Wild Card
what a bouncer thinks before asking to see your id
PrintIt’s only 9 p.m., but your night is already over.
“Guys, ID’s,” says the La Negrita bartender who, up until now, has served you countless drinks without a problem. Your friend promptly pulls out her ID—she’s “21” and from “West Orange, Maryland”—and hands it over. The bartender grips the ID and stares at it. “It’s fake,” she nonchalantly says, not even making eye contact.
As you reluctantly step out of the bar, one question runs through your mind: “Why have we been turned away?” In a Columbia-centric neighborhood where half of Carman provides half the annual revenue of Morningside bars, there seems to be no reason for what just happened. Was the La Negrita lady having a bad day? Indigestion? Did you have oregano in your teeth?
For underage students, navigating New York’s bar scene can be both thrilling and terrifying. Reuben, a junior in the College who requested his last name be withheld, remembers the night that his fake ID was folded in half before his eyes. “The bouncer and I said ‘hi,’ and I thought we were cool, but he took my ID, looked at me, and completely destroyed it,” he says. “The guy just owned me.”
Ultimately, success or failure all depends on one individual: the bouncer. But what exactly is going on in a bouncer’s head when he’s shredding your ID with his bare hands? Is the process of carding as illogical as it seems?
Anna Malkan, a junior in the College, believes that there’s a tolerance for underage drinking in campus bars, which makes bouncing arbitrary. “I think they’re so aware of the fact that everyone has a fake ID that it can go either way,” she says. “If they’re in a bad mood, they can say no regardless of what they [bar-goers] show. When Pourhouse first opened, they were rejecting real IDs.”
But real bouncers say that there’s no secret to getting carded. It all comes down to being 21—whether in reality or according to a laminated piece of plastic that says you’re from Kennebunk, Maine.
Bruce, a SEAS junior who requested his last name be withheld, used to work as a bouncer at O’Connell’s. He says he would only turn people away if he was completely sure their IDs were fake—“If you were a white dude, you shouldn’t have a black guy on your ID”—or if someone tried to get in without an ID. “If I wasn’t sure, I’d let them in,” he says. “I wasn’t going to sit there and look the entire night.”
Nevertheless, a place with an easygoing reputation like O’Connell’s still has a very strict official policy. Although Bruce is a Columbia football player, he couldn’t show favoritism even when a teammate tried to enter the bar illegally. “I base[d my decision] on ID and if it looked legit. I tried to do that for everyone,” he says.
The same rule holds true on the Lower East Side. Barrie, who asked her last name to be withheld, is a GS student and a host at a swanky LES lounge. She says that having a real ID is non-negotiable for her: “If someone super fabulous comes up and is underage, I don’t care. If you don’t have an ID, you’re not going to be let inside.”
But Barrie adds that she has a hard time distinguishing whether an ID is fake. As the hostess who works weekends, when the lounge gets most of its patrons, she doesn’t have time to pour over the tiny facial details of a driver’s license picture. “If they’re handing me fake IDs, they’re [those IDs are] really good,” says Barrie.
Instead, she judges would-be patrons by their body language. Like Bambi-eyed foals, the underage call attention to themselves. As Barrie explains, “They [underage drinkers] make it almost easy to spot who has a fake IDs … They’re shy people who don’t speak, and they’re meek.”
Barrie and Bruce’s claims make sense, since the price of underage drinking is steep. According to the New York State Liquor Authority, bars that let in minors can be fined up to $10,000 per violation. Bill Crowley, the head of public affairs for the Authority, says that each violation is taken on a case-by-case basis and is dependent on a number of factors: how many minors are present, how old the minors are, how many violations the bar has had, and how long the bar has been licensed. Usually, three violations within the span of a month will result in an establishment’s liquor license being revoked.
But even with such steep fines and official policies, there’s a huge gap between words and actions. Jon, a junior in the College who requested his last name be withheld, says that when he’s out on the weekends, “probably more than half [of the drinkers in bars on campus] would be underage.” He believes that even though bar owners would never admit that they let underage kids in, “no owner is going to say no to 20 underage girls in their bars.”
It may ultimately be impossible to tell whether bouncers and bar owners truly try as hard as they can to spot fake IDs, or if they let fakes slide because it would be impossible to survive without an underage clientele. Either way, there’s at least one bar near campus that doesn’t plan to cater to the under-21 set: La Negrita. Eric Johnson, the bar’s new manager, says that he wants La Negrita to get away from their reputation as the underage bar. “If people look young, you check their ID,” he says. Looks like the baby-faced among us will have to start searching for a new go-to watering hole—bouncers are probably more easygoing near NYU, right?
8 October 2009
vol. 7, issue 4
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