You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The Broadway Bash 2013.
It was billed as a Nashville Chamber of Commerce event.
The idea was simple: Promote commerce downtown while ringing in the new year.
The city shut down lower Broadway and set up a stage for bands.
There were constant reminders not to drink and drive and to call sober ride.
It was all going to be so easy.
Yeah right.
Around 10pm the skies open up. It’s in the low 40’s and the rain feels like wet death. It’s pelting the crowd of thousands who are milling about on the closed streets wearing party dresses and high end shoes.
I am high above it all, watching the masses from a secret rooftop spot called Ariel. It’s nestled between a honky tonk and a piano bar. You enter through a quiet hallway and take a non-descript elevator to the penthouse. There is no signage, no neon flash, no blaring country beat.
You have to know where you are going and your name has to be on a list to get in.
So I’m on the patio watching thousands of people below me. They are like happy ants meandering around. I cannot see their faces, but their body language tells me they are having fun.
It’s so crowded people are waiting in a line around the block to get into a sports bar.
A sports bar!
The rain starts coming down heavier. It’s cold and I’m wearing a Blazer not made by North Face so I go back inside and see what my drink ticket will buy me.
At mid night the guitar note at the bottom of Lower Broad drops and fireworks explode in the rain stained sky. Happy New Year the crowd cheers as the dancing commences.
I will watch half a dozen girls slip in the same spot on the dance floor.
If I take nothing away from this night so far, it’s that 6 inch stiletto heals get little traction on a freshly waxed dance floor.
Around 1:30 am we leave and head to the street.
We’ve had a few drinks, but over the course of 4 hours and much dancing, I don’t have even the slightest buzz.
As we exit onto Broadway, the harsh reality of the night slaps us in the face. It is raining and cold. People are sopping wet and walking like New Year’s zombies.
“Where are the cab stands?” One girl with runny mascara says. She looks like an extra in a chainsaw massacre movie.
Good question I think to myself as I step into another ankle deep puddle.
I go up to a Metro Police officer on mounted patrol. He and his fellow officers look like the four horsemen of the apocalypse as they over see an exodus into the unknown.
“Excuse me sir,” I say looking up into the blowing rain. The officer’s helmeted head is a silhouette against a street light. “Where are the cabs?”
“6th and Broadway,” he says. “2 blocks up.”
He either has bad information or he is a liar.
We get to 6th and Broad and it’s a scene from Mad Max Thunder Dome.
The promise of a well orchestrated cab stand with warm dry automobiles ready to pick us up and wisk us away is a mirage.
All I see is drenching rain and people full of anger and frustration.
I also sense a twinge of fear as the night gets colder and the rain falls more steadily.
Nobody has dressed for the elements. Practically nobody has an umbrella. I see women in short dresses shivering, almost crying, as moans of “where are the cabs” becomes more pronounced.
I walk into the middle of Broadway and raise my hand. This is Broadway in Music City USA, not Broadway in Manhattan. People don’t walk into the street here to do anything no less hail a cab. But that is where I now find myself. My hair is drenched and my hands and face are numb. My Blazer has soaked up the night sky like a sponge in a sink. I am miserable and desperately want to go home.
Cabs are driving by with lights on – with lights off. What does it all mean. Nobody knows. I try and stop a few cabs, but they race by. Hundreds of people are standing in the streets, their hands up, trying to find motorized salvation that keeps driving by.
The frustration is growing exponentially. There is no rhyme or reason to what is going on. It’s dark. It’s cold. The collective breath of the crowd is funneling up into the dark foreboding skies.
I step 2 lanes into traffic and raise my hand peering up the hill into an onslaught of murky headlights.
Is that a cab? Is it a passenger car?
Why am I two lanes out into traffic? Because the zombie ten feet ahead of me is only 1 lane into traffic. Somehow in this drunken geometric equation of taxi cab positioning, I feel this is the place to be.
“God damn it!” A man from the other side of the street screams as another yellow cab zooms by.
We will spend the next hour in this horrendous rain storm trying to hail down haunted cabs from hell. They zip by with tinted windows.
It is unclear if they have passengers or if they have been sent by the devil to taunt us.
I repeatedly watch cabs stop at the intersection for a red light.
No sooner than it does, frightened and angry people, frozen and drenched, run to the cab and begin tugging on the doors.
I watch as frightened people inside the cabs move away from the glass praying for the light to turn green.
I see several cabs run the red light to avoid the mob.
Somewhere Reginald Denny is shaking in his boots.
An hour has gone by. We are exhausted and miserable.
We walk 6 blocks up hill. We get to the world famous Union Station Hotel.
The driveway is filled with denizens of the night. 2 hours ago, they were New Year’s Revelers, now they are displaced miscreants soaked to the bone. I see soaked party dresses. I see girls in bare feet. I see faces so cold they look like they should be under a sheet at the morgue.
A cab pulls into the driveway. There is no hotel mechanism for this sudden wild card. It’s chaos. It’s battle for the planet of the apes and it is unfolding in front of me.
I just heard Ryan Sechrist on New Year’s Rockin Eve call for world peace.
We didn’t even make it 90 minutes into the new year. The anger is palpable.
I am in a hotel driveway full of anger, much of it drunk off its ass. The mob just wants out of this hell hole.
The cab pulls up and there is a dash to the yellow door.
My friend gets there first.
I am hopeful, maybe the Gods of insanity will smile upon us.
Just then a man sized woman, drenched and drunk crashes through him.
“Fuck you,” she slurs. The words exit her disgusting, distorted Pink Floyd the Wall face like some kind of bad dream.
My friend is taken aback.
Before he can say much her posse descends on the cab.
“That’s our cab mother fucker,” a man scowls protecting the front door like it’s the last steak at a caveman convention.
“I’ll rip your fucking head off,” He mumbles as he begins pushing the massive she-beast into the warm confines of the cab.
“Did you all call for this cab?” my friend asks innocently, trying to preserve some semblance of humanity.
“fuck you, if you think you can steal our fucking cab you fucking fuck.”
The people are blood thirsty cab pirates. They would literally kill my friend to get into this cab. They threaten him numerous times.
My friend backs away and lets the idiots win their tiny battle.
I am appalled at the lunacy that this night has deteriorated into.
We walk into the Union Station Hotel. My memories of “What about Dallas” come storming back.
The high ceilings and pristine architecture represent a building erected in another time. I remember sitting across from Gwynth Paltrow and Tim McGraw for hours on end saying the same line over and over and over again.
A much better day, I think to myself.
I look at the ornate lobby full of plush sofas and high back chairs.
There are frozen tired zombies with sad faces and running mascara everywhere. Like butter sitting on hot toast, these tired people are melting into the woodwork.
I walk to the manager on duty. “Dude, do you have any provisions for cabs?” I ask.
“No,” he says, his face hard and stern.
“This Boulevard Bash idea is awful. The city should be ashamed of itself,” I say.
“I agree,” he says eye balling a lobby full of loiterers.
“Do you have any rooms we could rent?”
“All sold out,” he retorts.
My friend pulls the phone down from his ear. He is frustrated.
“Yellow cab number just rings and rings,” he says redialing.
Just then a pizza delivery man pokes his head into the lobby.
I walk up to the man. He smells like he just applied pepperoni and sausage deodorant.
“Hey pizza dude. If i buy a pie from you will you drive us 5 blocks out of here?”
He thinks for a moment calculating what I’m asking and what it might mean for him financially.
“We’ll pay ya dude.”
He looks at the lobby staff. “I can’t do that man.”
I laugh that I just tried to bribe a pizza man to take me to my parked car.
Is this what the Chamber of Commerce had in mind I wonder. I suddenly hate my city.
Maybe I should call Purity Dairies and see if I can hitch a ride on a morning milk truck, I muse to myself.
I look at the lobby of people redialing their phones, fighting off drunken delirium.
“No cabs are coming to this lobby,” I say to my friend.
I go back into the street and assume my position in the middle of the four lane.
Cabs are coming and going and none are stopping.
Men and women dart into the street trying to get a cab to stop. It’s apocalyptic in its utter senselessness.
Suddenly a police car pulls up to me.
The cop rolls down his window, and in the chamber of commerce moment of the night he screams
“You want to go to jail?
“No,” I smile.
“Then get the hell out of the street.”
He rolls up his cop window and zooms past me to harass someone else.
I laugh out loud. Protect and Serve my ass.
The rain continues to fall as people ooze off the sidewalks into the street. How much worse can this get?
I walk into the union station hotel. The clock on the wall is 10 stories tall.
3:30 am it signifies.
We left our rooftop haunt 2 hours ago. We took a cab into the downtown like the city asked us to. And now because the planning is horrendously bad, because of a myopic thought process, we are trapped in this $300 dollar a night hotel lobby like well dressed homeless people.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the young manager says to us.
My friend is calm and pissed. He barely raises an eye brow.
“We’re not leaving. We’re not going back into the cold. We will rent a room from you. You won’t rent us a room. We’re not leaving.”
“Then we’ll have to call the police,” a security officer beside him says politely.
“Then call the police,” my friend says calmly.
Ballsy, I think to myself. Get Johnny Law back into the mix.
I feel like the chaos of this New Year’s day abortion has now entered the pristine Union Station Hotel. Like a ghoulish fiend, all the anger and insidious rudeness that is pervasive up and down Broadway has now blasted through the front doors and it is laying siege in this holy church of ornate architecture.
“We cannot allow all these non guests to stay in the lobby,” the manager says.
I look around. It is a smorgasbord of sadness and despair and hopelessness. It looks like every end of the world movie I have seen without all the radioactive fallout.
Happy New Year’s mother fuckers. Thanks for dropping your cash downtown now get the fuck out!
The angry journalist in me is starting to emerge.
“This guy’s on the news” my friend suddenly blurts out to the management staff.
“I know who he is,” the manager says.
I step up and talk to the man calmly.
“Dude. We want out of here, but it’s a mad house out there. This is the worst plan in the city’s history”
I look out the window to the street. Rain is pouring down.
There are still hundreds of seemingly un-dead roaming the boulevard and not a cab to be found. We are all like Haitian boat people with a southern drawl.
“You need to do a story on this,” the manager says to me quietly. “Just keep the Union Station Hotel out of it.”
That’s when it strikes me. Call the station for help.
It’s 3:45 am. I don’t even know what day it is. I’m unsure if anyone is working.
Ring ring.
“Newsroom,” the producer answers as if I’m another late night douche bag calling for a weather report or the lottery numbers.
“Hey it’s me, are there any over night photogs working?”
She seems surprised. “yeah.”
“Put him on.”
I begin to feel a ray of sunshine in this big stew pot of stagnation.
“Hey whats up?”
I fill him in on the debacle that has filled our lives for the last 2 plus hours. He agrees to make the five minute drive from the station to pick us up.
He walks in the lobby and smiles.
I know that we are saved. The news photographer is like the Coast Guard to Cuban refugees trying to reach the Florida coast in a boat with a hole.
I turn to the girls on the couch. One with sopping wet hair and no shoes stares at me. She has been on hold with Allied Cab the entire time we have been in the lobby. She says someone answered, told her to hold, and on hold is where she has been for the last 45 minutes.
“You want to be interviewed on the news?” i ask.
She smiles as the color returns to her face. “Yes.”
It’s almost 4 am and Suddenly I am news gathering.
“So what do you want to say to your city leaders” I ask?
The photog tilts down to the frozen girl with no shoes.
She describes her 10 block walk through sleet and anger. She questions the city’s planning and angrily wonders how they could abandon so many people with a desultory cab plan that seemed to fail so miserably.
I thank her and wish her well. She and her friends go back into the hotel where the hotel manager has found a warm place in his heart for these dissatisfied new year’s revelers.
On the way back to the station we talk about our battle for the planet of the Apes. We describe our Mad Max trek into the wasteland looking for the golden cab. We talk about wet zombies and angry blood thirsty taxi pirates. He is astounded that so much bad has happened in such a short amount of time.
“Let the producers know about the interviews we shot,” I say as we profusely thank him for his alacrity in saving our wet tired asses.
Hey Chamber of Commerce sons of bitches. YOU LISTENING TO ME?
Next time get a freaking plan that makes sense. Tell your cops where we should go, and that doesn’t include Jail.
If there are no cab stands on 6th and Broadway then don’t tell a thousand tired souls trying not to drink and drive that there is salvation over the crest of the next hill.
Lie to me once and I lose faith in your ability to execute something that ensures my safety.
Did I feel safe in your freezer of stupid?
Yeah, like a rabbit feels safe in the jaws of a coyote.
Next time I go downtown, if there is a next time. I’m driving and parking and taking control of my own destiny.
I’ll leave the best laid plans of douche bags and bureaucrats for someone else to worry about.
And that is crazy.