She had one of those ebony/ivory smiles — the kind with black gaps where a white tooth once peeked out from behind her happy lips. Her Lynyrd Skynyrd tee-shirt may have been a part of her wardrobe since the boys nosed into the hard Mississippi ground that fateful night in 1977. I ordered my usual — Jack on the Rocks with a twist of lemon — and she poured three mighty shots into a hefty glass. Nice.
Several of us stopped at The Hub in downtown Tampa after a day of civic volunteerism and leadership training. There we were, starched white shirts and silk ties, among the working class boys in laborer’s Levi’s. The locals sucked down PBRs in the can, cold and tasty. Those at the bar had “hangdog” expressions, most with their heads tucked down and somber. Most were solitary men, quiet in their moment at The Hub, contemplating, perhaps, their next job as a short-order cook at Waffle House or someone who unloads cold fish at midnight off a rickedy trawler down at the dock on the bay.
You can still smoke a Lucky or a Chesterfield or whatever you like while drinking at The Hub. It reminds me of my twenties on the Pacific Coast, when bars were dimly lit joints bathed in a stale haze of burnt tobacco. Most of the boys were puffing away as they drank.
The Hub has a jukebox pumping out bluesy rock and roll. Next to the tune machine find a classic standup video game, Gallaxa. What a wild time-trip seeing that box was to several of us. You could catch a hint of disinfectant coming up from the linoleum below. It mingled with the cigarette smoke and the beer drips that always seem to find the floor. We pulled a number of cheap tables together and sat of some hard-ass chairs. The conversation was lively and we had a few laughs.
Super Bowl posters were everywhere. It wasn’t a sports bar, but everybody is worshiping the NFL this week. The Big Bash is bringing in some serious coin and some of the boys in the room were probably getting some extra fares for their hacks. CNN was on the tube, “blah-blah unemployment-foreclosure-investor scam victims” coming out of the mouth of the beautiful people allowed to read the news to us via satellite. The boys at the bar paid little attention to the doom-gloom; hell, they lived at The Hub, it was their world. And their world has been down and out for a lot longer than the last four years.
The Hub gives us all a little comfort, a little solace from the “blah-blah” in a world where a bar stool is sanctuary.
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