The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Jihad Jack was parked in his usual spot at the beer-stained bar in the Pilot House, the South End Marina’s answer to marriage counseling. Any divorce attorney worth his margarita salt would drink nightly down there and write off his bar tab as a legitimate business expense. Jack was twirling his plastic trident in a concoction he’d gotten Brad, the usual bartender during Happy Hour, to ‘create’ for him, something with multiple boozes, eye of newt and a dash of habanero sauce. Jihad called it his Fox News Cocktail since he always watched it on the big screen directly in front of his customary stool.

“There it is,” he hollered so every manjack of us would halt our own conversation for his. “Measles!” he cried. “First E-bola and now it’s measles! You tellin me it’s a coincidence?”

As usual us assembled drinkers began to choose sides, sort of touch football without a football, just fire a pass out over the seating area and see who wouold risk catching the hot potato. “What’s your point, Jack?” Jesse asked, as if he didn’t guess. “You think the government brought this here?”

“Damn right they brought it here,” Jack replied, “just like AIDS.”

Pete set his beer aside and asked, grinning, “What would be their strategy, Jack?”

“They want to inoculate us, can’t you see?? They want to make you bring your kids in and shoot them full of vaccines and autism. Who knows what’s in those shots?”

Dave, two stools downriver, who’s a Physician’s Assistant at the South End Clinic, took his glasses off to study this guy Jack. “You kidding me?” he finally asked. “We got measles cured. We vaccinated kids and it worked. That’s all you have to do. Vaccinate the population. It’s like polio. There’s a cure!”

Jihad Jack smirked. “Yeah, and you want to fluoridate the water too, I bet! The government’s got no right — NONE! — to tell me what to do.” Dave shook his head. “It’s like living in the Dark Ages, that attitude,” he muttered and returned to his beer.

“At least they didn’t have to study propaganda as history, Doc.” Dave half finished his glass and headed for the door. The Pilot House, most nights, is pretty rudderless. Trouble is, it’s the only watering hole for a long ways.

Joe Crosby was watching Brenda, our waitress, as she took our drink order. He and his wife Jenny had recently moved down to the South End from Minnesota now that he’d retired. “Jenny was a stewardess for awhile,” Joe was saying, dipping a chip into his salsa. “You know, back when it was considered glamorous, not just a sky waitress. She loved it for the first few years.” He poked a finger in the ice of the margarita he’d finished, gave it a twirl, I guess to chill his digit.

“One flight she got a woman in first class, asked her what she’d like to eat and the woman never made eye contact, didn’t answer. Jen thought she hadn’t heard her so she asked again. Same thing, just stared straight ahead. Maybe she was deaf, ya know, but finally the woman’s husband said, matter of fact like he was used to this, ‘She doesn’t talk to the Help.’”

“Nice,” I said before thanking Brenda for the second round she’d brought us. Joe nodded appreciatively. “ Yeah. The glamour went out of stewing real quick, I mean to tell you. Jen never got over it. I said screw those people, but she looked in a mirror after that and saw someone else. Quit a few months later.” We both shook our heads. “And you know the funny part? Sad, actually. She treats waitresses bad herself. Stewardesses too. Like I guess they’re just the damn Help. Go figure.”

The Pilot House was pretty dead this Happy Hour, just Mudflap Mike and some pal I’d seen around and us, not all that happy a crowd. Joe swirled his finger in the new icecubes. “Yeah, Jen and I don’t go out much. I hope that woman in first class needs a medic someday. See if she’ll talk to him when he asks if her symptoms are heart attack or stroke….”

“Strange world,” I said, pretty sure we’d be leaving Brenda a tip big enough to put her kid through college.

Arizona, for me, was a lot like the South End is for most Camanoites. I really didn’t have much more than stereotypes to go on. Desert everywhere, snowbirds on a migratory flight path, illegal immigrants behind every saguaro cactus, Republicans on steroids and Viagra, eternal sunshine of the mind, epidemic melanoma.

We headed into the back country, not much in the way of work or water or food. My brother and a buddy wanted a roadtrip so we took the rental rig and beat it like a bad burro off the mainroads. Put about 1500 miles on it, covered it with mud, probably ruined the suspension and gave it back to Budget as payback for the time they charged me for a new tire after I’d blown one down in Arkansas that had 32,000 miles on it. After about four days of hard travel through the backroads only coyotes and the border patrol use, my impression of the state shifted appreciably. We didn’t see one single sombrero peeking out from the arroyos. Folks were universally friendly. The sun was only out about half the trip and the dry washes ran red with flash floods that forced us back to pave roads the last day. We even got turned back by a snowstorm in the mountains, barely getting to the nearest town before our car ran out of gas miles from anywhere.

Arizona is like a lot of the west, varied and beautiful. Mountains, desert, buttes and mesas, dry gulches and reservoirs, geologic wonders and archeologic sites — it had enough to make every day surprisingly different. We passed through Tombstone and the OK Corral, took pictures of the steel border wall at the Mexican border, climbed into cliff dwellings, 4 wheeled through the Saguaro National Monument, touched a toe in New Mexico, gambled with the locals in a desert watering hole, had dinner with the man who gave Obama is first job as an attorney, forded flooded gulches and wandered once abandoned mining towns that are tourist traps now. And we still only saw a small part of Arizona.

We went through more than a few towns on their way to ghost status and we crossed hundreds of miles where the only sign of life was cacti and sagebrush. The west is still wild here even though Wyatt and Doc are long dead. It’s a Big Land, too big for this short trip, but I’ll be going back, not to escape the winter here on the South End, but to see a different South End, the one at the end of America.

We 3 gringos took a little detour off the Arizona main roads as we headed down to the Mexican border. You got a rental car, you pretty much don’t worry about dry gulches and backwash arroyos. Those horrible scraping sounds of rock on metal eventually seem less alarming. We wanted to see the Saguaro National Monument up close, a vast tract of broken rock, cacti and the occasional black helicopter searching low along the hilltops, checking us out, maybe the only vehicle back in the scrub for the next two hours as we tested the endurance of our Kia’s shock and strut system.

The saguaros grow 200 years old, stand 20 feet tall and look comically human with their Taco Time arms waving at each other. This is where they have come for their convention, a million strong, until the road reaches the security gates of Asarco Copper Mine where ten miles of their tailings create a barren mesa devoid of saguaro or any other living thing. You want copper line to move electricity to power your TV, this is the price you pay.

By high noon we’ve reached blacktop and one of many towns drying up and turning to memory in the desert sun. Some broken down adobe block cantina offered $4 pitchers of cervezas so we beat the dust off our Stetsons and pushed open the doors, strangers in town. Five minutes later we’re provisioned and parked in the ramada off the back, just us, two black dudes, a Mexican and his wife, engaged in a homemade wheel of fortune, a vertical roulette wheel you spin and bet high or low, pretty much a primitive casino.

You may ask, is this what we came to the southwestern end of the USA for? And I will tell you, it beats a swimming pool in Vegas or a fenced resort with HBO and Wi-fi. If you go in search of the real America — okay, the America rapidly disappearing into the future — it’s not to be found along the damn freeway. But it’s out there if you want to take a few chances, risk a little inconvenience, dare the Fates and roll the dice. Or the wheel…. We didn’t lose anything serious to the hombres at the bar, all good folks, but we won back some of what 7-11 and Dish TV and Disneyland stole from all of us gringos without so much as a squawk or a whimper. We bought the bar a round on our way out and hightailed it toward Mexico. Vaya con Dios, amigos.

Well, buckaroos, it’s that time once again when the call of the cacti beckons this old claimjumper and the urge to hightail it down to the land of sidewinders and scorpions, gila monsters and Republicans becomes too strong to ignore. So I’m packing my kit and heading down to Arizona for a little road tripping on the red dirt backroad where only the border patrols know my name.

I don’t know Arizona much and mercifully the reverse is true. Back in the ‘70’s I plowed through and I wasn’t much impressed. But let’s be honest, we both must’ve mellowed by now and I’m willing to give the state another chance. I bet that rude waitress at the Flagstaff truck stop is a great grandma by now, maybe votes Democratic, collects her Social Security and dreams of jackalopes on the high prairie, not illegal immigrants. She doesn’t remember the longhaired hippie kid forty years ago. Although … I remember her.

Arizona’s like the South for me. Should’ve let it go back in the 1860’s and Arizona, we could still cut Mexico a deal, throw in the Alamo too for a few pesos, good riddance. I’m going down to reconnoiteur, not do a market analysis. I’m going to try my best to avoid Phoenix and the Snowbird Trailer Parks. Probably won’t go near the border, but … Tucson looks interesting and a buddy’s moving down by Bisbee.

Mostly I want to see the state top to bottom, left to right, up and down, in and out. Gives you a chance to take a breather . You deserve it — I know, I’m a blabbermouth and a chatterbox. Enjoy the peace and quiet, walk the beach, go down to the park. I’ll be back, tanned and rested. Or … detained and arrested. Either way, I’ll report back.

The Katmandu Kite shop opened up down at the long-shuttered Suds and Duds Laundromat. Katmandu Kite isn’t a kite store, its name means higher than a Katmandu Kite and they sell cannabis products. The Barker Brothers, Tom and Harold, both in their 50’s, figured it was the investment opportunity of a lifetime, deducing, I guess, us South enders had been waiting decades for legal marijuana to hit a retail store near us. What we’d been waiting for was another laundromat, maybe re-open the Tyee Store and why not, while we’re making a Wish List, bring in a decent little tavern and spare us the DUI’s getting home at night from our favorite watering holes.

On opening day a few of us curious lookee-loos rolled in to see what was behind the gated windows and the concrete block walls. Tom and Harold had painted the blocks, not green like you might expect, but an inconspicuous grey. Legal or not, they wanted a Stealth presence, apparently. ‘C’mon in guys,’ Harold piped up when we cracked open the steel door with KATMANDU KITE nicely lettered in mauve blockprint. In one of the barred windows a neon OPEN stood out like Christmas lights in June. Display cabinets had hand blown glass pipes and bongs, baggies of exotic strains, candies and drops, edibles and smokables.

Two Toke was in 7th heaven. At least until he saw the prices. ‘My god, Harold,’ he whined, ‘I’d have to get a job to buy from you boys.’ Tom said, ‘Well, it’s gonna shake down soon. Still got some bugs. Not enough product and the medical dispensaries undersell us but that’ll get sorted out. I’d give you some samples, ya know, but the State frowns on that.’

We all fumbled around awhile, a little embarrassed we weren’t filling up shopping bags with ‘product’, but finally Dotty Bingham and a gaggle of her friends hauled in, giving us an escape. I wish Tom and Harold all the luck in the world, I really do, but hellfire, they’re selling us at twice the price what we’ve been growing since the ‘60’s. Maybe they’ve been sampling their own merchandise….

My buddy Sam lives in a dilapidated house down by the newly opened Katmandu Kite Shop and no, it isn’t a kite store, it’s a recreational marijuana outlet. Sam’s place sits back in the nettled interior, down a dead end dirt road near the old trout pond that once held trout but got dredged back in the early ‘80’s on one debauched weekend that ended my trout fishing on the South End.

Sam’s been living the bachelor life since his wife left him. She’d grown weary of the power being turned off for non-payment and the back taxes on the place reaching critical mass and since neither of them were willing to work, they played ‘chicken’ with each other, hoping the other would swerve first back into the job market. No way was Sam going back to wage slavery so ultimately Bobbie packed her things, left a short and not-so-sweet note and headed back down to an old boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon who at least worked part-time driving schoolbus.

Sam says he never saw it coming. I believe him, not because all the signs weren’t pointing inexorably toward a dissolution, but because Sam doesn’t have peripheral vision. He would have to hit a sign head-on. In fact, he didn’t find Bobbie’s kiss-off letter until four days after she left. Which isn’t as myopic as you might think. Sam is a Hoarder. His house is like one of those ant farms I had as a kid, nothing but tunnels, stuff stacked along the paths head high, trails leading to the bed or the bathroom or through the kitchen to the stove on one side, the fridge down a different path.

Bobbie kept the piles slightly more passable, but now that she’s gone, the tunnels have narrowed. Nothing much gets thrown away, but stuff apparently is coming in constantly, at least by my observation after not seeing Sam for a few months. The folks who dreamed up ‘planned obsolescence’ never counted on the Sams who keep the broken crap and live in their own midden. Another year, I figure he’ll run out of room completely. I don’t know how many Sams are out there, but I have to wonder if this isn’t why Sears, after a century, is going broke.

An old friend of ours recently wrote to say he was trying to test drive some Buddhism. Be Here Now. Be in the moment. Pay a little attention. What my old man called Wake the Hell Up! …when we were what he referred to as ‘glommy’. My response, typically smartass, was something to the effect, what ELSE you gonna do? We’re paying attention to SOMETHING, even if it’s dopey.

You want to update your Facebook, well, I guess that’s your world. You want to watch Fox News all day, I figure you like being pissed off incessantly. Your choice. What I think is the world, your universe, is pretty much those thoughts in your head all the livelong day. Change your thinking and you change the world. Course, you could still get hit by a meteor coming right out of left field and WHAP! Brand new day. Or not.

We mostly live in a virtual world now. The kids already put down earnest money on the mortgage. Us old farts are working on how to forward e-mail jokes, but the computer’s tractor-beam is reeling us in, slow at first, but even if we never notice, accelerating all the time.

On the South End we still prefer the Old World, the one where we let nature and weather have a say in what turns and twists our day takes, the one where we still throw ourselves into a building project or a repair job or an art project or planting a garden, what I think of as the creative process, but is really just an attempt to do more than just Go with the Flow, maybe actually try to bend the river. God isn’t the only dude who believes in creation, not down here, no disrespect. You ask me — and, as usual, I know you didn’t — a good religion should ask for more than just paying attention.

A woman sitting next table to me at the newly remodeled Island Café said, “You’re lucky my husband isn’t here.” Since I hadn’t made a pass at her, I asked why was that and she said he used to wear a battered, beat up, half composted hat a lot like mine. “He called it his ‘Go to Hell ‘ hat.”

It’s amazing how this old fedora of mine elicits continuous comments and sometimes physical interventions. I was accosted by the Safeway security guard up north awhile back who demanded I stop. “Stop? Who, me?” I asked and she insisted I produce a receipt of purchase after accusing me of stealing the two half racks of beer I was loading into my truck. Not that my hat made me a Prime Suspect. Safeway, let it be known far and wide, is a Profiler. And apparently my sombrero fit their profile.

Sitting in an airport lounge a few years ago, an attractive stewardess sat herself down next to me to ask which I was, a writer or a musician? She at least didn’t ask if I was an artist or a bum. Or an old geezer with a Go to Hell hat or a shoplifter.

I’ve worn hats since I was a kid in high school, mostly the ones my grandpa gave me when he’d updated to a new one. Me, I don’t update. And anyway, I don’t have an impressionable grandkid to lead down some non-conformist primrose path. A hat makes a good umbrella. It keeps my head warm and it hides my uncut hair, saving me hundreds of dollars in bad haircuts. I don’t go anywhere without one, sort of like a credit card only the truth is, it makes getting credit harder, more profiling, I guess. So I wear mine until it falls pretty much to pieces, then, worst case, I’ll put em on my garden scarecrow to give the crows and the deer a good laugh.