The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Coming home the other day, I was listening to National Public Radio — mostly for further education credits — and they were talking about somebody working in the Inner City who went around to the homeless to offer them free health checkups. These folks were, as our reporter tactfully put it, probably on drugs or booze or were mentally ill or any combination thereof. Probably all three.

We always talk about the street folks this way. Poor sad souls who fell through the societal cracks, who might have, if not for drugs or booze or rock and roll or psychiatric reasons, might have been happy productive members of society. Almost exactly the prognosis for me and my neighbors here on the South End!! I mean, who wouldn’t want to work at Twin City Foods on the ‘line’, who wouldn’t rather drive to McDonalds and flip burgers for minimum wage, no benefits, no health insurance, no kidding???? Who wouldn’t want to go back to school, get that GED or a PhD. and become a 6 figure a year attorney?? You’d have to be CRAZY not to!!!!!!!!!! You’d maybe have gotten so dependent on drugs and alcohol this wouldn’t APPEAL to you! whatsoever, not at all!?

Holy Cowpie. Maybe our reporter never worked in a factory dawn to dark, 6 days a week. Maybe our Good Samaritan never thought of the American Dream as a rat race through the labyrinth of Hell in search of moldy cheese. Maybe our sociologists, who work for the universities, have full tenure and pensions and fat salaries, maybe they see unemployment or poor health care or an Insecure Future, as something, oh, I don’t know, something WORSE than a dead end job, a horrible boss, a joy-draining life on the assembly line of ‘respectability’.

Send those researchers, those professors, those academicians down here! Give me a couple of days, that’s all. After that, they’ll be on drugs or booze or sudden retirement. Probably all three….

I was down at the Diner a couple months ago. Anita, our morning waitress had let slip the news they were going to change the menus. Some of the regulars were instantly agitated — and this was before their second cup of Black Tar coffee, a high-dosage distilled caffeine that would prop a trucker ramrod straight behind the wheel of a Kenworth hauling from Stanwood to Berdoo.

“Why tamper with perfection?” 3 Putt Pete was asking the entire assemblage of us Late Morning crowd, although purportedly he was aiming his alarm at Brenda behind the cash register. When she’d finished ringing up Little Willy, our ex-commissioner who served one term before half these yahoos sent him packing over a detour during a months long road construction, she turned on 3 Putt and scowled her Early Morning No Nonsense scowl that sent half the boyz back to breakfast lest she shot a laser blast at them, ruining way more than some suddenly overcooked omelette smoldering on a charred plate. 3 Putt wasn’t looking her way, unfortunately for him, sort of like Bambi hopping happily in the meadow before Godzilla makes venison toejam out of our cute critic.

“Why, oh why,” he was lamenting, maybe imagining this was his Big Chance at a thespian breakthrough, play to the Imagined Producer who might be taking breakfast Off Broadway, “why can’t we just accept things as they are, not ruin em by pushing the limits to what might never be?”

By the conclusion of his soliloquy, Pete was practically standing on his chair, fork and knife dancing in a grand flourish of stainless and saliva, the expected applause, the cries of ‘Author’ and ‘Bravo!’ soon to follow …. when Brenda slammed the register shut to steal the finale while shaking a receipt in 3 Putt’s direction. You could’ve heard an egg break back on Big Larry’s grill as total silence descended on the café heavy as that chlorine gas leak the previous week when a welding torch opened a mystery tank and set off a South End mustard gas evacuation.

“For the luvva Grease, Pete, will you sit down!? We’re not changing the food, you fool, just the damn menus. These old ones are tattered and stained. You’ll still get your chicken fried steak and that heart attack that can’t come quick enough, you ask me.”

3 Putt, you can rest assured, left enough tip to pay half the printing costs. And when those new menus arrived a few days later, it was Pete who admitted they were a fine addition to the Diner and asked meekly if he could take one of the old ones home. As a special keepsake. Historians, it seems, are made, not born.

Folks ask me why I write these odd little vignettes of life on the salty South End. I always want to answer something like Because I have to. I have no choice. Us artists love to talk that way. Mr. Picasso, Pablo … why do you paint? To live, my little friend, to live. We never say, So I don’t have to work, you damn fool, what did you think?

We’re an odd society, us Americanos. We tend to exalt the Artiste as somehow unique, special, a rare breed, a person on an exalted plane. Probably the result of mental illness or malignant non-conformity. Prone to alcoholism, drug abuse and extreme hedonism. Who suffers more due to sensitivities more painful than herpes and who dies an early death with only one ear remaining.

We seem to like the notion of Starving Artists. Only through suffering, I guess, can you break the bonds of normality and ascend into true inspiration. Maybe explains why we keep minimum wages low — we’re trying to help folks find their Muse.

Art is a form of insanity, we think. Why else would a grown yahoo live in squalor, risk the hostilities of friends and family and neighbors alike, all for a passion that rarely makes a living and is always an invitation to cruel criticism.

“Let me show you my newest painting. Be honest, what do you think?” Do you folks do that??? Would normal people do that??? And the sad part: artists are the very WORST at rejection. Every review, criticism, rejection and commentary is a verdict on their creation. On them! Imagine the neighbors knocked on your door and gave you a criticism of your kid. “Did a nice job raising Jimmy, pal. Spittin image. Too bad about that shoplifting incident and that pregnant no-account girlfriend of his. Next time maybe get a vasectomy. Just thought you’d like to know. By the way, my daughter, Jennifer, she just got accepted by Harvard Medical School.”

So why do we write … or paint … or put broken glass back together? I could lie to you, I could spin a web, I could wax romantic or philosophic. But the truth is if I didn’t, I’d go crazy out of sheer boredom. I’ll probably go crazy anyway, just not as fast….

We had some mail theft recently. My neighbor Erich was vacationing with the family in some exotic place – Smokey Point, I think maybe it was – and I was feeding the cats, checking the mail, doing what neighbors usually do when friends go away. My neighbors across the street even mow each other’s grass, but they don’t have the estate Erich does and I suppose I could make excuses, but hellfire, I was feeding his cussed cats and picking up his bills – you expect me to pay em too????
Okay okay. After a few days of emptying the mailbox, you get to know a person pretty good, sort of an unpaid private eye, seeing what bills come from who, what associations they belong to, what magazines they get, what charities they contribute to, all that personal stuff. You can learn a lot –NOT that I’m analyzing their buying habits, their credit card information, their giving trends, their collection agencies, the nasty threats they get; no, I’m just picking it up and hiding it where snoopy folks, TOO inquisitive folks won’t find it and make it THEIR business when it isn’t. I mean we used to have privacy laws in this country and I don’t care WHAT the damn government’s doing, I think a person ought to be able to hide his sins from the rest of the nosey neighbors.
So when I get to day 3 and the Collection Agency seems to have given up and the credit card applications have dried up and the charitable organizations have wised up and there’s NO MAIL for 3 straight days, I should’ve known. I should’ve waited by the mailbox in the ditch with all the empty beercans with a sawed off shotgun, cause I should’ve SURMISED some meth dealing crackhead was stealing Erich’s IDENTITY!!

But I’m happy to say it didn’t ever occur to me and because of that, Erich can thank me because that desperate junkie got more than junk mail, he got all of Erich’s overdue bills and now HE’S stuck with em and he’ll get to pay em off with his ill-gotten drug money and I say justice once again prevailed. So Erich can thank me for bailing him out once again. I just hope next time he doesn’t expect me to mow the lawn too.

Folks are all the time making suggestions for how I can improve this South End literature I’m writing, figuring, I guess, a little tweak here, an improvement there, we got the Pulitzer sewed up. The Camano James Joyce or another Homer ready to be passed down orally generation to generation around the smoldering trash barrels. And sometimes, as much as I hate to admit it, they’re right. Doesn’t make me wrong, you understand, just amenable to perfection.

The other day some folks up north wanted me to write about the North End. I said okay, that’s well and good, but I might just as soon write about France for all I know about their customs and cuisine and odd ways of speaking. Then, a few days later, a neighbor mentioned how what I was doing was creating an Us vs. Them scenario. I said, gee, I sure don’t want to do that. Not so much because I’m afraid folks would scapegoat Stanwoodopolis or Utsalady, but I wouldn’t want all the refugees afterward.

I once offered KSER, our Everett public radio station, the opportunity to have Skeeter read these aloud. But the program manager said he didn’t want to ‘offend’ people living on the South End of Camano by inflicting these on them. God forbid! And so those poor wretched citizens will have to succeed or fail on toeing their own Straight and Narrow, no help from me.

It’s hard to tell, I guess, whether the South End is more to be pitied or more to be envied. I’d say yes, but other folks feel different. Okay by me, I’m a great believer in co-existence, not only between Us and the North End (Them), but between my editors (Them) and me (Us). As always, your criticism is welcome and your suggestions duly considered. Just remember, though, you may be the next story. No hard feelings, I hope. We sure don’t need another Rwanda on Camano.

Stanwoodopolis is a fine town. IF you’re from there or still are…. If you’re not, it’s a little less than friendly. When I first moved here I had a buddy roll in and I said, hey, let’s go to town for some pizza and beers and a few laughs, just like the old days back in Wisconsin. So about 8 or 9 at night we rolled into Jeno’s Pizza, what’s now Jimmy’s, a family place. Jeno’s had a liquor bar and all the 21 year olds liked to drink there and get sloshed quicker. Rough place some weekends.

Me and my pal ordered a pitcher of beer and a pizza. We were the only two in the joint, it being a Monday night, We did a little catching up on the old days, ordered a second pitcher and pretty soon we were laughing and reminiscing and laughing some more. Pizza came and we ate and told more war stories, laughing so hard our pizza grew cold. Pretty soon we noticed a policeman watching us. Wasn’t much ELSE to watch other than the cook and the waitress.

Some folks think cops are there to protect THEM. I’ve never really thought that way. I mostly think they’re there to protect THEM from ME. Maybe it’s the 60’s, you know, tear gas, riots, cops and National Guard rioting too. I just like to avoid the law and if that means going the speed limit and behaving myself, it’s a small price to pay. In fact, I recommend it to most of you citizens.

The cop watched us for 10 minutes or so, mostly us telling jokes and stories , sitting in a back booth, nobody to bother. He finally went over to our waitress/bartender and said, “They seem okay to me.” Our waitress obviously didn’t think so, but the officer left and we were alone with Miss Sourpuss. I guess she preferred the drunk kids fighting in the parking lot after being overserved — you know, so long as they were Locals.

We paid our bills, left a tip even, and drove back to the shack. I never went back much to Jeno’s. And tell you the truth, I don’t go to Jimmy’s either. I’ve decided once an Outsider, always an Outsider. I think we both like it that way, me and Stanwoodopolis….

Back in the era when I first moved here, the island was more of a frontier, more of a lawless place, an outback backwash where crime existed, but for the most part it was either tolerated or taken care of on a personal level. Oh, we had some rumrunning and moonshining, we had some cannabis cowboys, we had a few folks pulling off trannies and axles at the Tyee Store junkyard, some out-of-season deer hunting and the usual Dungeness overharvesting. The Island County deputies had a big area to cover and way too few deputies….

Must’ve been shortly after those gas shortages from the OPEC embargo let up, real estate took off and the rich folks looked at Camano the way movie stars looked at Montana — cheap land for millionaires. And the housing boom took off. McMansions got built, hobby farms started up, vacation homes sprouted along the bluffs. Camano was discovered. For the second time.

Trouble with being an absentee wealthy landowner is you leave yourself wide open to vandalism and theft. Back then we didn’t have Costco surveillance cameras you watch on your cellphone. Hell, we didn’t have cellphones invented then. Where there’s a vacuum …. leave it to a South Ender to fill it. And so Sammy’s South End Security and Surveillance was born. Sammy had his crack security squad assembled, put out ads every week in the Little Nickel and the Stanwoodopolis Gazette, and offered his services. He’d check your hacienda once in the day and once in the evening, see if any odd lights were on or garage doors partly up or back door’s ajar or an upstairs window open. For an extra fee, he and his militiamen, Flathead Fred and Two Toke Tom, would water the plants, feed the cats, whatever needed done. All those dot.com millionaires moving in, Sammy figured he’d corner the Security Market, upgrade to vehicles that didn’t look like what the thieves were driving — and retire in comfort like his clients.

And it DID look promising. He’d just traded in his 1978 Datsun pickup with the seat springs always tearing his semi-official Levi jacket that all of the crew wore now with the lettering SOUTH END SECURITY AND SURVEILLANCE on the back for a one owner Chevy half ton with a spotlight for night shining the shrubbery and sometimes the occasional deer he poached. Things looked good. Real good. Flathead and Two Toke got a buck an hour raise, clients seemed satisfied … and then … the bottom fell out. Along came the Citizen’s Patrol and, well, now you know the rest of the story. Another entrepreneurial dream up in smoke. Sammy never really got over it. Oh, he tried dogsitting, but he never really liked dogs and it turned out he had allergic reactions to the longhaired ones.

Last we heard he was selling knock-off sunglasses out of a booth at the Skagit Mall. Flathead Fred went back to the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop and specialized in scuff and buff paint jobs. And Two Toke? Well, Two Toke went underground, developing skills that serve him even today … now that marijuana is legal.

Crime — ya know, on the South End, it sometimes pays.

I’ve got a county roadsign at the bottom of my driveway. SOUTH CAMANO DRIVE one side, TIMOTHY WAY on the other. Not much I can say or do about it, and really, who cares? Other than me…. I have to mow around it, look at it, landscape it. I guess you have to put em someplace until we all have GPS in a circuit board implanted in our heads at birth.

A friend gave me a plastic heron years ago. She stuck it down my my pond where herons at the time were snacking on my goldfish. Goldfish, for you non-yuppies, are baby koi. Pretty bottom feeders. This poly-tri-hex-styro heron showed up one morning and I spent five minutes throwing rocks at it to scare it away. Plastic herons, in case you are as dumb as me, don’t scare easily.

So a month ago I took this very life-like facsimile of a heron and roosted him at the top of my unwanted, unasked for, roadsign. Got a ladder, some Captain Kangaroo materials for affixing the bird, and hauled up to the top of this 10 foot signpost. Which, having rotted beneath ground, snapped right off —- and me, the bird and the sign all tumbled not so comically into the highway. No one was killed, no real birds were harmed, no passing cars were struck by a highway sign and I was only treated for a twisted ankle. An hour later, pissed off, humiliated, somewhat discouraged, I had the heron atop a shorter sign in its new hole, no charge to the County.

For awhile passersby would do a doubletake over that heron perched above them as they whizzed by at 50 mph. I started to LIKE my county sign. Neighbors mentioned the bird, we all had a good laugh. At least until the county sign guy, and yeah, there’s an officially designated one, took the bird down, no doubt a violation of RCW 367-15B, No Flamingos, Herons or Owls Can Be Affixed to County Signs, Whether Plastic, Cardboard or Dead. My first inclination upon discovering my bird purloined was to remove the road sign too. No heron — no sign. Easy equation. Two can play this game without a sense of humor.

But you know — and I sorta know — I was taking a chance messing with government property. Probably lucky the Sheriff didn’t follow up with a fine or a warrant. ‘We’re gonna let this one go, kid, but don’t pull this stunt again….”

My friend who gave me this bird in the first place went down to the county sheds to retrieve her gift. They made her promise the scofflaw who put it up on their sign wouldn’t do it again. And she made ME promise too. So if you’re cruising by Timothy Way where it hits South Camano Drive and you see a heron perched like a Pterodactyl on the sign — for god’s sake slow down! That’s going to be a real bird. One that’s ready to swoop or poop….

I heard a rumor the other day — the rich are getting richer. And the poor are getting poorer. I checked with some of the neighbors and a few of my relatives and yeah, it looks like the rumor’s true. Kinda surprised me, though, considering we’re just staggering back up out of the last great recession, the one where the rich gambled on fast profits on hedge funds and derivatives and CDO’s and exotic Wall Street fiscal formulas …. and lost the bet. For all of us.

They say the banks are too big to fail. A lot of corporations are too. Down here I’m mostly surrounded by folks like myself, the ones too small to win. Talk all you want about trickled down economics, it feels like somebody pissing on my leg, pardon my Francais. These days we hate government, but golly, Molly, I don’t think it was government that screwed us over. It wasn’t them that fired us or dropped our pension plans or lowered our wages. Let’s cut the comedy — you can bitch all day about the damn government, but we live in a corporatocracy now and the only thing standing between you and the CEO of some global digital widget-maker is … you guessed it, the damn government.

Personally, I’m not gonna trust either one, but if I have to pick sides, I guess I’m cynical enough to believe the corporations care WAY more about profits and CEO salaries than they do me and you. Back in the radical 60’s, I thought government and business were pretty much the same thing. Now I’m hoping they’re not. At least until I’m one of the rich guys … then it’s good luck to the rest of ya.