A cheapskate and a cheat

For a time in my first year of college, I worked as a bouncer at a night club on the Arkansas side of Texarkana. The club was open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights, with two bouncers on Wednesday and three the other two nights. We all had a uniform – white shirt, black trousers, black clip-on tie, and a Miller County Arkansas Special Deputy Sheriff badge. A clip-on tie is important for people whose jobs involve the distinct possibility of physical confrontation – If an antagonist grabs your tie, you want it to come off easily.

The club did not sell alcohol, but did sell ice, bottled water and sodas – Coke, ginger ale and such. Patrons brought their own bottles of liquor. Beer was not allowed; that would have cut into profits.

One night after the club closed, I found out another way the manager kept profits up. I went into the water/soda/ice area (a former kitchen) for some reason, and I saw waitresses filling bottled water bottles with tap water and replacing the caps, and another employee pouring Coke from half-filled bottles into other half-filled bottles, and three quarter-filled bottles into one quarter-filled bottle, then recapping the full bottles.

I knew the manager was a cheapskate cheat, but proof came that night.

I got fired a few weeks later after confronting the manager over another incident. The $25 a night pay was OK for a college student in 1971, but I didn’t lose any sleep over losing the job.