The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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My pal Joey who’s been laid off now, oh, about 5 years ever since the recession hit back in Ought Eight, has turned from cynical to bitter. Used to be he hated his employer for poor wages and lousy benefits, now he hates the government for no wages, no benefits and no jobs, not even ones he hates. He spends a lot of his day e-mailing buddies, myself unfortunately included, screeds against the President and Congress (mostly the Democratic side, what he calls socialists and traitors and worse) rather than look for work.

I always wonder why he doesn’t spend his bile on Wall Street and the banks who sent the economy on a wild ride of greed, which finally plummeted to terra firma, crashed and burned and pulled the economy into the smoldering crater with them, but I guess you got to blame somebody.

“Joey,” I say. “Now that you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, how come you don’t become a Job Creator? Be the capitalist you dreamed of being? Start a bizness?” Joey looks at me with pity and shakes his head in disgust. “You and this damn government, Skeeter. You’ve set up regulations and roadblocks. Too many taxes. How’s a Little Guy like me gonna get off the ground? It’s like running a race carrying a 50 pound concrete block. Guaranteed to fail.”

“Too small to succeed, that it?” I can’t help saying. “They all started out small, Joey.”

Joey’s exhausted a long stretch of unemployment compensation. He’s pulling 401-K retirement money too early to live on and that ticks him off, all those penalties. Michelle, his wife, works part time at Jolene’s Beauty Salon, but even with tips, she’s barely clearing minimum wage. Course, Joey’s against raising minimum wage because if he ever did start being a Job Creator, that 50 pound block holding him back would be 60 pounds.

Joey’s never going to work again everybody but Joey knows. He’s retired at 55, another casualty of the Recession, and for his remaining years he can aim his wrath at the illegal immigrants who take the jobs he might have wanted, at the government which ended his unemployment compensation with only two extensions, at the IRS for taxing his 401-K withdrawals, at his old employer for sending jobs overseas, at the people on welfare who’d rather take a handout than look for work, at the women who’ve joined the labor market….

The American Dream withered on the vine for Joey and his fellow victims. He doesn’t have Clue One why it all went wrong, but he’s angry and he’s scared. I don’t know how many Joeys are out there, but too many, that’s for sure. The party’s over for them. Now all they got is the Tea Party and that one doesn’t look like much fun, not for Joey and certainly not for the rest of us. Even on the South End, anger is contagious.

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Many a closing time at the Pilot House, the cramped little watering hole at the South End Yacht Club, P.T. Barney could be heard over the country western twanging away on the jukebox — “With the right advertising, you could sell anything!” He had variations on this theme. With the right advertising you could sell a cow milk. Or my favorite: With the right advertising you could sell a crab a new set of claws.

The point being, Barney was THE South End huckster, no question about it… and if you know how many hucksters have rolled through, that’s no small brag. P.T. wasn’t all talk either. He put his money where his mouth is and if neither are with us today, well, it wasn’t for lack of effort. If you know where to look, you can still see a half rotted wood sign back by his old place, hung over what once was a small barn but became South End Tourist Trap—Bait Inside! P.T. Barney Prop. Course now most of the letters are flaked off and another potential Wall Drug or Reptile Garden or Lookout Mountain has gone to the snake oil burial ground of roadside attractions.

I guess maybe Barney was a bit ahead of his time… or the curve … or himself. He hung Burma Shave style signs from the freeway exit to the South End. He stocked postcards and doo-dads and Chinese crap, all with South End printed on them. He sold birdhouses that hung upside down. South End Bat House. He had T-shirts and sweats. I Survived the South End. Well, you know what he had. Every trinket shop from L.A. to Boston has it.

But what they didn’t have — and what ultimately ruined Barney’s grandiose plans for World Novelty Hegemony was the labyrinth he constructed behind the aptly named Trap. P.T. thought if the corn farmers could sell a maize maze, by god, he could clean up with the Labyrinth of Stinging Death, a 50 cent per person attraction through a maze of nettles. What seemed a good idea in March that first and only year became a lawsuit in the summer when a tourist family from Iowa, unfamiliar with Urtica Horribilus, found themselves lost in that jungle of carnivorous plants 8 feet high. Once they were stung a few times they panicked like puppies in a hornets’ nest. Poor little Jimmy, the five year old son, tried a shortcut on his hands and knees and was soon swallowed by the prickly predators. An hour later he emerged, covered hairlick to toenail in welts.

P.T., sensing disaster afoot, tried bribery, but a few T-shirts that said I’m With Stupid weren’t a bulwark against the ensuing lawsuits, child psychiatric witnesses on Post Nettle Trauma Syndromes, the entire public flogging that played out in the papers from Portland to B.C. In the end Barney got the last word and true to his creed that he could sell anything, last we heard he was selling custom skateboards to the kids of hi-tech execs after a series of sales positions in used car lots, an RV/trailer outfit and a brief stint in door to door cutlery. Couple more years, P.T. will have sold nearly everything.

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I just got back from the coast — sorry if you went into Daddle withdrawals, but like most things addictive, best to keep your fix in moderation. We met up with old college era friends and their kids and their grandkid for the luvva old age! Rented a modest mansion twice the size of our hacienda and only four times as nice, then set up camp on the edge of the Pacific. And discovered razor clam season was open.

My cronies from the Heartland, lubbers all, didn’t understand my excitement over this. 43 years ago I vacationed out to the coast and for a sunny week in June, dug razors until I essentially ‘went native’. The rainforest at Kalaloch was wild and temperate and everything the coast was too — I was totally, absolutely, irrevocably hooked on the Pacific NW. It took me a few years, but I moved out here to live.

The year after the first visit I drove 2500 miles back to dig those clams once again. The beaches were closed! I felt like Adam at the Gates of Eden with its No Trespassing sign up and a This Means You! underneath. Eve and the snake were on the other side making applesauce. I drove back to Wisconsin a day later. Dumb, I know, but I came, even if symbolically, for the razor clams.

Since then I’ve never been out there on the coast when the digging season was open. 43 years. But this week it was digging tides once again, the weather was perfect and I was back in 1971, shovel in hand, a 21 year old kid who had no clue where life would lead, down in the sand looking for telltale dimples, clues, it turned out, to the future.

Whales spouted beyond the surfline and the crabbing fleet, old friends gathered for a retelling of stories told too many times, the stars came out at night in numbers beyond fathom. I don’t believe our lives are cyclical … but sometimes we do circle back and it’s almost as if we can begin anew, optimistic, naïve, starry-eyed and willing to follow a path into an uncertain future. I’m home now but it already feels different.

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