Fucking parking. Downtown Tampa doesn't make it easy. If they did, the place might not look like a ghost town most nights.
I know I'm not unique in feeling screwed by a $25 parking ticket. Do any of us really deserve one? Except for the jerks who use bogus handicapped parking decals, probably not.
My latest "meter violation" took place last Thursday following a little happy-hour action with Buck and his big brother at Gilligan's. I strolled out just as the officer was walking away from my car. I begged, pleaded and then — when I realized the damage had already been done — cursed his very existence and prayed that he would contract such a potent strand of syphilis that it would cause the flesh to fall from his face.
Of course, there are worse things than walking out of a bar and seeing that bright orange envelope shoved under your windshield wiper. Like, not seeing your car at all. That's happened to me three times. The first incident was more than a decade ago. I had borrowed my mom's minivan to drive Buck, Mike B. and a couple girls down to Ybor City for Guavaween, if memory serves. I don't recall shit about the night except that when we got back to where I had parked, mom's vehicle was nowhere to be found. Suddenly I was painfully sober — and stricken with fear of what Dad would do when he learned that his son, still a senior in high school, had misplaced the family van.
Turned out the car had been towed. Buck and I eventually waited several hours for the crooked cretin who operated the tow truck company to finally arrive at dawn so that I could retrieve my mom's car from his junkyard.
Fast forward to my early 20s. I leave my car at the old Weekly Planet parking lot in Ybor City and go see former P-Funk All-Star and Talking Head Bernie Worrell put on a funktastic show at The Rubb. The night went great. Met a girl on the dance floor and she drove me back to the parking lot, we did our goodbye thing and I got out of her truck. Scanned the lot and my car was nowhere to be found. I flagged down a police officer.
"You're drunk," he snapped. "Keep looking. You probably just can't find it."
I was buzzed. I'll give him that. But I wasn't wrong about my car being stolen. It turned up several days later. Some hooker's hairpiece and a rusty razor blade were among the items retrieved from the backseat. Gang signs had been scrawled across the dashboard.
The last time my car came up missing was a couple years ago in Bradenton. I closed down the Old Main pub and stumbled home (I lived a couple blocks away), because I knew I was too drunk to drive. Left my car parked on Main Street overnight, as I'd done a dozen times before. But that Saturday morning they towed it to make room for a farmer's market. One hundred and seventy-eight bucks down the drain.
I got to Gilligan's last Thursday around 4:30. Found a parking spot right in front of the door. "$1.50 an hour" read the meter. I asked the bartender Cam for change and she directed me to a change machine.
"Do they check the meter after five?" I asked her.
"Tonight they will," she said. "There's an event."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Girls' basketball," she answered. "There's two games. USF and Tennessee are playing."
I jammed four quarters into the meter and got 40 minutes. Gilligan's sells domestic pints for $2 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. I ordered one. "Good deal," I thought, but the price of parking puts the price right back up to $3 a pint. That's decent, but not good.
Buck and his brother arrived about a half hour later, as I was downing my second pint. We relocated to the outside patio. I then went back inside, stuck another dollar in the quarter machine and fed the meter — again.
The three of us knocked back our beers and had a pleasant discussion about how Russia and China are probably going to join forces against us, the terrorists will eventually get the bomb, and it's only a matter of time before we will be standing outside our houses with high-powered firearms, fighting off the invading barbarians.
With our spirits thoroughly lifted, we decided to split ways. Buck's bro hit the road first. Buck cajoled me to stay while he finished his beer. We exited, and there was the officer walking away from my car window.
"Come on, man, I already put two dollars in the thing," I said to the officer. "You saw me walking out."
The officer shrugged his shoulders and turned down Jackson.
"You're the lowest of the low," I screamed like the mature adult that I am. "What you do is the lowest of the low. Why don't you get a real fucking job!"
Which, I know, coming from a guy who gets paid to write about music and bars sounds pretty dumb.
Gilligan's, 202 Morgan St., Tampa. 813-301-9050.
This article appears in Nov 21-27, 2007.
