Free Wild Thing by Bernard O'Mahoney, Lew Yates

I told him in no uncertain terms that he was welcome to try, but he remained where he was and continued to shout abuse. Eventually the lift arrived, he got in, the doors closed and I thought I had seen the last of him. Ten minutes later the lift doors opened and the Asian guy re-emerged. ‘You wanker! Die, you wanker!’ he screamed as he ran towards me. I stood in the door and waited for him to get within striking distance of me. With arms flailing wildly, he crashed into me. I managed to knock him back out of the door, but not before he had lunged at me with a knife and stabbed me through the right forearm. Blood poured out of the wound. I looked down at the hole in my jacket, looked down at my assailant and moved towards him. The expression on my face told him all he needed to know. Before I could grab him, he was on his feet and moving rapidly in the opposite direction to me. Instead of waiting for the lift, he jumped down the short flight of steps that led onto the multi-storey car park and ran down the exit road until he reached the ground floor. I chased him out into the street, and when he realised I was not going to give up, he sought sanctuary in a pub. I didn’t care where I caught him or who witnessed what I was going to do to him, so the fact he was in a public place meant nothing to me. The bastard was going to pay wherever he was. As I entered the pub, he stood next to the bar and picked up two glasses, one in each hand. ‘Stay back, you mad bastard!’he shouted. ‘Stay back, or I will glass you.’
    I was so relieved I had caught him and so pleased he was clearly terrified that I began to laugh. ‘You’re fucked, son,’ I said. ‘Glass me. Go on, glass me, because I am going to cut you a new arsehole.’ I picked up a glass and walked slowly towards him. Before I could reach him, two police officers burst into the bar and told me to put the glass down. My assailant was crouched down trembling in the corner of the room, so they assumed I was the aggressor and arrested me. Once outside I explained that I was a doorman and the Asian guy had stabbed me for no reason. The officers looked at my wound, told me to remain where I was, then went back into the pub to arrest the man. When they brought him outside, he was struggling and shouting that he was going to ‘do the bouncer’. Being public spirited, I decided to help the officers. I grabbed the Asian by the hair with one hand and by the seat of his trousers with the other. I lifted him until he was waist high, asked the police to open the back door of their car and then launched him head first into it.
    I returned to work, but it was made clear to me that my way of dealing with unruly customers was not acceptable. Nothing was said to my face, but there were constant snide remarks made by the management about unnecessary violence and the number of customers who were complaining. It seemed as if they were looking for an excuse to get rid of me. Inevitably they found one. Like most door staff of that era, we had a fiddle going. Customers would come in, purchase a ticket from the cashier and then hand it in to the doorman at the point of entry. These tickets would then be counted by the manager at the end of the night to ensure the cashier’s till tallied up with the number of customers who had paid to get in. For instance 1,000 tickets sold at £5 each meant there should have been £5,000 in the till. I would collect the tickets, wrap an elastic band around ten or twenty of them and then drop the tickets to a friend, who would be waiting 50 ft below in the shopping precinct. This person would then sell them to people waiting to get the lift up to the club at a discounted rate. Those who had purchased a ticket would then come into the club, show the cashier the ticket and say they had been in earlier but had popped back out for something. The cashier would wave them through, and the ticket would be handed back to me. It wasn’t exactly lucrative, but it