AMERICAN FOOTBALL SUPER BOWL 2009: TA-DA! Hello? Super Bowl week has come to Tampa with all the usual fanfare and fireworks, but, as a sign of the times, it has come with fewer people and later arrivals.
Tampa’s showpiece areas for drinking and dancing are Channelside, where every TV station is pitched up on the look-out for a Super Bowl reveller to interview, and Ybor City, which is slightly seedier but equally deserted.
At Wet Willies in Channelside it has been possible for most of the week to walk right in and demand one of the house Dacquiris without having the intrusion of other people’s company. The tips jar looks forlornly empty and the bargirl so perilously under-utilised that when Wet Willie dries out he may think of making his joint self-service.
The tragic thing is Wet Willies, which is open only about six months, is an establishment made for the Super Bowl. Behind a long, curved, stainless steel bartop lies what looks like a series of washing machines from a 1950s launderette. However, the porthole window to each machine reveals a different coloured icy liquid inside. Sex on the Beach. Pina Colada. Attitude Improver, and so on and so on.
It takes about three seconds to hand over eight dollars and be handed a large plastic cup filled with a frozen Dacquiri of your choice, a refreshment which the house menu warns has a higher alcohol content than your average bar drink. For eight dollars you would hope so.
Each icy drink comes with two straws and you can mix any number of colours to make your own cocktail. They even have a $12 cup with a lid and dispenser like athletes use to drink from. Ideal to purchase and take away if you have a long drive ahead of you.
If Wet Willies were in Temple Bar our fair city would be laid to waste in the space of a weekend. In Wet Willies of Channelside, though, the worst which can happen to you after a few minutes of exchanging gloomy looks with the girls behind the bar is that you could be killed in the stampede of TV crews looking to interview you about your Super Bowl partying extravaganza as you wiped the last glob of Black Russian from your grizzled chin.
It’s a short trolley ride from Channelside to Ybor City, where the long drag of Seventh Avenue has obviously been expecting business to be a little more brisk. Kurt Warner, the slightly cheesy but born-again quarterback of the Arizona Cardinals who discusses most of his plays with God (and, Kurt likes to imply, vice versa), wouldn’t like it here at all. The shops sell bongs and waterpipes.
The other establishments have music wafting from their cavernously empty spaces which are guarded by small platoons of ’roid-enhanced bouncers. Instead of keeping people out, the bouncers hustle the odd passer-by: “No Cover Charge. No Cover Charge.”
Passing the deserted, fifties-style eating palace that is Roma’s Pizza, a young girl in a blue T-shirt asks brightly, “Where ya from?”
Considering that we don’t exactly look like a red-haired and freckled extra from Ryan’s Daughter, we consider this identification of our mysterious and enigmatic otherness to be quite perceptive in one so young and lovely.
“Ireland,” we say brightly, but before we can develop the specifics of our Irishness she has another question.
“Ya got a hotel?”
This concern for our wellbeing is an unexpected hospitality but an unnecessary one.
“Yes thanks, the paper . . .”
“Bring me to your room. Two-hundred bucks. Come on.”
How bad can times be?
Unfortunately, the poor girl has happened upon the Most Politically Correct Man on the Planet, and, anyway, even if he weren’t so shackled he would require her to provide verifiable receipts for the paper’s bean counters, also testifying in a manner which might make her eligible for tax to any tips or gratuities which the Most Politically Correct Man on the Planet might donate to a young hooker so down on her luck.
You just wish her well and hope the weekend is busier for her.
She says her hotel rooms visits will be dearer at the weekend. Because we can’t think of a thing to add, we just smile and say cheerily, “I hope so.” Gives her something to think about as we walk on down Seventh Avenue.
The trolley back across Tampa is empty except for a student and an extra trolley driver whose shift is finished. At a traffic light our driver pulls in and says he will be back in a minute. He leaps out and runs across the road to a well-lit little patch of ground where a makeshift carnival has set up. The driver queues for a Philly Cheesesteak while we abandoned passengers on the trolley are suddenly assailed by a stream of abuse.
“Yo! Y’all too pussy to get outta there? Y’all gonna keep starin’ right ahead or y’all gonna come over heah and take me on?”
It takes a while to establish that the abuse is coming from a man seated on a plank of wood above a large tank of water on the far side of the road. He is trying to entice us to get off the trolley and come over and throw baseballs at a target at $2 a pop. If the baseball hits the target plum on the sweet spot the loudmouth will be dunked into the tank of water.
We stare back across the road at him feeling strangely emasculated by our unfathomable dependency on the trolley driver, who is just now paying for his cheesesteak. He can leave us. We can’t abandon him. Not to throw baseballs at a carny freak? It’s just not adult.
So the carnival man shouts some more as our trolley shudders back to life. Just then, from the deep darkness which brackets either end of the carnival strip, a young, dreadlocked kid in low riders saunters along and, scarcely breaking stride, just lifts one of the baseballs which are stacked like Ferrero Rocher at the ambassador’s party. He pegs it with nonchalant grace and elegance at the target before the barker on the seat has even noticed what has happened. The trolley is just pulling away as we see the flailing figure of the carnival barker fall into his tank of water with no audience there to witness his baptismal dunking.
We trundle on towards the antiseptic downtown of Tampa smiling thinly to ourselves. A Super Bowl on the cusp of the depression. The first bites are taken from the bottom of the pie.
Same old story.
