Quiet Nights

Not every night is chaos. People think working security means constant fights, drunk fools spilling out of bathrooms, or high drama under neon lights. The truth? Some nights are so quiet you could swear the city forgot about you.

Take a slow Tuesday night, for example. The guests trickle in like they’re half-asleep, older couples who’ve seen it all before. They sip their drinks slow, not to get wild but just to fill the silence. The girls, usually all fire and flirt, are left with nothing to do but lean against each other in boredom. That’s when the gossip starts. I’ve stood within earshot and heard them laugh about how easy it is to play guys for scraps—dinners, favors, petty gifts. They talk like hustlers swapping tricks, but underneath it, you can feel the boredom chewing at them.

The hosts drift in and out, pretending to stay sharp, but even they can’t keep the energy up. Instead, they start talking about their families—scrolling through phones, showing pictures of kids in Halloween costumes, or telling stories about their parents back home. I’ve seen a man who runs one of the wildest bondage nights in town soften up completely when he starts bragging about his daughter winning a school art contest. The leather and chains disappear, and for a moment he’s just a proud father in a quiet corner of a bar.

Nights like that remind you: no matter what the event is—swinger meetups, rope sessions, even private BDSM shows—quiet is still quiet. If the crowd isn’t there, the storm doesn’t come. It doesn’t matter how wild the theme sounds on paper. A dead night is a dead night.

And in those hours, my job is just to stand, breathe, and be present. No fights to break up, no hands to pull apart, no raised voices echoing off the walls. Just me, the sound of lazy conversation, and the low hum of music nobody’s really listening to.

It’s not glamorous, but it’s grounding. You learn that security isn’t just about adrenaline and action—it’s about patience. Because just as often as you guard the wild, you also guard the silence.

The funny thing about security is that the training books and the real nights never line up clean. On paper, guards are prepared for everything: de-escalation techniques drilled until they’re second nature, the power to arrest written into state law, the emphasis on teamwork hammered home. Even the PSI exams—the ones you take to get licensed—make it clear: don’t go alone. Work as a team. Call for backup. Cover each other.

But at the clubs? It’s almost always the opposite. You’re bouncing from one spot to the next, patrolling bathrooms, walking the floor, posted up at the front gate—all of it alone. You’re the first and last word on whatever walks through that door. If things go bad, it’s just you until someone else catches on. The team is more theory than reality.

A lot of those jobs are under the table, too. Cash in hand at the end of the week, no taxes, no benefits. And strange as it sounds, that’s part of what keeps you there. Not because you don’t know better, but because the cash makes it easy. The employer knows it, you know it, and nobody really complains. That’s the hook. It’s not glamour that keeps your interest—it’s the simplicity of fast coin and the rhythm of the work.

Most guards aren’t chasing the spotlight anyway. We’re wallflowers by nature, watching the crowd, staying still, making sure the chaos never spills over. Some are looking for connections, relationships, a taste of the nightlife they’re guarding—but for most, it’s about the money. Not the party, not the scene. Just the coin.

And every guard learns the same lesson quick: your time is the most valuable thing you have. That’s why overtime is king. The longer you stand, the more you’re paid, and the hours you give up are worth more than anything happening under the lights. It’s not about muscle or glamour—it’s about time, and what your hours are worth in a city that burns them up fast.

That’s the paradox of working nights. You spend hours on your feet, standing as a shadow, guarding the gates of someone else’s fun. The music blasts, the lights flicker, but you don’t dance. You don’t drink. You’re untouchable—the wallflower, the watchman, the invisible hand that keeps everything from unraveling. And it pays. Overtime stacks, cash fills your pocket, and your silence becomes its own kind of power.

But after the shift, when the doors are locked and the last guest stumbles out, you carry something heavier than your paycheck. The weight of other people’s lives, their chaos, their desires. And that’s when I turn to the page.

The quiet scribbles of Gaze of the Basilisk are my escape. Writing lets me bleed out what I can’t say at the door. The secrets I’ve kept, the moments I’ve witnessed but can never confess—they find their way into the lines of fiction. That’s how I breathe. That’s how I make sense of being both the wall and the man behind it.

Because here’s the truth: you can love being untouchable, but being touched—being human—is still something you’re allowed to feel. Maybe it’s in the brush of a hand as you guide someone to safety. Maybe it’s in the warmth of a quiet conversation with a coworker on a dead night. Or maybe it’s just the pen in your hand, carving pieces of your soul into a story nobody else can own.

That’s why I write. To remind myself that even in a job built on distance, there’s still a pulse inside me. A pulse that refuses to be silenced.

My books exists because the nightlife of Los Angeles has a heartbeat I could never ignore. For years, I stood at doors, behind velvet ropes, and under dim lights, watching the city live its secrets. I wasn’t there to party. I wasn’t there for glamour. I was there to guard—to keep people safe when their guard was down, and to carry silence when their confessions slipped past lips too loose with liquor.

What many never see is the balance: the nights when chaos roars, and the nights when nothing happens at all. I’ve learned to be grateful for both. The quiet nights are when coworkers become human—when hosts talk about their kids, when dancers confess their boredom, when guards admit we’re all just trying to climb out of the same pit. That quiet is a blessing. It reminds me that when the party *does* get wild—when fists are clenched under a low vaulted ceiling, when someone stumbles too far into their drunken stupor—what people really need isn’t just a wall of muscle. They need an empathetic heart steady enough to hold the storm back without judgment.

*Gaze of the Basilisk* was born from that duality. From the silence and the chaos. From the discipline of being untouchable, and the humanity of still being touched. It’s fiction, but it carries the truths of those long nights: discretion, danger, and the raw beauty of people living unfiltered lives behind closed doors.

To the quiet nights—I owe you gratitude. To the wild ones—I owe you lessons. And to the reader—I offer these pages, written with both.