Sarah Habershon takes a very personal and navel eye-level look at our doormen.

There is a war going on outside every decent bar, club, live music venue and cocktail lounge on K’Road tonight.
It is a war that has been quietly waged every night for as long as I can remember, and losses on both sides have been huge. I’m talking about a war between Auckland’s drinking public and our fair city’s hospitality security staff. War is hell, though the fight seldom gets all that violent.
The days of bouncers emptying a room ‘spaghetti-western-sheriff’ style are long gone. Instead, the victims of this conflict – the often poorly-paid but critical frontline foot-soldiers, and the punters they protect – suffer mostly income and reputation injury.

The sole aim of most bar and club patrons is to feel comfortable letting their guard down. There to set the tone are your bouncers.
Those who protect our guests (and us) while they drink and dance are a conflicted bunch. My friend Nav is in a constant battle of the ego between his humble yet appreciative self-image and the fact that he’s amazing to behold, making Midas himself look like a cheap scam. Nav is an ‘atmosphere technician’.
Placing this guy neatly outside your front door will attract thousands of people with cash in their pockets and time on their hands. These he will then filter against overt inebriation, excessive youth or any other undesirable element. It’s all about setting the tone.
With Nav on the door, you will make lots of money; he won’t, this is just another frontline in this war of pleasure. His kind doesn’t just do security, he is security. But the kind of security offered by a $9000, ‘I am the man at everything’ leather jacket is well outside the reach of your average door-man.
Another friend, who goes by the professional pseudonym ‘42’, has been known to be on the clock 24 hours a day for up to five days straight, and walk away with $50 and a whole box of Tui. Like his urban counterpart, he often finds himself the first, last and only line of defence against angst and agro in the vast venues he watches over.
“If the first thing you show the punters is a capable and trustworthy new friend, you end up with an event full of trusting, friendly customers who can relax and enjoy themselves. Relaxed, happy people don’t look for trouble, and if a ‘situation’ arises, you’re in the company of friends. I know I’d rather that than being in a crowd of people I’d tried to intimidate.”
The best bouncer doesn’t just stand there and look the part, bullying IDs from the wallets of 24-year-old women and beating up crack fiends. Good bouncers are formidable and highly disciplined soldiers who must always be ready to lower their 6'2'' eye-level down on one knee to make sure that same 24-year-old woman feels safe whilst she sits in a puddle of her own chardonnay.
These days drugs other than alcohol and nicotine feature heavily in the bloodstreams of people out for a good time. This creates an interesting and often comic challenge for door staff, who hold a unique and intimate outside perspective on a culture of altered states. More than ever, the role of a club bouncer is to protect munted punters from their own twisted senses.
“Every night at maybe 3am they start to trickle back out in singles and pairs with their eyes popping and their sweaty shoulders heaving,” says Polish adobe outhouse Leo. “They want to tell me all sorts of things about the world and how beautiful everything is, but they need to be watched with care. The ones with the drugs have the most energy right before they fall down. Sometimes we need to crack a man’s arm to make people safe, sometimes we crack a bottle of water. Sometimes we call police, sometimes a taxi.”
Often you will see a pair of human pillars in front of the busier watering holes. Whilst one interacts jovially with prospective customers, asking for ID and smiling politely, the other will stand proud and un-moved with hands in the deep pockets of a large coat. In one hand will be a clicker-counter keeping track of numbers as they approach capacity.In the other is not only an innocuous pack of gum.
This is the ‘bad cop’. Mr Red is a kick-boxing Palmerston North bouncer who isn’t there to talk nicely. At certain drinking establishments, the patronage can get, shall we say, a little out of hand. I once had the awe-inspiring, nightmare-inducing ‘privilege’ of watching Mr Red bring four very big, ill-intentioned meat-packs to rest outside a particularly notorious pub in The North Island’s student capital, rendering the collective threat immobile with surgical precision and a minimum of cruelty.
At the end of the day it gets dark, and punters go out and get drunk. While they surrender themselves to the great tides of social recreation, there are a few who guard the coast, tirelessly scouting for hidden rocks and prowling sharks. While bar-staff scuttle the foreshore, bouncers stand outside, high and dry and ready for anything in the service of both our industry and the community at large.