The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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G.I. George is positively apoplectic watching the news on the flatscreen over the bar at the Pilot House in the South End Marina. “Torture?” he’s snarling, “they can’t HANDLE torture!!! They’d rather see those *&%!!* Arabs blow us up in our sleep than interrogate the ?!!@*^’s!” Jerry, the night bartender, hits the channel changer and the Senate committee’s report on the CIA becomes Two and A Half Men, Charlie Sheen smirking with a cocktail in his hand and a girlfriend with 38’s spilling into the camera, usually a Pilot House pacifier, but not tonight.

George is threatening to waterboard Jerry if he doesn’t turn the station back to Fox News. Little Jimmy votes with his empty beer bottle for Charlie Sheen and his lady friend and out of sheer contrariness I second the motion. “Who’s with me on this?” George shouts. He’s standing up and he’s ready to hit Omaha Beach – or Tyee Beach in this case – but he’s getting no Takers.

“Call up Dick Cheney,” I prod, “see if he wants any more sunlight on the subject.” Jerry shoots me a warning as he wipes a glass with his bar towel. Politics and liquor, a flammable cocktail. He’s seen too many fires. George is scowling at me now. “You creepy little draft dodger,” he growls.

“Too old for Iraq, George, too young for Korea. I missed all the good ones.” I watch George calculating my age, see if maybe I should’ve been in Viet Nam like all the other drafted patriots, but he’s not certain enough to go for my skinny jugular. George, we all know, lost a brother those last days of the Saigon evacuation and he’s bitter, even after forty years. He’s got two American flags on little antennas off the roof of his Hummer that look like the Star Spangled Banner after 200 years of Hurricane Sandy.

I can see if I say one more wiseass thing, he’s going to waterboard me in the men’s room so I say, “George, let’s agree to disagree, okay?” I know, it’s a stupid cliché and I feel small for saying it, but George heaves himself back down at the bar and sighs. “Jeez, Jerry,” he finally says, “that Charlie Sheen is a total %!@**#.” Jerry pours him another whiskey sour, on the house, and says, “Yeah, but he’s a funny %!@**#.”

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I’m parked right now in a heroin den. Don’t be alarmed, don’t call Nine One One — I haven’t succumbed to the siren call of narcotics. Yet. We had a couple of neighbors renting the low rent house next door for quite a few years and if I’d been more alert, I might’ve realized the discarded syringes I occasionally found by our property line weren’t from diabetics littering from passing cars. Call me naïve, but I’ve never tuned into the ‘needle culture’. Turns out our boyz were what their counselor — a friend of ours — refers to as Heavy Users. And here all the time I just thought they were Hopeless Losers.

When I moved to the South End, I was figuring I’d be leaving the city and my ghetto neighborhood behind. Course I realized I’d substitute urban gangsterism for redneck reality, but … there were way fewer rednecks than pimps, prostitutes, gun runners, thieves, drug dealers and white slavers that populated my street in Seattle and Gomorrah. Give me a few NRA anti-government racist whackos in exchange for all the capitalist creeps next door to me in the Big City and I was happy to decamp on Camano Island.

Little did I know these urban lowlifes were going to follow me out to Nirvana, no doubt assuming our sleepy island deputies were related to Barney Fife. Even Mayberry is pockmarked now with meth dealers, crackheads and smack addicts. And for certain they’re here on the South End. Although … we’re rid of two. The renters next door moved on. One to the afterlife and the other to Oklahoma. You won’t hear me say HELL. I suspect the survivor will do real well in Oklahoma, a gay junkie in a Red State. Couldn’t do much worse than here. The last month he was sequestered in this house, no power, no lights, no heat, the curtains pulled, no visitors, no sign of life. I thought he’d moved away … until the day he was hitting the electrical panel box with a hammer, hoping, I guess, PUD was joshing about non-payment disconnections and a few hard blows would do the trick to restore juice, probably a fairly common mistake among urban refugees.

His landlady, good hearted soul that she was, gave him an extra month free of charge to find a new lair. In the end she even helped him pack, rented him a storage unit, moved his stuff and gave him a ride to the airport. I think it was the straw that ruined her dream of renting the place anymore.

So … we ended up buying the place. I’m not too hot to rent it just yet. Maybe clean up the discarded syringes, fumigate the joint and let the little house breathe for awhile. I think it deserves a rest. And … so do we.

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Well, they just discovered the oldest known art on the planet, some zig zag scratches on a clamshell from 500 thousand years ago. This is about 300,000 years earlier than the next oldest masterpiece from the prehistoric era. I guess that zig zag abstract set us artists back, oh, not quite half a million years. Presumably the philistines of the Neanderthal caves weren’t ready for avant-garde minimalist renderings at their clam barbecues, a lesson us contemporary aesthetes ought to take to heart. Sure wouldn’t want to be responsible for another Dark Ages. And … I notice the Neanderthals have mostly died out. Okay, maybe not died out so much as just kept denouncing art and Western culture. Okay, actually they seem to be making a comeback in the Middle East, parts of Africa, and all of the American South. Kind of a heavy price for a couple lousy scratches on some bi-valve shell left in a midden, you ask me. Course there will be a boatload of theories why art languished from then until the French cave drawings. Everything from comets hitting the salons of the shell carvers’ showings to Obama’s predecessors over-reaching their political positions.

Art, not for everybody. The cave renderings in France awhile later were a little better received. Realistic animals the Cro-Magnon boyz hunted, probably used for target practice with slingshots. Practical art. The mizzus probably complained but they didn’t have wallpaper yet and even some animal scribbles probably Martha Stewarted up the damp cave walls. That happily-received realism held sway for, well, pretty much into the 20th century. For you art historians that adds up to about 300,000 years… or pretty much 99.999% of human existence. That’s a lot of painting and sculptures of horses, cute kids, sunsets and nature scenes. I mean, I can’t really get enough either. And so, apparently, can’t the South End judging by the tourist art cramming up the galleries and boutiques . As the gentleman who sent me a hate letter when we built the decidedly abstract Visitor Center a decade ago stated vehemently, Modern Art was dead and relegated to the ash heap of history according to his fellow art professors … and pretty much my so-called career was too … or so he hoped. Why, he asked, couldn’t I have done a mural of a mountain or a stream, something equally as beautiful as nature? Why too couldn’t I just go away and spare the island my blighted vision of the world?

A good question, Professor, but since you didn’t give me a return address, it’s one that you apparently weren’t interested in hearing a response to. The Zig Zag Man of half a million years ago might have had a better answer than mine anyway, but since Art beat Literature and Writing to the historical table, we’ll never know, will we? And since I beat the good Professor to the finish line, his criticism was a bit too belated to stop the project. He did, however, write a similar complaint to the Senior Center when he got wind of another contemporary window we’d planned for installation in the entryway, more ‘degenerate’ art he might have called it if Adolph hadn’t sullied the description for future critics. Of course, unlike a lot of artists, I’m a bit tone deaf to criticism. So instead of just a couple of door panels we doubled down and did the entire front entryway to the Center. The Perfesser no doubt was apoplectic, but … it didn’t destroy the building after all. Jump forward a nano-second in the Human Timeline and those abstract shell scribbles are dotting the landscape from the South End to Seattle and Gomorrah and beyond. Someday, no doubt, future art archeologists will pry up remnants of broken glass and marvel that nothing like that has been seen on earth for a quarter million years. And my guess is they’ll probably be thankful. Like my old man always said, You can’t please em all…

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Most of our crime on the South End is local. You got basically one way off the island, even most criminals can figure out how easy it is to put up a Roadblock by the bridge. But occasionally we get Outside Trouble. Rare, but it happens. Last year one of my old band members, who rents his castle a little to the south of us, dropped by his tenant where he planned to meet his realtor so he could discuss why his house hadn’t sold in, oh, four or five years.

His tenant, when he knocked on the door and finally shouted inside, came down the stairs in a state of disrepair, having been tied up, pistol whipped and shot in the shoulder by two ‘friends’ from Seattle who’d purportedly come by at 7 or 8 in the morning to, what she claimed!, give her some money they owed. Instead, I guess they decided to keep the money and take hers. Happens all the time …. Just not a whole lot on the South End. Did I mention our victim denied being shot?

It’s probably lucky for us that most criminals think the police are as dumb as they are. If not decidedly dumber….

My ex-band member — I did mention EX band member, didn’t I? — believed every word, even if the deputies who arrived later were somewhat more suspicious. Still believes she wasn’t shot, last time I talked to him, even when I asked about the hole in her shoulder, entry and exit. Probably doesn’t believe the Band 86’d him either. So when she gets released from the hospital, he takes pity on her and lets her stay rent-free until she can get back on her feet.

About two days later he gets a call from another ex-band member, neighbor Jim, who informs him there’s a box truck loading up in the driveway and maybe he ought to come on down and see what’s what. Which he does. Only to find two guys busy loading his artwork and furniture into the truck. He politely tells them this stuff belongs to him and they apologize and say they’re helping his tenant load her stuff and didn’t realize. All a misunderstanding, an honest mistake, see? He puts his stuff in the garage so they won’t misidentify it from hers, goes home satisfied that things worked out, and of course, they load up all his paintings and furniture and hit the road, where, since he’s a trusting sort, no roadblock awaits them at the bridge off the island.

If there’s a moral to this story, hell if I know what it is. Other than to say, if you’re ever starting your own Band, be sure you audition your prospective musicians.

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