Ybor City, Florida

We had arrived in Tampa a day after a hurricane had just blown through.  It was mid-September and a friend of mine, who we will call John, set up the trip to Clearwater for a long weekend.  He booked the flight, room, rental car, and even had a daily itinerary of things for us to do; all I had to do was give him the cash.

After fetching our luggage and walking out of the terminal the outside temp was equal to getting slapped in the face with a steaming hot towel; I immediately start to sweat my balls off.

We picked up the rental car, a convertible Mustang, popped the top and turned the AC on full blast to keep from frying like bacon on the seats.

Shortly after arriving at the hotel we change into our bathing suits when I realized that I needed a pair of sunglasses.  Across from the hotel was one of those beach stores where towels are 3 for $9.99.  As usual, the cheapest pair of sunglasses are ten bucks and a pair that were remotely stylish broke me of $20.

Back across the street to the beach we find ourselves in solitude except for that one guy who wades in three feet of water with his metal detector.  By this time I look as if I had already jumped in the water because I have been sweating balls since we stepped foot in Tampa.  

I peel my shirt off and make a mad dash for the ocean with John right behind me.  Into the water I dove forgetting that I still had the sunglasses on that I had bought about ten minutes ago.  I quickly surface with glasses M.I.A.  I dive back underwater hoping to retrieve the new shades but alas, they were gone for good.  After wading around for a few I hit the sandy beach to work on my tan.

While catching some rays I am busy watching this old fart with the metal detector who has now weaseled his way over to where I had been swimming.  

Watching, waiting, watching, sweating, BINGO.....the metal detector starts beeping.  The old codger kept waving the detector over the object as if he couldn’t hear the loud annoying beep.  I sit up as the old man bends over to feel around in the water and to my surprise he pulls up a pair of sunglasses.  This is my cue to run over and ask for them back.

I walk over to the old man and tell him I had just lost my glasses and if they were mine, could I have them back.  He looks up and smiles and says, "are these the glasses?”

"Yes they are, thanks!"  I sigh in relief.

"Finders keepers" he says.

"You COCKSUCKER!!!!" I shout at him as he walks away.  

I was really hell bent on not getting my glasses.  I really would’ve liked to pull some Jackie Chan shit on him, but I figured if he couldn’t give me the glasses back the poor bastard needs them more than I do.  They weren’t even the big clunky wrap around like half the population in Florida wears so I have no idea what his intentions were with my glasses....they were gone.

After a day at the beach we decide we'll ride down to Ybor City, which I was told would be like the Flats in Cleveland.  We arrived there and it was a ghost town.

We pick out this little restaurant because I thought it would be nice to have a couple drinks and some fresh seafood, John agreed.  Now I have shrimp on the brain but there is one craving that has to be handled first.....beers!  After a few cocktails I order what I thought was shrimp cocktail. 

The waitress lays the shrimp appetizer on the table.  By now I am feeling like I can finally get over the incident on the beach and I was feeling great.  The conversation was great as we talked about important things like getting laid, off the hook bars, and work.

As I am flapping my jaw I grabbed a piece of the jumbo shrimp and dipped it into the cocktail sauce.  I stop chatting for a quick second to bite into the shrimp and it was crunchy.  I quickly grab the napkin to spit the shrimp in and I begin inspecting the other shrimps to see why they are crunchy.

While inspecting the shrimp the waitress comes to the table to ask if we need anything else while we await our dinner and she asks me if there's something wrong.

"Yeah the shrimp is crunchy!"

"That’s because it’s peel and eat shrimp cocktail!" she laughs.

"Well you might as well just bring me another beer while I work on this shrimp" I utter in an unassumingly embarrassed tone.

After eating I came to the conclusion that even though we are surrounded by ocean, it doesn’t always mean great, fresh seafood in every restaurant.  I would’ve been content eating at Red Lobster.  

Aww fuck it. I'm on vacation and there's always tomorrow and plenty of seafood to be had is what I thought to myself.

The next day I decided that I had to try that parasailing gig they offered up the street from the hotel.  John didn’t seem interested in doing much more than taking a nap so I hoofed it up the block to the dock.

I paid my thirty bucks for approximately fifteen minutes of 'air time'.  While up in the air I concluded that it wasn’t worth what I had paid and figured it would be more fun to unstrap myself and freefall about fifty feet into the water, but I didn’t and I was reeled in.

There was a middle aged couple that was next and the wife was gung-ho about doing something so risky.  For Christ sakes it’s only parasailing, its not skydiving or even bungee jumping;  I had walked iron 300+ feet at work, unharnessed, so there was really no thrill in it for me.

The woman is all giddy as she is being strapped in and when it’s the husbands turn, he backed out because he was afraid of heights.  Seeing that this woman weighed about 100 pounds soaking wet, I was asked to ride with her.  There has to be a minimum amount of weight on the tow line for them to reel you back in, so I got two rides for the price of one.  The husband looked like a nervous wreck as we took on air.  The second free ride had made up for the thrilless thirty bucks I had spent on one.

On Saturday night, John suggests we should go to this high class bar called 'Liquid Blue'; it came highly recommended by his cousin who lives in the area and he claimed there were plenty of scallywags for the taking.  With pimp suits on we rode.

We arrived at the club and walk in; swanky was my first thought.  Black lights, strobes, neon, leather couches everywhere, and the perfect hunting ground for a date.

First things first we hit the bar for some drinks.  Now John tends to be slow and cautious with his drinking, but not me; I had a tendency to drink like I lived....fast and hard.  Had to build up those beer muscles to compete with guys who were on steroids at this club.

The people there were plastic people, dolled up with snazzy outfits and hair.  I almost felt like a homeless bum mingling with celebrities.  The alcohol quickly erased those barriers in my mind.  Now I was in pimp mode as I made my way over to these two blondes sitting on one of the leather sofas.

John and I walk over and I make some small talk with them to see if I can spark some conversation, but these two ladies were about as sharp as bowling balls.  The conversation is not going as planned and I can see I am going to strike out before I am even up to bat, so I throw out a quick "can I buy you a drink?".

Neither of them was willing to let me buy them a drink, so I immediately cut through the crap and ask the one chick about her fake boobs which she wasn’t going to admit were fake.  In all my years of pimpin, that is thee only time that a woman has ever sad no to me buying them a drink.  Let's face it, when you use that line, most women will feel a slight obligation to converse with you if they accept and that is undoubtedly the best time to change their mind about you.

Now I am just a wee bit offended that they shot down the drink offer so out with some more polite insults; I mean as sharp as they were, they took each and every insult as a compliment until John decided it was time to roll before the Barbies found some Kens they knew to ruffle our feathers.  We stayed at the bar for a while longer, just enough time for me to get totally blitzed before we headed back to the room.  I was feeling like Popeye as I talked out the side of my mouth the whole ride back, not quite getting over the fact of being shot down.  

The following morning around seven o'clock I awoke to the door of the hotel room opening.  It was John with a bag of McDonald's.

"Damn that was mighty white of you to get up so early to grab us some breakfast."  

"Get up?  I am just getting home from the hospital!"  John replies as I choke on my hash brown.

"The hospital?  What? When did this happen?"

"Don’t you remember last night when I woke up and told you I couldn’t breathe?"

"Uhhh, NO" I state in a sort of disbelief.

John goes on to tell me that after getting back to the room after the bar, that he had been asleep for a short while before he had woke up.  He was having trouble breathing and he said it felt like his throat was closing up.  Scared, he called the front desk to see if there was a doctor at the hotel.  There was no doctor so the front desk called an ambulance for him.  He tells me that he laid back down and minutes later the ambulance arrived and the paramedics pounded on the door.  He also says that I hopped outta bed and opened the door to let them in and said " hey come on in, you guys want a beer?" right before I did a swan dive back into the bed and instantly fell back asleep.

"Wow, I don’t remember that at all.  We had more beer last night?"  I asked.

The paramedics took him to the local hospital where a doctor examined him.  The doctor said there was a bite mark on the roof of his mouth near his throat.  He had obviously been sleeping with his mouth open and must've been bit by a spider and had an allergic reaction which caused his throat to swell.  They gave him a shot of Benedryl and sent him on his way.

I guess there is truth to the story that you eat about eight spiders a year while you sleep.

While eating McDonald's, John and I find it amusing that I don’t recall a single second of the incident.  

"Remember I told you I woke you up telling you I couldn’t breathe?"

"Yes"

"You know what you told me?" John asks.

" 'If you cant breathe, try harder!'  and that’s when I got scared".