Have You Ever Seen The Rain?

*Originally posted on Dec. 5, 2018 from my old blog "This Is Why I Can't Have Nice Things"*

A guy named Noah, the local news and a lucky red hat... this is Have You Ever Seen The Rain... and this is why I can’t have nice things...  

I’m a big sports fan, thanks in part to my dad. He was an athlete (the best ever, in his words) and he passed that love down to me, along with all of his teams and superstitions. If you’re a sports fan, chances are you’re a little superstitious or — if you’re Michael Scott — you’re not superstitious, but you are a little stitious. I’m no exception to that.

Back in 2002, before the Fiesta Bowl between Ohio State and Miami, my mom thought it would be hilarious to give me a bottle of hot sauce with an Ohio State logo on it. I’m a Hurricanes fan, thanks to my dad, and I didn’t think it was a good joke. I told my him about it when I saw him and he shook his head. Your mother just jinxed us. He told me about a story back in 1986. Game 6 of the World Series. They were watching it after a wedding and were late to a party. Who cares about the game? The Red Sox are going to win, she said confidently. 

They didn’t. The ball went by Buckner… Boston fans have never, and will never, forgive my mother for that day. The same thing happened in the Fiesta bowl. Miami stops Ohio State in overtime to win back to back championships, however, the refs call a phantom pass interference as the final score was on the screen, resulting in Ohio State punching it in at the goal line. We ended up losing. The hot sauce was in the cabinet. My mother jinxed us. Miami still hasn’t recovered.

My dad’s from Wildwood, New Jersey and he is a die hard Philadelphia Phillies fan, so naturally, I grew up loving them and still do to this day. If you find me walking the streets of Los Angeles or abroad, you’ll notice that not only am I oddly compelling to look at, but I also rock a red Phillies hat. All. The. Time. I’ve often referred to it as my lucky hat. I think it embodies a lot of who I am and represents me well. Because the Phillies and I are a lot alike.

Much like the Phillies, I can be pretty frustrating to watch at times. There have been some good moments and a few bright spots over the past decade, but poor management and inconsistency have been the Achilles heel. Much like my beloved Phils, I haven’t lived up to the hype or the potential that’s on paper. It could be worse, though… I could be a Mets fan. So at least I have that to hang my hat on.

I know you’re all wondering what the hell I’m saying this for, but I promise there’s a point to all of it. I’m just not good at getting to it… anyway, let’s pivot from this and get to it. 

My first home will always and forever be Tampa. Say what you will about it — and Lord knows I have said plenty on the subject over the years — it’s a great place to grow up. There’s a lot to love about my hometown, however, one thing about Tampa that I do hate is all of the rain during the summer. It’ll be sunny one minute, a torrential down pour the next, and then it’s fine twenty minutes later. Florida is a weird state.

For a brief period of time, France was my second home. I spent five months in Cannes during my senior year at University of Tampa and it was the greatest experience of my life. That was a moment in time I will never forget and wish I could have back everyday. Even though I didn’t learn that much — seriously, I still can’t speak a lick of French — I learned something that became apparent with every passing day: I had to get the hell out of Tampa.

Anyway, when I came back from Cannes, I moved into this place called Palma Vista. It was a few minutes away from UT and right in the middle of “SoHo”, next to all of the bars on S. Howard Ave. Across the street was The Patio, which became the watering hole for my friends and I. There were some good times in that apartment. I had a nice TV, a big black couch and a lot of space, all for $800 a month. Man, do I miss that rent…

I thought graduating college was going to solve all of my problems. Jobs were going to start pouring in and I was going to further my career in Florida before ultimately moving to LA. That first post-grad year was one of the most difficult years of my twenties. I felt stuck, like I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything meaningful. I needed a miracle. An act of God.

Instead of moving out of Palma Vista, I figured why not stay? It wasn’t as if I were going anywhere. At that point, LA seemed like it was never going to happen, even though I had considered graduate school out there. Still, how the hell was I gonna do that? Especially when I just renewed my lease on a place I actually liked. If grad school became an option, how was I going to get out of this place?

Enter the Great Flood of 2015: The day rains washed away all of my problems, as well as all of my stuff.

For those of you familiar with the story of Noah, you know that God made it rain for forty days and forty nights, flooding the world and ridding it of all it’s sins — except for all of the shenanigans on the ark itself. (Think about that for second — forty days on a boat with all of those animals? Someone did something crazy, I just know it.) That’s what it was like in July of 2016. Every day it rained and occasionally it would flood in certain parts of South Tampa. Nothing out of the ordinary, especially if you’ve lived through a hurricane before.

July 31st, 2015… I had a few (several) drinks at Patio and came back to Palma Vista. My neighbor was having a drink in her place so I went over for a chit chat. I was showing off my new red Phillies hat that my friend Chambers gave to me, the same red hat that I just introduced in the last couple paragraphs. It was already dubbed the “lucky hat” despite being in my possession for barely an hour.

Maybe we’ll both get lucky and not have to pay rent tomorrow, we said. Crazier things have happened, right?

August 1st, 2015. I wake up to the sound of thunder crashing on my window. After I caught my breath, I turned on the TV and put the news on. Severe weather warnings all throughout Hillsborough county. This isn’t news, Bay News 9. It rains everyday, tell me something I don’t know! 

I go to have my morning smoke and when I open my door, the flood tried to come inside. Nope. Not today flood. Finding humor in this, I take out my phone and decided to taunt the storm on Snapchat (RIP Snapchat, you will be missed). LOL! I’m trapped inside my apartment! #TheGreatFloodofTampa. 

Rule number one: don’t get cocky.

There was this football game back in 2002 that I’d like to go back to. Kentucky vs LSU. UK looked like they were going to seal the game, and the team started to celebrate on the sideline. They even gave their coach a Gatorade bath, which is the universal signal for this game’s over, y’all. Except the game wasn’t over. There was still time on the clock and LSU had one last chance to pull of a miracle. A Hail Mary to the end zone. The ball gets tipped and somehow lands in the hands of an LSU receiver. Game over. The UK coach is standing there on the sidelines, shirt soaked in Gatorade, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. Keep that in mind.

After trash talking the storm, I decided to go take my morning poo like an adult. (Don’t judge me, it’s part of my routine. Coffee, cigarette, poop and shower. This is normal if you ask me.) I look in the bathtub and see brown water coming from the drain. Why it was brown? I don’t know. I didn’t have time to think about it because I apparently left my sink running in the kitchen. The only problem: I never turned on the sink.

As I walked into the living room, my carpet started to come up like some sort of waterbed bouncy house. The running water I heard wasn’t from the sink, either; it was coming from the front door. And it was coming in fast. I turned to the only thing that I trusted in a time like this: television.

Bay News 9: In the event of a flood, sandbags are the only thing that can prevent water from coming in, so make sure you load up on them. 

Well, that’s not gonna work during the flood. You know what else doesn’t work? Rolls of paper towels, because that was all I could think of in that moment. My survival skills are unflappable.

Bay News 9: Be sure to unplug all appliances and turn your breaker off to prevent electrocution and fires. 

Now here’s some advice I could use! The sad part is, I didn’t think of that in the first place. There’s so much I don’t know about the world, and I thank the TV for pointing that out. However, I can’t turn it off until I get the rest of my advice.

Bay News 9: Most importantly, try your best to stay dry. It’s gonna be wet out there. 

Go fuck yourself, Bay News 9. (Just kidding, Bay News 9 is the best. It’s not just the news, it’s your news… all the time.)

After unplugging everything in my apartment and putting things on my couch, it became clear that the water was not going to stop. I really needed a cigarette. I didn’t want to open the door because I didn’t want to let anymore water in (sound logic) so I decided to light one up in the apartment, which I wasn’t allowed to do. It was a watershed moment for me, pun very much intended. But this wasn’t a time for jokes; this was doomsday.

I opened up my windows to let the smoke out and noticed all of the things floating around in the courtyard. Bicycles, children toys, trash cans… you name it. If it was outside, it was either on the water or underneath it. We didn’t have a pool when I moved in a year before, but that day we had a lake. I had never seen anything like it and I had to see more of it.

I decided the best exit was through the window by the front door, because I always have to make things difficult for myself. At this point, the water in my apartment was above my ankles. Had I opened the door, it would’ve just made it worse. I was sure it was going to stop at some point. I decided to keep documenting it on Snapchat (RIP) and it ended up becoming like a Heart of Darkness style film, where my sanity slowly began to fade away.

I crawled out of my last window of hope, into the waist deep water. I’ve seen footage of floods and storms on the news, but until you’re wading through the courtyard of your apartment complex and you’re not sure what’s underneath you, you can’t prepare for what happens next. And this was pretty bad, but this wasn’t some Katrina-level flood. I can only imagine what that must have been like.

The front of the apartment wasn’t any better. Car alarms were going off because the cars were floating in the parking lot. People trying to drive through the water, then finding themselves stuck, with nowhere to go. You see, my street had a bowl shape to it. To the naked eye, it looked like a straight shot but the truth is the street had a slight slope to it. My apartment complex sat at the base of this slope. You think you can get through, but you can’t. Yet people still tried.

The first car I helped out of the street was a Subaru. The driver yelled at me from his car and asked if I could help push it to the dry part of the street. True story, there was a parking lot across the street that was above the slope and dry. It was maybe 1000 feet from my apartment complex. To keep myself busy, I sat on my car with a six pack of Coors and waited for the next person to drive down the street.

I pushed a dozen or so cars to that parking lot. I will say, the people I helped were entertaining. Yes, it was a bad day. Yes, I felt bad for everyone… but I needed a pick me up. As I crushed my Coors, I started to feel like I was surviving the apocalypse. I had a little more confidence in myself. A new swag, if you will. Like Kurt Russell in Escape from New York, minus the eyepatch and rugged good looks.

After a while, I had to go back into the apartment. The water was past my knees. It was like my apartment turned into a kiddie pool of sorts. At one point I remember taking a coaster and skipping it across my living room. I laughed, but I’m pretty sure it was a crazy laugh. The kinda laugh you have right before you go insane. That’s when I knew I had to get out.

I took two suitcases and packed what I could. Most of my stuff was a lost cause, but my clothes were fine, as were some boxes that I had stuffed at the top of my closet. I could leave that there. Those two suitcases were all I could take. That, and a lucky red hat that sat on the kitchen counter. I put the dry hat on my wet head and headed out.

So there I was, wading through waist deep water with two suitcases on my shoulders. I stopped at Patio, which was dry and not flooded. As I waited for my mom to pick me up, I sat with my stuff and another Coors Light. What the hell just happened? It had been hours, yet that was the first moment I had time to think about it. It was the longest day of my life, and it wasn’t even close to being over… because as they say, when it rains, it pours. The worst part of a flood isn’t the flood itself; it’s what happens after.

Two days later, the thunder woke me up again. I heard it in my old room at my mom’s house. I woke up the exact same way, only this time my mom was in the doorway. Shea, I’m so sorry… I bolted up from the bed and grabbed her car keys. I had no shirt, no shoes, but I had a really big problem: the street was flooded. Rather than drive through it, I parked. As I ran to my apartment, I feared the worst. Sure enough, there it was… the apartment had flooded again. Twice in three days. I drove back to my mom’s, not sure of what to expect next.

I’m not saying I had PTSD, but for a couple weeks I couldn’t sleep or think about anything other than the flood. I tried to drink it away, to think about something else other than that. All of my stuff was ruined. Every time it rained, I thought my apartment would be underwater. We had planned a trip to Utah the same week as the flood, so I tried to put my focus in that.

A week away from home was a good thing, too. First of all, it was dry. That was nice. Secondly, I could get my shit together for a few days. The landlords called me and told me the situation. They were gonna fix everything and even asked me if I wanted to switch to hard-wood flooring. I was pretty pleased with that. Except when I came back to Tampa, they did nothing. It looked exactly the same.

After a few weeks, all of the furniture was ruined and mold was growing throughout the apartment. Before they fixed our apartments, they wanted us to pay. We were furious and a few of us discussed filing a lawsuit. It was bullshit. That didn’t seem to matter to our landlords, who were confused as to why we didn’t pay. I don’t know… maybe it was the fact that we were all trying to escape from Atlantis on the first of the month. It wasn’t like we planned to lose all of our shit in the process.

I bounced around from place to place for a few weeks until I moved in with my grandparents. I didn’t know what to do. I eventually gave up on the apartment and tried to come up with a new plan, but I couldn’t. My mind was elsewhere. It was a sign of sorts… maybe I wasn’t supposed to be here anymore. Maybe it was time to close the book on Tampa. Maybe I might have overstayed my welcome, so to speak.

It sucked though… I loved that apartment. I loved that neighborhood. Even though I wasn’t happy with the way my life was going, I was happy there. I had a nice thing and guess what? I couldn’t keep it.

The flood washed away all of my problems. I was free to go. Without the apartment, I didn’t have to pay rent. All the nice things I had? Who cares! You know what’s better than that? Renter’s insurance. My car was submerged in water, the engine flushed out. Guess what? You get a new car from Geico. Problem solved!

I may have lost all my nice things, but I had found a new nice thing: I had a way out. A clean slate. Much like the Phillies, all I had to do to get back on track was trim the fat around the organization. A fire sale, if you will. Addition by subtraction. It was then that I realized I had to move. I applied for grad school, got accepted and never looked back.

I live in Hollywood now, in an apartment with hardwood floors and four stories above the ground. No more floods! I finally made it to a place that I feel comfortable enough to call home, for now at least. I’ve been in this particular apartment for two years and I have no plans to leave. For the first time in a long time, I’m committing to something.

I still have my lucky red hat. It survived the flood with me, and it’s a constant reminder of that day and the things I left behind. It’s one of the few nice things I’m allowed to have (even though the Phillies break my heart every year). One could argue that it’s not a lucky hat, that I essentially traded an apartment for it and it’s not really a fair trade. I don’t think of it like that. Maybe this hat was the catalyst for the biggest leap of faith I’ve ever taken.

I’ve made some dumb decisions in my life, but moving to LA was not one of them. It was destined to happen, it’s what I always wanted to happen… I just lost sight of that. I needed an act of God to open my eyes, and now three years removed from that day, it’s made me see things in a new light. To be happy with what you have and be thankful that you’re allowed to have it, because you’re not guaranteed to keep it.

When people ask me where I’m from, I say Tampa, Florida and I say it proudly. I’m forever grateful and thankful for all of the things that Tampa has taught me. It shaped me into the person that I am today and it follows me everywhere I go. It was at times challenging, riveting, frustrating, thrilling, depressing, but most importantly… it was home. It always will be.

I miss it everyday, and while I wish things were different, it’s like I always say: Sometimes, if you really love something, you have to let it go because you’ll never know how much love something until it’s gone. Or, in my case, it gets washed away into the sewers of South Tampa. 

Tampa, I will always love you and I will never forget you. Even though you rained on my parade more than once, you will always have a special place in my heart. I hope you feel the same way about me.

Until next time…

SF

“Someone told me long ago, there’s a calm before the storm. I know. It’s been coming for some time.” Credence Clearwater Revival