“You get your ticket at the station of the Rock Island Line”---Lonnie Donegan
Where have all the tickets gone, long time passing? Gone to graveyards every one, the victims of the booming Computer Era, which swallows things whole and leaves no hint they ever walked among us.
I went over to the Phillips Center at UF the other day to get our $100 Hogtown Opry tickets and Captain Rob in the ticket office plunked his magic twanger and here they came, just like in the old days, nice little white rectangles with the event of the day posted on the front with the seat numbers, spiffy little relics of an earlier time.
Now some people will tell you what a wonderful convenience it is to have phony tickets locked up in your phone where you can’t forget them at home. They fail to mention you can forget your phone at home, too. Or it might, perish forbid, run out of juice, making your ticket impossible to find. You never have to worry about your paper ticket being printed with invisible ink or self-combusting and bursting into flame. It’s there for the duration.
Sometimes, for important events like the World Series or the NCAA Final Four, the tickets were enlarged, glamorized, festooned with pictures and colors and holograms even. Fans clutched them to their bosoms, put them in fancy glassed frames, hung them in their fan caves. Old men stacked dozens of colorful ducats in the hatbands of their boaters, proud of their faithfulness and longevity, in love with the constant reminders of glorious Saturdays. Now you get bupkus…or as John Prine said, “Well it took me years to get those souvenirs…And I don’t know how they slipped away from me.”
Scalping The Scalpers
Once there were typewriter shops, record stores, a bookshop on every corner. You could rent your choice of hundreds of video rentals at a movie paradise called Blockbuster or take your wounded automobile to a mechanic at any gas station. Suddenly, almost overnight, the rug was pulled from under them. The typewriter man went broke, the record stores disappeared, the book places were reduced to one or two, Blockbuster stock fell through the floor and car maintenance required an early appointment. But nobody had a faster fall than the legions of brazen ticket scalpers at sports events and concerts, destitute almost overnight.
The big ticket guys in Gainesville were Bobby D. and Ticket Steve, who always held a clearly-delineated seating chart in front of him at his post hard by the University of Florida football stadium. Steve was my go-to guy for UF games, he even called me when he had a spectacular single ticket. Occasionally, we discussed the scalper trade, which was brisk, and caused Steve to actually buy a $10,000 franchise. Who knew this sort of commerce went on amid the barbecued glories of tailgater-land?
Now, football fans are simple people. While it is still possible to move tickets from phone to phone, this is like the deepest arcane knowledge to the average fan, fearful of being cheated and left out in the cold. Joe Sixpack wants to see tickets in the air, hear “I got two on the fifty!” and nuzzle into the middle of a claque of buyers and sellers to check out the action. Some fans like to buy and sell as the day goes on, perhaps earning a dollar and improving their seating. However, nobody, but nobody is interested in cell phone commerce. A few scalpers tried and a few scalpers died before tossing in the towel and retreating into the edible shoes business.
As for me, I dutifully called the UF Athletic Association, sadly plunked down $1600 for my season ticket on the fifty and savored the memories of snagging a choice pair of seats just before game time in Knoxville from a desperate seller, grabbing a single for $5 in a downpour at a Florida-Georgia game, showing a scalper all $654 in my pocket to convince him I had nothing left at the 2008 national championship football game in Miami. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. Alas, one more casualty of the Computer Cyclone, the Age of Nothing Left Behind. Ticket Steve, wearing rags and creeping through the streets of Reno, solicits a smoke and tells his benefactor, “I use to be Somebody, y’know…a man about town, a guy everybody looked up to. If the breaks didn’t fall the other way, I coulda been a contender.”
Gee, Officer Krupke
In the good old days of automobiling, we got real tickets for busting through stop signs, driving 100 miles an hour or silly stuff like “following too closely.” How can you save gas, however, without drafting behind a semi going 75 mph? They were real tickets then, with little checked boxes on the front describing your affront and the amount of your fine, which wasn’t the current-day $200 minimum. Today we get yellow carbon copies barely legible in their poorly-written, smudged condition and clearly unworthy of their horrendous fees. And often we don’t get even those. Several years ago, many municipalities got the notion they could reap even greater fees if the stony-faced ticketing cop was removed from the equation in lieu of the infamous traffic light camera, the Blue Eye of Death. Naturally, chaos resulted.
In California, where the cameras take photos of both the license plate and the driver, a traffic court judge looked twice at the sharply dressed man standing before him in court. What he saw was the man’s alter ego, a womanish sort resembling Marilyn Monroe. “Not guilty” gaveled his honor. “Now go back out and find the real Timothy Foo for me.”
Another Cali camera caught a married couple (but not to each other) grousing in the goodie at a rest stop. When the ticket arrived at the home of the driver, his real wife was there to intercept it. The bad new is that the wife bailed. The good news is that the charges were thrown out because the state of California failed to black out the image of the passenger.
Enthusiasm for the cameras began to wane as more and more drivers challenged the charges in court, many of them gaining succor from the judges. The expense of taking these people to court eventually exceeded the amount collected in fines and many cities abandoned the cameras altogether. We still see the little fellows occasionally, though, peeping at us at the major intersections, embarrassed at their plight, a mere shadow of their former selves. We like to give them the occasional pick-me-up, darting through the amber light at the last second, throwing them a bone, imagining a robotic smile, a renewed sense of self-worth. No one likes being tossed on the scrap heap of time, seduced and abandoned. Remember that the next time the light turns yellow and you’re a hundred yards away. I think the proper expression is “GERONIMO!”
Traffic School Hijinks
Back in the lonely days of the gas famine, the state of Florida saw fit to reduce the speed limit on its highways and byways from 70 mph to a snaillike 55, resulting in the dawn of The Agony Era. Imagine traveling from Gainesville to Miami and back the same day, if you will. It was like driving in quicksand, sitting through the Stations of the Cross in a Lenten Catholic church, watching a double-header between the St. Louis Browns and the Washington Senators while coming down off acid.
Since I had horses running at the thoroughbred tracks in Miami at the time, I was forced to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous traffic laws and might have bent the regs a few times. If you do these things often enough, you accumulate 24 demerits in 36 months and find your license suspended, an unacceptable penalty. The state throws you a life preserver, however, in the form of a bone called Traffic School. Mine met every day of one week at 7 p.m. and any failure to appear caused your driver’s license to cease to exist. That week was quite a revelation.
The population of the class hovered around 30, almost all of them males with suspect powers of deduction. They were strangely remindful of your sophomore class in high school, perhaps because some of them were sophomores in high school. To a man, the group was outraged to be forced into this primitive cubicle and made to put pen to paper answering difficult quizzes, although there was always the eventual reward, watching endless people maimed in the nightly accident movies. Foremost among the natives was Wally, still a high school junior at age 20, who felt he was somehow tricked into this imposition by unnamed government authorities with an axe to grind against the little guy. Wally saw nothing particularly heinous about zipping 110 mph through school zones or driving over, not around, traffic circles. “They do it all the time in Mexico City,” he pointed out correctly.
When you find yourself among a group of this ilk your first inclination is to think, hey, I don’t belong here. These people are mindless idiots, trailer trash rejects with brains made of silly putty, incapable of following a few sensible rules. Then, of course, you realize you are there for the same reasons. The week drags on like an endless loop of Dog, the Bounty Hunter or The Real Wives of Burlington as all day long you anticipate another night with these intellectual invalids and you promise God you will resort in the future to the wisdom of your cruise control if he will only make it end. There is no Pomp and Circumstance on graduation day, just the temptation to run to the parking lot at full speed to escape your new buddies who are busily making plans to meet for grog and franks at some future time and place.
Wally, alas, is somewhat emotionally drawn by this sad time of parting. “I feel like the old gang is breaking up,” he sniffs. I pat him on the back and remind him life will offer new friends, future pleasures. “And if worse comes to worse,” I remind him, “you can always plow into City Hall and meet a new gang of buds.” He smiles at that, contemplating a rosier future. “Thanks, Bill,” he tells me. “You always know how to make a guy smile.”
That’s right, Wally. I live for those special moments.
That’s all, folks. Please remember to give to the Retired Scalpers Fund and always observe the rules of the highway.
