Despite an initial impression, Tallahassee proved to be a nasty place

Last Friday I drove to Tallahassee to play a show. I hadn’t spent much time there before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had heard Tallahassee was “nasty” from many of my peers at UF, but I never quite understood why.

I got to Tallahassee at about 7 p.m. Upon exiting the highway and driving through the streets surrounding the Florida State University campus, I was disappointed to see strip malls and traffic congestion. Still, none of this struck me as the nasty squalors about which I had heard frequently.

I found the venue, a quaint house surrounded by other quaint houses, presumably rented by students. It looked a lot like my own neighborhood in Gainesville. The people who ran the show were accommodating and friendly. Their house was cleaner than my own. I still hadn’t seen anything outlandishly nasty in this mysterious town, and I was getting antsy.

At about 11 p.m. that changed — seemingly. The touring performer who was scheduled to go on before me entered the room, bringing in a sort of cheesy body odor. I eyed his equipment, which included a Backstreet-Boys-style-hands-free microphone, an incomplete drum set and four pink suitcases with illegible graffiti on them.

His performance consisted of beat-boxing, making up free-verse poetry and hitting parts of his partial drum set and opening the pink suitcases to reveal pounds of cardboard, doodled on with sharpies and riddled with ambiguous phrases like “free your mind” and “whatever.” His ragged outfit consisted of several layers of colorful garments. I wanted his set to be my aha “Tallahassee is nasty” moment, but I learned later this performer was from Vermont.

After the show, I stopped at a late-night fried chicken restaurant. Once I got my food, I parked and ate on the hood of my car.

It was about 2 a.m. when I finished eating. I felt disappointed by Tallahassee. It just didn’t seem any nastier to me than Gainesville. I recognized someone from the show, strolling down the sidewalk with a pack of Rolling Rock and an open can. We got into a short conversation about the performance.

We had been talking for a few minutes when I noticed a large shadowy figure approaching us, shouting words I couldn’t understand. My new friend and Tallahassee native, Tyler, for the sake of anonymity, didn’t seem alarmed when this 6-foot-something man addressed us directly, speaking gibberish that resembled English, but was nearly impossible to understand. This bumbling man gave me a big hug. Then he looked at Tyler and, in an uncharacteristic moment of linguistic clarity, said “I know you.”

The tall man then produced a steak knife from his jacket pocket, and started waving it around carelessly. He wasn’t directly threatening either one of us, but I got freaked. Nobody had ever pulled a knife on me before.

“I know you, man!” said the tall man wielding the knife again.

I bolted toward my car and Tyler followed. He got into in my backseat without me really noticing. Then he asked me for a ride home, so I locked the door and drove off.

“I really appreciate your helping me out, man,” Tyler said from the backseat. “I’m not going to lie to you, I used to do a lot of crack right around that area. I don’t know who I might have wronged in some of my benders. That guy definitely knew me, and he wasn’t happy to see me.”

I entered Tyler’s house briefly, to urinate and fill my Nalgene. In his living room, I saw the smelly Vermont guy doodling a mural on the wall with a sharpie. There were several dirty mattresses lining the floor of the main room. After I used his moldy toilet, Tyler showed me the bullet holes in his door from the last time there was a drug-related raid of his house. Tallahassee, as it turned out, did not disappoint.

Jeremy Haas is a UF English junior. His column appears on Wednesdays.