"Hey," says the guy with whom I'm drinking beer, "did you happen to check out the last website I sent you?"I reply that I did, and that I loved it.
We're at St. Pete's State Theatre, a venue that appears so often in this column simply because so many of the more relatable things I've experienced are connected to it somehow. (In the nearly 10 years since I gave up Hyde Park for St. Petersburg, I've come to accept that the stretch of Central Avenue from Jannus Landing to the State is the sun around which my life revolves.) Onstage, local favorites Car Bomb Driver careen through a rollicking, voluminous set of the same excellent punk songs they've been playing for eons. The guy and I don't have to scream into each other's faces, however, because we're upstairs in the club's backstage area, where some charitable soul has left a smuggled case of ice-cold cans unguarded.
Seemingly out of nowhere, the guy — we'll call him Stinson, because I'm thinking of putting on a Replacements disc — asks:
"Do you have any idea how many people will be heading out to the beach tomorrow for Memorial Day?"
It takes me a minute to connect the quasi-rhetorical question to the website we were just discussing: Freewayblogger.com, an energetically anti-Bush page that schools activists in the art of "installing" thought-provoking slogans and statistics in areas of high public traffic.
"Wait, you're not gonna —"
Stinson smiles, big and evil.
"Yup," he says. "Corner of Park and Tyrone, right on the way out to the beach."
"When?"
"Around five in the morning."
"Can I come?"
Hours later, but still nowhere near 5 a.m., my cell phone rings."We're going to go ahead and do this now," says Stinson.
He gives me directions to a house in Kenwood where, it turns out, most of the 10 or 12 people present are more interested in getting their drink on than in making a political statement. Out back, adjacent to the tiki bar, Stinson reveals his message's centerpiece — George W. Bush's face poised over crossbones, in bold black, on a 4-foot-by-6-foot tarpaulin painted glaringly white.
"Are you down with this?" I ask a young man slumped against the tiki bar.
"Hell no," he growls, slurring just a little. "I love George Bush."
Stinson beckons me into the front yard, where he lays out the whole deal. Five tarps: four with three letters each, and the ol' Bush 'n' Bones. THE. WAR. IS. A. LIE. The complete sequence is far too big to fit in my camera's frame. And its stark, stenciled, black-and-white design will be seen easily, long before the sun comes up.
It seems important to note that Stinson doesn't consider himself a political activist. While he's certainly socially cognizant, and his informed opinions display an obvious lefty bent, I've got a hunch this may be the first direct action he's taken beyond conversation, and maybe playing for free for various causes as a member of a band or two.
He's just had it with what he sees as the Bush Administration's alarmingly imperialist policies. Freewayblogger.com exposed him to an inexpensive, creative and potentially high-impact avenue for expressing his frustration.
"No words could really display how strongly I feel about it anymore," he says. "That's why [we're] doing this."
When asked if the attraction was completely in the politics, or if maybe there was something to the thrill of running around in the middle of the night acting all subversive, he curtly replies that "it's more the former than the latter."
The two other main offenders — let's call them Sid and Nancy, shall we? — are rounded up. A couple of drivers are nominated, chosen for their sobriety and comparative detachment from the gig (i.e., they're not dying to run up a bridge, climb a fence and zip-tie the damn thing into place). And we're off.
As we park in a vast, deserted lot next to the Pinellas Trail, it's easy to see why Stinson and Sid chose this location. Come morning, thousands of day-offers will take Tyrone Boulevard out to the beach, and many of them, out of habit, will stare up at the massive, enclosed overpass that carries the Trail over Park Street. If the bloggers are fortunate, a goodly number of travelers will see their message before somebody calls somebody in charge, screaming about terrorists (nope) and vandalism (nope) and disgracing the war heroes' holiday (OK, that one's up for grabs).
Sid is out of one vehicle before its engine quits idling, using a skateboard to full advantage as he hops onto the Trail and begins pumping up the incline. There are several minutes of Three Stooges-esque comedy when the rear of the car is opened, and no tarps are found — a car is dispatched back to HQ, only to be recalled when Sid comes back to ask what the fuck everybody's waiting for, because he's got the tarps.
At the center of the Trail's bridge, Stinson and Sid affix the tarps to the inside of its chain-link enclosure, so that if one falls, it'll crumple on the Trail rather than dropping into traffic. After the planning, anticipation and initial dive into battle, the finish is a bit anticlimactic; hanging the tarps takes all of three minutes, and no one below pulls over and starts shooting at them. When they're finished, though, we all do the deed justice by sprinting down the incline as if pursued by a SWAT team on Rollerblades and accompanied by trained cheetahs that shoot Tazer darts out of their eyes.
And a half-block away, as I stop to try and get a decent photo of the finished product (I can't), they admire their handiwork. It may not even remain in place until daybreak, but they felt compelled to do something, and they did.
Alternative media, indeed.
Contact Scott Harrell at 813-739-4856, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklylpanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2004.