The Last One
Standing

The sound Jared describes isn't one you forget. A Halloween pumpkin, he says — one that stayed out too long and got tossed into the middle of the street. That low, dense thud. He heard it the night a young man flipped backward off the third-floor railing at 216 Court Avenue and fell twenty-eight feet to the concrete below, and Jared was the only one watching.

That was several years ago now, but he still talks about it the way you talk about something that rewired you. He had been the last person to speak with the guy — walking him toward the stairs, cracking jokes, telling him to have a good night — and then, a door cracked open, a moment of liquid courage, and everything changed. "Being the last person," he said quietly. "You feel all the responsibility, the weight of your shoulders on you right then and there."

Jared has been working doors in Des Moines for twenty-six years. He arrived in the city from San Diego in 2001, a twenty-something who had already been doing this work for a year, and somewhere in the middle of all those Friday nights and bar-time countdowns and seasons cycling through downtown, Des Moines became home. He is forty-four now, and he still works the door at American Outlaws — a three-level country, rock, and top-40 bar on Court Avenue with two DJs running simultaneously — where he has been stationed for the last four years.

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Jared has worked security at multiple downtown venues over 26 years. American Outlaws has been his home for the last four.

New Day, New Adventure

Ask Jared what keeps him coming back to a job that requires giving up weekends, holidays, and most of his sleeping hours, and he doesn't hesitate. "It's a new day, new adventure," he said. "Sometimes it can get a little boring, but as long as you have fun with the job that you do, you'll start noticing people will have fun around you." That's not a philosophy he recites — it's the operating system behind everything he does on a shift. He dances with customers, he talks, he jokes. The security feature, as he puts it, switches off when it doesn't need to be on.

The work, he's careful to explain, is nothing like what people imagine. Not roadhouse fantasy. Not just checking IDs at the door. "It's not a sit-down job like people think," he said. In-house security staff clean, pick up cups and bottles, patrol bathrooms, clear blind spots. They have a duality — customer face on one side, physical authority on the other — and the skill is in knowing when to shift between them. In twenty-six years and hundreds of nights, he has been involved in only seven major skirmishes. He considers that a point of pride, not luck.

His current team at American Outlaws runs around fifteen people on paper, though on a given Saturday night you might see seven: someone checking IDs at the door, someone taking the five-dollar cover and doing risk assessments, a bouncer working the main two floors, and up to three more upstairs. Jared, who describes himself as a jack-of-all-trades, prefers the floor — though he admits the door has always come naturally to him. He has trained so many newer security workers over the years that he has considered starting a YouTube channel dedicated to ID verification, not because it's a flashy subject, but because he thinks the knowledge gap is real and dangerous.

Your Eyes Beat the Scanner

He can talk about fake IDs for a long time, and it becomes clear fast that this is the craft inside the craft. The most common trick isn't a laminated piece of paper claiming to be a license — it's a real ID handed over by someone it doesn't belong to. Sisters who share bone structure. Siblings close enough in age that the face on the card could plausibly be the face in front of you. "Could you really tell if this person is 21?" he asked. The honest answer, he knows, is sometimes no. But he's learned to look at bone structure — eyes, nose, chin, cheekbones — because weight fluctuates, hair changes, but the underlying architecture of a face doesn't lie.

When downtown bars shifted to handheld ID scanners, he ran an informal test and the results were not encouraging. "I pulled out seven fake IDs in three regulars and scanned them all," he said. "All but one said they were legal. That's not a very good percentage for a handheld scanner." The flaw, he explained, is that 2D barcodes — the smaller barcode on Iowa licenses — can be coded with a name and birthday to pass a digital scan even if the physical card is fraudulent. The scanner reads what it's told to read. The human eye reads what's actually there. "Your eyesight," he said, "will always be better than a computer."

The Two-Hour Power

Downtown Des Moines has its own rhythms, and after a quarter-century, Jared reads them the way a farmer reads weather. Spring and summer slow business at indoor bars — not because fewer people come out, but because patio season pulls them elsewhere. "People go to patios," he said simply. When the warmth finally edges people inside, the night starts late. American Outlaws might open at seven but won't feel a real crowd until eleven or eleven-thirty, and then the real window arrives: what Jared calls the two-hour power, midnight to two, when the bar is full and moving.

Bar time runs fifteen minutes ahead of the clock — a long-standing practice, he says, that gives venues the window they need to safely empty out before the legal alcohol cutoff. "Ugly lights are on," he said, describing the signal to start finding your ride home. Getting a crowd of two hundred people — or sometimes more — moving toward the exit in an orderly way, while some of them are determined to stay rooted in place, is one of the more delicate things he manages. Regulars, he notes with a kind of dry patience, are often the most stubborn. "People always think that just because they know the ownership, just because they know the general manager, it's going to get them somewhere." It usually doesn't.

He watches the city change in four-year cycles, tied roughly to the college cadence — a new wave of twenty-one-year-olds, a shift in which bars they prefer, which patios they gather on, which blocks feel alive. Downtown has had its highs and its stretches of quiet. The pandemic took a toll on places that had been around long enough to feel permanent. He remembers Spaghetti Works as one of the long-standing staples that didn't make it through. Live music, which once gave downtown a different kind of energy, has been harder to find. But the city, in his view, still has a pulse — and events like NCAA basketball, Monster Jam, and concerts at what used to be Wells Fargo Arena still reliably pull people from three states over. "Those who come to Des Moines," he said, "are still very respectable."

Twenty-Eight Feet

The night at 216 Court Avenue started ordinarily enough. A group of young men had come in, met three women at a neighboring table, and the six of them had a night together — dancing, drinking, doing nothing wrong. By last call, four of the six had already headed downstairs. Jared had walked the remaining young woman out first; she'd left her number for the last guy in the group. Then the man came out of the restroom, and Jared flagged him toward the stairs. They shook hands. He told him he'd had a great night and to come back next weekend.

There was a flat landing at the top of the stairs and then a set of steps going down to the second level. The handrails had been intentionally roughed up to discourage people from sliding down them — but liquid courage, as Jared says, doesn't read warning signs. The man decided to pop himself up on the rail anyway. The first time, he caught himself. Jared, door still cracked open, told him to stop, said they'd both had a good night and to walk down like a person. The man laughed, agreed. Jared let the door ease toward closed.

He could still see him through the crack.

The man tried it again, harder this time. His feet swung out. His center of gravity went with them. And once his knees and feet had passed straight up over his head, Jared says, "you're reaching past the point of no return, unless you're a gymnast." He went over backward. He reached for anything. There was nothing there. Jared hit the door open and heard the sound — that pumpkin sound — and ran down to where the man was lying motionless on the ground below.

He was down on his knees within seconds. The man was breathing — barely, and with a faint pulse — but there was no external blood, which scared Jared as much as anything. He checked pupils. He found a small square patch of scraped skin and hair embedded in the concrete where the man had grazed the railing on his way down. He kept him still, flagged down the Summer Enforcement Team officers who were on foot just off Court Avenue, and gave them a quick triage overview before the paramedics arrived. When his boss finally grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back, he was already doing the math in his head on whether they were going to lose him. CPR was administered. The man's pulse came and went. He was loaded into the ambulance, and they worked on him all the way to the back of the vehicle.

Jared was told that night that the man had died at the hospital. He carried that for years.

It wasn't until the Damar Hamlin incident — when the Buffalo Bills safety went into cardiac arrest on national television in early 2023 — that KCCI ran a story connecting that moment to local tragedies of a similar nature. The young man's mother had called in. She recognized herself in Hamlin's mother. A reporter reached out to Jared, who had already contacted the station with his own account. In the process of that reporting, he found out the truth: the man had survived. Against odds his mother described as somewhere around one percent, he was alive.

"Not everybody has the right information," Jared said. "That one incident — a phone call and emails later — changed my whole perspective of being a bouncer. Knowing that being a first responder means everything."

He has never met the man. He's never met the mother or the sister. He has read the excerpts from the KCCI story and knows roughly that the man is still dealing with the aftermath five years later — walking, talking, but far from finished with what that night cost him. What Jared wants, more than anything, is simple: "Just to see him physically. Get the final closure. Not a gold star, not a cookie. Just to know that I did everything I could, then lifted it to the professionals that took it from there."

That closure — and some finality that hasn't arrived yet — is the one thing in twenty-six years that Jared still can't quite put down. Everything else, he carries lightly. The late nights, the sacrificed weekends, the slow seasons and the packed ones, the regulars who pretend the clock doesn't apply to them. He is sober now, which he mentions without drama, an alcoholic in recovery who once knew every happy hour deal within walking distance of downtown and now watches other people drink from the door. The job fits him differently than it once did — not worse, just differently. He still dances with customers when the moment calls for it. He still trains new door guys. He still thinks the green zone concept could save some headaches if someone with the right resources gave it another shot.

Every shift ends around two in the morning, and occasionally on the walk out he still sees a few cars doing slow loops around the downtown blocks — the last remnants of scooping the loop, five to fifteen cars on a good night, doing what people have always done in this city: going around and around, just to see what's there.

Jared's Favorite Places

A few spots Jared keeps coming back to after a quarter-century in this city.