The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m back up in Anchorage, Alaska doing what half the folks I meet here are doing: looking for a job. Flew in on the noon run after getting up pre-dawn — really, post midnight — and now I’m beat, hunkered down in the Puffin Inn, a motel at the edge of town. The edge of town, at least for us thrifty tourists, is almost affordable, at least now that summer’s over and the salmon runs too.

My first visit I stayed in the Captain Cook Hotel, a downtown upscale joint with multiple doormen and valet parking. It would have been nice but I had a 104 degree fever, chills, vomiting — a good case of the flu in a city locked down by an icestorm. Second time in, I stayed at a seedy wreck of a place the reviews recently called ‘the worst motel in Anchorage’. Admittedly it was rundown and located in the worst part of downtown. When I inquired of the manager, a nice Pakistani whose young daughter studied her school assignments in what passed for the lobby, about the possibility of breakfast, he seemed confused. No, I figured but I thought I’d ask, how about coffee? Oh yes, he nodded, happy to oblige. He pointed to a thermos on a counter nearby and I said that would do nicely. Two cups of bitter java later he approached me with another cup. Crackers? he asked, holding out a cup of Saltine crackers. My turn to be confused, but finally I realized he was making the gesture toward providing a Continental style breakfast. Well, if not continental, maybe Kashmir. Or Syria.

My next visit I decided to play it safe so I stayed at a Motel 6 quite a ways from the Alaska Suites and their Saltine breakfast. Kind of felt bad I wasn’t loyal to the owner, but hey, life is change, adventure, danger! The Motel 6 was, I’m sorry to disagree with the reviewers who thought the Suites were the worst motel in Anchorage, because the 6 was genuinely creepy. Prostitution, drugs, all night parties, hallway fights, you name it, they had it. Well, no Saltine crackers. Genghis Khan could hole up there for months without garnering undue attention. There’s probably a Motel 6 Gang, an offshoot of the Crips, paying by the month and menacing the neighborhood.

The neighborhood, unfortunately, was me. So I’m at the fabulous Puffin. My window faces, well, a wall. So far it’s relatively quiet. And the lobby — half a block away in a separate building — has a breakfast nook, 5-9 am. Probably Triscuits and Tang. I didn’t come for the food, though, I came looking for a job.

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

Once again, we got good news and we got bad news. The good news is I have to scoot up to Alaska on a work related junket for a possible job. The bad news is you’ll be left without your daily Skeeter fix. Okay, I know, they’re both good news. Jeez…. If you need to go the methadone blog route, scroll down and catch some old posts, see if they’re as scintillatingly interesting on the second reading as the first. If you’re like me, you won’t remember them anyway. I barely remember writing them.

I’m standing at the bar in the South End String Band’s latest hangout after the last couple of dive bars closed. If you want to know why they closed, consider I’ve been here five minutes already, enough to write this much this far. The bartender watched me walk in, the fry cook apparently doesn’t serve liquor to people with a hat so here I stand, still scribbling in my notebook.

Ah … here comes my bartender now to take my drink order.

Oops, no, she’s going to serve the guy who followed me in three minutes after I came in, a regular, surely that justifies leaving the occasional customer to stand another few minutes while they catch up on gossip. There are four of us total in this shotgun alley of a bar. Trust me, only one of us ever leaves a tip. Oops, make that none of us today….

This particular tavern has always been a rough joint. Bikers back in the day, crack users next, meth heads for a time, now just down and outers idling away their afternoons, their evenings, their lives. If you are an aficionado of such places, a connoisseur of the hard drinking, chainsmoking denizens of these inns that the Liquor Board keeps on its permanent Watch List, you can’t really get upset with miserable service when the bartender cops an attitude. After all, the whole place comes with attitude and isn’t that why you come in the first place? You want brass and ferns, muted conversations, white wine in a stemmed glass, the hushed tones of incessant cellphones (‘Excuse me, I have to take this.’) and bartenders who enquire occasionally if you’d care for a refill or a ‘freshening’, you definitely leave town.

There’s some kind of ruckus among the three regulars down the bar but it ends as quickly as it ignited, too early for more than verbal violence anyway. My bandmates eventually arrive and after a short wait Charlene takes their orders. My glass sits empty, but just as she wheels suddenly I try to signal for another beer since she didn’t connect the empty glass with a possible refill. She strides away without turning. My kind of place, I realize, and sure, I’ll leave a tip.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine they brought in a new minister, Rev. Baxter. He’s replaced Pastor Paul’s Bible thumping, fire and brimstone, Hell and damnation sermons with ‘prosperity preaching’. Forget worrying about the eternal furnace of Hell as punishment, imagine the temporal rewards of riches Right Now. “The Lord,” Rev. Baxter intones in unctuous, perfectly enunciated promises, “will reward you with fiscal manifestations for your belief in His good works. Ask,” he tells the flock, “and you will receive.”

This is good news in the pews. The South End, never really as worried about punishment after death as the one they live daily, was more than ready to receive money, not manna, from Heaven. That bunk about the meek inheriting the earth stuff Pastor Paul occasionally mentioned paled in comparison to the high wattage of an eternity of blistering boiling retribution. Brother Baxter promised the earth and heaven too and forget about being meek and modest. Ask for the moon. Ask for more! You deserved it and when you got it, that was proof of your worth, that was the Keys to the Kingdom, hallelujah!!

“Have faith in the generosity of the Lord,” Rev. Baxter admonished with his wide gold tooth smile and his expensive watch sparkling occasionally beneath the sleeve of his purple robes, proof itself of the truth in his words. “He will bless you until the end of your days. He will make you rich. There is no shame in wealth, only evidence of your devotion and the Lord’s beneficence.”

Well, he is the minister, the congregation reminded skeptics who quoted that chestnut about a rich man squeezing through the eye of a needle trying to get into Heaven or whatever the hell it said, better to be poor and miserable, old time mumbo jumbo, suffer and ye shall receive. Maybe it was time to try Rev. Baxter’s version, they argued. Try the caviar of optimism instead of the gruel of pessimism and self- denial.

Christmas, it looks like, has come to the South End to stay and God, if Brother B. is correct, is going to be a whole lot better than Santa. Folks at the Chapel are making their lists and checking it twice. Amen to that.

I’m one of those people who pick up hitchhikers. I give spare change to street beggars too. I guess because some part of me feels like there but for the grace of God, go me. Maybe you’ve never had to hitchhike, but I have … and I hated it. Broke or broke down or both — it’s not much fun, but it does teach you humility and an appreciation for the kindness of strangers and gives you huge motivation to buy a used car.

The hombre I picked up this morning was a lean long haired young guy, maybe 30, looked a little worn out already. He asked how I was doing, I said fine, how you doing?

“Okay now, I guess,” he answered. “Just got out of the hospital.”

Course I had to ask what he was there for. “Well, I’m not real sure,” he replied. I’m thinking some unknown undiagnosible malady, but no, he’d been up river partying, drinking, doing some recreational drugs (although he didn’t say so) and when he woke up, he was in a hospital bed, no recollection how he got there, no memory of most of the night before. “How long were you in there?” I asked. He shrugged, didn’t know. Didn’t ask either, apparently. Helluva party.

“Yeah,” he mused, “got another one this weekend up in Darrington, some festival my pal told me was going to be awesome. Awesome,” he repeated, already imagining it. I read about guyz like this everyday, heroin addicts who are brought back from an overdose, but shoot up same day. Alarm bells don’t, apparently, go off for them. Or the line between life and death is just a tightrope they think they can walk, no net necessary.

In town I dropped him off at the curb in front of Mission Motors, the Christian used car lot. “Gonna be a gas,” he intoned, already halfway to Darrington in his mind. A better man than me might have lectured him. A better man might have offered adult counsel.

“Party on, dude,” I said, throwing the truck into gear. He won’t be hitchhiking much longer, I figure. Slow learn, fast burn.

I’m about to leave fogbound Madison, Wisconsin this morning after a week of adult daycare for my folks. Mom just went into the medium care apartments but she didn’t go quietly. Dad is still up at their house where they’d lived for 5 years and you can bet she wanted to go back up there too. The Old Man finally relented, even though the assisted living staff said no way could he handle her needs, but at the last minute he decided they were right, at 93 he was no serious caregiver. Believe me, my mother was devastated.

Still, she wasn’t going to give up. She wanted to go ‘home.’ Home, I said, was where you are, make the best of it. Three meals a day, light housekeeping, nurse a buzzer away, laundry once a week, friendly and professional staff — really the best that money can buy, a blessing for the rest of the family. Hell on earth for her.

I got here a week ago. Her apartment had furniture my brother and his wife hauled down, kitchen table, chairs, TV, couple of small end tables, lamps. They wanted to hang some paintings and prints but Ma growled No Way and so the apartment had all the warmth of a Keokuk Motel 6 in the dead of winter. She wasn’t, she told us repeatedly, staying long, she was going home.

Where there’s a will there’s a way is an old aphorism that’s plenty oversold to eager optimists, okay with me, but there comes a time to accept your losses and move on, make the best of a bad situation you maybe didn’t choose. So … my job was to cheerful up the place. I bought a few paintings and when I rolled in with them under both arms, she asked what I had. Presents, I said, early Christmas, late birthday. Little by little, day by day, we hung art, placed silk flowers, brought in vases and baskets. Takes a heap of living, though, as the poem notes, to make a place a home, nothing she was going to do, that’s for sure.

She knew, with every nail in the drywall, every framed painting hung, every vase placed, she knew she wasn’t going home. I’ll look back months or maybe years from now and wonder if all that art, rather than the cheery bumper sticker ART SAVES LIVES! art didn’t actually kill her.

Someone the other day asked if I thought by writing sketches about the South End I wasn’t contributing to the polarization of the island, Us vs. Them. I will admit, it gave me pause. Had I set in motion the wheels of discontent? Had I created the mechanism for separatism, otherness and the seeds for civil war? Should we make South English the lingua franca or should we encourage bilingualism? Are we a mixing pot or a melting pot?

So … you can well imagine the sleepless nights I’ve had to endure, the moral dilemma of all who slam face to nose with the reality of their mightier-than-the-sword pen and can no longer avoid taking responsibility for the effects our words have on a population fed starvation diets of Tweets and Twitters. Admittedly it’s an explosive concoction, thee short little expositories, and when what might have been seen as scarcely more than travelogues of a twisted imagination become kindling for fevered prejudices, the burden, my friends, is heavy indeed.

The warnings were there, I admit. I sent some of these audio recordings to our local public radio station KSER only to be told they might Offend. Offend who? I asked. People on the South End, the station manager replied.

Satire, you see, is a two edged sword. You’re never really sure who will take umbrage, but rest assured, someone will. Or everyone! I decided finally that in a world where Fox News is considered actual news or where we still debate (outside coal mining towns) if Global Warming exists or when one political party nominates a rich playboy philandering loudmouth know-nothing, I can’t really shoulder the burden of fomenting polarization. If you decide I’m poking fun at you and yours, I might just be. If you think I’m on your side, don’t bet on it. If you think I know what I’m doing, think again. I’m a South Ender. You think we live down here so we could spread the news, I got a job for you as copy editor. Call after midnight most any holiday, my secretary Raoul will set you up with an interview.

Cafes come and go on the island about as fast as the weather. Open up one day, seems like a month later they’ve put the CLOSED sign in the window, locked the doors and another business bites the beach sand. When I first got off the banana boat down by the Yacht Club, a boutique café hung a shingle where the first Senior Center thrift store would eventually take over. Seeing’s how there wasn’t much food service on the island, you’d figure a breakfast and lunch joint would have a pretty easy time making a success of it.

But you’d be wrong. The yuppie couple who ran the place offered macadamia nut waffles, strong fresh ground coffee (long before Starbucks ruled the world) and a menu of fresh vegetables, sprouts, whole wheat breads and local eggs and meats. They were maybe half a century ahead of their time.

I took a boatload of pals up from the smog-smitten city who were crashing at the shack for a wholesome breakfast and a little relief from the hangovers from the previous night’s revelries. We ordered big mugs of coffee and the owners went around the table studiously writing down our orders. Since they were the chief/cook/ and bottle washers, we waited a long time for our servings even though we were the only customers, but the coffee was refilled, our lethargy seemed to subside and life on this side of our foggy island was good once again.

At some point – about a gallon into the coffee – one of us inquired where the restroom might be. We were solemnly informed there was none. This was dire news indeed for nearly all of us. We shrugged it off and waited patiently for our breakfasts. And waited for our breakfasts. When they came, they came one at a time, with five minute intervals in between. Fine fare, however, and we ate our plate’s worth, individually as the rest watched enviously while our bladders swelled like a Guernsey at a dairy where the farmer overslept.

We ate fast. We refused further refills. We crossed our legs and slapped ourselves with knives and forks. We began low moans. I couldn’t tell you if the food was good. Maybe. Probably. All I know is 8 guys stood in the parking lot as soon as we could pay our bill and let loose the floodgates right beside our Volkswagen bus. If we left a tip, that was it, but near as I can tell, they never took it. A month later the café was closed and another dream bit the dust. Well, hit the mud….

It’s easy to come back to the place of your youth and fall into a nostalgic reverie, long flashbacks to the good old days. You know, if they were actually good, not mostly memories of hard struggles and forlorn winter glooms. But looking back from these years future, though bittersweet, reveals a winding road you might not care to travel again, still, you wouldn’t want to have missed that detour.

Old age, so they say, brings wisdom. Youth, I say from experience, was a frenzied search for some kind of meaning, maybe any kind. The monks, and the zen masters, they removed themselves from the distractions of the world to contemplate, to synchronize with the OM, to hear the one hand clapping. When they had reached satori, when their breathing was one with the cosmos, when the koan of a tree falling in the forest without them there to hear was solved, they emerged back into the world, exemplars of purity of thought.

I wonder if they wished they had stayed. I wonder if what they learned in solitude and meditation was that they were one with what they had left, that the sound of the one hand was the same sound as the tree falling as the same sound as the OM as the same sound of their breathing which is the same exact sound of everyone’s breathing and that the journey we take is the journey they took without our distractions but the distractions are actually the one hand clapping after all.

Maybe they know the answer to that and I don’t. But … what I think, looking back from the road I started on, is the answer to that is that the road is never the same. We are never the same. The sound of the one hand clapping, don’t kid yourself, it sounds different the next time. Be glad to be IN the world, don’t try to BE your own hermetically sealed world. And that one hand clap, by the way, it won’t be the sound of applause, more like a sigh of relief.