Night Knuckles.

I don't often say this, but to tell you the truth, I have been very lucky in my time at this pub. Not just because I managed to find a job within walking distance of my house that required little more than babysitting a group of retirees for a few hours a day, but because of the typical pub nasties from which I have been notably spared - I have not once had to clean vomit from a carpet, I have only had to wipe shit from the toilet wall once, and I was once allowed the opportunity to drag a snoozing drunk outside, call the police, and poke him from a distance with a gigantic umbrella and until Hawaii Five-O - Sergeant Gibson and Officer Chippendale - arrived with a van with a cage on the back (the doors of which flew open on the way to the station, leaving the perp's face in plain view of the entire village like a witch to a trial; this would have been all well and good had he not been our district councillor at the time). But there's one thing I had managed to dodge all the way up to this week, when a full-on fight errupted on my shift.

Of course there's been plenty of near misses - I've been here over a year now and I've seen a fair few fuses fizzle out before they have the chance to reach the end and explode in an earth-shattering (or at least glass-shattering) finale of fisticuffs. This just isn't that kind of pub and I'm thankful for it - I know there's plenty of pubs where fighting isn't so much an event as a side-order to the evening's events, and luckily we've very much policed ourselves; there's usually one or two voices of reason in the bar ready to stand up and say "c'mon now". Unfortunately, our fella who usually sits in the bar and will say "c'mon now" in times of trouble was away; had The Who not been on tour this whole sordid affair could have been very much avoided (but hell, he deserves a break now and again, regardless of how poorly-timed they are - if Martin wants to go and see an aging paedophile swing his arm around in a circle for ninety minutes then the very best of luck to him, and his ten-year-old son).

It all started in a particularly innocuous fashion - every Monday we get a gigantic manilla envelope from the company containing charts and statistics from the week; takings, takings in relation to pubs of similar size, takings per hour, the sort of thing only the upper management really cares about due to their unwavering devotion to their task of making sure the shareholders can afford another yacht this year. Also included is the ever-irreverant company newsletter that takes a potentially sensitive subject and attempts to ply it with puns and whacky clip-art in order to make it seem like less of a blight on the face of the organization. This week, it turns out The Cargo Hatch still has a cocaine problem - "Who nose what they're gonna do about it!", guffaws 'Last Orders Weekly' editor Martin Henford, who decided to simply forget the fact that The Cargo Hatch is only in the news because three people died on cocaine in the toilets there (and good on him, that would have been a bit of a downer on his "nose" pun had he mentioned the deaths). Apart from this poorly-printed waste of company money and time, the weekly envelope contains things that are actually useful, such as our wage slips, and any general information that we need for the week in terms of the business side of the company.

This week's envelope explained that we are no longer serving a rather well-known product, possibly one of the hottest things on the market at the moment (you'll know what I mean when you realize, one day not too long from now, that you haven't seen it in a pub for months). Now, part of the statement we were issued is that we "should avoid - and encourage colleagues to avoid - publicly discussing the decision or slandering the company", so unfortunately I can't tell you that the company wanted to jack up their prices almost 50% and as such a lot of chains/breweries are showing them the door rather than allowing them their selfish whimsy. I also can't tell you that they're a gang of moneygrabbing shithouses who would come to your house and molest the living hell out of your kids if they thought there was a quid in it for them. I'm sorry, I just can't - as you may have guessed, I'm the kind of person who takes non-disclosure agreements extremely seriously. Sorry.

The other part is that we were, effective immediately, starting a new promotion - buy two pints and receive a free bag of pork scratchings. For those of you that aren't aware, pork scratchings are sort of hard to describe; hard to describe, infinitely harder to eat (and subsequently digest) and only British pubs with dartboards and cask ales are allowed to sell them, much the same way only cigar shops are allowed to have people smoking on their premises because they're the only people who would buy them. Nobody sober would eat pork scratchings, namely because they actually taste like despair - real, honest, human despair (with too much salt). Don't believe me? Try them yourself. If you can't find any, you can make them at home. Go and buy some Shredded Wheat, wrap it in bacon, piss on it and then cook it at temperatures approaching the face of the sun until it is the size of your fingernail. Eat this - note that doing so requires such physical assertion that a few meager chews will give you a neck like Arnold Schwarzenegger and a set of jaws that could rip through steel in no time at all. If you aren't sick or dead (or deaf - biting into pork scratching is an extremely loud experience that will both shock you and leave you a lifelong sufferer of tinnitus), then Monday was your lucky day, because two pints wins you a bag of these vile, solid lumps of cholesterol to suck on while you wonder just what in the name of all that is good and holy allowed these air-sealed bags of pure misery to not only make it to the shelves, but to be priced at fifty-five pence a packet. Prior to the promotion, sales weren't exactly good; so bad, it seemed we couldn't give them away.

Naturally, we put this notion into practice (as we do with everything we can't even attempt to sell, with varying success - remember S.A.F.E, that alcohol free lager from a while back that was aimed at people who were the designated driver? No? Here's why - that stuff tasted so bad that it probably caused more deaths than it prevented; anybody foolish enough to try it needed approximately a gallon of Vodka afterwards to scrub the taste out of their mouths), and discovered that when the pricetag is "free", suddenly all the world simply can't do without pork scratchings. Even though you can literally see the hope and joy evaporating into the air above their victims like a puddle of back-alley urine on a summer's day as they are haplessly chewed and crunched, because they're a freebie people have just got to have them. It's a bizarre phenomenon, it really is. But what started as an earnest attempt to get rid of our aging piles of pork scratchings assumed a strange air of trouble; it was almost as if a cult of pork scratchings was taking over. What is usually little more than a back-bar prop - a visual aid to give the impression that we're a proper pub, like the mixing equipment that litters our shelves despite the fact I have never, ever, had to make a Manhattan (nor do we even have the correct ingredients to make one) - soon, with a bit of a promotional push, became a commodity so valuable that everyone and their brother couldn't bare to be seen without a pint and a bag of wretched lumps made almost exclusively of pure human hate.

"Can you take for two pints and leave one over?" became a common request as the ins and outs of the promotion soon became clear; yes the pints have to be bought at the same time, no there's no limit unless you lot manage to crunch and crack your way through the whole bloody lot, no it doesn't matter which pints you buy, yes the promotion will come to an end one day. So "leaving one in" became common practice; it also became a pain in the arse as we had to write down what the house owed everybody. All for the sake of a few pork scratchings.
"Why?" Of course, we knew why they were doing it.
"...Give me my pork scratchings." I would hand them over, but often they would be viciously clawed from my hand before I had even had a chance to put them across the bar. People were forgetting their drinks, trying to combine rounds to maximize their pork scratching gain (I saw a group of twenty - made of four groups of five who normally detest eachother - enter into a £50 a throw round just to get their hands on ten bags of pork scratchings), trying every which way they could to get their hands on something they would never, ever have paid for. There is probably a metaphor for modern society in there somewhere but I cannot bring myself to go rummaging through mounds of pork scratchings to look for it.

"I've never seen anything like it," Christine told me in the corridor prior to our shift on the night of the shift. We had to speak of the pork scratchings away from the earshot of the customers; discussing the pork scratchings with other members of staff ensures mass panic will take hold as all and sundry assume that we are discussing the end of the promotion. The staff corridor has oft provided a trench for us to dive into when we can't talk in front of the customers.
"I know," I said in a hushed tone. Any public discussion of the pork scratchings between staff was reason for suspicion; as keepers of the scratchings, what need had we to discuss our treasures? Perhaps the stock is running low? Perhaps the promotion is coming to an end? Let's rush the bar and find out. I wish I was kidding. "Have you seen Ray, though?"
"No?"
"Count yourself lucky. You soon will." And she did. She was also, as I predicted she would be, inherently sickened by the display Ray put on upon getting his calloused hands upon a bag of the foul cracklings.

Ray is the exception to the rule, in that he would occasionally buy a packet of pork scratchings - yes, buy - before the promotion came in, but now that they were being given away, he went scratchings crazy. Drinking twice as fast (and he was a fast drinker to begin with) to keep his pile of pork scratchings sizeable, Ray - who usually gives the impression that he could drink molten tarmac and suffer little else than a bad stomach and the faint smell of roadworks radiating from his person - got absolutely bollocksed. Ray is from Newport, and worked at a steel mill for approximately a hundred years. After being molded and beaten like the steel he so poorly produced (Ray's steel mills had a bad habit of being closed down for some reason and I've got to believe that's it), Ray - who's hard as nails and as blunt as a hammer - retired to a little village out of the way, but never really adjusted to it. So naturally, we weren't looking forward to telling him he had to leave because he was drunk.

"Have you not had enough, Ray?"

Sensing trouble, Ray scooped his scratchings into a bag and left. He was back the next night, but so were the Princesses for their semi-regular visit to "the local". And this was the source of the trouble.

Drew and Tyler Prince - named the Princesses because they are absolutely insufferable and the only way for the rest of us to express this without confrontation is to simply imply that they're gender-benders, the pun on the surname is merely a bonus - come in once in a blue moon, get very, very drunk and then go home. The reason Drew and Tyler wind everyone up - apart from their perfectly grotesque christian names that were so haphazardly ripped out of the rotting corpse of The Brady Bunch, you spend the rest of the evening waiting for Cousin Oliver to turn up and murder them both in cold blood) - is that they act like the pub is some sort of nightclub, and they themselves behave as if they are a pair of pimps. With a different girl on their respective arms every time they come in here - the sort who always appear to have more paint on their face than Krusty the Clown with a laugh just as grating, and spend the entire night cackling like a greasepainted witch while sucking on a bottle of WKD like their life depended on it - and, depending on how drunk they are, will often get up in the middle of the bar and attempt to 'vibe' to whatever happens to be on the jukebox, their 'bling' jingling around their wrists and necks like a tambourine (while they live the life of a Mack, the pair work as delivery boys for UPS - hardly the vocation of a "gangsta", I'm sure you'll agree).

Now, our speakers pump out a wide selection of bands and artists - from the Welsh National Opera that Henry so fervently promotes to my own ill-fated attempts to get a bunch of sixty-something curmudgeons into a slightly more off-kilter Welsh flavour (namely my personal favourites mclusky, whose hit single "Alan Is A Cowboy Killer" has not gone down well with our punters) - but it is never the sort of thing that you would hear in those frightful city centre nightspots; they may well have tried to make Amy Winehouse go to rehab, and R Kelly may well be a flirt, but the truth is you'll find neither of them on our jukebox (not even the delightful mash-up of "I'm A Flirt" that pits Kelly against Broken Social Scene). In fact, seeing as Henry controls our night playlist (I am no longer to be trusted with the peak hour playlist after a particularly volatile reaction to one of my playlists), there has been more than one occasion where Drew and Tyler have tried to get down and groove the night away to the Werzel-tongued anthem "I've Got A Brand New Combine Harvester" (Henry is in love with novelty records; if a C-list celebrity has spoofed it for Children In Need or the like, you can bet Henry's found a dodgy MP3 of it). The two Princesses will grab their ladies, drunk out of their faces, and will begin throwing their arms in the air, gyrating without care or consideration for rhythm, WKD and Stella spilling as they haphazardly attempt to 'vibe'. All this while the darts team are having a doubles knockout tournament and Dickie Dixon is in the corner burping and breaking wind as if he were auditioning for a job inflating hot air balloons. With this sort of atmosphere on a Saturday night, you see why we decided not to buy a foam machine, I'm sure.

Drew and Tyler came in this week - with a completely new pair of ladies to ply with alcopops - with the added bonus of walking in without shirts; as the girls fawned over the sunken chests and scrawny arms, the pair spent all night showing off their latest impulse purchases; tattoos on their chests. Drew has "Tyler" on his; Tyler, surprisingly, opted for "Drew". Needless to say, they made these well-known to all present (I was genuinely dismayed that Eddie was not present to witness such appalling body art, as he has a bad habit of being away whenever a particularly brutal and poorly-done piece of body art is whapped out in the bar for all to see).

"See our tattoos?" said Tyler, sticking his chest in my face as I put a pint of Stella on the bar and took their money.
"Aren't you two really cold?" But it was a rhetorical question; I could have lit a match on the goosebumps on his arm. I could have, had Tyler not managed to jab me in the eye with one of his stiff, frozen nipples. Ever seen that Madonna video?
"Blood is thicker than water, broseph," asserted Drew through chattering teeth.
"It's not thicker than ice, however," I reminded him, feeling the chill with my thick work shirt on.
"Yeah, well we paid £200 for these," shuddered Tyler as he downed his drink in one - presumably under the assumption that the superchilled lager would somehow warm those frostbitten ventricles of his, "and I'll be damned if I'm putting a shirt over it." I appreciated his honesty; many a time I have seen people walking around in a state of undress in a rather blatant effort to get comments on their latest abhorrent permanent doodle and claim that it's just the weather or the way they dress. Tattoos are strange enough as it is ("can you please draw this picture/write these words on me so it'll never come off ever?"), without the added curiosity of why somebody's kicking it around town without a shirt when it's cold enough to freeze 'em off a brass monkey.
"Two Stellas and two WKDs again please Rick." My name's not Rick, incidentally, but Tyler and Drew made an assumption regarding my name many moons ago and it has stuck. No point correcting them again now. Perhaps I should have it tattooed on my chest.

Several hours passed of this behaviour; Ray become more and more incoherent as the alcohol began to make its dent (as he struggled to make his way through the pile of porkies he had amassed), and Tyler and Drew were now having a heart to heart at the bar. I was getting ready to close the bar down; Christine was dealing with the last few stragglers in the lounge as I was treated to the deep, philosophical yammerings of a pair of superchilled tossers.

"I got this tattoo because... you're blood, man, you're blood," called Drew, becoming slightly choked up at his own touching sentiment.
"Aw man, no, no..."
"No, seriously, you're like a brother to me."
"We are brothers."
"That's what I meant."

At this point, Ray stood up and laughed, spattering the girls with pork scratchings as he sent the contents of his mouth flying.

"Eew!" screamed one. Drew turned to see Ray stood there, cackling at him.
"You think something's funny, buddy?"
"You two gettin' them bent tattoos, that's what's funny," cackled Ray, dousing the pair in a mixture of saliva and partially-digested pork rinds. There was something extremely bizarre about the whole situation - I was putting the nozzles on ice for the night, but the other side of the bar, an aging steel worker was spraying a pair of topless tattoos morons with crystalized pork fat. Deciding not to think about the implications of this image, I decided to take the drip trays into the kitchen to hose them down.

It seemed strangely appropriate that I wound up fishing a crumpled-up pork scratchings packet out of one of the holes in the driptray. As I cast it to one side, Christine came to fish me out of the stale, soapy water in which I had so thoroughly immersed myself and the drip trays.

"You might want to get out there."
"Look, if Rob's complaining about the bitter, I'll deal with him in the morning."
"No, Rob's gone home, it's the lads in the bar, they're getting a bit rowdy." It turns out she wasn't wrong.

"Aw, sit down mate, before we have a problem," Drew was calling from behind his girlfriend, who was attempting to hold him back as if a slight altercation with a steel worker in a village pub was grounds for the death penalty.
"No, Drew, don't!" Drew shook off his woman; Tyler's was too full up of WKD to make much of a fight, but gave a general mumble of disapproval in between belches that were more befitting of a lumberjack than a twenty-something who, in her own words, "pure wants to be a model and that". Quite.
"No Chantelle," Drew bellowed (Chantelle? Ouch), turning his attentions to Ray. "Sit down you silly old prick, we've all had a drink and you wanna sit down mate. And do us all a favour, stop eating those fucking pork scratchings, you're fucking stinking and you don't seem to know how to chew with your mouth closed, so fuck off."
"Oh, and what're you going to go, pal? You want a fookin' punch up?" said Ray, advancing on Drew - how dare he disrespect the pork scratchings! At this point, Tyler leapt out of his chair and it was at this point I realized this was perhaps a little more than hot air.

Of course, standing up like you're ready to get brawlin' means nothing when you're fuckdrunk and can hardly stand to begin with - pupils slipping around like bowling balls on ice, words being manhandled brutally by alcohol-lazed tongues, these 'conflicts' often amount to nothing. But there was something different about this one, it was moving very quickly. These things usually go pretty slowly, partly because neither party really wants to fight but can't be seen to back down, so will just puff themselves up and hope the situation will diffuse itself, which it often does. However, this time, it seemed different; neither side was backing down, neither side looked as if they weren't sure.

And there it was; the first punch was thrown. Ray pulled his arm back and went in for a swift right jab - unfortunately, it was getting on late and everyone had drunk a fair bit by this point, so the fight wasn't exactly Ali-Fraser. It wasn't even Balboa-Thunderlips or Tom-Jerry. What proceeded was a truly surreal spectacle that I shall probably never witness again.

Much like the mixed martial arts of yore, several different styles of fighting were employed, but all can be defined under the cover-all blanket term of "pisshead slapfighting". Pisshead slapfighting is a strange and unpredictable art form, but it either takes extreme bravery or extreme inebriation to even attempt, seeing as most of the art's main moves can be countered by somebody with the reflexes of a sloth. To win a fight against somebody employing this technique, all you need to do is keep both feet firmly planted on the ground, deflect all incoming slaps, and wait for the assailant to tire himself out. However, since both sides were engaging in this, it escalated pretty quickly (however, due to the collective alcohol intake of the three. Before either Christine or I could get out from behind the bar, the pair were making an advance on the door, dragging Ray outside in a headlock; Ray was squirming and getting the occasional slap in, as Tyler and Drew's female accompaniment went to call a taxi (there will no doubt be a different pair of girls walking in with them next time after this particular display - they were probably right to get eachother's names tattooed on their chests, as for either of them to get a girlfriend's name would be akin to tattooing the headline from today's News Of The World on your forehead). Christine and I followed them, unsure of what we'd do when we got there.

Upon reaching the dusky, floodlit front porch, we saw what can only be described as two young men, stripped to the waist, grappling around on the floor with a sixty-something steel worker. A bit like Women In Love without the fire - it could have been vaguely homoerotic had Ray not thrown up down his shirt. The vague smell of indigested scratchings and stomach acid seeped into the night air as Tyler and Drew did their absolute best to wrestle with him without actually touching him, as it would seem the alcohol had not dulled their sense of disgust and nausea. Try and imagine that.
"So what now?" asked Christine, as Drew held Ray face down in a bit of muddy grass, rubbing his face in his own mess the same way you would an errant pet.
"Well, there's no point getting the police out for this, they'll get tired in a bit and move up the road. They're not our problem then."
"So what do we do when things like this happen?" It was a good question, as this had never happened before. However, the obvious answer soon presented itself.
"I'll call Glen."

Glen Christie was made the regional manager a few weeks ago - I met him at our barbeque last week, but he has made it very clear that he will be a lot more approachable than the previous regional manager. In a boardroom coo, the previous assortment of feckless Brents were sent packing and replaced by Christie, who was headhunted from a security firm for pubs and clubs. Christie started as a doorman in his native Ireland, and quite literally pummeled and headlocked his way to the top, so he's not one to fuck about. Knowing this, I decided to leave him a message. Perhaps he could give me some advice on how to stop fights in future - perhaps he would teach me how to "slap a sucker in a headlock", or reveal to me the secrets of his famed scowl, a glare so intense that he uses it to light cigarettes.

"Glen Christie's office," came the voice down the phone.
"Oh, hello?" I wasn't expecting this.
"Aye, and who the fuck's this?" Glen was in his office. At midnight. I informed him who the fuck it was. "Ah, y'alright there fella?"
"What are you doing in your office at this time of night?"
"Negotiating some contracts with our bread suppliers."
"At midnight?"
"Them fockers'll chat when I tell 'em to." He wasn't wrong; Glen Christie is not the kind of person you wait until the morning to call back, much as he wasn't the sort of person who would wait until the morning to call you back. "What can I do for you? Are you having another barbeque?"
"Not exactly, but things did get a little hot in here this evening. We had a code red tonight."
"What's that? Is that a murder?" enquired Glen, in much the same way you would ask a neighbour if they had seen the footy last night.
"No, Glen, a fight."
"Oh, right, gotcha," mumbled Glen, recovering remarkably quickly from the seconds-old idea that one of his pubs had seen a murder occur inside it. "What happened?"
"Well, somebody was eating the pork scratchings really loudly and messily, somebody had a word and a punch was thrown. It was all over pretty quickly, to be honest, but these things have to be reported," I informed him; these things do need to be reported to give the company an idea of how dangerous their pubs are, and whether some pubs need assistance in the form of door staff or the like.
"You have my word that measures will be taken," bellowed Christie down the phone.

The very next morning, the company placed an all-house recall on the Pork Scratchings promotion.