By Kevin Gallagher
His crystal blue eyes stare into your soul, but it’s the pristine smile—somehow untouched by a lifetime of smoking off-brand cigarettes—that captures your imagination. For 33 years, Texas Tim has been drinking Busch in the can on a bar stool in downtown Tampa’s Hub Bar.
Born in Arlington, Texas, in a year unknown—because this vain and obviously elderly man refused to tell me—Timothy Cline Smith grew up to be a truck driver for fourteen years before moving to Tampa in 1987. When the road lifestyle became too much to handle, he started working as a glass cutter—a job he held for 30 years.
Decades later, Texas Tim is a daily presence and an image of perseverance. He spent his entire life living paycheck to paycheck at the same labor-intensive job, spending his money at a dive bar just a three-minute Uber ride from his current home in Ybor City. He never married and never had children. Not exactly the American Dream personified—but you’d never know that talking to him.
His infectious smile evokes all the mischief of a Cheshire grin. But his warmth and kindness reveal the sometimes over-the-top yet genuine appeal of a working man just looking for a fun night—until it’s time to punch back in at the glass shop and repeat.
I worked as a bartender in Tampa for 20 years in every aspect of the trade—from fine dining to the posh South Tampa lounges and Ybor City’s counterculture clubs. I even had an interesting foray at the prominent gay bar City Side, working with drag queens and male strippers I tried not to make eye contact with. But the three years I spent behind the bar at the Hub were, oddly, the most illuminating.
The Hub’s Strange Unity
Dive bar culture is a unique world separate from everyday society’s rules, and the Hub is a perfect example. Its central proximity to a large cross-section of the Bay Area community attracts and serves a cauldron of various patrons.
Most bars are particular, and the clients that frequent them are aware of these unspoken standards—especially in Tampa, where the lines of social segregation seem rigid and permanent. But there’s something special about 719 N. Franklin Street. The barriers aren’t entirely torn down, but for the duration of a visit, they become translucent. All walks of life unite there for one purpose: to get wasted off cheap, stiff drinks surrounded by temporary cohorts unconcerned by the poor life choices that brought them there.
Casey Hodgin is a 27-year-old makeup artist. She’s a fashionable girl with tattoo sleeves and a pierced septum, and she’s been vegan for seven years. Not exactly the type of person you’d expect to be spending time in the same establishment as a man like Texas Tim, whose charms often fail to hide the unapologetically un-PC Southern boy he never outgrew.
Casey enjoys the sanctuary of a neighborhood bar that won’t pass judgment on her appearance. The world might have changed, but side glances and hand-covered murmurs are still common when she walks into most places.
On any given night, the diversity of people walking through the Hub’s doors has more range than a Mike Patton solo—from homeless vagrants buying blunt wrappers to smoke spice in Gaslight Park, to the well-to-do living in SkyPoint and The Element, and everyone in between. The mystique of that magical place draws them all in to escape and get drunk.
A Bar Without Pretension
Good luck ordering anything more than a single liquor pour or a bottle of beer—PBR tallboy excluded. Current bartender and mixologist extraordinaire Kamran Mir has pushed the envelope some, but the Hub is not a bar for pomp and circumstance. They serve booze the way it was meant to be drunk—before getting drunk became a culinary adventure for Instagram fame.
The many bartenders who’ve worked there are hometown heroes—some even iconic. Day drinking with Jeanie was a rite of passage, and I felt I’d finally made it when Skooter remembered my name on a Saturday night in my early twenties. Scott Imrick, Mark Bustin, Brian Katz, Jeff King, Paul, Jamie, Kelly, and Joanne are all community staples if you’ve lived in Tampa over the last twenty years.
Charles Fox, co-owner and current bartender, has worked behind the bar since 2006. He talked about customers growing up with the Hub in their lives: “The young ones come in late nights to party, then they get jobs, and you don’t see them for a while. But they always come back.”
Even customers who move away return to connect with their past over a cocktail at the Hub. Christmas Eve is one of the bar’s biggest nights every year—it’s tradition for former locals visiting from their new homes to swing through.
The Hard Truth of the Hub
So, what is it about this bar that attracts so many diverse and loyal followers? Writers like Charles Bukowski penned well-circulated novels romanticizing dive bar dramas. But after spending three years employed there, I can tell you his impassioned metaphors are fairy tales at best.
Working at the Hub is hard. It’s late hours in a smoke-filled coffin, slowly dying of lung cancer while spending most of the evening arguing with mentally ill homeless people looking for an angle to bend the rules.
The job part of the job isn’t much better either. I spent more than a few evenings questioning my morality for serving regulars who were slowly killing themselves to feed their addictions. But it’s a job, it pays pretty well, and just like everyone else in the building, I chose to be there. At various times, the fast life was my way too—and just because I changed my direction, who am I to judge the Texas Tims of the world for theirs?
The Last Round
Tim has stage four throat cancer and is living day to day. Despite our pleas for him to seek proper treatment, he keeps coming to the bar for his cigarettes and beer. He’s determined to die the way he’s lived his life for the last 33 years—and I can’t think of a braver way to go.
Like the Hub and many of its patrons, Tim is not the ideal image of an exemplary life. But it’s the life he has lived. And just like the rest of us trying to make it through the years until the universe recycles our consciousness into cosmic dust, there’s a Zen beauty to Tim’s mastery of his own self.
The Hub offers itself as a church to the many social misfits looking for the same awakening. Texas Tim is the pompadoured Dalai Lama for their kind—the ultimate picture of inebriated perfection.
So the next time you walk into a questionable bar and order your first drink to forget about the day, play Willie Nelson or Hank Williams Sr. on the jukebox as an offering to Tim. Let him forever be remembered as the face of so many before, and so many still to come, who have died alone in obscurity pursuing the same awakening.
Namaste.