The sign taped to the door said "Private Function," but Fuma Bella owner Charlie Doan waved us in from his customary spot behind the bar. We joined the small, quiet group of familiar faces scattered among the cozy Eighth Avenue watering hole's few tables.
"We're sitting for Tom, and Wendy," Doan explained, pouring a drink. "Did you know him?"
It was the fifth time in 18 hours I'd been asked that.
It's a natural enough question. Twenty-nine-year-old Thomas Laskas was well-known in the realm where live-music-loving, art-appreciating, tattoo-bearing, good-beer-drinking circles overlap in Tampa, where nobody is more than one mutual friend removed from anybody else.
But while I remember being a head-nodding sort of acquaintance with Wendy Laskas, I didn't know her husband. And I never will, because on Thursday night, a man with a knife took Tom Laskas' life, and injured three other people, during what was supposed to be nothing more than a good time.
You probably know the basics: After an unintentional and seemingly amicably settled collision with a man in the mosh pit during a show by Corrosion of Conformity at Ybor's Masquerade, Wendy Laskas and a friend were accosted by the man's girlfriend.
A fight ensued, and several people, including Tom Laskas, his friend Nicholas Stegall, and Masquerade employee Dallas Ashe, tried to break it up. The man from the mosh pit intervened, stabbing the Laskases, Stegall and Ashe before fleeing. Paramedics treated Ashe at the scene; the rest of the victims were taken to Tampa General Hospital. Stegall was treated and released. Wendy Laskas spent the weekend there.
Tom Laskas died there.
A little more than 24 hours later, Tampa Police had a suspect in custody – 39-year-old Michael Pyne, who during the concert had been handing out business cards for the Dunedin tattoo shop where he worked, and who admitted to police that he'd had a knife at Masquerade, but said he didn't remember anything after seeing his girlfriend get into a fight.
Local TV station Bay News 9's website offers readers the opportunity to post comments about stories. After its initial Friday-morning blurb about the stabbings, a handful of surfers were immediately compelled to weigh in.
"Ybor city will die out … go back to your trailer parks and go back to your hoods, go back to fighting your dogs and go back to boosting cars," wrote one.
"It's a craphole and this incident proves that … the place is riddled with violent crime and your only patrons are thugs, hookers and drug dealers and death," wrote another.
This is, of course, the wholly ignorant spieling of folks who've never been anywhere more culturally kinetic than a showing of the work of P. Buckley Moss, and who get their information regarding nearby neighborhoods from the crime-spree segment of the local TV news. What's more, it misses the point entirely. (Since Friday, several other posters have attempted to explain this.)
Tom Laskas and his friends and family, and the man with the knife, would've gone to see the concert wherever it had been booked, be it Ybor City's Masquerade or St. Pete's Jannus Landing or wherever. A community isn't about location, it's about people, and the community that goes to Ybor only for the music is hurting and angry and one individual smaller than it was a week ago.
St. Petersburg Times staffer and local musician Jonathan Milton, whose band played Masquerade Friday night, was quoted in that paper as saying "nobody seems to be talking about it" at the club where it happened.
But two blocks away, at Fuma Bella, the previous night's tragedy was all-consuming. Doan turned away everyone he didn't recognize, as the young men and women inside sat hunched, uncharacteristically quiet, over their cocktails. Attempts to lighten the mood with humor were only momentarily distracting, or fell instantly flat; no new lines of conversation were engaged for very long.
Across the street from Fuma at New World Brewery, where Wendy Laskas once worked (and regulars were still recovering from the blow dealt by the ominously similar stabbing death of Dave Anderson only eight months before), the bands played on. The packed house sipped pints of beer and sweated and went out of its way to enjoy itself.
Many of the smiles were forced, however, and whenever the TV above the L-shaped bar showed Masquerade's facade or the now-familiar picture of Thomas and Wendy Laskas, heads turned in that direction. The dull roar abated for the length of the newsbyte; they still couldn't hear it, but they didn't need to. And when the news moved on to preparations for St. Pete Pride or the weather, some quietly slipped out to cross the street for a mournful drink in honor of their friends, while the others picked up the thread of talk again, though more subdued, and endlessly circling back to the heartbreaking subject at hand.
"Did you know him?"
Some of us never got that chance.
SCOTT.HARRELL@WEEKLYPLANET.COM
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2005.