You couldn’t tell through sunglasses, but his crystal blue eyes stare into your soul, and it's a pristine smile somehow untouched by a lifetime of smoking off-brand cigarettes that captures your imagination. For 33 years, “Texas Tim” has been drinking Busch in the can on a bar stool propped on the checkered floor of downtown Tampa dive The Hub.
Born in Arlington, Texas—year unknown because this vain and obviously elderly man refused to tell me—Timothy Cline Smith grew up to be a truck driver for 14 years before moving to Tampa in 1987. When the road lifestyle became too much to handle, he started working as a glass cutter—a job he held for 30 years.
Decades later, Texas Tim is a daily presence at The Hub and an image of perseverance. He’s spent his entire life living paycheck-to-paycheck at the same labor-intensive job only to spend his modest salary at a dive bar, a three-minute Uber ride from his current home in Ybor City. He never married and never had children. Not really the American dream personified, but you’d never know that talking to him.
His infectious smile evokes all the mischief of a Cheshire cat grin. But his warmth and kindness showcase the sometimes over the top, genuine appeal of a working man just looking for a fun night ‘til it’s time to punch back in at the glass shop and repeat.
I’ve worked as a bartender in Tampa for 20 years in every aspect of the trade, from fine dining to the posh South Tampa lounges and Ybor City’s counterculture clubs. I even had an interesting foray at the prominent gay bar City Side, working with drag queens and male strippers I avoided eye contact with because we might have grown up together. But the three years I spent behind the bar at the Hub were oddly the most illuminating.
Dive bar culture is a unique world separate from everyday society's rules, and the Hub is a perfect example. Its central proximity to a large cross-section of the Bay Area Community attracts and serves a cauldron of various patrons.
Most bars are particular, and the clients who frequent them are aware of these unspecified standards, especially in Tampa, where the lines of social segregation seem rigid and permanent.
But there is something special about The Hub, located at 719 N Franklin St. in the shadow of the Tampa Theatre marquee. The dividing barriers present at most other Tampa watering holes aren’t entirely torn down here. But, for the duration of a visit, they become translucent.
On any given night, the diversity of people walking through the Hub’s doors has more range than a Mike Patton solo, from homeless vagrants buying blunt wrappers so they can smoke in Gaslight Park to the well-to-do $60,000-aires living in SkyPoint and The Element, and everyone in between.
Casey Hodgin is a 27-year-old make-up artist. She’s fashionable, with tattoo sleeves and a pierced septum, and has been vegan for seven years. Not exactly the type of girl you’d expect to spend time in the same establishment as a man like Texas Tim. His charms often fail to hide the utterly un-politically correct Southern boy he never outgrew.
Hodgin explained in a brief interview over a rum and coke that she enjoys the sanctum of a neighborhood bar that “won’t pass judgment on my appearance.” The world might have changed, but side glances and hand-covered murmurs are still familiar when she walks into most doors around town.
The mystic of that magical place draws them all in to escape and get drunk. But don’t order anything more labor-intensive than a single liquor pour, a bottle of beer or PBR tallboy. Current bartender and mixologist extraordinaire Kamran Mir pushed the envelope some, but the Hub is not a bar for pomp and circumstance. It serves booze the way it was meant to be consumed before getting drunk became a weird badge of honor or cry for Instagram likes.
The many bartenders who worked there are a list of hometown heroes, too, some of them iconic. Day drinking with Jeannie Robinson—who died in 2017—was a rite of passage, and by my early 20s, I felt I finally made it when co-owner Ferrell “Skooter” Melton remembered my name on a Saturday night. Scott, Mark, Brian, Jeff, Paul, Jamie, Kelly, and Joanne are all community staples if you’ve lived in Tampa for the last 20 years.
Charles Fox, co-owner and currently a bartender, has worked behind the bar since 2006. He spoke about customers growing up with the Hub in their lives throughout the process:. “The young ones come in late nights to party, then they get jobs, and you don’t see them for a while. But they always come back.”
Even customers that move away return to connect with their past for a cocktail at the Hub. Christmas Eve is one of the bar's biggest nights every year, and it’s a tradition for former locals visiting from their new homes to swing through.
So, what is it about this bar that attracts so many diverse and loyal followers? Writers like Charles Bukowski penned well-circulated novels romanticizing dive bar dramas. But, after spending three years employed there, I can tell you his impassioned metaphors are fairy tales at best.
Working at the Hub is hard. It’s late hours in a smoked-filled coffin, slowly dying while spending most of the evening arguing with the customers who’ve seen better days loitering near the package store. The job part of the job isn’t much better either. I spent many evenings questioning my morality for serving a few regulars there daily.
But bartending at The Hub is a job, and it pays pretty well, and just like everyone else in the building, I chose to be there. At various times, the fast life was my way of life, too, and just because I changed my direction, who am I to judge the Texas Tims of the world for theirs.
Tim, the same Texas gent who’s lived paycheck-to-paycheck, has stage four throat cancer and is living day-to-day now. But, despite his friends’ pleas, he keeps coming to the bar for his cigarettes and beer instead of seeking proper treatment. He’s determined to die the way he lived his life for the last 33 years, and I can’t think of a braver way to go.
Like the Hub and many of its patrons, Tim is not the ideal image of an exemplary life. But it is the life he has lived, and just like the rest of us trying to make it through the years until the universe recycles our consciousnesses into cosmic dust, there’s a Zen-like beauty to Tim’s mastery of his own self.
The Hub offers itself as a church to the many social misfits looking for the same awakening. And Texas Tim, the pompadoured Dali Lama for their kind, is the ultimate picture of inebriated perfection.
So, the next time you walk into a questionable bar and order your first drink to forget about the day, play Willie Nelson or Hank Williams Sr. on the jukebox as an offering to Tim. Let him be remembered as the face of so many before and still to come that have died alone in obscurity pursuing the same awakening on a barstool at the Hub bar in downtown Tampa.
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