I'm not fighty, but I am a bouncer. I am a bigger guy than most. And my shirt says "SECURITY" on it. I got it as a lark. A Halloween costume. I used to wear it around and people would ask which door at which bar I worked. I couldn't conceive of ever working that job until I got that job.

There are bouncers at the bar who are fighty. Very fighty indeed. One of them plays rugby and another is in a gang backed by the Mexican mafia. Rugby is cuddly and Gang-guy is very funny. When Rugby says "keep it up" three times, that means that he is going to fight you. When Gang-guy says "you don't know me" or "you don't know where I'm from," that means you had better go away or you might meet White Boy Chris or Boombah or any other colorfully named West Side Gang Guys. White Boy Chris says, on reflection, "don't ever get stabbed, because it'll never heal right and it was always, always itch."

I don't have a thing that I say. Nothing that denotes I am about to fight. Nothing that reflects having been in a fight with knives or zip guns or anything. I'm not fighty. I stand by that.

When I got the job of a bouncer, it was over the phone. Someone put me in touch with someone who hires bouncers and can do it via telephones. I felt like I should be honest lest I let someone down. I told the lady who wanted to hire me that I had never been in a fight and I didn't intend to get into one for 9.50 an hour. She asked me, "are you really six foot five?" I said "yes" and she said "you're hired."

I'm a physical presence. I smile when you come in the bar. But I have a shirt that says "SECURITY" at your eye level. I have arms as thick as your legs. You don't know I'm not fighty. And if you want me to prove I am fighty, it will not happen. Not merely because I am not fighty. Also because I have become a sort of mascot to the fighty bouncers. "Do not mess with me," I'd urge you, "or those guys will beat your ass." And they would.

There is a story about bar fights in my family. My father worked as a bartender for one night. A fight broke out. He was the biggest guy in the place. He had the best view of the fight. That was as close as he got to it. The owner of the bar asked him why he didn't jump in and break it up, via fighting. He told the owner "Mama Acker didn't raise her boys to fight." Then he was fired.

There is one other family story that springs to mind. Generations ago, when the family name was changed at Ellis Island from Achotsky to Acker, my great great great grandfather got the only job he could find. He worked for a landlord. If you couldn't pay your rent, he'd beat you up. Mama Acker may not have raised her boys to fight, but perhaps Mama Achotsky did.

Let me add to those two family stories of violence the story of the night I broke my fight cherry. 

Two Persian brothers started some shit. They were kicked out of the bar. Not by me, certainly, but by Rugby and Gang-Guy. Natch. I was door guy. Door guy doesn't leave the door, in case underage types were to try to sneak in during a skirmish. Underage types are crafty and opportunistic and all they want is to get drunk. So I sat and watched the show as Rugby and Gang-Guy gave two Persian brothers the old ear-toss.

But when the two Persian brothers stormed back in, not five minutes later, they used the door. My door. Where I was supposed to control the ebb and flow. There was nothing I could do but act. All I could think as I began my first fight was "if they had come in quietly, I never would have recognized them and they could have done whatever they wanted." I am not the best bouncer around.

But I am good enough to think this on the way to grappling the bigger of these two guys. I just held the guy tight. I established that i wasn't going to let him go. Time slowed down and I became aware of minutia, like apparently you do when adrenaline does its job. I thought "this guy's pretty strong. But not as strong as I am at all." I shifted my grip a little so as to prevent him from being able to shift away from me and maybe get a punch in or get out of my hold. And then I watched his brother. I wished that Rugby or Gang-Guy were around, but our smallest, least tough bouncer (and this isn't an indictment, just a fact, as he's probably the most level-headed bouncer of all of us) grappled with the brother. Smally didn't have as easy a time as I did, and I wanted to help him, but I couldn't let my guy go. So i watched as Smally handled himself all right and dragged his guy out the door. Then the logic part of my very own brain clicked in and I remembered that that's what you do with this type of troublemaker: You bring them outside. You don't just hold them very still until they calm down.

So I lifted my brother off the ground and carried him outside, telling him "just be cool." As if it was the kind of thing I say when I want people to be cool and let me carry them off to where they can cause no trouble. And he was. Cool. For the record, he had no choice. A police car rolled around the corner and we hailed the car like another kind of car: a taxicab.

We found out that these two Persian brothers were bouncers at a Hollywood club. In my first fight, I beat a proper bouncer. Feather in cap! My adrenaline was flowing, like it had burst the adrenaline dam. I wanted to ride the ride again, but nobody else acted up. Which is likely just as well.

When Rugby retold the story, and he did often, the two Persian brothers became two Iraqi brothers and I become an American hero. It has been pointed out that I didn't actually fight anyone. I just grabbed and carried. Which, I guess, is a nice balance between the teachings of Mamas Achotsky and Acker.