The Wild Bunch is a draft chapter six (Bergen anno 1985) for your perusal, I pray that it is enticing, the book is going to be quite a ride…
“It’s all gone Pete Tong.” – Paul Oakenfold
Paal was working as a bouncer at La Mirage and by that had joined the fraternity of Bergen hardmen. Working on the doors also meant becoming accepted by the bouncers at the other pubs and clubs too. This was a band of brothers; conspicuous because they all walked with the same confident swagger, comfortable that everywhere they went where alcohol was sold, they would be treated with respect. There were plenty of perks to being a known face around Bergen; girls were plentiful, for a start. And Paal’s new circle of friends guaranteed that life would never be dull.
The Wild Bunch
Checking IDs on the door was essential. Should the police find an underage drinker on the premises, La Mirage could lose its alcohol license, and that would be the end of that. The young men working security on the door downstairs also decided who could come in and who should be denied entry. Offending them would be a severe blow to somebody’s social life, and not to mention their sex life. Youthful romances typically began in Bergen’s pubs and nightclubs. So, most people were well behaved when queuing outside, but there were always exceptions.
Identifying trouble
Identifying trouble before it started was an acquired talent, necessary to the job, a bouncer’s sixth sense. Couples that weren’t typically big drinkers and didn’t get out much would often fight each other when they got drunk enough to do what they never did at home – speak their minds. Groups of working-class young men standing too close to groups of the children of the privileged middle-class were likely to turn on each other on nights when males outnumbered female customers. And worse than the nasty drunks were the masochistic self-loathing drunks that would go to great lengths to get somebody to hurt them, and they typically didn’t care who it was.
Walking Disasters
These walking disasters came in all shapes and sizes and would be nasty and aggressive to provoke somebody to hit them. They were always happiest when they’d bled profusely or broken their nose and lost a tooth, or two. A bouncer was expected to be proactive and step in before blood was spilt, whenever possible. Reading the mood of the room, so they knew when to move in to calm things down.
The Wild Bunch
At La Mirage, like everywhere else, there was a skim on the door money, and the bouncers shared it between them. It was tolerated by the management as long as they didn’t get overly greedy and take too much. Paal refused to take his cut on principle, and that meant more for the others, so nobody asked questions. He was content with what he was earning every night and didn’t want anybody to have something they could hold over him later. He had plans for the future, and working on the doors was something he expected to be temporary.
When trouble kicked off
When trouble kicked off at the club, the bouncers were supposed to be impartial. Their job was to stop a fight quickly and throw out both sides and any other troublemakers that had been part of it. But, like everything else, impartiality had its limits. One night, the shout went up, “Fight!” and Paal and Knut hurried upstairs to deal with the problem.
Knut had been working at La Mirage for a while and knew what he was doing. He was short and stocky, weighing in at around ninety kilos, and he was a committed power-lifter and street fighter. Of all the bouncers, Knut was the quietest – a thinker philosopher with a big right hook. Knut liked his privacy and was secretive about his background and where he came from. On the rare occasions that he did say something, the words had meaning, and the accent was Bergen local.
The Wild Bunch
Found what they were looking for
Paal and Knut found what they were looking for just inside the main entrance, beside the pool table, and one of the troublemakers was Geir, their friend and a member of their local gym. He had arrived at the club a little earlier with two young women, his girlfriend and her friend, and they had been playing pool together. Both girls were dressed to the nines and had the kinds of bodies that would always get attention. But Geir wasn’t the kind to put up with people disrespecting his women.
Geir had intense, piercing grey-blue eyes, and a face marked with the kind of scars that can only come from fighting. He looked mean, and most people steered clear of him. It was undoubtedly unwise to antagonise or confront him.
It was evident to Paal and Knut what had happened before they got there, somebody had entered into a disagreement with Geir and hit him across his nose with a pool cue. This deduction was not hard because there was a broken pool cue on the floor, and Geir’s nose was flattened across his face, a mess of blood and torn flesh.
The man who had swung the cue probably didn’t know that Geir was an up and coming boxer at his local boxing club. Well known for being very talented with his fists, or that he had worked on the doors in the tough neighbourhoods of Fyllingsdalen or that he was presently a bouncer at one of the other clubs in Bergen. The man seemed to know he had trodden on a viper’s nest now though because Geir was rhythmically beating him to a pulp with both fists.
Faced with a dilemma
Paal and Knut were faced with a dilemma. Geir was their training partner from the gym in Lille Ovregaten, and the man taking the beating had apparently done something to deserve it. The rules were, when the bouncers saw a fight, they were supposed to stop it and throw both parties out. However, there was no hard and fast rule about how long they could take to assess the situation before they jumped in, so Paal and Knut stood with their hands in their pockets evaluating things and watching their friend land fist after fist on the man.
When the fight was over, they only threw the now semi-conscious man out onto the street. When they got back upstairs, Geir was trying to talk, but he sounded like a man with a chronic head cold, and it wasn’t easy to make out what he was saying. He was leaning over his girlfriend, and Paal’s guess was the conversation had started when she had said something like, “You’re bleeding.”
The Wild Bunch
Nose squashed across his face
Without the aid of a nose, it being squashed across his face, he sounded adenoidal when Paal heard him say, “You’re girlfriend’s bleeding too, isn’t she?”
“What do you mean?’ she asked.
“You told me in the car,”
“Told you what?”
“That she’s bleeding. When I asked if she was coming home with us tonight, you said she couldn’t.”
You’ve taken a knock on the head, maybe you should sit down,” she said.
“No, I’m alright. I remember, you told me she was bleeding, in the car,” Geir insisted.
“I don’t understand,’ she told him.
“Her handbag,” he said, sounding so adenoidal she wasn’t sure she had understood.
“Her handbag?” she asked in a worried voice.
“Yes, I need her tampons,” he told her.
The Nose reset
Confused, the other girl reached into her handbag and handed him the small box of tampons. Geir removed two tampons from the little packet and walked over to a mirror on the wall. He grabbed his smashed nose between his thumb and fingers and reset it in front of the mirror.
The Wild Bunch
Then he stuck a tampon up each nostril to stop the bleeding, went to the toilets to wash away the blood and when he came back he grinned at Paal and Knut, then walked over to the bar to order himself a drink.
For the rest of the night, every time he took a sip of his drink, the two pieces of string dangling from the tampons up his nostrils would fall into his glass and annoy him, but it made everybody else laugh.
Geir was hard; tough as nails, a real piece of work and would become a close friend and business partner in the years ahead. Paal and Knut had done the right thing. When you worked on the doors in Bergen, you looked after your own.
The Waterfront
The waterfront of Bergen is a picture postcard of yachts and brightly coloured wooden Hanseatic, commercial historical buildings in front of a high green hill with mountains behind. In the lanes and alleyways behind Bergen’s waterfront, you find the charming bars and restaurants popular with locals and tourists alike.
A bouncer at one of the waterfront bars had been attacked by a group of men, and discretion being the better part of valour had retreated and was watching things deteriorating fast from the doorway. A US Navy ship was in the harbour, and the crew had been given shore leave. Six of them were in the bar, drunk, loud, throwing their weight around and bullying both staff and customers. He sent up a flare to La Mirage and Christian nightclubs from the telephone in the cubicle just inside the door and was told help was on its way.
Christian nightclub was named after its location in Christian Michelsens gate, not far from the waterfront. Being closer, the bouncers ran down the hill to answer the call for help. At La Mirage the boys piled into cars and burnt rubber exiting the car park. The Christian crew arrived first with the vehicles from La Mirage pulling up shortly after. As the two groups came together, they shook hands to formalise their alliance.
Motley crew of Bergen bouncers
While the motley crew of Bergen bouncers stood on the cobblestones being briefed on the situation inside the bar one of them brought up the fact that they all wore shirts with sewn-on badges of their places of work. On the pavement, just outside the bar, they all took off their shirts, turned them inside out and put them back on.
Then they charged through the door, and all hell broke loose. Fists, elbows and feet were used on the surprised bullies in their pretty white uniforms. The customers had already moved as far away from the sailors as possible, leaving plenty of room for fighting. Paal remembered the bullies that had made his life a misery on Litlesotra and went in hard. It wasn’t long before the white sailor uniforms were splattered with blood.
A Giant Black Sailor
The sailors were drunk and had little hope of winning the fight. Only one, a giant black sailor, put up any real resistance but he was outnumbered, surrounded, and eventually, he took a severe beating too. The fight had only lasted a few minutes, and the US Navy was soundly defeated. The six prisoners were unceremoniously dragged out and dumped on the cold cobblestones of the city’s waterfront for their military police to collect and take back to the ship. It took three Norwegians to carry the enormous black sailor out of the bar. The Battle of Bergen was over.
Such events led to stricter controls on shore leave from American ships and in the future MPs would patrol the waterfront and keep their sailors from misbehaving. This ended the violent confrontations between drunken American seamen and Bergen’s bouncers.
The Wild Bunch
Saturday nights after closing
On Saturday nights after closing La Mirage and telling all the customers to go home, the bouncers would open the back door so their friends could walk around the building and come back inside. The clubs were closed on Sundays, so Saturday was the one night of the week the staff could go a little wild in the knowledge they could spend all the following day in bed recuperating.
Later, a few of the bouncers from other pubs and clubs in Bergen would arrive. Lock-ins would be all-nighters and bar staff and bouncers would party together with their friends until six in the morning. Because none of them had been drinking during their shifts, alcohol was consumed at a frantic pace to play catch up as the night turned into morning.
One of the waitresses, a well-built young lady, who liked a drink and had a reputation for being something of a nymphomaniac when she got inebriated was well known for wanting rough sex and demanding her sex partners talk dirty to her. Kinky in appearance as well as deeds, she had dyed blonde hair with colourful streaks and had a rubber fetish. She would arrive at nightclubs and parties in a bright red rubber raincoat even in summer, and the assumption was that she never wore anything underneath. She was said to be quite a handful in every way, and the bouncers mostly stayed away.
The wild bunch
The late night DJ
Her new boyfriend was the late-night DJ at Bergen’s first independent radio station. They broadcast from the attic of one of the historical buildings a couple of streets back from the waterfront. One night she suggested they all leave the lock-in and continue the party at the radio station where her boyfriend was working the graveyard shift alone. Paal and a dozen of La Mirage’s rowdy partiers followed her across town to the building and up to the attic.
The Wild Bunch
The radio station was a reception room and a small, soundproofed booth where the turntables and broadcasting equipment were kept. The La Mirage crew had brought a few bottles with them, and the party continued in the reception area. While the disc jockey played records in the booth those in the outer room drank and talked. Occasionally a drunk would unsuccessfully try and chat up one of La Mirage’s waitresses. But it wasn’t that kind of party, more a continuation of their work environment, so everybody was on their best behaviour. The disc jockey’s girlfriend drank a lot, and she was rarely on her best behaviour, even when she was sober.
The door of the booth had been left open, and the party noises were carried across the airwaves. Fortunately, most of the city was still asleep. Shortly before six, the now soused waitress entered the booth, closed the door behind her and, in a voice hoarse with alcohol and desire, demanded immediate satisfaction from her boyfriend. He didn’t need to be asked twice.
The Microphone
The microphone switched off during songs, had been left on in the scramble to make space on the desk. Unbeknownst to the disc jockey, the filthy phrases that would be employed at the young lady’s insistence would be broadcast to the waking city. The copulating couple were also oblivious to all the noses pressed against the outside of the soundproof booth’s glass window, watching their every move.
It was now Sunday morning, and Bergen’s most upstanding senior citizen was getting ready to go to church. Turning the radio in his kitchen on, as he prepared breakfast on the stove, he heard the clear voices of a man and a woman and the squelching sounds of sex.
The wild bunch
“How’s that, you dirty bitch?”
“Harder, harder. That’s it, that’s it.”
And so on. And so forth.
The Wife
At this point, the wife of Bergen’s most upright citizen entered the kitchen too, and she also heard the broadcast. Initially, thinking her husband had lost his mind and was intentionally listening to two people putting on a pornographic audio show, she berated him mercilessly. When she had calmed down, he explained that it was a local Bergen radio station and not something he had intentionally turned the dial on the radio to. At this juncture, she instructed her husband to immediately pick up the phone and call the police – which he did.
As the sun came up on another pious Sunday morning in Bergen, a procession of blue flashing lights wove their way through the empty backstreets behind the waterfront. The police cars screeched to a stop in the middle of the road. Uniformed officers jumped out of the vehicles, entered the building and charged up the stairs to the attic.
When the door to the radio station was thrown open all the police found was the debris of the party in the reception area and the disc jockey, alone in the booth, tidying up his records before he went home.
The police were not amused
The police were not amused, and he was taken into custody. The news spread through Bergen and by the time Sunday was over, everybody in the city had heard the story. On Monday morning the disc jockey was fired, and his promising career in independent radio was, for now, over. At La Mirage that Monday night the boys made a wise decision; from now on their lock-ins wouldn’t go mobile and would stay on the premises. The now sober, even more infamous and somewhat embarrassed waitress wholeheartedly agreed with their decision.
The wild bunch
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