But it’s early in the week. It’s Tuesday, during the week of the Little 500. Everyone is getting a head start on their weekend drinking.
The Tuesday front door line — where customers pay a $2 cover charge — is growing. It’s ?7 p.m. and the side door bouncer’s stool has been knocked over by an intoxicated girl. People pay a $5 cover charge to get in the side. The girl is waiting to speak with the bouncer.
“I have a question,” she says. The question is unanswered; the bouncer is talking to someone else already.
She sways. She waits.
“I just have a question,” she says again. When she reaches out and touches the bouncer, he finally turns to her.
“What can I do for you?” he says.
She wants to know if the stamp on her wrist will get her into Sports. When he tells her yes, she is elated.
She walks over to another girl who is waiting on her, and together, they plunge down Kirkwood Avenue, into the night.
Mike Kaminski is the bouncer who told the girl about the stamp.
He’s working the $5 door tonight: checking IDs, taking money, stamping upturned wrists, reminding person after person that yes, the stamp will get you into Sports, as well.
While people in line in front of KOK are being slowly shuffled in, people who stepped into the line on the side of the building are moving through rapidly. They are experiencing virtually no wait time.
Kaminski is quick with his routine: check-take-stamp. That quickness comes with a price — while it costs $2 tonight to get in through the front door, it’s $5 to walk through Kaminksi’s door.
“About 30 percent of the people from the front line will end up coming through this door,” Kaminski says, speaking from his personal experience.
That’s on a regular Tuesday or Thursday night, on which Kaminski says the bar sees 200-300 people through the side door.
“Tonight I expect to put in 500,” Kaminski says. “The front door will probably put in over a thousand.”
Kaminski’s working a 12-hour shift tonight.
He says he came in at 3 p.m. and will be working until 3 a.m. Mathematically, if he does put 500 people through his door, that’s equivalent to 42 people per hour who are paying the extra $3 for convenience, making KOK an extra $125 an hour, or an extra $1,500 by the time Kaminski’s shift is done.
Michael Nunley, a 2012 alumnus and Tuesday bar hopper, says when he went to Kilroy’s for the Little 500 in years’ past, the side door could get even more ?expensive.
“When it got really late, it would cost, like, $20 to get in through that door,” Nunley says.
Tonight, Nunley came through the front door and paid $2.
At a table near the open windows, a group of friends are laughing and looking around for a server, who will eventually come bearing shots and drinks.
Like Nunley, they too had come through the front door. Two of them had come early enough that they didn’t have to wait to get into the bar. Jaclyn Hadfield says she had never heard of the $5 line before.
“I’ve seen the red rope, but I didn’t know I could get in there,” Hadfield said. Her friend Caleb Marshall said the same.
“I would have used it,” Marshall says. Marshall had arrived at KOK later than his other friends. Thor Hadfield said Marshall had spent about 25 minutes in line.
“We watched him slowly make his way up through the line,” Hadfield says.
At 7:45 p.m., the front line reaches the intersection of Kirkwood and Dunn Street.
