Beer spills, crossed arms and permanent markers.
The band, Chronicles of the Land Squid, is crescendoing on the Saturday night before Easter in Blacksburg. A sea of strong yellow and purple lights washes over the fans gathered at the Lantern as they raise their hands heavenwards in excitement. To the left of the stage, a patron is yo-yoing, the silver discs weaving in and out of the snares constructed by its own string, but to the right of the stage stands Dave Caldwell, his arms are crossed, face cold and expressionless. He almost looks bored or uncomfortable.
Caldwell is one of the bouncers on duty that night at the Lantern. His official job title is "security," and he and four or five other members of security are working their various posts tonight either upstairs, somewhere behind the bar, or on the floor.
Watching him slowly prowl through the crowd looking for any infractions, it's hard to imagine that this is the same easygoing and jovial person I had spoken to earlier in the night. Tonight is his ninth night on the job.
"I'm not that green," he excitedly said earlier in the night, "but I'm pretty green. I love it. I don't mind the job at all. It's not a bad job. I'm a night person. I'm up usually anyways, and it seems like I do some good down here."
It is a job he has come to enjoy from the little extra perk of seeing live music night after night to the type of generally laid back patronage that frequents the bar. He feels this is a circumstance unfamiliar to many other local bars.
"I know a bouncer," Caldwell said, "at Sharkey's and a guy at the Gobbler, and they all hate their jobs, and it's like, 'Why?' It's just straight bars are different than this. We have shows and more people come here for shows than just to get drunk."
Caldwell is clad in jeans and a black Los Lobos T-shirt with a white font spelling out the band's name. It is part of the Lantern's security uniform, or lack thereof. This attire, however, offers the bouncers a certain advantage when dealing with a customer that might require some assistance from the premises.
"We sneak up on a motherfucker," said Roy McCoy, a fellow bouncer. "Before you know it, you got a grip of hands on you, and you're going toward the door."
McCoy and James Wiley are the first two bouncers I meet when I arrive at the Lantern at around 9 p.m. There is no one outside but the two of them, sitting at the entrance of the Lantern, and only a table with a box of cash, wristbands and a piece of paper to monitor how many overs and unders are in the club at any one time separates them. They pass the time chain-smoking and finding whatever it is they can to talk about before the rush comes.
McCoy is wearing a green hoodie with a charcoal Dickie's jacket over it. A former army man, his hair is slicked back, and a few tattoos are revealed sometimes when he moves. I think that I spot a cloud with a cross in it on one of his hands that might be part of a larger tattoo; on his neck is the face of Christ.
People trickle in slowly; it's almost 10 p.m., and Chronicles won't be on till near midnight. After watching for a while, I begin to get the sense that the bouncers see a lot of the same faces coming through their doors. They talk casually with a few while still keeping a slightly disinterested demeanor.
"We're probably the most well known bouncers around this town," Wiley said, "because we're cool with everybody. ... We're not dicks, like if you go to any other bar, like the people at Big Al's throw you down the steps. They don't give a fuck about you. Every bouncer in this bar is friends with pretty much every person in this town."
A tiny, blonde regular approaches the two and starts up a conversation. She decides to leave when she realizes that her friends have not come yet tonight.
When she returns, they briefly chat back and forth again; for a moment she sits on Wiley's lap. Inevitably, she pays and gets her hands X'd, an indicator that she is under 21, before going downstairs into the club.
"Make it pretty," she instructs McCoy. After she leaves, Wiley looks at me.
"It sucks," he said, "not being able to hit on the women on the job too. Like if Big Mama (the bar manager) had seen her sitting on my lap, I would have been in trouble. It's not professional."
As a whole, the obligations of the bouncers as employees are as follows: They watch the table upstairs, check IDs, give out wristbands, keep track of the number of people in the club, and do many bar backing details such as restocking beers and getting rid of empty beer bottles. McCoy also informs me that they do a lot of the short order cooking. When I ask him if it's helped his personal ability to cook, he laughs.
"I've cooked at damn near every joint in town, dude," he said. I take that as a no.
The final task of the bouncers, and probably the most frustrating for someone who works there, is cleaning up everyone else's fun at the end of the night. This includes throwing away all the trash and mopping. Occasionally, acts playing at the venue will make this more of a challenging task.
"One night the Boogieburg gang, they came down here. They had a toilet paper gun, the thing shot an air current that had a roll of toilet paper that just unrolled as it shot so that all over our beer soaked floor was pretty good stuff," McCoy said.
I see someone get ejected around 12:45 a.m. A shaggy black haired young man has had too much to drink and is beginning to have trouble staying awake at the bar. His removal is quick. A pat on the shoulder and a quick exchange of words, and he and Caldwell are walking toward the door.
"I had to shake him," Caldwell said. "He was out."
When they arrive upstairs at the table, Wiley cuts off the youth's pink wristband, and he goes off on his way into the night. Caldwell and Wiley compare their numbers for the night; so far everyone has only one under their belt.
Ejecting someone from the venue is a regular occurrence, happening almost on a daily basis, according to Wiley.
This is mostly attributed to the many minors, mostly college students, who attempt to break the rules of the bar. The bouncers are constantly forced to watch the dance floor from various positions, mostly on the elevated platforms to the left and right of the stage where the full expanse of the club can be realized, for underage drinkers or anyone getting too rowdy.
"We still get the most kills," McCoy said, "I bet out of any bar. We throw out more people than anybody just because of that shit. It's always the underage kids. Catch a kid in the middle of a dance floor just pounding a Joose with big old X's."
When a person is ejected, it is normally in a peaceful manner.
Wiley, who is wearing a blue Boogieburg shirt and jeans said, "They know they're caught and get out. Every once in a while there's a bout."
"The girls are the worst," quickly added McCoy. "The girls are the ones who will just not go. You have to carry more girls out."
Both have worked here for about eight months. Wiley, whose past jobs have included working at Owens and the Farmhouse in Christiansburg, has developed a technique for dealing with those who put up a lot of resistance.
"The fireman carry is the best," he said. "Say you got a girl who won't get out, you just throw her over your shoulder."
The most common problems that the bouncers have to deal with are underage kids trying to pass as over 21 years old; this includes kids attempting to use fake IDs. After working on the job for so long, Wiley has started his own wall of shame for the number of IDs he has personally started confiscating.
Currently, he has nine and at times the kids make it easy for him to consider the possibility of future additions. Normally he sees people just using other friend's IDs, where descriptions such as height and eye color can lead to their demise.
"I had one girl that was 6'1," said Wiley. "Her ID said like five foot."
Minors have recently gotten creative with the ways in which they attempt to slip into the legal drinking realm. The club tries to combat this by checking IDs (normally with a variation on greetings such as "'Sup, hoss? ID?" or "Can I see your ID, bud?") and handing out wristbands to those who can legally drink.
These wristbands change every day in order to make it even more difficult for anyone to get past the bouncers unnoticed. For the unders, their hands are stained by a permanent marker that leaves two, large, damning X's.
"A lot of people wash them off," Wiley said. "Some people put Vaseline on their hands so right when you put your X's on, you can do this (rubs top of hand against palm) and it comes right off."
At two o'clock, the lights flick on, the music stops, and people begin to mill toward the door. What is left is what is keeping the bouncers from getting back home: a sticky floor, half empty beer bottles, and ashtrays loaded with butts. These types of preoccupations can sometimes force the men to remain until 3:30 a.m. or later. Right before McCoy jokingly tells me I need to go or hide in a corner somewhere, I ask Caldwell how his ninth night went. The stern looking man standing next to the stage before has reverted to his old self. An unprovoked smile rests on his face.
"Great," he said. "Loved it. I'm still trying to get beer off the floor."