The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End, for more than a few of us xenophobes, has always offered an escape from our past. A chance to bury the dead and make a clean start here on the far reaches of reality. For some of us it was a place to return to, lay low awhile and hope the past had a short memory.

Ruby Reed belonged in the latter category. She was born here over one hundred years ago, went to school in the Mabana schoolhouse, even lived in our old shack with her mom and sister and brother. Not many neighbors back around 1915. Not much work either. Not much to keep a young person with dreams of the city life. Not much, really, too different than today, just more so.

Ruby left the bucolic and boring South End to become a burlesque dancer. We have a full size theater marquee of her we dug out of the shack walls in one of our many remodeling jags. Black leather bra with an X across the sweet spots, black leather bottom with laces on the sides revealing plenty of thigh. Not much else other than a come hither smile. She worked the strip tease circuit from Seattle and Gomorrah to Spokane, Portland to Frisko, married a vaudevillian with the lewd stage moniker Harry Reed. We’ve got newspaper ads of Ruby and Harry at the Temples of Sin. What a time they must have had! What a wild ride! You want to leave the banality of the South End, there you go.

In the mid 40’s she and Harry were sleeping in a hotel in downtown San Francisco when an intruder burst in, hogtied Harry and raped Ruby in front of him. Maybe unpaid gambling debts, maybe promises unkept, who will ever know? Shortly after this incident was reported in the Bay area papers, she and Harry came back to the safety of the South End. They built the house next to our shack which her sister now owned, raised chickens and ducks and geese, stayed home. Ruby taught dance classes in Stanwoodopolis, lord only knows what Harry did.

They didn’t last long. Not here, not their marriage. Way of the world, I guess. We bought their house, the one they built next to ours. We’re now the keepers of their history, we’re their caretakers. I wish we knew more about these two, but like most history, theirs is lost to rot and rust and ruin. Same as ours someday. Same as most of us on the remote South End. Probably for the best. Probably what we wanted in the first place.

Back when I first got off the Mayflower south of Utsalady, I hitched my fortune to an unlikely looking piece of bottomland which had a shack, a large shed (or small barn depending on your agricultural perspective), a chicken coop, doghouse and a pen for some rabbits. Better than raw land, I figured. But not by much ….

Those early years I mostly hunkered down and tried to stay warm. Some folks would just look at this and shake their heads. Can’t say I blame them, but looking back now 44 years, I’m glad I bit it off. Occasionally I’d get friends coming up to see the estate. We were all pretty much layabouts from our days driving school buses in the Big City, not big dreamers, just slackers getting high on getting by, or so the song goes…. We were an aimless bunch, lacking in ambition and drive, plenty short on cash, but optimistic the future would play out all right for us. Why? I couldn’t say, just that a good positive attitude might, in the end, carry the day. I guess we drank the Kool-Aid —- or if we hadn’t, we were more than willing.

Some of those weekends, come nightfall, we’d load up the VW bus and motor into town, figuring to catch some Stanwoodopolis night life. Rudy the Banjo King played every Saturday night at the Hotel, but once was plenty and so we went to the other side of town to see what the Sportsman and the Sundance and the East Side had to offer a half dozen of us thirsty revelers. First tavern up, the Sportsman, we ordered schooners of tap beer. A minute later every barstool was empty and we were alone with the scowling bartender. Couple of beers, some pool, we moved next door. Our absentee barstool pals were all there, waiting, I guess, for us to bring the party.

We bellied up to the bar, ordered pitchers and watched our fellow revelers finish their beers and head for the door, about half a dozen fellas exiting. Was it something we said? The bartender took our money, but offered no clues. An hour later we were at the East Side, little shotgun of a place, shuffle board half its width. The locals kindly gave us their stools, tipped their hats and left. Once again.

Some places the drinking establishments are lively, a democratic conviviality. Alcohol has its negatives, but for loosening up inhibitions, it’s tried and true. I’ve lived here now 44 years. I’ve been to every drinking establishment that’s come and gone, lived and died. The mizzus says you can’t judge a town by its saloons … and she’s a historian … but I say you can. I could live here longer than Methuselah on scotch and soda and I tell you what, it’s way more fun to drink alone. Which is what we got in spades down here on the South End.

If you venture back into the interior of the South End — and I guarantee you very few do — you’ll wander up on illegal buildings, Aryan nation signage, lost homesteads and small forests covered by English ivy, making it feel as if you’ve found some ancient civilization gone to rot and ruin. The last few miles of the island there are no roads running across from east to west, just a few dirt ones that lead to xenophobic neighbors. Most of the roads on the South End that pierce the interior give fair warning you’re not welcome. There are more No Trespassing signs than there are Trump/Pence, which is to say, there are plenty.

Behind our little Shangri-La-La there used to live a man who, if you met him, you’d think to be a very polite, well-mannered person, someone you might enjoy a conversation with over a beer late in any given afternoon. You’d be wrong. He holed up back in the woods, raised a few farm animals and shot anything that came onto his property. One of my neighbors, painter John, rang me up one day, this would be back twenty years or more ago, to ask if I’d seen his dog who’d run off. I said I hadn’t, but … and I hesitated to tell him this … but maybe he should go see Tyler, the man who lived behind us back in the nettle jungle.

“Why’s that?” John asked and I told him because Tyler would shoot his dog if he happened to wander onto his property. John, being a peaceful sort of man, declared that he doubted anyone would do such a thing. But he would ask, if nothing else, see if Tyler had seen his shepard. When John drove up there, Tyler said sure, he’d killed the sonofabitch, seen it menacing his chickens, put a bullet right into him, shot him dead. Now John loved that sonofabitch and you best believe he was upset to hear this turn of events, kind of a shock to his faith in his fellow man. John hadn’t even heard the story of two other dogs found near Tyler’s place, hogtied with baling wire and left to die. Shooting a dog for trying to kill your own animals is one thing, killing them in a slow heinous way is quite another.

However, John heard Tyler’s wife say to Tyler, ‘that dog wasn’t bothering the chickens’. One hard look from m’lord shut her up right then and there, little doubt that a beating was coming once John drove off, but it told John all he needed to know. ‘What you planning, John?’ I asked when he told me he’d found his dog.

I lived for a time in a hardscrabble place in Northern Wisconsin where my neighbor and good friend had found his beagle drag itself home after being shot. Eddie was ex-Marine, a kindly sort, but not when it came to someone shooting his dog Barney. Eddie followed the blood on the snow all the way down to where the road took a turn and knocked on the door of the guy who’d put a bullet in Barney. The guy said he didn’t shoot no damn dog and went to shut the door in Eddie’s face, but Eddie held the door open. ‘If my dog dies,’ Eddie told him, and I have no doubt, knowing Eddie, this was a blood vow, ‘you’ll be dead too. ‘

Barney lived. And so did the man who shot him. I told John this story, but John only shook his head. Like I said, John’s a peaceful man. He did take Tyler to court, got a settlement, if I remember correctly, of 500 dollars. I’m not sure he felt vindicated, I know I wouldn’t have been. I do know this, I’m glad it wasn’t my dog. I loved Gonzo more than most people I’ve met. Sometimes, I have no doubt, it’s best not to know what you’re actually capable of.

Art is a funny sort of investment, let’s say that right off the get-go. It’s worth what anybody is willing to pay for it. If you’re an artist whose work is actually collected as a hedge against recessions, inflation, wars, disasters and the coming apocalypse, you really can’t lower your prices when the bank account dips too low, not if you want to keep your investors happy. Me, I don’t worry too much about this part of the art game. I charge by the square foot for original designs in glass, a price I haven’t changed since 1995, one that’s cheaper than the stained glass shops in the area. The obvious corollary to this is that, well gee, maybe I’m selling product, not art. But let’s not get sidetracked, okay?

This week Christie’s auction house sold a digital painting for 69 million dollars plus change. For what was advertised as an NFT, which for you poor readers living in the comfortable past, means a non fungible token. Huh? you ask and I say yah shure, u betcha, a non fungible token, where ya been? An NFT is basically artistic crypto-currency, see? And don’t say Huh? It’s the future and the future is here.

A guy you never heard of named Beeple is now the 3rd richest living artist after his first sale ever. Not bad. Or is it? Bad, I mean. This Beeple is a graphic designer who lives in Charleston, South Carolina. The idea behind the “Everydays” project is to create art daily, no matter how complex or simple, he said.

“These pictures are all done from start to finish every day,” he declared on his website. “The purpose of this project is to help me get better at different things.” Well now, he certainly got better at selling his work, and hopefully maybe even fine-tuned his graphic art. I mean, he has 5000 images tucked away in that digital painting, some maybe good, some maybe not, and if you owned the painting you could scroll through and find a few you loved and a few you wish you could photoshop out.

Of course I’m trying to figure out a way to digitize my own glassworks. Jam every doodle and design into a collage that would fill my own computer’s hard drive in a South End minute. I was worried at the beginning I wouldn’t know how to make a non fungible token since I wasn’t really sure what an NFT is, but then I realized most of even the non-digitized stuff I have collecting dust down at the glass shack is basically non fungible now since obviously it appears to be unsaleable. Keep a close watch on Christie’s. I’ll be there soon. 4th richest living artist? Why not?? Bid high!!

Back in 1978 I bought my first motorcycle — from my then wife’s boyfriend. I know what you’re thinking, I wasn’t, and you can congratulate yourself for wisdom I did not have at the time. The bike was a beat-up 1960’s Honda 350 that wouldn’t start, which is why my wife’s boyfriend was selling it. Cheap. Maybe it was the despondency over a marriage gone south, but that bike seemed like just the tonic to reinvigorate my depressed life. Right … get a suicide machine.

It took me months to get that crummy motorcycle to start, but there came a day when it sparked to life down in the basement of my ghetto house and triumphant, I brought that Honda out into the sunshine, popped the clutch and hung on for dear life as I menaced the car strewn streets of my shabby neighborhood. No license, no tags, no helmet — that’s right, amigo, bad to the bone!

Only a few blocks from my house the bike quit, stalled in an intersection and so I ingloriously pushed the thing back home, disappointed but still determined. If you’ve never sat a bike, that raw power between your legs, a monster growl snarling with the smallest twist of the throttle, the sudden acceleration from zero to 60 in seconds, you’re the lucky one. Only insane people and Tesla money love that G-force barely under control. Me, I knew this was a death machine. I could all too willingly hurtle into my dark future.

Lucky for me I spent most of my time with the bike working on it, not riding it. Dreams of horrible motorcycle accidents littered my night, recalled next morning as black omens, harbingers of an early and messy demise. An encounter with a black motorcycle gang at an intersection where we all stopped for the red light, the boys surrounding me right left front and back, revving their Harleys to red line RPM’s, then sprinting on the green, all but me, stalled out yet again when my ugly Honda died when I hit the gas, leaving me in their wake of oil and gas fumes and imagined laughter. I knew right there my days of being the Wild One had crashed and burned. Like Peter Fonda said to Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, we blew it, man.

In the end I sold the bike. Back to my then wife’s boyfriend. Same price. Seemed only fair. And every once in awhile I wonder if maybe he took a turn too fast, laid that Honda down on some backroad blacktop in a shower of sparks and screaming metal, wishing he’d just kept my hundred bucks and my wife, called it a good deal all around, lived happily ever after. But then I think, we probably all got what we wanted, or at least deserved. Hopefully the only ones disappointed are the Hells Angels. Sorry, guys, I hung up my bike.

Sarah Jensen runs the South End Animal Rescue here on the island. She’s got an old barn, some sheds, half a dozen outdoor pens, a small vet clinic off the house plus a few acres of fenced pasture where horses and alpacas and llamas patrol the grounds along with a menagerie of dogs, goats and the occasional Vietnamese pig. She doctors eagles and cats, raccoons and the usual squirrels. Most return to the wild but some stay with her the rest of their lives. Her longest guest by far is Quixote, a donkey she had to amputate its hind leg back she guesses around 1995.

Quixote wants nothing to do with the horses or the alpacas and especially the cantankerous two llamas. He gimps around the pasture waiting for Sarah, apparently the love of his donkey life. A truck had hit him on the highway where he’d made his escape from the Drummond place north of the Diner where he’d mostly been staked to an iron rod and left day in and day out tied to a shackle on the metal stake. His life with Drummond was about 20 feet in diameter, water bowl, moldy hay, a circle of mud to stand in or lie down in or just try to ignore. Why old man Drummond wanted a donkey is anybody’s guess but when Quixote snapped the rotten rope and hit the road before being hit himself, the last thing he wanted was a 3 legged jackass, or so he declared when Sarah presented him with a bill for an amputation.

Life is hard enough on the South End for us 2 legged denizens, but if you visit Sarah, you’ll feel like we’re the Lucky Ones. If you take an apple like I do when I drop by, Quixote, who is not above being bribed, you’ll appreciate that the world, hard as it is, also has a few Sarah Jensens to offer balm and medicine and compassion. Quixote too is one of us, the Lucky Ones. You decide to visit the Rescue, bring an apple. Or three.

The Mabana Sunset Villa was originally a sort of low end Dry Out facility, mostly aging alcoholics but later everything from meth to heroin. The fact that they were fairly inexpensive kept them at full occupancy for decades, but when ownership changed hands and the new folks thought they could double profits without changing services — in fact, maybe eliminate a few, everything from staff to cable TV to the quality of the food — well, maybe that works in Seattle and Gomorrah, but up here in the boondocks, setting up a rehab clinic that mimicked a penitentiary, not so much, not when half the inmates, I mean residents, know exactly what a prison looks like from the inside.

When the recidivism went through the roof and half the residents were selling drugs in the recreation room ( a few chairs and a card table plus a filthy aquarium) after hours, a de facto happy hour of their own, well, the Villa lost referrals and profits went more southerly than the South End and eventually the place was sold for less than the last entrepreneur had paid five years earlier. So much for South End dreams of fast riches!

The Villa, once a hotel serving Mabana’s not-very-thriving Port one hundred years ago, was practically historic. When the Mabana Villa LLC purchased it, the previous owners had upgraded plumbing and electric, added amenities such as saunas and hot tubs, recreation rooms with pool tables and jukeboxes, in-room TV’s, all the luxuries … but now the saunas sported black mold, the hot tubs weren’t hot and the TV’s were relegated to one 31 inch tube set in the Commons cafeteria that was itself historic.

Now, some years later, the Mabana Sunset Villa (LLC) offers retirees medium care for a medium price. The staff is mostly minimum wage, but they’re caring and they’re honest. If we geezers need a sterling silver drool bucket,well, we can go to the assisted living franchises up north, pay the dime and spend our Golden Years with cable TV in our well-appointed and spacious rooms. Since most of us down here don’t need three shopping channels or care about the politics of Fox or MSNBC, the gossip at the Villa’s dining room will do just fine as about all the entertainment we’ll need as we all slide slowly but inevitably into history.

Holly Burgess has been singing every Sunday since 1991 at the Little Chapel in the Ravine, our South End church, which, despite its declaration by the road as non-denominational, collects every denomination in the collection plate passed for tithing right after the incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and the ever popular 23rd Psalm. Yea, though she walks through the Valley of Death, Holly will sing a joyful noise.

Pastors come and go with alarming frequency down at the Chapel. It’s some kind of ecumenical banishment to the nether regions apparently. The last Reverend, Pastor George, was promoted to some outpost in heathen Kenya and within a week had packed up his Spartan belongings and his long suffering pinch-faced wife Elizabeth (NOT Liz), a woman who kept to her bed during the winter drizzle, then administered a stern sermon laced with promises of Cotton Mather style penalties for the sinners in the congregation and left the South End immediately after the final hymn in a mudcrusted Chevy SUV with a crumpled quarter panel never fixed after a run-in with a six point buck four months prior.

Holly and two other robed choir members were the only congregants gathered to wave adios at the pastor’s driveway and she was aghast at the dearth of well wishers. Perhaps, she wondered aloud to her fellow singing compatriots, that last sermon WAS overly pointed. She herself was no stranger to sin and venality, but …. my Lord, a Sea of Eternal Fire seemed a bit extreme for some harmless gossip. Pastor George was practically apoplectic from the pulpit, the vein on his tanless forehead positively throbbing to the beat of his thumped King James version, the spine finally splitting open at a particularly vehement whack.

“Well,” she sighed to Kate and Kate’s boyfriend Leo, all hands still aloft in farewell to the padre’s departure, “our loss is those poor Africans’ gain, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Leo agreed, starting to head down to his truck left in the church’s rutted parking lot. Kate hesitated a final moment longer, watching the exhaust cloud of Pastor George’s SUV dissipate after the car had disappeared up over the hill. “You suppose Sin is the same over there?” she asked. Holly, caught off guard, considered that, started to say ‘of course’, then thought maybe she had a point. Something to consider. Definitely something to consider. Maybe even something to ask the new Pastor. If he stayed long enough.

People always ask me, how is it you can manage to live down at the Millionaire Club of the South End when you don’t really have a job? They think the way the world works is you make an hourly wage or a salary, then you hop right out and buy a new car, a palatial house, a super size TV —- all of it on time, all of it figuring out those payments the mortgage company or the credit card company or the car dealer is gonna fit into your income.

I think the schools in America, at least the ones I went to, wanted to keep us in the dark about interest and principal. The only principal me and my wiseass buddies saw was in his office, reading us our detention notices. I don’t owe anybody anything. Except maybe an apology. I drove a jalopy. I lived in a shack for 17 years. I built my ‘new’ house myself. I’m not saying it’s going to make the Street of Dreams, but it’s paid for and I tell you young’uns, that’s a dream come true for a boy a mortgage would’ve made into an indentured servant.

I had a former friend’s punk teenage boy ask me one time if I was rich. Big smirking grin. Real smug kid. Already a con-artist like his old man. Smarter than you and me by a country mile, he figured. I thought about wiping that smile right off his map. But finally I said, naw, I’m not rich, not the way you mean, not in any way you’d ever understand. But I am free. I don’t owe anybody a red cent. Don’t have debts weighing me down. Don’t have to worry about the mortgage. Course, that’s a rich money won’t touch. That’s a wealth you can’t take to the bank.

I won’t tell you my buddy’s punk son got any lessons here — but at least I figured he wouldn’t come back after dark to see what he could steal. He’d go find a rich guy….

I know you folks have probably heard the news: Stanwood wants to bring a 4 year college to the area. Univ. of Stanwoodopolis. Higher degrees in Lefse Rolling, Lutefisk Engineering, and Storage Unit Management.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. The town’ll be over-run by eggheads. Professors taking over the barstools at the Stanwood Hotel, ruining our rural backwash hick ambiance. Expecting political discussions, not fishing stories. Wanting napkins with their hand-crafted malt beverages and hors douerve plates, not peanuts. The Stan-Isle Bookstore will sell 5 pound tomes with 5 dollar words nobody but the PhD’s will understand. FOR 50 DOLLARS! With titles like the Socio-Economic Dialectic of 3rd Generation Scandihoovian in the Stillaguamish River Drainage.

The whole town’ll go to hell in a hurry. Just when the fast food franchises were giving us a glimmer of hope of joining mainstream society. All those student shops will take over now. More art galleries. Boutique soap stores. Boutique clothing stores. Boutique furniture stores. Head shops. Movie houses, Art movie houses. Fancy pants restaurants. Ethiopian Epicure. Persian Pizza. La De Da Linguini.

Gonna look like Berkeley in the 60’s. Long hair. Free love. Dope smoking, anti-war, bohemian anti-establishment types. Weird clothes. Weird music. Weird period. Weird as a Way of Life.

Which….. if you stop and think about it, is a perfect description of the South End. Which … if you been following our logic here, is exactly why the new campus should be located down by us — the University of the South End, Tyee Branch. Save em from hiring new professors. The woods are thick with em. The Band alone could be a quarter of the art faculty. Think about it. It’s the obvious location — and it’ll preserve the Stanwoodopolis we all love……