These are the girls from Tampa. And this is their beach-pub crawl.
But why the drawing of a claw-slashing cougar on all their shirts?
"A cougar is an older woman who likes to prey on a younger man." That's Maggie. She explains the image on her pink tank top, as well as those on her five friends' matching tops. They are, she says, the Pink Cougars — middle-aged gals with a kitchen pass from hubby, a penchant for groping men and a headful of booze.
We're standing in the parking lot of the Wachovia Bank in downtown St. Pete Beach, mustering a crowd of about 50 people who have joined about 20 members of the Creative Loafing staff, including the publisher, to test a theory: Can you host a successful pub crawl up and down the beach by using only the Suncoast Trolley to get from bar to bar?
The answer, it turned out, was a resounding no.
But you can have a helluva lot of drunken fun trying.
3 p.m.: Maggie gives her last name as "Fineequa." It is not her last name. It is the name printed on the back of her Pink Cougars tank top. All of the Pink Cougars have fake names on the back of their pink tanks: Felatianio, Fartavia, Titiala. You get the idea.
The crowd is as varied as this newspaper's readership. A Tampa Bay Storm player (who joined midway through). A radio personality. A daily newspaper reporter. A kindergarten teacher. Radiology techs. The president of a Gasparilla krewe.
The Pink Cougars plan on having some serious fun — of the all-flirting, catch-and-release kind. Marcie says, "Don't tell my husband."
The pub-crawl idea, it is explained to the happy wanderers, is that we will jump on a trolley, pay the $3.50 for an all-day pass, and ride the waves of public transportation to a few bars on Gulf Blvd. We're going to pick up the trolley across the street, and the group heads there 20 minutes after our scheduled 3 p.m. shove-off time.
And the waiting begins.
Tip 1: Don't ride the trolley if you are in a hurry to drink.
Several problems are immediately apparent.
First, the trolleys come only every half hour. For a thirsty, ready-to-party mob, this is entirely unacceptable.
Second, we've attracted about 70 people to this experiment. The trolley holds maybe 30 to 40 comfortably and 60 packed like sardines.
As for the third problem, we'll get to that.
"It is better to have and not want than want and not have," his friend, Mike Heath, 26, offers, Buddha-like.
"Dude, that's horrible," Escobar tells him. "Shut up."
This is the last time I see the pair.
3:42 p.m.: A group of pub crawlers, impatient with the wait, has procured a bottle of La Tienda Segura Viudas Cava sparkling wine, its pewter-adorned bottle in a requisite brown paper bag, and are pouring small shots of it into tiny plastic cups the size of thumbnails. They shoot them down with a howl.
They are, of course, the Pink Cougars.
3:44 p.m.: Overheard: "This is a lot of downtime."
3:48 p.m.: The northbound trolley arrives. Already, about 10 people have peeled off from the crawlers to take their own cars to our first stop, the Undertow. Unfortunately for them, we've shifted gears because of the delay and are heading north instead, to Caddy's on Sunset Beach.
Then the third problem of beach trolley pub crawling becomes apparent.
Tip 2: Don't travel to bars in groups of 70.
It takes more than 15 minutes for what's left of the pub-crawl gang to step up into the trolley, feed three dollar bills and two quarters into a temperamental cash machine and receive the coveted day pass. The driver's face is etched with a mixture of horror and awe. But to his credit, he allows our entire group to shoehorn onto the trolley — capacity be damned. Packed in nice and tight, we move. A female passenger already on the trolley threatens to call the fire marshal for overcrowding the bus.
Overheard: "Look, bitch, you're not bringing anybody else back to the room."
4:15 p.m.: Our feet hit sand for the first time today! We're at Caddy's, among the last of the classic, on-the-beach bars. It's Sunset Beach, where alcohol is legal on the sand, so there is a big crowd all the way past the lime-yellow and green picnic benches down to the water. A stiff breeze takes the edge off the sizzle of the sun.
"When we finally hit the bar, we were like 'aaaaahhhhh,'" says Chad Jackson on Caddy's roof bar. The CL trip had a lot to live up to — Jackson's first pub crawl was in Rome, Italy.
"I've never been here before," says Deana Firlick, pulling another Budweiser from the bucket o' beers.
Firlick is setting an alarm at every stop to make sure she and Jackson don't miss the trolley.
"We're professionals," quips Jackson.
Tip 3: Once you reach the beach, start partying hard.
I ask Debbie Batchik of Tampa what the secret to drinking at the beach is. She answers, "Give it to me cold and give it to me now."
Upstairs, on Caddy's second-floor deck, CL music critic Wade Tatangelo does a shot of Jaegermeister (full journalistic disclosure: Garcia bought it for him) and moves to the rail to watch the hot bods below. Only problem: "I don't have my glasses." We opt not to describe the women below to him.
By the end of our one-hour stay at Caddy's, Tatangelo is loosened up enough to agree to a wrestling match with another CL staffer, Lyndsay Tubbs, whose brother was a championship grappler in their native Minnesota. "You'll be very surprised at what I have," Tubbs boasts to Tatangelo, who also wrestled in high school. "I've wrestled 200-pound guys." They vow to get it on at the next pub stop.
Booze intervenes. The match never happens.
5:30 p.m.: We're back on the trolley heading north again, to Gator's, the sprawling party complex on John's Pass. It's a cross-section of Florida: Bikers sit in front of the Dave Perri Band, playing "Gimme Three Steps" as we walk in; hotties out on the deck; groups of friends eating and drinking at tables under beach umbrellas; $300,000 powerboats tied up at the dock.
At Caddy's, Sean had four beers; his friend, Joey B, had five. As they walk up to Gator's, they pass along some ideas on how to do future pub crawls better. "I hope we learned a lot of lessons today," says Joey B, an on-air personality on the MJ Morning Show on WFLZ 93.3. He offers us:
Joey B and Sean aren't feeling much pain, though. More and colder beers lie ahead, and as long as they find themselves in front of a TV screen for the New Jersey Devils game by 8 p.m., all is going to be right with the world.
Joey B is even charitable in his disdain for our "planning."
"It's trial by error," he says. "So we live and we learn."
5:45 p.m.: Two CL staffers, Melanie Kools and Dannielle Fiore, are onstage with the Dave Perri Band within five minutes of our arrival, singing and shaking a tambourine. And within that same time window, the well-oiled bar band cranks up the official anthem of every beach bar in the world: Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl." The dance floor fills.
I spy Larry, one of our most gregarious crawlers, the first with a drink in his hand at this stop. He is intensely tanned, well-muscled, bald and happy/scary. He's already made such an impression on his fellow travelers that the subsequent trolley rides are marked by chants of, "Laaaaa-rrrryyyy, Laaaaa-rrrryyyy." He is wearing our official T-shirt, from which he immediately ripped the sleeves and collar to make it into a muscle shirt.
6:10 p.m.: Out on Gator's deck, there is a good view of the cigarette boats as they power out into the pass, avoiding the dozen or so porpoises that roll happily in the salt water to the delight of tourists. One of the great beasts even slaps its tail for onlookers.
Henry has taken our setbacks in stride: "Train wreck or not, drinking at the beach doesn't suck."
6:50 p.m.: We gather back at the trolley stop for another long wait. But the experience is not all bad because:
Tip 5: If you have to wait for a trolley, make sure the stop is in front of a liquor store.
John's Pass Liquors is the apprehensive host to a wandering drunken mob that invades the store and leaves with mini-bottles of liquor that are drunk as shots; a hip flask of Captain Morgan's Parrot Bay coconut rum, which is mixed into a bottle of Diet Coke; and various other cans of Red Bull and alcoholic beverages. Somebody procures a bottle of Pucker Island Blue Schnapps, which is later passed around on the trolley ride to our next stop.
A CL staffer comes up to me, wobbling, and comically announces, "The reason my Coca-Cola smells like suntan lotion is I put coconut rum in it."
This, in retrospect, is where everything really starts to fall apart.
7:10 p.m.: We arrive at the Daiquiri Deck in Madeira Beach, in a small strip center across the street from the sand and surf. No sunset for us tonight; the condos block the view.
The place has a bank of frozen drink machines on the back wall. Strawberry, pina colada, mango, Deck special, banana, purple haze, margarita, rumrunner.
The rest of the time at the Daiquiri Deck passes in a blur of people eating, drinking and hooking up to one degree or another.
8:30 p.m.: After leaving the Daiquiri Deck, we wait for more than a half hour for a trolley to take us to our final destination: The Pub on Indian Rocks. When a southbound trolley arrives, a gaggle of folks hightail it across the street and jump aboard, effectively calling it a day. When the northward trolley finally rolls up to our group, we're about 18 people strong.
The trolley operator, who transported our party of 70 earlier, seems relieved. A stranger who's practically bouncing off the walls of the bus tells Tatangelo about his jail exploits. "I'm pretty good at handling crazies," Tatangelo mutters to the guy next to him.
But apparently our crawl has caused some sort of trolley backup, because two other buses are right behind ours. Our driver pulls over to argue with two other trolley operators about which way to head on Gulf Boulevard. We switch trolleys and finally arrive at our next stop.
Somewhere along this stretch, the Pink Cougars, the Storm player and a few others jump off at a random stop and depart into the night.
9:30 p.m.: The Pub is full of condo dwellers, drinking and dancing to a piano man playing schmaltzy standards — a somewhat older crowd. After introducing ourselves, the Pub manager tells us to keep our language clean for the other guests. We grab our tickets (redeemable for a draft beer). Some of the remaining crawlers choose to imbibe with a view of the water while others dance with the older folks inside.
Whenever p.m.: As the hour wanes, many of our pub crawlers decide to forgo the trolley and take a cab back to St. Pete Beach. (For those who jumped ship after the Daiquiri Deck, waiting and riding the trolley took them more than an hour to return to their cars.)
Nine of us decide to brave it, drink more and wait for the last trolley of the night. But when we finally finish our drinks and head out for the next bus, it blows right past us. Panic sets in. People reach for cell phones. A few crawlers attempt to hitchhike, flagging down large vans for the rest of us. Just when we're about to lose all hope, another trolley comes barreling toward us. We get the operator to halt, crawl in and make it to our stop at St. Pete Beach — just in time to hit another beach bar for an after-party.
On the way back, after nearly getting stranded without a ride, Deana Firlick offers one last suggestion:
Tip 6: "We need to do it more often, and with a party bus. Forget this trolley shit."
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This article appears in May 9-15, 2007.