The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Didn’t I just write about parrots in my produce section? I thought I’d pretty much seen it all. Course, you think that, you’re either in hospice or you haven’t watched reality TV lately. Down here on the South End, if we know one thing, it’s this: something weirder is coming down the blacktop, probably sooner than later.

This weekend I was loitering by the dairy case looking for some growth-hormoned-up milk products when a guy passes by me and on his back, plastered down like a silk-screened tattoo was this scaly lizard , claws hanging on to his t-shirt at the neck. At first I thought it was a rubber toy. You know, give grandma a good laugh when she recovers from her heart attack. But it was real. Some gila monster or maybe a small komodo dragon, hard for me to say not being a herpetologist.

I don’t know — maybe you got a python you like to go to the mall with. Or a crocodile tame enough to bring to the daycare when you pick up your kid. Maybe I’m just an old fogey out of touch with current trends in animal husbandry, a curmudgeon who thinks a vicious pitbull should suffice for those looking for attention-getting pets.

It’s a free country I’m told, especially on the live and let live South End. In fact, Jungle Jim informed me of that when I asked him why he needed a lizard to go shopping with. At the checkout line I paid my bill and said to Jenny as she handed me change, “There’s a guy coming through with a gila monster on his back pretty soon.” She laughed. I said, “No, seriously, he’s got a two foot lizard on his back.” From her reaction, I’d guess they don’t see a whole lot of reptiles in the store. Jenny asked what did I think.

“Tell him you’ve got to weigh it.”

“Weigh it?” Jenny asked.

“Sure, tell him you charge $14.99 a pound for whole lizard. More if he wants it cleaned and deboned.”

Somehow I don’t think Jenny was going to. The customer, I guess, is always right.

You live upriver half your life, you’d feel a little like the world was constantly moving past you, no slowing it down. I think folks who live down further where the river empties into the Sound must watch the tides go out then come back in. Over and over. Do they see the world as a constant ebb and tide? A flowing out, then a return? Is the world to them like breathing, an inhalation and exhalation?

I was up Otter Creek last week checking on Indian Bob. He’s part Stillaguamish, part Norwegian and mostly, just Ornery. Lives alone, he says, because he likes it that way, but I know he couldn’t live two days with someone before it drove him to homicide. He has set routines and he likes to keep em set. He tolerates my visits — interruptions to him — for awhile, but not long. He’ll announce he’s got to get back to his chores even though both of us know he’s going to watch daytime TV with his two dogs. It’s my signal that it’s time to quit our socializing.

Bob has a rundown cabin set beside a backwash that dries up most summers when Otter Creek becomes little more than a trickle. I often think his world is more attuned to seasonal shifts. Time flows, just way slower.

I don’t so much think of Bob as native American as I do Zen Priest. It’s like he’s nearly stopped the River. I would go bat guano crazy with boredom living his life, but like I said, I’m a river person and the universe is in constant motion for me, maybe WHY I live upriver. Or maybe I became this way because I live here. Do you choose your environment or does your environment make you?

Indian Bob told me once his grandmother, a Stillaguamish elder back when Elder meant something, told him that there are no mysteries for those who ask no questions. All I can figure is she must’ve lived on a lake. Me, I got lots of questions, just not enough answers.

I guess since all my cronies are throwing in the towel and taking retirement on schedule, it’s only reasonable I’ve been getting calls from the Mabana Financial Services asking if I’d like to come on down to their lavish offices overlooking the Port of Mabana and discuss fiscal strategies for my upcoming Golden Years. Ho ho, would I ever? Course, like I tell Ben, the head honcho down at MFS, it’s a little like saddling up the horse that ske-daddled when I left the barn door open back in my earning years. Earning years. Old Ben loves expressions like that.

I said I’d talk to him, but only over beers down at the newly opened Bar 282, named after our zip code’s last three numbers, probably some numerology factoid that becomes apparent deep in the cups. Better, I suppose, than 666, what the Little Church in the Ravine refers to it as. So if Benjamin and I are going to discuss finances, what better place? At least that’s what I told him when he asked, why there?

We got through the first two schooners okay, managed to navigate around my Social Security numbers which, admittedly, were poor, a reflection of my life as a fiddling grasshopper while my neighbors labored as productive ants. My mistake, at least from the vantage point of an old grasshopper, but I wouldn’t change anything even if I had a time machine. Ben commiserated the way a funeral director would offer comfort to the bereaved, not totally heart-felt, but what his job calls for. What’s he gonna say, you deserve poverty, Skeeter? Instead he mentioned annuities, aggressive equities, municipal bonds and a dozen other financial instruments. Instruments. I kid you not, that’s what he called them. Like something in a fiscal orchestra and he, I guess, was the maestro.

By the 3rd beer we were both convinced it was hopeless. I wasn’t going to catch up to Warren Buffet, not in the remaining years, not if I worked until I was 300 years old. “Ben,” I said, “I appreciate you trying to help. But you can’t prime a pump if you don’t have water.” Ben shook his head wearily. “You change your mind, Skeeter, drop by and we’ll strategize some more.” I haven’t been in since, but I might go for another beer with him. Maybe some of that high rolling fiscal firepower will rub off. That, or I could trade a few of my banjos for a couple of his instruments.

The Monk was uptown last week making his once a week shopping trip. You live down on the South End, you schedule your trips to town as infrequently as possible unless you’re driving a Prius or you’re one of the new folks who couldn’t tell you WHAT the price of gas is and couldn’t care less. The Monk drives a beat-up Ford 150 pickup that gets about ten miles to a gallon of gasoline, about two gallons to town. It runs, barely, and if he could afford something better on his Social Security, he’d gladly own a hybrid, buy better food and probably become a howling environmentalist.

He was squeezing melons over in the produce section. No, not organic melons. Did I mention he was scraping by on Social Security? The Monk buys what’s on sale. The Monk eats on the cheap. The Monk — I’ll give him this — cooks his meals from scratch. The only Hamburger Helper he’d dream of is himself. He’s not much for boxed anything, he doesn’t care how long the preservatives will keep it edible. He makes his own spaghetti sauce, his own salad dressings, eats mostly fresh. He’s not exactly the poster child for Good Health and Living, but he tries. “You are what you eat,” he tells me. The Monk is about half broccoli.

He was squeezing that melon, I think I mentioned, when this guy comes by him with a parrot on his shoulder. The Monk stops squeezing his melon and holds a hand up to Long John Silver and his bird. The Monk, maybe I haven’t mentioned, is not exactly Live and Let Live. He’s ornery and he’s opinionated and he doesn’t suffer fools with parrots lightly. “What the hell, Bluebeard?” he asks the man with the bird. “That some kind of Service Animal?”

“It’s a parrot,” Sinbad replies, smiling, probably pleased his antics haven’t gone unnoticed. “I KNOW what it is,” the Monk says. “It’s a damn disease carrying bird in my food store. You need it to locate the crackers for Polly here?” Well, one thing led to another, the manager finally came down to the produce section and the Monk demanded this pirate wannabee goofball get that flu-bearing bird away from his chard and his tomatoes. The manager, noticing Cap’n Hook didn’t even have a basket, much less a cart, sided with the Monk and asked if he could leave his bird back in his car. Or his schooner.

“You believe that shit?” the Monk asked me when I dropped by when he was unloading his groceries from the truck. “These are tough times, Monk. Them that died be the lucky ones. The rest of us, well, who’s to judge?”

He gave me a dark look from over the melons. “The Monk, that’s who.”

Jihad Jimmy, last time any of us South End yahoos talked to him, was holding court at the Thursday AA meeting a month ago. Jimmy had kicked his drinking problem but now he had a religion problem, maybe not to him, but for the rest of the assembled abstainers, for sure. Jimmy had grabbed the first lifesaver that floated by when he was hopelessly adrift in a gin-filled sea and I suppose it could’ve been music or woodworking or yoga …. But no, Jimmy found four nicely dressed folks at his door one inebriated afternoon who asked if he’d care to discuss Scripture.

Good timing! Brenda, his long suffering wife and breadwinner the past two years, had left him the day before and in his drunken despair, Jimmy had sense enough to reach out for proferred help. Always nice to find a Sign or an Omen when you’re free-falling over the cliff of your imagination and believe me, Jimmy was expecting the Bottom.

Addiction, whether it’s alcohol or Heaven, makes True Believers of us. I’m not saying they’re equal, especially when you see Jimmy clean himself up, dust himself off and return to the world of the living. Course now J.J. is talking Rapture. Revelations. End Times. Sign of the Beast. He finds Signs everywhere now. He’s a prophet, although he never claims it. He just Sees what’s obvious, just wants to share it with us Lost Souls.

Just for once, I’d like a religion that loves THIS world. That doesn’t think the Next World is gonna be better. Maybe Jimmy’s going door-to-door with 3 other Jimmy’s, knocking on broken hearts, broken dreams, broken hopes. Maybe they’re saving lives, hell if I know….

Brenda’s doing some clerical work for Windy Rear Realty. It’s okay, she says. Twenty hours a week, not too stressful. She told me he’d stopped by her house a week ago. Wanted her to leave with him and start over. He’d changed, he said. He was sorry. He asked forgiveness before it was too late. “Too late?” she asked. “Too late for what?” “The Rapture,” he told her. “You’ll be left behind.”

Left behind?? “Jimmy,” she says to him, “that sounds exactly like heaven to me.”

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

I was chatting it up with some of my UpCreek neighbors the other day and we got to arguing whether living Up River was the same as Up Scale. Bayou Bill was making the point that any riverfront property was upscale, no two ways about it. Course, Bayou was undercutting his argument by standing on what was left of his dryrotted, slick-as-snot porch in front of his 1973 single wide with the lower one third vinyl green with mold or algae or moss or all three. “Up scale,” Little Jimmy was saying, making his point with his second Milwaukee’s Best can, “might not be a description the realtors would come up with on the sales brochure.”

Bayou crumpled his own can and snorted, “What are you talking about, Jimbo? I wouldn’t sell this riverfront paradise for any price under a million.” The boyz talk like this, sort of like their Lottery Dreams, something to fill the conversation between ball games and Wheel of Fortune. Harmless enough, I guess, but not exactly uplifting or educational. Maybe we all live in our fantasy worlds … and that’s okay with me so long as they’re upbeat even if it isn’t a synonym for upscale. Us river folk — at least us up river folk — can use all the optimism we can muster. It’s dark back here, it rains an extra inch every inland mile and there’s no jobs left anywhere near for us moss-backed old timers. If the Oso slide had closed us off from downriver civilization during winter, our suicide and alcohol rates would have been alarming. As it was, illegal fishing and some minor deer poaching kept us occupied while the State was preoccupied with re-opening the highway.

Course now that the road to Arlington and Gomorrah is passable once more, Bayou figures his real estate values are soaring to stratospheric heights. Life is good, the river isn’t flooding and the boyz are getting richer drinking cheap canned beer. It’s a fool’s paradise all right. That, or a drunkard’s dream.

More Tales from UpCreek

My old shack looks east into the mountains and across the river where two or three fishing cabins still sit perched on the bank. Last year’s spring melt after a week of unseasonably warm weather and heavy rains turned the river into a rage that ate at the banks across from me and finally, one afternoon, sloughed off one of the cabins, Harry Watson’s, a Seattle attorney who’d come here since before me, and sent it into a log strewn Waring blender where I watched it go over sideways, hesitate a minute or so, then collapse in on itself. The boarded up windows turned beseechingly toward the sky, the front door popped off its hinges, the roof tore away in two parts and Harry’s cabin set sail briefly before sinking from view. It was a sobering sight to behold.

Harry came up to inspect for damage a few days later and I drove around, took the bridge and found him staring at the gash where his house had sat for 50 years. ‘I’m real sorry about this, Hank,” I said when I came up beside him standing over what must have seemed like an open grave. “Lot of memories in that old cabin,” he muttered mournfully.

I tried to console him, of course, said hey, you’ll rebuild another one, a better one, but we both knew the county would never grant a building permit that close to the river now. 1960, sure, go ahead, what’s it to us? Your loss if the river eats it and who cares where the outhouse drains? It all washes out to sea so let the Down River folks in the next county worry about septic overflow. We’re UpCreek people and maybe that’s what gives us an Uppity Attitude. But times change, not as fast as the river, but they change.

Trouble is, Harry’s no spring chicken. My guess is Harry’s fishing days are pretty much over. I just hope it’s only the fishing that’s ended for him. I sure don’t need to see another obit photo with a guy and his damn big fish he caught 30 years ago.

The South End Slammers are the local Roller Derby queens, mean mamas on ball bearings, elbows sharp as their tongues. Jammin Janice, by day a demure office secretary down at Windy Rear Realty’s south office, captain’s the squad with an attitude like an unfed piranha. The Slammers are a no-holds barred bunch of bruisers with a volcano of pent-up aggression they unleash on their opponents as they hurtle around the maple track that’s canted for increased speeds on an oval circuit. Cheryl is a teller at the local branch of Coastal Bank 5 days a week, but weekends she’s the spearhead for the Slammmer’s feared Flying Wedge, a vicious phalanx of boiling estrogen mowing down any and all opposing skaters too slow or witless to get out of the way. Elbows hammer chests, bodies slam bodies, skates are used the way a mallet is used to tenderize meat.

Paula is the point getter, small and wiry and able to stoop low and slide under or around the opponents’ blockade. She’s their best Jammer, lapping with graceful strides on her custom made skates like a dancer on bearings. Paula waitresses at the Diner part-time and if some of the patrons mistake her quiet demeanor for mousey modesty, she has a tongue fast as her trademark passing maneuvers. You want a refill on that coffee, mister, you learn to say please. And you better try a thank you when you get it.

The Slammers are ranked #1 this season. For good reason. I ran into Betty, the team’s burly Blocker, the other night. Not many Jammers get by Betty. And if they do, they’ll pay for it next time around. She was at the Pilot House Lounge ordering her 3rd whiskey on the rocks. “Nice shiner,” I remarked, sliding onto the adjoining stool. Her eye was swollen half shut and she had a bandage over her right eyebrow. The whiskey was probably half painkiller. Betty laughed. “You should’ve seen the other skater when I got back up and caught her on the next rotation. She’ll think twice next time she elbows this mother.”

“Betty,” I said, “that’s true of ALL of us.” The Slammers, like I might’ve mentioned, aren’t to be trifled with on the rink or off the rink.