Within seconds, he was off his feet and being rushed toward the door. A bouncer hurled him through the bar's glass-and-wood doors with such force that one of his sneakers flew off his foot into the street.
Sprawled on the sidewalk, he felt his arm tingling. Horror overtook confusion when he glanced down.
"There was a huge chunk just gone. Blood was pouring out. I thought I was losing my arm," said Bowser, whose forearm had been flayed open from the underside of his elbow halfway to his wrist.
Dizzy, he sagged against a parked car.
"Get off the car!" a bouncer shouted. It was the first time, he said, since he reached for his wallet, that any bar employee had said anything to him.
Powder keg
In the booze business, anyone can be a bouncer, at least in Pennsylvania. Getting a job as a bar doorman is no more complicated or regulated than landing a job at a Wawa.
But, unlike bouncers, Wawa clerks aren't likely to send you to the hospital with a nearly severed arm - or kill you. Two bouncers at a Southwest Philadelphia strip club are awaiting trial for their roles in a 2009 beating that left a customer from Delaware County dead.
"Bars hire guys who just look big and buff, rather than people with a personality, people who can handle themselves by communicating rather than immediately getting physical," said Bowser, 25, of Chalfont, Bucks County, whose 2008 brush with Field House bouncers left him with a jagged scar and a reluctance to revisit Philadelphia's social scene.
They don't get paid very much money, either.
While pay can vary depending on how classy a club is, bouncers typically make about $30,000 a year in Philadelphia, according to salaryexpert.com.
But some states, recognizing the powder keg that alcohol, groups of male strangers and low-paid burly bouncers can create, have beefed up screening and training requirements for bouncers.
