Cigar City
The assignment started with a simple message. In my inbox, from a name and face I did not recognize, was an invitation:
“Yo are you doing anything for May Day? We’re planning to have a huge-ass event in Tampa and are trying to get leftists from around the state to show up. It’s gonna be militant as fuck.”I was intrigued. Truthfully I had no plans of my own and had been wondering what exactly I was going to do for May Day. There was no leftist presence where I was, not even an inkling; I knew if I wanted to see real human beings even vaguely challenge the ruling order I’d need to put many miles under my feet.
The location seemed ideal. I had roots in the city and kin buried out that way, having spent the most poverty-stricken years of my youth in nearby New Port Richey. I knew Tampa was big enough to probably draw a crowd and remembered an energy there uniquely suited for revolutionary politics.
Everything in Florida cities revolves around money: Tallahassee is all about borrowing it, Miami is all about spending it, Orlando is all about taking it, and Tampa?
Tampa has always been about making it.
From the late 1880’s all the way to the 1930’s cigar manufacturing completely dominated the local economy, hundreds of firms fighting tooth and claw to outproduce and outmaneuver each other. A proudly immigrant city, Tampa also boasted its own division of the Italian Mafia, and had a stranglehold on every racket, hustle, and scam from Havana to New Orleans. The Tampa Bay mob became notorious early on for a peculiar method of making a point to anyone that stood in the way of profit: a shotgun blast directly to the face, done in broad daylight and right in the street. The violence may be gone, but the killer instinct familiar to hustlers everywhere still survives: Tampa has gone from from cigars and bolita rackets to become the industrial, commercial, and financial hub of Florida’s entire west coast.
Electronics, medical equipment, beer, paint, steel, fertilizer, citrus products, livestock, processed shrimp, all roll through Tampa and its eighteen lines of railway. The port of Tampa handles 50 million tons of cargo every year and, thanks to its status as a “foreign trade zone,” goods can be unloaded for repacking, storage, or transshipment without being hit with additional taxes.
In a state dependent on cattle and tourism, Tampa alone had taken the Capitalist model and ran with it.
That naturally creates problems.
In the Tampa Bay area a black third-grader is half as likely as a white counterpart to read on grade level. Just a few years ago it had the nation’s highest homelessness rate. Tampa, along with Miami, is in the top ten every year for the prized position of highest income inequality in America.
Money, power, corruption, violence. Tampa was the real deal, a quiet powerhouse of global trade long reliant on a dispossessed and oppressed population. No matter what happened I’d at least get a good story out of it.
I just needed to cross the dangerous and uniquely odd territory known as the Floridian interior first.
The Sunny Place for Shady People
I lived on the eastern side of the peninsula, and mere miles outside my town lay a vast and unforgiving wilderness. Danger. Death. Dismemberment. Towns long since dropped off maps and shambling, inbred creatures. Concrete castles and roads where cars rolled uphill. A trip through the Florida interior could bring one or all of these things.
Tampa was going to be easy. I could expect electricity, antibiotics, even basic literacy. Even if there was a riot, even if I got arrested, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t get cancer from the water.
No such guarantees exist in the interior. Perhaps that’s what gave Tampa a better revolutionary chance. The rest of Florida was simply too wild, too cutthroat, and too focused on eating one another to give a damn.
After packing up the essentials I hit the road, pushing my Kia Soul well into the nineties and through the swamplands. Dilapidated shacks blended into burnt out churches, strange hovels well outside any building codes or homeowners association. Out here there was no law, save for what you could make with your own hands, and after getting some distance between me and the nearest court house I cracked open a beer and began recording notes.
“Temperature is 85 degrees, humidity in the interior close to 80%. At that level sweat no longer evaporates.” I crossed counties, moving from swamps to towering pines. “The human body’s one defense ends up turning against it, the streams of water pouring down your neck effectively capturing every ounce of heat around it.”
Holopaw came up fast, a town with one stoplight and around 1500 drunk and angry rednecks at any given time. A new street sign said to slow down but it disappeared in a whir. The sounds of four-wheelers came through the open window, as well as shotgun blasts. Hunched inhabitants sniffed the air, and as I passed by they pointed as if spotting a ten-point buck. Before they could give chase I was long gone, briefly passing a wrecked minivan no doubt ambushed the day prior.
“I’m coming prepared: Gas mask for tear gas, revolver for lethal force. In the event of close combat I have mace and a folding trench knife, a wonderful invention from the killing fields of World War One combining a dagger, skull-splitter, and brass knuckles. Completely legal with…with uh…” To my left a wild hog the size of a Volkswagen was chasing a pack of dogs, a human arm dangling from its tusks. It seemed oblivious to me and the road, this wild creature more akin to a Bigfoot on steroids than its familiar domestic cousins. Nothing but a tank could challenge it here. I watched in awe as it killed two pitbulls, swallowed a third, and as the car finally passed the creature appeared to be mounting the fourth and final pup in act of bestial lust. I pushed the engine upwards as I put the creatures behind me, screaming for no less than ten minutes before I could carry on with my notation.
“…Completely legal with a concealed carry permit, thanks to our wonderful weapons laws. This monster of a tool is affectionately known as a ‘gator paw’ and has gained cult status in some of Florida’s rougher trailer parks. There the weapon is believed to carry the souls of all it has killed, and fighters swear when dipped in Mountain Dew it makes the bearer invincible.”
The town of Harmony surged forward, a massive fake literally built out of a cowfield. No history, no connection to anything, it was playground where small-town aesthetics and townhouse dreams could be had for the low $200,000’s. The doomed children raised there are almost 10 miles from other people and spend most of their time tearing ass through the woods and getting high.
“This may seem excessive. Let me assure the reader if anything I am under-prepared. This kind of load out is what we Floridians carry to go get gas, shop for groceries, or walk down the hallway to take a shit. The fact I don’t have an AR-15 or AK47 in my car on a journey farther than five miles would be deemed pure foolishness by many of my countrymen.”
A nameless fish camp began to hurtle towards me, million dollar homes and fishing shacks intermingling between two massive lakes that appeared capable of swallowing the sky. The poor were hold overs from wilder days when finding a home in Florida was merely a matter of heading to the woods. They had been pushed out of the cities, or simply abandoned to their own devices, and as such had claim to some of the most breathtaking scenery the state could offer. This wouldn’t last, most obviously when the scenery was shore-side as it was here. The presence of three story mansions next to the dilapidated “Not a Clue Bar and Grill” was itself a potent metaphor. As the camp moved from windshield to rear-view mirror I wondered how long it would be before the whole thing was just another Walmart or worse, a Super-Target.
I reached Kissimmee, my halfway point. Cops on motorcycles rolled through the street, all white, and seemed to “accidentally” kick their engines whenever a black person behind the wheel seemed to linger too long. The place was a contradiction of sorts, formerly the rough saloon and brothel infested cousin of Orlando when more cows could be found than people. As the economy shifted with the times so too did Kissimmee. The brothels are massage parlors, the saloons are sports bars, and instead of nickel-and-diming every hick fresh from the prairie they sell “discount” Disney tickets to tourists hopelessly lost. Immigrants may have improved the food, some of the signs may be in Spanish, but everything still reeks of an older and rougher way of life.
Onward, ever onward, I kept my eyes open for the next leg of the journey. After thirty miles or so of trailer parks and wild jungle, I found the road that would take me directly to Tampa.
I4.
Now I4 is usually one of two things: a highway that operates at the speed of a tortoise practicing Tai Chi or a bare-knuckle road warrior experience with vehicular manslaughter every few miles. I grabbed more beer for the journey before jumping back on the road, but not before witnessing a peculiar sight: in the parking lot of a Wafflehouse a preacher was administering last rites to a group of soon-to-be weary travelers. The families held each other and weeped, and the robed man himself seemed to tear up uncontrollably.
“Why Lord? Why must our roads be temples to the Devil?”
He waved his bible in the air, seemingly buffing the crowd with +2 luck.
“Why must ‘is love for carnage and brutality hold sway in your garden of Eden? Save these fine people Lord, protect them on their way to Tampa! Let not the Devil have his way!” Shouts of “Amen!” “Yes Lord!” and “Has anybody seen my wallet?” rose from the crowd.
“Now,” the preacher continued, “the collection plate was a little light, folks. So we goin’ ta pass it around juss one mo’ time…”
With no time to waste I joined the throng heading to the highway. At first the going was slow. Things rapidly began to pick up though, and that’s when people started to get pissed. I wasn’t the only one itching to go fast and people were treating SUV’s like nimble dirtbikes. Lanes were switched, blown over, traded, and attacked; even 18 wheelers violated every traffic law and routinely rode in the left lane. Twice, no three times, pistols were brandished outside windows and I blinked in macabre disbelief as a flock of what appeared to be sand hill cranes attacked a school bus, flayed every child inside alive, began driving the vehicle, and plowed it into a concrete wall at two-hundred miles per hour.
“JESUS FUCK!” I remember yelling, flames and feathers coating the road. “What kind of shit IS this?” I wanted to say prayers for the dead, do something, but it was far too late.
I’d reached Tampa.
And with it an entirely new world of dangerous opportunity.
If Leftists Follow The Tampa Model We Might Actually Have a Chance, DR. BONES 
