It happened one night
For his Comedy Central TV show Insomniac, Dave Attell prowls the streets for interesting people. We have a few of our own.
By LANE DeGREGORY
Published April 22, 2005
Come with me and you will see
A late-night freak-show jubilee
Kick the sandman in his sack
Stay up late: Insomniac!
- opening to Dave Attell's show on Comedy Central
While most of the world sleeps, comedian Dave Attell scours the streets, searching for stories. He chats with drunks and bouncers, cops and con artists, guys who work the graveyard shift at the sewage treatment plant.
Every week, Attell and his cameraman hit a new city, shooting their after-dark documentary for Comedy Central. Insomniac, now in its fifth season, takes viewers into an underworld of drinkers, smokers and bleary laborers.
Attell is coming to the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center at 8 p.m. Sunday as part of his nationwide stand-up tour. He'll probably go prowling afterward. So we thought we'd give him a glimpse of what goes on around here after hours.
We picked the slowest night of the week, Monday, and cruised from 10 p.m. until the sun stung our slitty eyes. We tried to avoid the obvious - cab drivers, toll-booth operators, Ybor City - preferring, instead, to show a side of our cities that tourists might miss.
Note to Attell: Watch out for the skinny-legged "ladies" beckoning in front of the coin laundries on Fourth Street in St. Petersburg. They're not waiting for their clothes to dry.
11:02 P.M., DERBY LANE, 10490 GANDY BLVD., ST. PETERSBURGComing around the bend it's No. 5 out front, 4 right behind. Easter, a 22-month-old greyhound, was supposed to be last, but she's sprinting through the pack, her eyes fixed on that fake rabbit.
"C'mon, Easter. C'mon, honey," Kathi Graham calls, clenching her fists. "You can do it. C'mon, baby girl!"
It's the last race of the night at Derby Lane. The grandstands are almost empty. The greyhounds are running five-sixteenths of a mile, sprinting up to 45 miles per hour. In 31 seconds, the race is over.
Easter, whose name in the program is Oban Eachann, places fifth. "From last to fifth, not bad," says Graham, 39, the dog's trainer. She takes Easter's leash from a handler, peels off the dog's blue blanket with the No. 2.
"You did a good job, darlin'," Graham coos, rinsing the greyhound's slender paws with a hose. "You're such a good girl."
The spotlights above the track click off just before midnight. Faint stars freckle the navy sky. The bettors head home. A guard locks the gate. Graham walks Easter to her truck, drives past the doggie whirlpools, weaves through rows of concrete kennels.
More than 1,200 greyhounds live behind Derby Lane. Easter stays in an air-conditioned building with 58 other dogs. Their crates wrap around three walls and are stacked two high.
Graham and her husband, who also is a greyhound trainer, live 3 miles from the track. They switch off taking care of the dogs and their three children, ages 10, 11 and 13. Graham spends afternoons with her kids, then returns to the track before the first race. Every night except Wednesday, her husband puts the children to bed while she washes and walks the dogs.
When she opens the kennel door, the greyhounds start barking. Indy and Alice. Gina and Monk. Ingrid and Gabby and Jagermeister. "Hey, baby. Hi Sparky. What's up, Splendor?" Graham asks, scratching the dogs' wet noses through the crates.
While Easter eats, Graham lets some of her other charges take a turn around the yard. Jack licks her face. Keepsake gives her a high-five. And Hollywood bares his teeth like Cujo. "You've got the prettiest smile. Yes, you do," Graham says, stroking the dog's anvil head. "But you have to go back in here now, Hollywood," she says, opening his crate. "It's late. Time to go to sleep.
"I have to go home and kiss my kids good-night."
12:26 A.M., DAVE'S AQUA LOUNGE, 10820 GANDY BLVD., ST. PETERSBURGIt's dark inside the bar. Smells like Marlboros and working men. The six regulars are slumped on their stools, bent over brown beer bottles.
There's an empty stage in one corner. The juke box in another whines Desperado. The walls are papered with posters of faded blues men.
"Dave's dad built this bar. Been here 40 years or something. I been coming here since 1978," says a man in a camouflage cap. His sweat shirt is splattered with white paint. His wallet is chained to his jeans. He's tall and lanky, with a lean, sunburned face and a couple of holes in his smile. He looks like a character that Harry Dean Stanton would play.
"They call me the Birdman," he says, offering his rough hand. "I live behind the marina, about a baseball throw from here."
His name is John Fruauff. He's 52. Three or four days a week, when he gets done trimming trees, he walks over to Dave's and tosses back a few. He remembers when a disco ball used to spin above a lighted dance floor, right over there; when a D.J. would have folks shaking their booties all night.
"This place used to hop!" the Birdman says proudly. "And it's still a good bar," he says. "We all know each other. The bartenders are friendly. You can smoke in here. And we have a guy who cooks, Barefoot Jerry. Oh, he makes the best barbecue."
He taps an ash off his cig. Leans close, as if to reveal some secret. "But you know what the best thing about this bar is? The best thing about this bar is that we never fight inside."
1:53 A.M., ST. PETE DINER, 1101 34TH ST. N, ST. PETERSBURGHe's licking her shoulder.
While the thin young woman in a baby-blue tank top looks over the menu, the guy next to her is tasting her arm, her neck. The woman doesn't seem to mind. She doesn't really seem to notice. She turns over the laminated menu, studies the specials.
The St. Pete Diner serves breakfast, lunch and dinner 24/7. Picture windows facing the highway are painted with slabs of brown meatloaf. On an overnight shift, waitresses pour 20 pots of coffee.
"I'm starving," says the woman. The guy biting her elbow doesn't answer.
Ellena Wade is 28. Beautiful. She has a bright smile, smooth skin, and long, slender arms and legs. She says she has four babies, but her stomach is flatter than the diner's homemade hotcakes.
"I just got off work," she tells a visitor, sipping soda from a plastic foam cup. She says she's a dancer at Vixens, a little club on Park Boulevard. "I'm just dancing to have some money in my pocket," she says. She wants to be a nurse.
Brian Jenkins is 21. He says he's Ellena's roommate. He picked her up at Vixens at 1:30 a.m. and drove her here.
They're sitting at the counter beside the cash register, his right arm draped around her waist.
"Steak, eggs and French fries," she finally tells the waitress.
Brian looks up from licking Ellena's back and says, "To go."
3:37 A.M., ST. PETE BAGEL CO., 7043 FOURTH ST. N, ST. PETERSBURGYesterday, Ned made the dough, kneading, stretching, rolling it into hundreds of rings. All afternoon, then all night, he chilled it in the walk-in cooler.
Now he flips on the bakery lights, walks behind the counter and tugs green plastic gloves over his strong hands.
St. Pete Bagel Co. won't open for hours. But the boiling takes time. And Zuzana has to make that long drive.
Zuzana Pleva and her husband, Oldrich, bought this little shop seven years ago. The couple, both 38, split shifts between here and home, handing off their 2-year-old daughter. They came from the Czech Republic. Nedeljko "Ned" Corokalo, who helps with the baking, is from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Their specialty: New York-style bagels.
"Not too many places do them like this any more, especially in Florida," Zuzana says, watching Ned sweating over a vat of boiling water. "It's too hot."
Ned slides a dozen dough rings off a tray into the bubbling cauldron. He boils the bagels for five seconds, to make the crust crunchy, then scoops them out in a metal cage. He shakes them, spinning off excess water, lines them on long boards. The boards sit on rotating racks in the wall-size oven. It takes 10 minutes to bake the bagels. Whole wheat and blueberry. Salt and egg and poppy seed. "We have 16 flavors," Zuzana says. "We sell 200 dozen a day."
That's 2,400 bagels every day. Ned bakes half; Oldrich the rest. Only a fraction of those are sold in the store.
"We deliver to the Vinoy, Don CeSar, several hospitals," Zuzana says. After Ned bakes them, she stacks them into boxes lined with white paper. She loads them into her van and drives through the dark to Tampa, Clearwater, St. Pete Beach.
When she gets to her last stop in Dunedin, the bagels will still be warm.
4:19 A.M., TAMPA WHOLESALE PRODUCE MARKET, 2801 E HILLSBOROUGH AVE.Trucks and trailers are pulling into the lot. Under the bright beams of street lights, vendors are setting up their stalls. Collards and eggs. Onions and tomatoes.
The flower man has the brightest booth of all.
While others rush getting ready, he lounges in his canvas chair, his straw cowboy hat tipped back, his legs crossed. "There were three of four flower trucks when I started out here," Ed Alex says in his soft drawl. "Now, it's just me. And that's just fine."
He drinks in the perfume of the petals: pink petunias, scarlet geraniums, golden sunflowers so big their heads bob. Puffs of powder-blue hydrangeas; buckets of minicarnations; thick stems of gladiolas bursting with star-shaped blooms. And the orchids, oh, these orchids. Elegant cattleyas that bloom only once a year; tender violet-colored vandas that take seven years to flower.
Ed grew those himself. That's why he moved to Florida.
"I had a construction company in Pennsylvania, built condos in Atlantic City," he says. In 1989, he bought 12 acres in Palmetto and started Hawaiian Orchid Connection. He sells to 28 florists from Sarasota to Clearwater and sets up at Tampa's farmers' market twice a week.
"I'll take all those baskets, these buckets of glads," a man tells Ed, rifling through his flowers. The man spins bluebell baskets, squeezes gladiolus stalks. Then he spies the splash of pink. "Are those petunias?" the man asks, excited. Ed nods. "Those too," the man says. He buys $96 worth of flowers to sell at his produce market in Lake Wales. "These'll all be gone by tomorrow," he tells Ed, grinning.
Most of Ed's customers buy wholesale: hotel and restaurant managers, flea-market gurus and florists. But some folks want only a single stem. "I have a guy who comes by to get his girlfriend a rose every week," he says.
"This business I'm in here," he shakes his head, smiling beneath the orchids, "you see someone who's down or someone who's mad, you give them a flower, even one single flower, and it brightens them right up."
5:58 A.M., TRAPPMAN CRAB TRAPP & SHRIMP SHACK, 11350 GANDY BLVD., ST. PETERSBURGBig Bird wants his breakfast. Outside the back door of the bait shop, behind the pinfish tanks, the great blue heron is pacing across the porch, fussing.
"He's here every morning, long before me," says Bill Trappman, who owns the store. "He's a night hunter. He stays up all night."
Trappman, 69, limps across the cement floor, checking his tanks. The shop has been open only an hour, but already his khaki shorts and guayabera are streaked with wet spots. He adjusts a hose in the shrimp tank, stirs a net through the blue crabs.
Big Bird follows him, peering through the bait-shop windows, squawking. "He loves pinfish," Trappman says. He peers into a bathtub brimming with fiddler crabs, pretending to ignore the angry heron outside.
"Forty years ago, maybe more, I was sitting out in my skiff one night, listening to the mullet jump," Trappman says. "It was all peaceful out there, till some big old thing swooped down and landed right on my oar. Oooeee!" Trappman whoops, laughing. "I thought Jesus had me."
Instead it was a heron, one almost as big as Big Bird.
Just after 6 a.m., Trappman shuffles over to the pinfish tank and scoops out a handful, slinging the silver fish, one by one, out the porch door. Big Bird opens his beak and gulps greedily.
"We got a white heron hangs around here too," Trappman says. "But he won't be by until daylight."
Lane DeGregory can be reached at 727 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com
IF YOU GODave Attell "The Insomniac Tour," 8 p.m. Sun., Ferguson Hall at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 1010 N MacInnes Place, Tampa. $30.50-$35.50. (813) 229-7827; tbpac.org.