The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A couple of the Flatheads, the vintage car guyz, are starting to bring politics into the Monday morning breakfasts … and worse, they seem to be lobbying to convert the carb heads into their own brand of evangelical prophesy. Sure, the boyz will argue the aesthetics of after-market parts vs hunting down the originals, but they don’t accuse the other of sin or blasphemy. Like Little Jimmy says, there’s room for both to be wrong. Actually what he preaches is there’s room for both to be full of shit, but he doesn’t say that in the Diner. And not in front of Anita, the owner and referee over barfights and language when families are present. You want a refill on that coffee, mister, keep a civil tongue.

But lately we got this mess over in the Holy Land, what Ralph considers the coming Apocalypse, we can read it for ourselves in Revelation. Two Toke, not exactly the poster boy for biblical studies, declares he’s read Revelations and Ralph ought to maybe stick with the Chilton’s Repair Manual and leave off the prophesies, which sets Buick Bob on a rant against these heathen Moslems who attacked Israel and now are getting exactly what they deserve, the Wrath of God.

You want to wind up Two Toke, these two got it figured out. ‘Bob,’ he says, pointing a fork stabbed into his potatoes, ‘there’s a bigger picture here, maybe you haven’t noticed. You want another Crusade, you might just get it.’

Ralph says that’s exactly what he’s talking about, the Second Coming, and Bob says, ‘you’re damn right!’

Fairlane Fred puts his hands in the time-out position. ‘C’mon, guys, let’s skip the sermons. I barely got started on my chicken fried steak and you’re spoiling my appetite, all this gloom and doom. Brenda,’ he hollers at this morning’s waitress, ‘give me a refill. But no more for Bob and Ralph, they’re over cranked as it is.’

Two Toke slops some ketchup on the rest of his home fries, starts to say something, then thinks better of it. Brenda pours Fred another cup, hovers over Bob and Ralph’s, hesitates a nano-second, then fills both up. ‘Two cup solution,’ she announces, ‘something for everybody.’

I was curious afterwards what her tips were like that morning.

I went to see a fortune teller once. Big sign on the highway and under a crystal ball it said: Fortunes Read $10. Don’t ask me why, but I decided to go see Madame Rita and find out what tomorrow held for me. I’m not much of a spiritualist and usually I figure tomorrow’s coming soon enough, why spend money to get a preview. But for some reason, not very clear to me, I went across the road from where I worked stripping furniture for two Armenian brothers in their stained glass and furniture repair shop just across the bridge in Burlington. This was before the malls and the fast food chains.
The Armenian brothers were aghast I was going into the fortune teller’s shop for a reading. Don’t do it! they insisted. Once she’s got her long fingernails into you, she’ll control you like a puppet. The boyz must’ve known some vampire gypsies in their day, is all I could figure, that or watched too many late night chiller thrillers on the cheap channels. Undeterred, I walked across the highway and up the creaking stairs of a dilapidated old two story house and knocked on the door with the logo of an eyeball in a crystal ball. SEE YOUR FUTURE, it said. MADAME RITA

Madame Rita herself came to the door. She wore a shabby bathrobe and her hair was in curlers under a babushka tied in a knot in front. She asked if I was here for a reading. Indeed I was, I said. We went to a small room off the kitchen next to a backroom where she was doing her laundry. The washing machine was in spin mode and made a wild racket, kind of killing any mood of a séance or any possible connection with the spirits of the next world, unless they were the ghosts of Maytag repairmen. Taking my hand in her pudgy one, she asked what exactly I hoped to find out, which, sadly, I didn’t have much of an answer to other than that I’d seen her sign for a year and the sale price of the fortune telling drew me in like a moth to a burn barrel fire. I might as well have said, I’m too cheap to pay for a full price soothsaying, but hey, in the hands of a mindreader, what does it really matter what you say, she’s got your number.

Madame Rita studied the lines in my palms, pointed out the age line, said I’d live long, looked at a few tributaries and finally sighed before telling me I had enemies. Did I know that? she asked. I said I had folks who maybe didn’t like me much, but enemies, naw, not really. We were at a round table. No candles, no crystal ball, no voodoo anything, just a cup of half drunk tea she never touched. Probably eye of newt tea but how would I know? She excused herself and got up to put the wash in the dryer which soon was tumbling in a sinister soundtrack to her inquiries about my enemies. She returned and assured me I had them.

But … if I chose, I could have her exorcise them. She would be willing to go to the church and burn candles to rid me of these harmful pests. Did I want her to do that? Sure, I said, who needs enemies. It would cost five dollars a candle. I asked how many candles did she think it would take? She shook her scarfed head sadly. Who knows? It depends on how much they wish to harm you. I said I didn’t think my enemies really wished to harm me much, maybe not at all. I don’t even think they really dislike me, you want to know the truth.

For you readers thinking of going to a fortune teller, don’t tell THEM about the truth. Madame Rita informed me solemnly that my enemies were the reason why I couldn’t achieve happiness. I said I was pretty reasonably happy. Madame Rita was pretty sure I wouldn’t be in her parlor if that was so. She said she would burn 10 candles for only $25 and that should rid me of my curses. It was her last offer, and by implication, otherwise I was on my own to face these unnamed people who wished me ill and prevented me from achieving even more happiness than I already had. Over the dryer noise, which sounded like loose change clattering in the cylinder the way a deranged kid might whack a wall with a stick, I declined her offer. It took a few times to convince her I didn’t want to help myself, but finally I left after paying her 10 bucks for the reading, then I sauntered back to the Armenian brothers, a little poorer and who knows how much wiser.

They were waiting by the front door, nearly paralyzed with fear for me. What did she do to you? What did she tell you? What was it like in there? If I’d told them she was keeping pet bats in cages and feeding them children, they’d have believed me. If I’d said, She put a curse on you and your business and your sons and their sons, they’d have put a FOR SALE on the front door that day and left the country, doomed, absolutely doomed.

She was washing her laundry, I told them. They didn’t believe me. She said I have enemies I need to get rid of, I told them. That, they could believe. Go over and let her read your hands, I suggested, you’ll see. Are you crazy??? they almost screamed in unison. She’s not Bela Lugosi, I said. But by then they were at the window, surreptitiously checking for odd activity across the highway in the battered old house with the gypsy inside. If she can read minds, they said, she can control you. You should never have gone in there.

I never went back, of course, and within a few weeks, I’d had enough of stripping furniture and breathing toxic fumes. My enemies never showed up, at least at my shack door, and happiness poured over me anyway. Madame Rita’s Palm Reading by the highway lasted a few more years, until the malls arrived and the highway got widened. My guess is she made a bundle on the real estate sale. Probably living in a nice condo now with a state of the art washer/dryer combo. Her own enemies across the street moved away too. Although, the few times I’ve run into them, they seem happy enough too. I guess it worked out for all of us.

“My granddaughter tells me, get this, I need to call her they.” Fairlane Freddie is stirring another bucket of sugar into his already sucrose saturated coffee. The Flatheads are assembled for their Monday morning soiree at the Diner, vintage cars parked in a line outside that would make a scene in American Graffiti look modern.

“They what?’ Little Jimmy wants to know. “What what?” Fred mutters, ‘what they.” Two Toke stifles a laugh and coughs caffeine into his nose. “ Another educational morning for the unwoke,” he finally manages to squeak after cleaning the coffee off his beard and out of his sinuses. “You never heard of gender neutral pronouns?”

Pretty obviously Fred hasn’t. “What the hell are you talking about? My granddaughter is a girl. Daughter, get it? That makes her a she, not a they. They is plural last time I was taught English.” Little Jimmy asks, “When was that, sixth grade? Times have changed in the past 60 years, Fred. You need to get up to speed. Speaking of which, you drop in that V-8 yet? You been talking about that for years.”

“Screw the V-8, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with my granddaughter who thinks she’s not a girl. What does that make her, then?” Jimmy says why don’t you ask her and Fred, shuddering so bad he spills his coffee, admits he’s afraid of the answer. “What if she identifies as a he? Or worse.”

A terrible silence descended on the Diner as the Car Guyz pondered the possibilities. Worse? Holy Hemi, breakfasts sat suspended as they whirled through the horrible potentials. Animals? Cat might be okay, but …? Maybe one of those make-believe things, whatchacallit, an avatar, could be anything, nothing real. A they? Sure, a they.

Two Toke finally interrupted the séance. “She’s just saying, Fred, her generation wants you to quit making assumptions about who they are. She gets to choose, not us old farts.” Fred shook his head. “They, you mean.” TT smiled. “Exactly what I mean. Be glad we’re old, the kids got a complicated world.”

The mansion down the street burned the other night. This thing was 8 or 10 thousand square feet, large compared to even the McMansions going up around us, a behemoth that has been in progress the last couple years after the owner leveled the old house and began construction on the bluff. Not a bad house, the one they tore down, but hey, why buy a vacant piece of real estate, same as the folks who build next to old firs and cedars, then saw them down. Probably couldn’t find a place already clearcut, I guess. But if you were to ask them, they would all say they moved here for the beautiful trees and forests, just don’t want them anywhere too near.

We don’t get a lot of house fires around here anymore now that most people quit heating with wood stoves so naturally a mansion fire rises right to the top of the gossip grapevine. Did the owner run out of money, couldn’t pay the bills, maybe decide …? But naw, they owned other homes in high priced areas, probably money wasn’t an issue. Did the painters on a Friday night toss rags in a corner and head early down to Happy Hour? Could some environmentalist have taken issue with the Gatsby excess of tearing down one house to build a castle big enough for ten South Enders? Should the Mabana fire station have been manned at night? All these rumors flying around probably could spark another inferno of innuendo and fear mongering. Is there an arsonist among us?

The castle on the north end torched a few years back had a sheet with ELF hand written on it for the fire inspectors to find. Earth Liberation Front, eco terrorists, bad actors wreaking vengeance on those who use too much of the earth’s resources, the price to pay for unmitigated greed. But the investigators ruled that out right away, not ELF’s modus operandi. Probably some unpaid subcontractor, one rumor had it, but in the end, nobody was arrested. And, until now, no other houses were set ablaze.

We may never know what set off that blaze up the road. The burnt out hulk of the mansion stands eerily out in its field, partial walls charred, fireplace still standing, a dystopian vision of things to come? or just a dream deferred? We all hope it wasn’t arson, but we all know too that bad luck can stalk us all. The ruins of that neighbor’s house are stark reminders of our own fragility, that even the rich will not be spared. Course, after the smoke settles and the insurance claims too, we got another few years of hammering and sawing next door.

The South End has never had a tavern or a bar, at least not a legal one. You might think the Temperance Union was strong down here, righteous keg-busting zealots opposed to strong drink, hoping to keep Beelzebub at arms length across the Camano bridge since the north end didn’t have a tavern or a bar either. Nowadays real estate contracts would require that fact listed on disclosure forms. No Alcohol Within X Miles. For us South Enders, that might be as much as 20 miles. Probably more on the inebriated drive back from Stanwoodopolis or La Conner, missed turns and all.

I suppose Utah has those kind of long distance dry stretches and I’ve been in contiguous counties down in the Deep South that ban sales of spritis. Moonshine thrives in those arid regions. That, or religion. We islanders — at least us bibulous ones — could purchase beer and wine at the original Plaza Grocery and the four other mom and pops, Tyee, Huntington, Elger Bay and Utsalady Stores. Pricey, but factor in the gas expense to get off island, we complained quietly.

The Nestor Brothers brought in the first actual bar around 1990, a restaurant about a mile on the mainline once you crossed the bridge, aptly called the Shipwreck. Which in no time flat became the Hot Spot for diners and drinkers, dancers and drunks, plus cops and DUI’s. The sheriff’s deputies could wait down the road for Last Call, just pick em off one by one. Course back then they had to haul their catch to Coupeville, book em in and drive clear back. You learned to let a few others leave first before exiting that juke joint. Or, like myself, avoid the place at all costs. I’m sure the cops are swell fellows but we don’t need to be on a first name basis.

Another of our neighbors is selling out, pulling up stakes and heading somewhere more hospitable. Had enough of the Homeowner Association’s prolonged battles, I figure, or maybe just the upcoming water fees, bulkhead repairs and endless surprise expenditures, sort of the trouble with Paradise. The Garden of Eden needs maintenance, the No Trespassing signs need upkeep along with the fences and the barb wire, plus all the weed mitigation, blackberry removal and trail improvements. It isn’t just Adam and Eve, it’s a whole passel of folks with different socio-economic backgrounds, some who think money is water and others who bleed it.

Story of the neighborhood near the end of the half century we’ve lived here. Houses by us run about a million dollars minimum. The one next to us across the ravine fetched a cool 2.1 million, sold in one hour, cash on the barrelhead. I’ve thought about cashing in, take the money and run, go where land is cheap, live the life of Riley somewhere less crowded, no HOA’s, way fewer neighbors, greener grass. Or no grass at all.

Adam and Eve might’ve had that same itch. Tired of all the covenants, the rules and regs, the don’t eat this don’t eat that, do what you’re told and you’ll get along just fine with the landlord. Course they couldn’t just throw up a For Sale by Owner sign, cash in and parlay the loot for another parcel up the road. Paradise is hard to replace for the same price, much less leave without even the clothes on your back. Folks used to do it though, call it the American Myth. Tell the boss, the landlord, the government or the King of England to go to hell, hit the road and don’t look back. You can only take so much.

My neighbor’s had enough. I know he didn’t want to leave. He’d set roots, landscaped his place, remodeled his castle and fell in love with the island. Personally I’m going to miss him. I hope he finds another South End. Hopefully there are still a few left.

The Camwood Mobile Home Park, long gone now in this era of gated communities and exclusive developments, once offered modest living on beachfront tracts destined for future high taxation. When the hammer finally fell, there must have been 20 single wides all lined up in angles that gave each tenant a peekaboo view to the Sound and the Olympic Mountains beyond, and although the lease was a bit high and the power and water levy exorbitant, folks with limited means could enjoy a small piece of the good life at a reduced price. Most of the island back then, really, was affordable.

Sure, there was no work and the drive to the nearest town was hellishly long, but there are always folks who prefer the edge of poverty to the sacrifice of 8-5, a sadistic boss, a crap job. I should know, I was the same way. My good luck, however, was having a small savings account, enough to buy a shack, not rent a trailer at the Camwood. Some folks there owned their single wide but most rented from Elmer Havelot, the slumlord/slash proprietor of the place who rarely made any appearances, just let Sue Novinsky manage the properties in exchange for free rent in Unit #6, the one with a fine view of the road down from the west side highway.

Sue was divorced. Twice. From the same guy, Phil Novinsky, a charmer but a mean drunk. The second divorce she needed a restraining order the Island County sheriff wouldn’t enforce so she left the island for a year and came back when Phil had died in a head-on, killing his drunken self and a teenage girl when he crossed the centerline just south of the Plaza Grocery. So Sue came back, managed the trailer park for Elmer, worked part time at the Tyee Grocery and decided the single life in a single wide was the life for her, what easily could have been a chart buster single on the country western station she listened to most days. If she’d been a song writer. Or played honkytonk guitar.

When Elmer gave the residents 30 days notice, her life threatened to become that country western song, heartbreak #3. But she worked a deal with Elmer, bought trailer #9, a reasonably intact 1953 Silver Star for peanuts and used what savings she had left for a half acre parcel behind Tyee Store, moved the trailer and cut her commute to walking distance. A few years later Tyee went under and Sue took a job at Twin City Foods, long commute, at least until TCF closed down. Last time I sat with Sue, drinking coffee with a shot of Jack, she said she was ready for retirement and Social Security. “If I learned anything in this place,” she told me, “it was how to live poor.”

The South End, if you give it a chance, I might’ve said back, will teach you that, all right. What I did say was what old Ted Snowden, the guy who built Tyee Store back in the ‘70’s, told me once: “It’s a poor man’s paradise.”

“A woman’s too,” Sue said, “once you get past the drunk husband.” We drank to that….

Gone are the days when mobs of us kids, festooned with sheets of scissor-cut eyeholes or bandanas and eyepatches carrying wooden pirate swords, out in the neighborhood with our beggar bags, hollering Trick or Treat, armies of zombies and skeletons and ghosts collecting enough candy to make a dentist smile for months on the wages from future cavities. Our parents back then didn’t drive behind us as we slipped through the darkness waiting fearfully in their station wagons idling at the curb — no, they enjoyed a night without us munchkins, that was their treat! Mine sometimes dressed up too, going door-to-door to their friends’ houses, holding out a shot glass, not a pillowcase. Halloween was fun for all ages back before we scared the bejabbers out of all the parents.

Course that was before the urban myths of apples with razor blades imbedded. Or lurking pederasts. Or 8 year olds showing up days later on the back of milk cartons. Have You Seen Me? Moms and dads listened to the evening news and heard the monstrous rumors Loud and Clear. Danger waited on every street corner, up every dark driveway, down the alley and behind the trees. No way they were letting their precious out of sight for one Stanwoodopolis minute!

My remembrance, murky as it is, was that the real danger was us marauding kids. Lawnmowers hoisted onto car roofs, outhouses moved back a crucial yard, paper bags with dog poop set on fire out in the driveway, all the stunts that gave credence to the Trick half of the entreaty. Give us sugar or else! We were candy terrorists. Children without supervision, unleashed on our neighbors, hidden behind masks and makeup and cheezy costumes.

We didn’t have helicopter parents. We accepted homemade cookies and home grown apples, all us little Huck Finns, out under a cloud covered moon, free at last, free at last, way before the Pied Piper Parents of the internet tethered their kids and bought them expensive costumes and drove them in broad daylight to some supposed safe suburb of town or to the merchants who offered treats as bait on the crowded sidewalk in front of their stores.

There’s a trick being played all right. But not by the kids….

Some billionaire recently argued that our leftist cities are struggling financially because of their woke politics, semi-plausible I guess, so it got me wondering if this was the reason why the South End is fiscally handicapped, all us artists and anarchists tossing grenades into every Chamber of Commerce attempt to haul us out of our financial torpor. Tyee Store threw in the towel a few years back, blamed it partially on me for some of the whoppers I used to tell about their E-coli superstrain from the 24/7 rotisserie hot dog rotator, and yeah, I realize some folks have no vestigial funny bone whatsoever and believe everything they read, so sue me. Geez.

Truth is, outside of real estate sales and VRBO vacation rentals, the South End economy has atrophied from the roaring days of chicken farms at Mabana when the Mosquito Fleet could dock at the pier that only lasted a few years before storms sent it to Davy Jones’ I-cloud. Supplies, mail, passengers, investors!, all disembarking to rake in the riches of South Camano. Old growth nettles and firs were logged and skidded out to the booms offshore before the sailing ships hauled them to San Francisco and Japan. No doubt the woke crowd at the turn of the century ended that booming era. Probably pre-PETA activists ruined the chicken trade and pre-ecological tree huggers ended the logging craze.

Trade back then plied the water. Roads were nearly non-existent and what had been built were muddy and potholed, nothing useful for commerce. Oh sure, a few enterprising folks attempted entrepreneurial miracles but customers were scarce as those chickens’ teeth and many a scheme ended in financial ruin, leaving a legacy of broken dreams and bankrupt pioneers, a legacy that endures to this day. Some left for the cities and more favorable economic possibilities, but many stayed to live a life without the stress of bleak business dealings, content to accept defeat but happy to manage the poverty as best they could. Not everyone wanted to be a millionaire back then the way we do now. And so they found time on their hands. Time to build homes, furniture, art, lives. Some might say they were woke, if woke meant anything back then. If it means squat today.

So maybe our billionaire sociologist is right. Go woke, go broke. Just don’t tell us down here on the South End that’s a bad thing.

I was cruising through the South End Pawn Shop the other day, scratching for musical gear the kids bought new and then had to sell to Jesse, the owner, for pennies on their dollar.  The days of finding a vintage Gibson Mastertone pre-war banjo are so far back in the rearview, even the memory looks like week old roadkill, thanks to the internet and Antiques Roadshow.  Takes about ten seconds to determine anything’s value.  Jesse’s prices, though, are wildly inflated, but if you’re a good haggler, he’ll come down a long ways.

Me, I’m the kind who hates to go around on prices.  Just put it on the tag and I’ll take it or leave it.  In the course of my lifetime I’ll probably pay twice what everyone else does.  But for peace of mind — and the lowering of blood pressures — I don’t care.

“How’s biz?” I asked Jesse who was perched predatorially on a stool behind a glass case.  He looked like a hawk on a telephone line.  Patiently waiting for the next mouse.  “Couldn’t be better,” he smirked.  I shrugged and he went on about the boyz hurrying in to sell their guns ‘before Biden takes em away’ and the boyz who wanted to buy guns ‘before Biden outlaws em.’  “I shoulda voted Democrat.  The guy is making me rich!”

I never really paid much attention to Jesse’s arsenal before, but I said show me what you got.  He asked what I was looking for, pistol, semi-automatic, shotgun over and under, military assault rifle …..  “Whoa,”  I said, “Jesse, I’m just an innocent bystander.  Doing some research …”

Half an hour later I’m casually acquainted with enough armaments to take the City of Stanwood, just me and a few NRA pals.  If Jesse has 200 firearms — and apparently my neighbors are stockpiling what he’s selling — the idea of disarming my het-up citizen friends seems more than a bit quixotic.  They’re apparently a gun-totin, pistol packin, shoot from the hip pack of yahoos and by god, good luck talking down the barrel of a Smith and Wesson.  You can probably tell a South Ender easy enough by his gun collection, but you sure can’t tell him much.

I walked out of Jesse’s with a big used tube amp for my electric guitar.  Jesse said it was brought in by a kid from a heavy metal band who was dead broke.  “Democrats’ll probably ban these too before long,” he said as I lugged it to my truck.  “Dial it up full volume, it’s potentially lethal.”

Right, it could kill my marriage, if nothing else.