The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Biker Bob rides with an odd assortment of outlaws. He’s got a Honda he’s tricked out to sound like a Harley, meaning he’s got a glasspack muffler you can hear from Tyee Store to my shack, a ferocious rumble that belies the pussycat bike he can barely keep running. I had a bike once, a beat up 350 ready for the scrap heap but scary enough to give me nightmares of highway wrecks, skidding sideways down on gravel and blacktop, legs scraped to raw meat, my football helmet exploding plastic into my brainpan.

You want to ride, Biker Bob will tell you, you need a death wish. I didn’t have one so shortly after I got my street license, I sold it. $100. Cheap life insurance is how I figured it even if I paid someone to take the suicide ride off my hands. That was 40 years ago and I’m still alive with two legs and semi-functioning brain.

Bob’s a good guy, at least when you’re one on one with him. You get around his outlaw pals, his loyalty is with the Pack. If things go bad — and they invariably do with this crowd – he doesn’t recognize friendship when the dogs go hunting the weak and infirm. This is not good news when you realize you’ve become the prey. I try very hard not to antagonize the pack, but there are lines you cross without recognizing them until it’s too late.

I don’t see Bob much these days. He had a cabin I helped build up in the foothills, sold his Harley to help his ‘lady’ out, a woman who was a schoolbus driving friend of mine from the city days. Bob kept a little dirt bike at the time for off road fun, but one night he took it down to the local watering hole off Highway 9, stayed a few too long, then hit the highway late, no lights or license, just a dark run for home. The county sheriff did a U-turn when they passed each other at 50 miles an hour, hit the bubbles, but Bob didn’t see much sense in pulling over and as he explained later, thought maybe he could outrun the deputy. Yah, he said, I was pretty drunk.

A mile before the road to Bob’s cabin the deputy could see he wasn’t going to pull over so he did what most county cops would do under the circumstances: he rode up alongside the little dirt bike and came into Bob’s lane. Bob hit the shoulder, lost control and sailed over a ditch and into a field where he crashed and burned. Being drunk as a skunk, he survived without much damage, spent a night in the Bellingham jail and came home a couple days later. For a few weeks, anyway, Biker Bob was bikeless. Too bad he couldn’t stay that way….

My old roommate Chicago Larry and I lived in a HUD house down in the ghetto in Seattle, two white boys gentrifying a mixed neighborhood not very much interested in being gentrified. Larry was a city boy and I was his chucklehead country sidekick. Our neighbors were pimps and gunrunners, white slavers and drug salesmen. Larry said, “They don’t know what to make of me, but I know exactly what to make of them.” Me, I didn’t have a clue what to make of either.

The lot next to our house was vacant, one of two or three on the block, overgrown with blackberries and bushes, weeds and garbage. A house had once stood there, but all that was left to indicate a prior civilization was the foundation and a couple of old fruit trees. In spring the cherries would blossom in a showy junkyard display and brighten our days. We didn’t get many cherries, not once the birds noticed them ripening up.

The day the guys came with a chainsaw to cut the cherry, Larry was home since he drove cab at night. The whine of the saw next to his bedroom window woke him up in a bad mood. He pulled on his pants and walked out the door to speak with these urban Paul Bunyans. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked. They said they were cutting the tree down. “What for?” Larry asked. “Sell for firewood,” they said. Their saw was dull and hadn’t made much headway into the trunk of the cherry. “This your tree?” Larry asked. “This yours?” they answered.

Larry said no, it wasn’t, but he didn’t want to see it cut down either. He said he’d pay them what they’d get for the firewood. The loggers said, in their best getto-lingo, to go away. They called him a Honky, started their reluctant saw and went back to work killing that tree. I won’t say Larry’s an unreasonable fellow. He prefers negotiation to violence. Up to a point. Past that point, Mr. Hyde steps into view.

He went back in our house, got his .38, the one he carried for protection in his taxi and went back outside. He tried to make himself heard over the shrieking chainsaw, but the two loggers refused to look his way. Larry pulled the trigger and everything stopped immediately.

Larry suggested they put their saw in the truck and leave now. It seemed like a good idea to them as well. Five minutes after their departure, the police arrived. Reports of gunfire, they said. Did Larry know anything about this? “Indeed I do, Officer,” he said, more than happy to tell them his side of the story.

“Do you own the tree, sir?” the younger one asked. “Do you still have the weapon?” Larry retrieved the .38, stood at the bottom of the stairs, answered a couple more questions, all the time gesturing with the gun in his hand, explaining his position with the tree muggers.

Finally the older officer stepped forward and asked, “Would you mind giving us the weapon?” There was a long moment when all three pondered the reality of him holding a loaded pistol, no doubt still a bit adrenalined up, obviously a person of some volatility, waving a pistol for story-telling effect. Larry smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.” The old cop took the gun. Everyone relaxed.

They cited him for discharging a firearm in city limits, confiscated his gun and warned him about further violations. Larry bought a new gun next day and hid it in the ceiling where he forgot it when he moved. No doubt it’s still there. The cherry lived. It oozed sap for a year, but it lived. Last time I drove by our old house a three story town house filled the vacant lot. They’d cut the cherry down to make maximum use of the space. Gentrification, I guess, has its price….