It’s not a news flash, but let’s establish a fact: it’s winter in St. Louis. Among many other things, this season brings a change to job descriptions. Maybe it’s a job that’s a true career, or it could just be about making a little pick-up money. In either case, when it’s winter and your job is based on spending time outdoors, everything seems a little more... heavy, somehow. And only those that spend hours in the wintry air can fully appreciate the true meaning of “cold.”
At the risk of gender neutrality, let’s talk about doormen for a second, who happen to usually be, well, men.
With the holidays approaching, people buy things. Without heeding their surroundings, they leave these things in their cars. Bags filled with packing peanuts are just as appealing as sacks of jewels, when viewed from outside a vehicle’s locked doors and windows. The possibility of what just might be inside those unmarked bags is plenty tempting to a thief. At some bars and restaurants, that’s what doormen are primarily there to do: to eyeball the block and keep your stuff yours.
At other places, it’s all about keeping out the kids. And the holidays impact this piece of the job, too. With school out for the term and students flooding back home, the temptation to employ that $70 fake ID that you ordered on the web is sorely there, especially because it worked so well in the youth-heavy bars of Chicago or Columbia or Carbondale. In this case, too, doormen are best-served by stopping the under-ager in the great outdoors, before a commotion can be made inside.
But the job of a doorman, in the bitterest chill of winter or in the middle of a gripping heat wave, is a streaky one, with long stretches of inactivity punctuated by the briefest of action. The job, then, requires a degree of patience and mental acuity, more so than the takedown skills of an MMA fighter. Granted, a doorman with size and combat experience is a nice chip for a certain kind of bar owner to employ, but having one with an innate sense of the surroundings is often just as useful.
And in time, you do learn your surroundings. Not that you want to learn certain things. You just do. You know how to identify the sound of a dumpster lid falling, as compared to a car door being jacked. You know who walks their dogs around the block, at what time. You can figure out what people are ordering at the greasy-spoon across the street, when the wind’s blowing north. And you can strangely identify time passing, without the use of a clock.
That’s especially true in the wintertime, when every minute and every second tick by a bit more slowly. On those nights, when it’s too cold and windy to read a magazine, when it’s too icy to take walks around the block for pure exercise, you can not only count down the minutes ’til last call, you can count down the days until the weather breaks in March.
Some of us make a bit of our living by working a door.
And not a one of us isn’t looking forward to spring.
