I worked for the biggest club owner in Boston for 4 years. Well, second biggest by the end, so maybe I’m not the best source. It started off great. This was bac

I worked for the biggest club owner in Boston for 4 years. Well, second biggest by the end, so maybe I’m not the best source. It started off great. This was back in the trance era. The clubs were full of mostly young and very attractive women, and their male friends they brought along. The small staff was reliable, and the DJ was creative and original but unobtrusive. It was a nice gentle real-estate investment business, but it didn’t bring in much money. The girls don’t want to pay much, and we didn’t let in a lot of unaccompanied dudes, which you may call foul on, but it was generally safe and pleasant this way. It made more money as a concert or event venue. So we started leasing the space more and more to promoters who would, of course, pack the place with anybody that had $20. For the first few weeks it was free, because they hire street teams to hand out promo tickets. That was utter chaos. The normal crowd was gone forever after the first night. They had to hire their own security, mostly ex-cons, bartenders off the street, and the DJ was playing straight off the top40 hip hop list and somehow making that worse by overdriving the pre-amp, hitting the horn every 10 seconds, and yelling derogatory rap tropes at the women. There was no dancing, just people mashed together with hands in uninvited places. I thought that would be the end of it, but it persisted. The owner was in court all week showing off his indemnity clause in the lease for all the theft, fighting, disorderly conduct, drug charges, and sexual assault cases that traced back to club goers. When the freebies ended it was nearly all dudes, and everything about the place got even worse, but, I have never seen so many $20 bills. The cashier was overwhelmed and scared for her life. Same thing at the bar. We couldn’t store enough well vodka, nor secure all the cash. All the cash-handling employees were ours, but most of them quit, and we had to replace and augment in a hurry. Then, predictably, the cash started disappearing. We were on the road once brainstorming with the owner about how to shift the business to a gym, or just about anything else. One day, the Pats were celebrating their super bowl win at one of the smaller clubs, so I was there for a bit and then went back to the man club. There was a dead body pooled in blood in the middle of the street outside, and the widest human I’ve ever seen in my life being held down and then ushered into the back of a police van. By that point, everybody was getting thoroughly frisked at the entrance. We had had a few shanks before, so were were trying to be careful. This dude packed a whole .357 magnum revolver deep under the folds of his belly and kept it there all night until the place started emptying out and he blasted a dude right through his back. Screw that. I was finally out. A whole industry built on the hopeless sexual frustration and angst of men buying alcoholic women free drinks in the hopes that they’ll become suggestible or possibly incapacitated. I loved night clubs in their best version. I loved the music. I loved dancing. I loved the show and the tease of scantily-clad beautiful people, the safe place we used to provide them to be admired and desired but in their own space. I always hated the alcohol and the drugs though. The best times were when it was rented out by a reputable group, like HBS or the “Last Chance Dance”, or the Russian parties. I don’t think it’s possible to have a good environment with open admissions. Even the high end clubs just ended up full of drug dealers and working girls that nobody “high-end” would have wanted to meet. The gay clubs were okay, much safer and more actual dancing, but lack a lot of the main attraction, even for the gay men. Well anyway, I see night clubs dying because they’re just not safe anymore, especially for the most desired patrons. You can’t count on a random group of strangers to uphold a strong code of community ethics. You’re vulnerable in there, especially when drinking, much more than you think when planning the night. Maybe it never was safe, but I’m pretty sure it’s gotten worse as the crowd has changed everywhere.