The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve had my share of bad Thanksgivings. Family arguments, odd combination of guests, friends who wouldn’t eat the dinner for fear of salmonella poisoning (I guess they didn’t believe the shack kitchen met Washington State Health Dep’t. standards). I don’t ask for much, just plenty of food and libation with folks who are friendly. We’ve had storms and power outages. Didn’t matter. We have a wood cookstove and plenty of oil lamps.

The one Thanksgiving I remember most we had maybe eight of us at the table, all neighbors and friends. Dinner was fine, the conversation was pleasant, the adult beverages were working their warm glow. All, it seemed, was well in this little corner of the world. And … there was still dessert on its way.

Somewhere in that toasty conviviality one of our guests, the eminent Dr. S____ who preferred the high class moniker to her given name, decided it was time to go around the room, each of us, and offer us assembled epicureans our best scenario of leaving this Mortal Coil. Maybe she was working up a post-doctoral thesis, I don’t know, but she insisted everyone make public our favorite manner of death. She, in fact, would begin.

Maybe a good host would’ve let this proceed. Which, in fact, I did, not quite believing this was actually going to be our dinner entertainment. The Doc wanted to die on her blue water boat cruising the world, a watery demise. She had quite a romantic narrative to fill in the plot. I could feel my cranberries curdling somewhere buried beneath turkey and dressing.

“Who wants to go next?” she asked and a neighbor friend began hesitantly, mistakenly thinking the House Rules somehow made confessionals mandatory. “Wait!” I demanded. “It’s Thanksgiving, for crying out loud, not the Day of the Dead. Maybe we could tell what we’re thankful for and forget this morbid death fantasy stuff. No good. It’s no damn good!”

A few years later the Doctor nearly did die on her sailboat near the Fuji Islands. Demasted the boat in a storm, motor conked out, the radio gave up the ghost and now they were adrift in the South Pacific. A dream come true for the skipper maybe, but for the crew, a couple of friends from the South End, not so much. I wonder today before I go in for Thanksgiving dinner what poor yahoos are sharing turkey with her this year. Me, I’m thankful, Big Time, I’m not sharing it with her.

I’m sitting at the airport waiting for my jet to load and on the TV news channel they’re showing photos of a satellite’s attempt to attach to a passing comet. My fellow passengers seem uninterested, no doubt weary of science in this Age of Cynicism. If Rush Limbaugh carried the story as another Obama over-reach, we might have some reaction here in the waiting room, but lassoing an iceball? I don’t thinks so.

We live in a world of miracles. Orbiting space stations, cures for diseases, self-driving cars, cellphones, nanotechnology , robots, instant answers on Google. We live in Science Fiction. Sticking a harpoon into Comet Moby Dick isn’t going to make anyone cut short a text message to get updates, that’s for sure.

I remember as a kid in gradeschool assembling to watch on black and white TV John Glenn’s ride into outer space. Walter Cronkite provided all the gravitas needed and us 3rd graders waited in wide-eyed awe to see if our astronaut made it back to Earth in one piece. Walter made it pretty clear what would happen if that little capsule caught fire or went out of control or hit re-entry at the wrong angle. God only knows what would’ve happened to us little witnesses if John Glenn had burned to a crisp on live TV with no grief counselors to comfort us, just a generation of scarred Baby Boomers who vowed never to fly in a plane or any other contraption that left Terra Firma.

As it was, John probably inspired half of us to be scientists, engineers or even astronauts. And Walter engendered a trust in the media that lasted almost into the 21st century before we stopped believing much of anything we read or hear in the press. Before we started questioning science itself even though we live in a world hurtling away from the past’s gravitational pull the way Glenn left the earth’s. He came back okay. We never will. And that comet …? Well, I expect I’ll have to wait til I touch ground back home somewhere in the Future. The world here might be growing smaller, but the universe is still expanding.

Back when I first came to Seattle and Gomorrah, I had a buddy who lived in a dive apartment that was going to be sold and remodeled. They were tossing the old 1940’s era refrigerators the junkies and alcoholics had used for decades and my pal asked me if I wanted to go in with him on the capitalist venture of hauling, cleaning and selling these vintage frigidaires for fun and profit. Not being employed and in full possession of a half ton Chevy pickup, I said sure. And by that afternoon we owned 60 reefers of various stages of mold and decomposition.

I had access to a garage none of my six roommates used, so we stored them there after a couple days lugging them down 2 or 3 flights of stairs near downtown, then hauling them up to the university district where I rented a room in a house full of students. Each one got cleaned, disinfected and plugged in to see if it still worked. They all did. Tough units, those old Kelvinators and Frigidaires. Not particularly efficient, but they’d run until the next century if you asked them to. All we asked them to was run for the 30 days we offered as a ‘quality assurance guarantee’. If we’d been savvier biznessmen, we would’ve offered a 2 year service plan like Sears. Course, Sears is in about the same shape today as some of those refrigerators were back then.

Our ‘advertising’ campaign was simple in those pre-Craigslist times — we put flyers on telephone poles.
$30 30 DAY GUARANTEE FREE DELIVERY CALL THIS #
The Freon filled appliances sold like hotcakes, mostly to little bistros and coffee shops and student renters and our friends. I kept one for my room after my roommates started stealing my beer and food. Then I locked my room. I guess they were young communists, share and share alike, mine is theirs. They weren’t bad people, but I learned why communism doesn’t work unless the others do and you don’t.

By the end of a month we’d sold every last unit. We made about $800 dollars each, more than I made the entire previous year, maybe two. My buddy said maybe we should’ve grabbed the stoves too, but by then it was too late and our experimental entrepreneurism came to an abrupt end when demand outstripped product. Probably lucky for both us Appliance Kings.

I bought my first house in a government auction. I’d moved to Seattle and Gomorrah to reconnect with my wife at the time after a summer’s hiatus from each other who’d connected instead with a new boyfriend who she lived with while I lived with a houseful of University students who mostly majored in drugs. My wife and her beau were intent on making a fortune in real estate so they’d gotten licenses and were working as realtors. Don’t ask me why, but my missuz — let’s call her Alice — decided we should buy a house together, live in it long enough to defer capital gains, then sell it for the profit and repeat the above until we were rich.

My roommates were people who stole my food and beer, never washed a dish until there were none clean and then only the dish they would use. I was ready for a new place to live and a house of my own looked more than okay. Not having much money and virtually no sources of income, the pickings were poor. But Alice found a HUD house for sale down in the ghetto, a large two story house with no distinctive features other than a hardwood floor that had been ‘rehabbed’ top to bottom and was offered up for bid at a minimum price of $18,000. We bid $24,000 and won, according to our realtor who specialized in HUD houses, by a few bucks and change. A mortgage company his real estate office must’ve owned gave us a loan and we became homeowners for the first time.

Alice stayed with her boyfriend/business partner and I rented rooms to friends and weirdoes and psychopaths at $50 a month. It paid the mortgage of $180 a month and it kept life interesting at a time of my life that welcomed demented and derelict diversion beyond the dreary bottom feeding neighbors that surrounded me in my introduction to true urban depravity. Life, I thought, certainly can take some odd turns. I looked at myself as a character in the modern novel I planned to pen, no doubt a tragedy, but hey, an interesting one. The house, I gradually realized, tied me to my wrecked marriage, to a city on the skids, to my own broken dreams, to a real estate fantasy I wanted no part of and on and on through chapter after chapter.

I could see a bad ending coming. I could even see myself taking the ride down, accepting my Fate as some kind of Lord Jim contrition, blaming myself, becoming bitter and no wiser. It might be a good book, but hell, it didn’t look like a good life. Maybe the squalor and the crime and the low life neighbors were the rewards for a life of laziness and dreamy inattention. Maybe I was in some subliminal atonement for my own failings. Maybe this was Just Desserts.

But I’m not much for martyrdom. I’m not much for contrition either, it turns out. I guess, thinking myself a writer by inclination, I decided to write a happier ending even if it made for a second rate novel. I’ve heard it said that happiness is overvalued. But I’ve never heard it from those folks who are happy. And you won’t hear it from me. Life isn’t a novel and us would-be writers would be wise to remember that.

The End of the Road Tavern isn’t actually where the road ends, but it’s close. A few Forest Service roads branch into the mountains and there are a few cabins up Rainbow Creek, but otherwise most traffic stops at the tavern. Donny Butler owns it, bartends, cooks and breaks up fights. He closes Monday and on Christmas, but otherwise Donny is always open. No one around UpCreek recalls him taking a vacation and if he’s ever been sick, it was on a Monday. His cabin is in the woods behind the bar, but none of us regulars have ever set foot inside. Most of us can’t imagine him in such a domestic setting and the others think the house is just his storage area.

You want to know what’s happening around UpCreek, the End of the Road is where you can find out. Who’s poaching what and where, who’s catching cutthroat and what size, whose wife is cheating with who and whose kid is going to prison for what crime. Two years ago Donny got a license to sell hard stuff, figuring to double his profits like a lot of the taverns downriver. Which he did. A lot of profit in a bottle of Jack, not so much in a keg of beer. Donny noticed even the women started coming around, ordered cocktails he had to learn how to make and these were very profitable, plus the ladies brought a fresh clientele and a new atmosphere. He put some checkered tablecloths on the stained tables, tidied up a bit and added salads to the menu. The End of the Road seemed like the Start of Something.

This hunting season a couple of Seattleites celebrated two buck kills a little too exuberantly. “Double Shots!!” they shouted deep into the night until Trapper Jim, also deep into his cups, took umbrage at the out-of-towners’ good luck and his own lack thereof. Later Donny admitted at the trial, he should have quit serving all three. Hindsight doesn’t need a high magnification scope. Jim was untying a 6 point from the hunters’ Range Rover roof when they stumbled into the parking lot. Words were exchanged, push came to shove and Jim pulled his 30-30 Winchester off his Chevy pickup’s rack and shot one of the men.

Who lived … fortunately. But that’s why the End of the Road no longer serves booze and why women drink downstream. Or quietly at home.

We got an election tomorrow, oh boy! Money’s been rolling in like gasoline on a tire fire. The airwaves are full of stench and smoke. The lies and insults and accusations and blame have left a charred landscape. Nice to know in this democracy we all mostly hate government. Nothing like burnout and cynicism to give the young folks hope for the future.

Fox News Channel runs 24/7 at the End of the Road Tavern where we’ll watch the returns come in. Donny, the owner, says he doesn’t believe half of what the Talking Heads pontificate about, he just likes their animosity to the present ‘regime’. Donny fought in Viet Nam, left a lot of buddies in paddies at Khe Sahn, lost a leg below the knee to a mortar round and came home to a country he claims spit on him. A lot of the regulars at the End of the Road served in Nam. They’re bitter all over again every time they see the vets honored now. They think they could’ve won the war if the country had supported them, just the way we won Iraq. Well, the first Iraq. Now they’re not so sure after the 2nd one and Afghanistan.

Up here in UpCreek, patriotism runs strong, which is odd considering how far from the Reach of Rome we are. Course we also got folks like myself who burrowed in up the river to get as far away from flagwaving as we could get. It’s taken a lot of years to gain even a meager acceptance from these people, but I guess we grudgingly respect the other for toughing it out up here, a place few stick with, a place others vacation at, or trout fish or hunt for deer and maybe bear. Those of us who stay are mostly loners and losers, refugees from America, wanderers who tired of wandering. We’re throwbacks to the early settlers, hard living, hard livered, hard headed honchos searching for a homestead thought lost long ago but still here up river at the foot of the Cascades’ northern wilderness for those willing to endure the hardships.

Most of this crew here tonight at the End of the Road didn’t cast a vote. They don’t like any of the candidates, wouldn’t trust em if they handed out free ammo at Dirty Larry’s Gun Shop. But they love the USA, the red white and blue, and on Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, more than a few have cried in their beers and beards. All I can figure is, it’s a free country, room for all of us and there’s no law yet that says you have to vote or that you’re required to love it.

I spoze the ghosts of the past are always waiting in the closet of the present for an opportunity to jump out of the dark and say Boo! in a voice that’s creepily familiar. Post Traumatic Spook Syndrome: finding a former self you thought you’d buried come knocking one midnight dreary. Sometimes, though, you’ll get a different doorbell.

My old buddy Ralph got one awhile back. Knock knock … who’s there? And lo and behold, there was a woman he’d ‘known” back when we all lived in the ‘hood. She was underage then, what the law would define as statutory rape then and now, but here she was 10 years later with a curly headed boy in tow, claiming, she said, the child was his. Whoo hoo…. The sins of the past do come stalking occasionally, the stuff of tragic novels.

Ralph, of course, was shell shocked. “Mine?” he asked. “Yours,” Desiree informed him matter of factly. Of course Ralph realized the implications after a quick deduction of the kid’s age versus the time since he and Desiree had made whoopee in her mom’s ghetto apartment while she was away working to support her dysfunctional family now that her boyfriend had disappeared after providing her with 3 children. And here was one of them, in the same sorry boat, looking for dear old dad.

Ralph, hard as it is to believe, was prepared to do the Right Thing by her. Child support, PTA, college tuition, wedding expenses, etc. At least that’s what he told me one confessional — and I believe he would have. But Ralph is nobody’s fool either, unless you count Ralph, so he asked Desiree if she’d mind having a paternity test. After all, the kid didn’t really look much like Ralph at age 10. Desiree balked, called him a few names, then ultimately admitted to friendly extortion. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and Ralph figured okay, he’d had his fun, now it was hers. He gave her a little money, guilt money I guess. And he fears she’ll be back for more. I think maybe she never left….

Jerry Hatrick had converted the back booth of the Marina’s Pilot House Lounge into a personal office, judging by the papers strewn around his empty pint glasses. “Whazzup?” Flathead Fred asked amiably as three of us yahoos slid in with our own beers at risk of foaming onto Jerry’s table top filing cabinet. “You doing your taxes early this year??”

Jerry pushed a pile of papers into a heap, leaned back with a groan and said, “Just trying to decide whether to take Social Security now … or wait.” The boyz are all over this one since we’re of that age. Fred took his at 64 even though the benefits were way less than if he’d waited til 70. “I’m grabbing what I can before they go broke,” he told Jerry. Phil laughed. “Fred, if the government goes broke, you got worse troubles than no monthly check.”

“Laugh all you want, Phil, I’m hedging my bets. There’s less people putting in and more of us taking out. You do the math.” Jerry said that’s exactly what he was trying to do before we interrupted. And that was assuming he lived until, oh, 90 and then how much would the difference be if he took early retirement and what would it be if he took it at 66? The last thing he needed was Fred’s monkeywrench logic, which included inflation, health insurance, nursing home care and anything else he could throw in to muddy Jerry’s mathematics. “Whadda you think, Skeeter?” Phil asked about ¾’s of a pint into the discussion.

I’m 64 and eligible for an early pay-out myself. Recently I got my earnings statement for the past 47 years. Four years I made zip. Nada. Zilch. Nine I didn’t break into 4 figures. The boyz consider me semi-retired and so do I … since about 1975. Truth is, I tell em, I’ll be working as long as I can. Which, of course, cracks the table up.

“Next you’ll be wanting us to buy your beers out of sympathy,” Fred crows, shaking his head. Fred worked for 45 well paid years as a construction foreman. His reduced benefits would look pretty good to this grasshopper who fiddled away his working years. Jerry’s going to have a hard time too, I know. But his working days are over with his arthritis problems and pretty soon he’s going to have to roll the dice like the rest of us. If I know Jerry, he’ll have a few more pints, divide by an even number, weigh the empty glass and then flip a coin. Just like the rest of us high rolling gamblers….

We got home late last night to find the front door wide open, leaves blowing around in the livingroom, the house cold as the frigid outdoors which was dropping past freezing, a hemlock crushing half the boathouse and woodsheds, the water association across the street working on the system so that black water clogged every faucet at the new house and the toilet filled with what looked like septic water.  Today I’ll see what needs to be done about most of the above.  Sunny and cold here on the tropical South End.  Pretty if you weren’t looking at disasters.  Home sweet Home!

I wrote here awhile back that WalMart was moving to the old Tyee Grocery strip mall. A neighbor thought it was true — and boy, howdy, did she ring my ears with outrage. She wanted that WalMart and now she’s stuck with a Marijuana Dispensary there. Course, when I wrote a year ago that South End Greenworks WAS going in there, a guy drove all the way down the island to find it. Yep, he was hacked it was all a joke.

I mentioned hunting season was opening up in a few weeks one April issue of the Crab Cracker — on alpacas. I got some serious threats from one particular herder that I would be billed for every one of the cute little buggers killed. Okay by me so long as I get the meat. When we built the new bridge onto Camano, I wrote that it would be named the Colton Harris-Moore Bridge and our commissioner at the time had his ears scorched by irate citizens. He said, Skeeter, you got to stop writing this stuff, folks think you’re serious.

Course then we ran Skeeter for mayor. Of the South End. The commissioner lost by a few votes and he thinks folks voted for me by accident. Maybe so. The line between reality and fiction is gone now. Political e-mails are so blatantly lies but nobody seems to mind. Hot talk radio has managed to pull the rug out from under what was once ‘unbiased’ reporting. If we think ALL news is skewed and biased, why not just make it ALL opinion? In an effort to give both sides, network news has quit making the call on what’s true or not. Let the Liars talk and you can make up your own mind. Except now we’re so saturated with prevarication, exaggeration and outright chicanery, half of us can no longer see the difference. Or worse, we no longer care.

Skeeter, needless to say (or so I thought), is a joker. He’s not advocating, he just thinks April Fool’s Day never ends. Sadly, in this Information Age — or Misinformation Age — it apparently doesn’t. Trouble is, folks out there on the blogosphere, on the internet, on the news, on the talk shows, they aren’t kidding.