He was no MIGHTY OG, which occupied a more-or-less permanent place of honor in the front yard of a home in Harvey, North Dakota. But this temporary inflatable gorilla was no less memorable to me.
Monster Sale! Lutz, Florida. 1996.
From a distance I thought it was made of stronger stuff, but closer inspection showed its hot-air innards.
I used to go back to Tampa frequently, but it’s been rare that I even consider it these days. There is no reason for this except that money is short and so is time.
In 1996 I seem to to remember Lutz as something of a cow town, but that the town was on the rise. There was almost nothing there, or so it seemed, so there was plenty of room for MONSTER SALES and tractor pulls. My mother considered tractor pulls to be the height (or depth) of redneck activities. I never had an opinion on the matter, but I feigned alarm when the full resources of Tampa Stadium were reserved for a tractor pull.
Somewhere in my hoarded coffers is a photo I took as a child of Tampa Stadium seen from Al Lopez Field, the now-gone space where the Cincinnati Reds held their spring training games. Vestiges of that photo linger in the broken image icon on this page. At Al Lopez Field I saw Johnny Bench hit a home run. It seemed like a big, honkin’, huge deal at the time. He circled the bases to ceaseless applause, cordially waving one hand and then the other at the adoring crowd. I seem to remember Bench as Major League Baseball’s most popular player of the day, which would have been the late 1970s.
I wouldn’t know exactly where the giant gorilla above was located but almost certainly it was somewhere on Highway 41, the main thoroughfare through Lutz.
Pictures like this — old but not so old — make me melancholy. It reminds of one of the first times I got my own photos developed. It was after a summer music festival, where I had snapped dozen of photos during a 5-week span. I picked the photos up at an Eckerd Drug Store in Tampa. When I took them out of the envelope I started crying. I was not bawling but tears came out and there was nothing I could do to stop them. I could not explain why this happened at the time, nor can I necessarily articulate it now. I think I saw tinctures of sadness in the very existence of photographs. They capture likenesses but not the memories or the reality of things. The past, through photographs, looks back at us in silence. In the case of the summer music festival photos I may have felt sad at having missed an opportunity to be with a certain girl who I could have talked to but never did. There is that silence again. The silence of my inhibitions confronted the silence of the past, where no sounds emerged.
