Environmental Protection
on blue lights, bouncers, and pretty houses
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1.
I told the bartender about these blue-tinted lights the French are using in parking garages, alleyways, library bathrooms and other places that people tend to shoot heroin so that when they’re sitting with a needle poised over the crook of your arm you can’t really tell where to inject.
He folded his arms and nodded. “Yeah we were looking into…” Made a tight line with his mouth. Blinked. “Anyway.”
2.
He says they don’t have issues with people shooting heroin in the bathroom but — jiggling fingers at his temple — “You mention the blue-light thing, those kinds of preventative ideas…” says he’s been trying to convince the owner to hire a bouncer three nights a week. Says it’s usually just him and one other bartender back here. Some nights there’s 30-40 customers. They can’t keep an eye on everything.
He points, “You see that sign?”
I’m one of three or four regulars at 4 p.m. and I twist on my stool. He’s pointing at the pool table. “What sign?”
“The ‘No Gambling.’”
“Oh!” I do see it! “Well that doesn’t work, does it.”
“It’s a bar,” he unfolds his arms and starts hand-talking, wise-guy, proud, “you can’t stop people from gambling. And that’s fine. A little Venmo action? Zelle? No problem. The problem is cash, because two reasons: number one,” he smacks an Oscar Mayer finger into his palm, “it’s fuckin illegal if a cop comes in and sees you doin it.” Doubling up, “Number two, think about it: two drunk guys throw their cash down into a pile, they shoot some pool, and then one of them loses — suddenly he’s angry about it. They start arguing. Now you’ve got two competitive drunks with poolsticks tryna make up their minds about who put how much money in the pile, and who deserves how much—”
He shakes his head slow. Folds his arms.
“So that’s—” he squiggles a finger at my brain area, “when you mentioned the junkie thing, that’s why I nodded, is it got me thinking about the bouncer. Preventative stuff. Environmental protection.”
3.
I found two different studies about the blue light thing.
It turns out that the overwhelming majority of intravenous drug users who are desperate enough to inject themselves in a parking garage stairwell claimed to care “not at all” or “very little” about the lighting situation of said garage.
One report said the likeliest outcome of making it hard for intravenous drug users to find their vein is that they fuck up the injection and bleed on your floor.
4.
He probably doesn’t mean “environmental protection” but everyone calls it something different. “Hostile architecture” or “defensive architecture” or “environmental deterrence” or “means restriction.” I found some good examples in a well-written pamphlet from the National Coalition for the Homeless where they refer to this kind of thing as
“civil engineering to achieve social engineering.”
It shows photos of curved benches, and benches with partitions between the seats, and benches with gaps or sharp right angles that prevent people from laying down comfortably. The pamphlet describes these items as “weapons.”
My former boss Jeff introduced me to this when he explained the “broken windows” theory. The idea was this: if a building’s windows were broken, and stayed that way, it gave the impression that there was nobody who cared enough to fix them, no authority presence.
It ended up not working for various reasons including things like police but also cops—I forget how Jeff explained it exactly but he was cool and I liked working for him at that tutoring center.
Pro-labor guy with a PhD in poly sci. Born and raised in a mobile home. Said he never ate an appetizer until grad school. Thirtysomething. Came into work one day racked by a hangover: he and his wife’d gotten trashed celebrating that his student loans were down to $50,000 after only a decade.
Short guy happily married to a very tall woman. They owned a small pretty house in an affordable semi-rural area down south. She was a coroner and made good money but the job ruined their holiday season every year because of how so many more people die around Christmas. Drinking and accidents but people also get lonely, she said, and so there are more suicides than usual, and with older people they lose some internal will to keep ticking and just stop, but also she believed that loneliness can accrue like a plaque in the heart and one day you go to bed for the tenth or thousandth time alone and next thing you know there’s a knock at your door from the neighbor who never says hello: she brings good tidings, nervous, calling gentle questions through your door about the stench.
I said, “You’re cool to hear all the ugly details from her job?”
He blinked at me like I’d said something bizarre. “Yes I love hearing about my wife’s job. It’s what she cares about.”
I was embarrassed at the moment but later came to think it was nice.
5.
I quit that job during COVID. A couple years later I met a former colleague for drinks. He told me Jeff got promoted to an administrative role but that Jeff, my old mentor-type pro-labor working-class hero, might be on the way out because he’d recently invited a professor into his office for a meeting.
He and the professor (an even-shorter person than himself) had some chitchat while walking through the lobby and then she took a seat across from his desk as he pushed the door shut and when he turned to face her his smile was gone and said to her, hands trembling, “I know you feel it too...”
6.
Bartender says the owner is reluctant to hire a bouncer because it costs $250 a night.
I said $250 doesn’t sound so bad…
He said multiply it by Thu/Fri/Sat, you’re looking at $750 a week; that’s about $40,000 a year.
“But I can’t tell you how many times somebody comes in, says they were here last night, oh but they left a little early cuz someone was dealing coke right beside em, or someone was fucked up and yelling at his girlfriend, or a pool game turned into a fight. That’s your $250 right there. But even aside from that: the real upside of having a bouncer, the thing you almost can’t put a value on, is that people feel safe, y’know? They feel protected.” He does a gesture like slapping cash off his palm. “And that’s money right there, brother…”
Great stuff. What was the job you worked with Jeff?
beautifully written. Edward Hopperish...