Floridian: A real cold one

Sunday Journal

A real cold one

By BRIAN CHRISTIAN

I wasted some good, salient years of my youth in Tampa, living in a studio apartment on the top floor of a shooting gallery in Hyde Park. Every now and then an ambulance siren would announce a new vacancy, but the caliber of the clientele never rose, and the new tenants fell away like the clapboard siding in the summer rains. I chalked up the sordidness to economy and the bohemian lifestyle. After all, I was a young man with a stomach of steel and no ambitions.

Drinking was the only life around, so I cruised every package store, pool hall, pizza joint and bottle club that would serve up a cold one to my pallid, underage face. Ybor City hadn't yet turned into a drunk's paradise, and driving down Seventh Avenue at night meant a brick through your car window or worse. I kept a crowbar under the front seat in case of trouble. I thought I was hard-boiled.

Late one night I was on my way out when I heard about a party at my friend Dave's house. He lived nearby, on Howard Avenue, in a come-and-go commune strung with black lights and tie-dyed prints. He was a charismatic and well-liked guy, my friend Dave, known to do anything for a laugh, and so he suffered fools all his life because they saw in him a leader. In a few years he would move to Orlando to write poetry and be dead by suicide. It would be his only notoriety.

I met him on his steps, where he was having a smoke. He offered me a beer, and I joined a half-dozen people sitting around drinking. That's when she introduced herself.

She was sitting near the window, and the streetlight gave her a faint halo. She wore black stockings and skirt, and her blond hair was pulled back like Garbo's. She called herself Sally.

All I remember now is that Sally had a job, a new car and an apartment and was 21. I felt like I had hit one out of the ballpark. The rest isn't important, only that I suggested that we leave the party and go for a spin.

We walked out without saying goodbye, and she opened the door of her little silver sports car for me, and I crammed in. When she sat down, I was expecting to smell her perfume, but all I could smell were the thickly sweet, smoky traces of clove cigarettes. She asked if I had any place in mind, but I figured we could just drive around. That way we could get to know one another.

We made our way down Howard onto Bayshore and drove through the warm, beautiful night with the windows raised and the A/C on. Soon Bayshore ended, and we crossed the river into downtown, waiting at red lights for no one. The courthouses and churches stood broad and unassailable, block after block deserted except for the forlorn bums and travelers in the Greyhound station. We hooked back onto Kennedy Boulevard over the bridge and passed the university, with its stone columns and spires lancing the sky. As we crossed the railroad tracks at Willow, I asked if she was hungry, and she said yes.

She pulled into an all-night sub shop, a place where I had been dozens of times coming home from drinking nights. Inside we stared at the menu board, though I can't recall the shop serving anything other than gyros and fries.

I was turning toward Sally when the bell on the door rang and two teens in denim shorts and white tees pushed in between us, cutting in front of us in line, to the counter. They talked quietly with the countermen, and so I thought it was a gag and shrugged them off as two neighborhood regulars. Then I heard a pop and some scurrying, and I knew that a gun had been fired. They were robbing the place.

It was an equidistance between the counter and the front door, but a marathon away in time, the prolonged repetitive time of nightmares.

I dragged Sally by her arm, because she was still unaware, like everyone else inside. A handgun, especially a small-caliber piece, doesn't have the cannon boom of a TV drama. It sounds more like a child's cap gun or a whip's crack. Because no one but us was standing between them and the way out, I figured that we were as good as shot. But our leaden feet made it to the door, and as I shoved her through, the shooter turned around. I met his eyes, eyes as electrified as my own, and in that eternal moment we both seemed about to shrug and say, "Hey, that's the way it goes."

He couldn't have been older than 15.

Outside, Sally was fumbling for her car keys, because she had a maternal instinct to protect her purse locked inside the car. I told her that they were going to come out any second, so we ran for it hand in hand across the boulevard. A few blocks away, we found a pay phone and called 911.

I was huffing and reeling and furious and turned on and alive. I wanted to kiss her, but I saw the cops and ambulances on the way and figured that we should go back.

Inside, a shock was still in the air, and a customer told me that the kids had robbed everyone and stole the cash drawer. The cashier, a Greek in his early 20s, had taken the bullet. The police took statements, and as the paramedics lifted the victim into the ambulance, he cocked an arm and gave a thumbs up.

Standing next to us watching it all was a cook in an untied apron.

"It looks like he's going to be all right," I said to him.

"I hope so. He's my brother."

I tracked the florid drops of blood on the floor and seats that led to the door. Any other day they might have been mistaken for spots of ketchup.

"Do you think you could clean some of this up so we can sit down?" Sally asked the cook.

The cook and I were too dazed by her asking to protest, and so he took some napkins from the metal dispenser and patted and blotted his kin's blood until it was gone.

"You're not still hungry, are you?" I asked.

"Yeah, a little." She turned to him. "Can we still get something to eat? Maybe some fries?"

"No. We're closed now." He walked outside.

As we sat in the yellow molded plastic booth under the fluorescent beams, I watched the ambulance silently pull away. I turned to Sally.

"Where should we go now?"

-- Brian Christian is a screenwriting consultant living in Los Angeles.