Daylight Limo Rides

Alfa pic credit.

Daytime limousine rides are a rare but sweet kind of fruit. Obvious advantages over night-time runs are the fact that it's light (yes, obviously, but very importantly) that you generally feel better (not exhausted by being awake when the body says go to sleep) and that they finish at a reasonable hour (therefore I can get to bed at the same time as regular people.)

The people who book a stretched limousine from noon until 10:00 pm are different from the night-time crowd too. They tend to be older, richer and happier. Often, the booking is made months in advance.

A recent run was representative. I was to meet eight folks in the parking lot of a local restaurant in The Boss's super stretched SUV. Naturally, he has given me NO details...no idea of who the customers are, where we are going, nor if it's a special occasion. All I have is a time and a place.

But experience told me the people would be fine, as indeed they were. As is usual, the organizer introduced himself to me, and gave me the outline of the day. His friends all arrived, and they're loaded with food and booze and in very high spirits. That's good. Happiness breeds happiness. When I see bottles of champagne, I too am happy.

But not everything is rosy. The airconditioning in this machine works satisfactorily, but not brilliantly. It's a constant refrain from the back, asking that the a/c be turned up. All I can do is to tell them that it will cool down as we get under way, and that it's a big volume of air to cool on a hot Florida day. They don't care. If the least thing is wrong, people bitch. Sigh.

Another pending problem is that I have a navigator on board. A navigator is someone, almost always a guy, who wants to know every turn you plan to make. If you don't describe precisely the route, they'll pick it up and correct it. Unfortunately, this turkey is sitting right at my shoulder...which leads me to raise the divider. Thank goodness for the divider.

The plan was a common one: to Tampa for a matinee live performance (The Jersey Boys) then to an early dinner at a fancy steak house, and then home. That part was easy, and almost quite fun. I had time to read three newspapers, finish my book, make a few calls, spruce up the interior of the limo and take a half-decent lunch. (The latter's not always easy, given how tricky it can be to find a park for the beast.)

After dinner, I was looking forward to dropping off these people and getting home. After all, I'd not finished until 4:00 am the morning before. (More bullshit scheduling from The Boss.) And then came the kiss of death...they wanted to stop for ice-cream. Oh, great. No-one can agree on where to go, and everyone's tired, so they're not communicating. The difficulty for me at a time like this is that I hear three different instructions from the back, but when I try to clarify which ONE I should follow, no-one speaks. It's like I have to play the parent to a bunch of nine-year-olds.

Mr Navigator then springs into action. Okay, if you just make a U-Turn here, he says, pointing hopefully at a break in the median. My eyes roll in their sockets. This thing takes about TEN lanes to make a U-Turn, and gently suggest that another, wider intersection a little up the road will work better. He starts questioning me, asking what I'm doing...

...until he observes for himself PRECISELY how much real estate this damned machine needs for a U-ey.

But it all worked out. And it turns out that they were all real estate agents, on a pep-up trip, hoping and talking themselves into a better year ahead. Good luck with that, guys and girls.

And for a bunch of people who LIVE AND DIE on percentage sales commissions, the tip was abysmal. But I didn't care. I was home in bed before midnight.

Ybor City Animals

Busy, a new feeling, even if it was only for one day. The weekend was the busiest for weeks, handy because now I might nearly make enough to pay a few bills.

Saturday was notable for blessing me with two (2) limousine runs. The first was an afternoon wedding run, which included a crying bride...but I'll save the tears for another post.

After that The Boss scheduled a 9:30 pm pickup. A bunch of twenty-somethings were heading out on the town in Ybor City, Tampa's high-crime sewer of a club district. Despite that, Ybor is an interesting place, centre of the cigar-rolling business for which Tampa used to be known.

Thesedays Ybor attracts the drunk and drugged crowd. I've seen more knife-fights, punch-ups and general anti-social behaviour on the streets there than anywhere else in the world. Besides that minor detail, the streets are narrow and there's no parking for a stretched limousine, so you can imagine how happy I was to be there.

As usual, the cops standing on the corner turned a blind eye to me stopping traffic on 7th Avenue to unload my people. It's a two-lane thoroughfare, and they understand we drivers are just trying to make a living. I move on as quickly as possible. But as I'm about to drive off to find coffee, another cop, a mounted policeman, guided his steed in my direction.

Using one of those dismissive hand gestures they teach in cop school, he indicated he had something to say.

"You can't park here," he said. I looked up at him, then to the two cops standing behind him on the sidewalk, and back to him.

I wanted to point out the double standard - two sets of cops, two different rules - but thought better of it.

Those horses are BIG.

Mons Venus

Robert is a big man, not particularly tall, but with a substantial gut. It's more than a gut. It looks large enough to sustain life without Robert's internal utilities - blood supply and the like - but for now, it's still Robert's gut.

Midnight on Saturday night and Robert is at his usual place, directing traffic in the car park at Mons Venus. The small area in front and the smaller area to the side of the club are full, so newcomers park at the pizza place next door. I sense some secret arrangement for this, the kind of secret arrangement that surrounds strip clubs everywhere. Beneath the surface there's way more going on than you can see.

I turn up with my group of ten revelers in a stretch limousine. They're drunk: we have just come from the Seminole Hard Rock Casino and Hotel (to give it it's full title.) More accurately, the men are drunk. The women are variously between sobriety and sleep.

As my charges head off to ogle womanflesh, Robert approaches and introduces himself. Yes, we have met before, but I'm not sufficiently regular to merit a piece of his memory. He eyes me up and down, and politely requests a quick removal of my car-park-blocking hunk of metal. It's midnight, you see, peak time at a Tampa strip club, and it's no time for damn limousines to block things up.

Keeping out of the way is part of the driver's art. Robert quickly assesses that I am on his side, and helps make sure I don't scrape the beast while I am backing and filling. I end up in front of the pizza place, close enough to keep my people happy, far enough away to keep Robert happy.

One of my couples comes back to the limo. They don't want to pay the twenty dollar cover. Last time they were here, they say, women entered free. A sign of the times, I think. But he was in a mood, and wanted to play. I didn't tickle his funny bone, so he started with Robert. The man was a happy drunk, and wanted to make body contact. Rubbing elbows, elaborate ghetto handshakes, bear hugs. Everything was fair game. But then he started in a little too rough. I could see Robert's brain working, fighting the instinct to knock this dope to the pavement, overcoming that thought with the logic that he's just another idiot customer wanting to bond with his fellow man.

By wrestling the car-park guy at Mons Venus.

The couple decided they would pay the forty dollars to watch the girls inside, so left Robert and me behind. I watched Robert in the gaps between pages of my book. He had the look of a man who has seen much.

You Too

I'm sorry. If you don't know that the lead singer of U2's name is "Bonn-Oh", not "Bone-Oh" you are not real fans. Fuck me. Dilettantes in pop culture make me wanna puke.

Sorry sir, may I open the champagne for you?

You see the kind of dual life I lead, being appalled most of the time, sickenly sycophantic the next. You'd be the same if you were surviving on tips.

The night of the U2 concert in Tampa was long and messy. Every limousine within 150 miles was out, and the other 69,000 people drove their cars. Raymond James stadium, home of an amateur football team called the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was chock-a-block full for the night, and that was just the performers' egos.

My people were early mid-aged lawyer types, overfed and undermannered. Snark aside, they were reasonably polite and not at all a problem, but who wants to hear about mild-mannered Richy Riches daring to live large at a Rock Concert for the night?

However, one of their number was a trouble-maker from the start. As I later discovered, he was an ex-fighter of some sort, the kind with a giant body, peanut nuts and dino-brain. Better living through chemistry, apparently. Why anyone pays to see artificially-grown men bash each other is beyond me, but I bore the weight of his 'roid rage that night. Except when he was being nice. And there he goes morphing into a prick again.

Oaves suck.

Where was I? Oh, that's right. Channelside in Tampa, after the U2 show, with a drug-addled lunatic and his nouveau riche friends. Whatever. Another show, another dollar.

Alcoholica

Metallica played the St Pete Times Forum Saturday night, a giant thrill for local metal fans. The hard rockin' hall-of-famers aren't familiar to me, so I figured it would be best to be prepared for anything when I drove eight die-hards to the concert.

One lesson one learns quickly in the limo game is the ancient one of not judging a book by its cover. My customers for the night might have looked like well-used paperbacks, but who the hell am I to judge? They were polite and friendly, and although I couldn't figure out just why their teenage children were coming, seemed like first-rate parents too.

Look, it's easy to be a snob about these things. Metal bands are a mystery to me, but then Scarlatti is probably a joke to them, unless there's an Italian hair band of that name floating about the place. Customers are customers, and as I say to The Boss, they all get the best treatment until their behaviour dictates otherwise.

Tampa is a dozy kind of place, with many one-way streets, and evidence of bored uninterest from the city fathers (and female mayor) that a clean sweep would rectify. Public performance venues like the SPTF are used all the time, and yet the organization around parking, traffic flow and (especially!) limousines is abysmal. The cops do their job as well as you'd expect, but the feeling one is left with is that administrators could care less what happens when the sun sets and they're comfortably ensconced somewhere else having dinner with a lobbyist.

That's a whole other issue.

A driving gig to Tampa for a concert like this is about as good as it gets, because everyone's in a good mood. They're also deaf and swaying when they come out, but that's fine too; I just turn up the heat, and they're all asleep by the time we've hit I-75 southbound.

The real fun lies in the time between when the show ends and the customers find me. Metallica girls are given to taking their tops off, I understand, an outstanding turn of events. When the sweaty crowd is melting out of the arena, there's plenty of eye-candy to keep a bloke occupied, even if they're with scary looking dudes.

They're probably shit-scared of my tie.