Outta-towner 1: Tampa: Searching for Tim Fasano

Comparatively speaking, Henry Morton Stanley had it easy.  He just had to trek through 700 miles of disease-rampant, dense tropical forest in Africa until, in 1871, he at last found the missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone living near Lake Tanganyika in what is today Tanzania. 

Would H.M. Stanley have been able to find my man?  If he thinks so, let him try.

Needing a break from New York, I had decided to fly down to Tampa and stay in St. Petersburg four nights so I could catch up with friends in the Tampa Bay area.  I'd been reading the blog "Tampa Taxi Shots" and thought I would try to hook up with its author while there.  Maybe I'd knock out a short profile on him for "Return Cabbie" and in the process get some feedback on how the cab business in Tampa compared with what New York hacks come up against.

So I emailed Tim Fasano at the address he gave in his blog, proposing a meeting, but heard nothing back.  I gave it three or four days and emailed him again, a day before my departure, and still nothing.

I knew he drove for United Cab, and added stopping by his garage to my Tampa to-do list.

I arrived in Tampa last Thursday evening, picked up a rental car and, after dropping my stuff off at my hotel room, phoned a friend.  We made plans to link up within the hour.  I headed off over the Gandy Bridge to meet up with him, only to run into a horrendous thunder-and-lightning storm.  Torrential rainfall flooded the highway and power was intermittently knocked out, blocking the route and sending me back to my hotel.

That put me behind the eight ball for the first half of my Tampa Bay stay, as I rescheduled get-togethers and places I'd hoped to visit.  In the end, I got out and about quite a bit, including to the Salvador Dalí Museum, but didn't reach the United Cab garage -- under the big Gulf Coast Transportation sign at 1701 West Cass Street -- until around noon on Monday, just a few hours before my scheduled return flight to La Guardia.

Gulf Coast has a garage and office and sizeable lot, and runs both United Cab and Tampa Bay Cab.  It probably wasn't the right time of day to expect a shift change but I did run into a few drivers coming in and waiting to go out.  Not one of them knew Fasano, so it wasn't going to be my lucky day.  I learned that drivers had a choice to lease their cars for 12 or 24 hours but not much else.

Who knows, but maybe I'll get back to Tampa again one day.  In the meantime, Fasano goes onto my "missing persons" list. 

But if there is a next time, my luck could change.  The hand behind "Tampa Taxi Shots" might have returned an enquiring wave.  I can see myself approaching him in the United Cab lot, putting on a serious face, and saying, "Mr. Tim Fasano, I presume."