Vincent Hawkins didn’t love his job as a security guard at Crossroads Entertainment Complex in Bladensburg, but it paid the bills, and, occasionally, it gave him a story to tell. For example, on Jan. 6, Hawkins held forth on the topic of the club’s parking lot pot smokers. In an interview with me for last week’s column, he told of potheads who wandered the club’s lots looking like “Mr. Magoo” and doused themselves in lotion to disguise the smell of marijuana. “Some of these people are crazy,” he said, adding that the club was working hard to crack down on parking lot tokers.

Yesterday, Crossroads cracked down on its chatty security guard, too. According to Hawkins, his supervisor instructed him to “find another gig.” He says, “they’re gonna have to let me go because I made the club look bad.”

Until Jan. 17, Hawkins earned $12 an hour for patrolling the club’s parking lot on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. He says his job was “to make sure people were able to get out, make sure nobody was breaking into cars…make sure they were conducting themselves in a manner that was conducive to good party behavior.”

Samuel Smith, who is contracted by Crossroads to oversee “parking enforcement” at the club, says Hawkins was fired for his “inability to come on time,” not for any comments he made to the City Paper. “It was definitely due to his work performance that he was released,” he says.

Hawkins, however, maintains he was fired for speaking to the press about pot in the parking lot. “They told me I was fired because of the article in the paper,” he says. “There was nothing about my tardiness, absenteeism, nothing at all….That’s a bold-faced lie. I was fired because of the article in the paper. That’s what I was told.”