I was getting panicky because I’ve had friends who died in similar situations. All sorts of things are going through my mind. I’m thinking about my kids. I’m thinking, ‘Wow, this is how I’m gonna end.’ I’m waiting for the ambulance and it seems like it’s taking a long time. I get up and go back outside. By now there’s cops and everything standing on the sidewalk, so I said to the cop, "Put me in the police car and take me to the hospital. This fucking ambulance ain’t coming." I can see by the look on his face that he was scared, like he didn’t know what to do.  He points up the block and he goes, "There’s the ambulance, over there," and I look up the block and the ambulance is stuck in traffic like four blocks up. I’m thinking, "Imagine I die while I’m watching my ambulance," but the ambulance comes.

I’m so big they can’t even pick me up to put me in the back of it. I gotta climb in there myself. They got these things they call ‘shock pants’ they put you in when you get a traumatic upper body injury. It squeezes the blood up into your organs but they can’t get ‘em on me because I’m so big they don’t fit. So I’m like half-naked in the back of the ambulance and it’s freezing out. One of the paramedics, it was his first day on the job, and he’s dropping shit on me. It was crazy. I got to the hospital and they had to put in a chest tube, which is really painful. They actually stabbed me with this thing: it was like a garden hose with this arrow point on it. They stick it into your chest cavity because when your lung collapses it’s not the wound that collapses your lung, it’s the water pressure from the blood.

86ed: Do you feel like the club took care of you after the incident?

Frankie: Nah, nah. I had to sue them. They didn’t do shit for me. Those guys got away. The dudes that I worked with came out and tried to chase them up the block but by the time anybody knew what happened they were gone. If they woulda caught them they woulda murdered these kids, man, because I worked with a lot of nutty dudes –

86ed: Sociopaths?

Frankie: Yeah.

86ed: What do you think about the recent spate of bouncers murdering people? Should there be a police background check?

Frankie: Anybody working in security is supposed to be state-certified, like a certificate that says that you took this course. And nobody ever really enforces it because its bullshit. It’s this eight-hour course and it doesn’t really accomplish anything. I think that there’s been a lot of overreaction. These are horrible incidents but considering the scale of how many nightclubs there are in the city, how many alcohol drinking establishments there are, those particular incidents –– I mean they’re horrible incidents –– but the only reason they got such big press is because of the racism of the media. At the same time as that John Jay student was murdered by a bouncer, there was also a trial of these guys who had taken this girl that they snatched off the street in Brooklyn a few blocks from my house. Her name was Ramona Moore. They chained her to a bed and raped her repeatedly for two weeks, burned her with cigarettes, and then they finally got caught but that case got very little press because she was black and it happened in Brooklyn. Anytime something happens with a yuppie or some transplanted person of affluent background, its front page news. Like when we were talking about the girl that got smashed by the brick that one time, if that woulda happened in Brooklyn or the Bronx, it would never have been on the front page. Giuliani had a press conference when that happened, remember?

86ed: What about some of the nutty guys that you worked with?

There’s definitely guys that are sociopaths that take that job. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with maybe requiring some degree of background check, however, I wouldn’t wanna see them exclude guys just because they got a prison record. Now, if it was for sex crimes, I can understand that, but when they do things like that –– make it so a guy with a record can’t get a job there –– they make it impossible for people to turn their life around. They did that at the Fulton Fish Market. How are people who go to prison supposed to work when they get out of jail? They gotta do something.

Some people suggested letting off-duty cops moonlight as bouncers. It’s illegal but a lot of cops do anyway. You know what? They’re the first ones to run home when something happens because they don’t want to be involved. They don’t want their name to come up, so they cut out. I’ve been in incidents where big fights broke out, people got hurt, and the guys that were off-duty cops were nowhere to be found. It can jeopardize their job at the station, this and that.