evolves around me, with promises from those in power that things are changing for the better and that what will emerge out the other side will be a more controlled, regulated, professional and better industry than we have presently. However, all the signs so far look like the industry is heading for an iceberg and we should man the lifeboats as soon as possible.