The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I got a pal, Guitar Bob, who just came back from the doctor’s office for his yearly checkup. The doc, he told me, last time I was over, said he should start taking statins. “Statins?” I asked. “Aren’t those for lowering cholesterol?” Bob’s cholesterol has always been low. His old man died at about 99 and Bob’s got genes like Methuselah.

“Whaddaya think?” he asked. Guitar Bob and I have spent many a night talking medicine between songs, mostly with the determination to avoid it. Folks I know spend a fortune on herbal remedies for arthritis and colds, pump ibuprofen for pain, take meds for depression, drink fungi-infused teas for god knows what, all in the hopes it’ll cure what ails em. I believe in eating good food. I know, not gonna sell self help books with that, but I believe you ought to skip the experiments and stick with apples off the trees in the orchard.

Statistics don’t lie, mister. But they are misleading. For awhile I was taking a baby aspirin every day. Supposed to cut down the odds of a heart attack. Now they say it increases the odds of a stroke. So I quit the baby aspirin. If the doctors can’t make up their minds, I sure can.

Who knows what combinations of the myriad stuff we stick into ourselves does what to what? Tomorrow night we’re making sauerkraut, fermented cabbage, garnished with Cindy, the goat woman’s, garlic. Her cabbage too.

Some day, years from now, some future foodologist will discover that fermented cabbage combined with garlic caused duodenal cancer in 10% of the South End population. Except for the lucky few who were taking statins to control cholesterol.

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For years I went to the local Beauty College for cheap haircuts. For a nominal fee, I’d let the students learn from their mistakes, something I apparently didn’t learn from. Maybe it’s low self-esteem or the simple realization that a major tonsorial make-over isn’t going to matter one whit, I don’t know but I hate getting a haircut and I particularly hate paying for one.

Course, I had a couple of memorable coifs, usually at the hands of gay guyz I let experiment on me, what I call Revenge on the Straight Boy. One unforgettable clip left me with a standing wave that no amount of shampooing or combing would tame. A year later it exhausted itself on the beach of my forehead and I never let another avant-garde stylist do a dada surrealist masterpiece with my locks. I assume my sadist scissorist has long since died of nostril cancer from the chemicals in blue hair perms — or at least I hope so. If he could embarrass me, an avowed unhandsome sort, he should probably have been brought up on atrocity charges.

I’ve had my share of bad cuts, most at the hands of those Beauty College students, but some from Ozark butchers hoping to teach the hippie a lesson with an Army cut or small town barbers who learned their craft using a bowl and shears, same as my old man when we were little shavers. Needless to say I go in for a clearcut every year or even two, usually, like today, when I’m off to a job interview. Which, sadly, should give you some insight into the frequency of these job interviews.

These days I go to the chains, SuperCuts or Great Clips or Hairy Masters. They don’t cut any better than the students, but they cut quick. And quick, if you’re a Samson in the hands of your tattooed Delilah, is of the essence. Half hour silences in the swivel stool seem like an eternity — I’ll pay extra for a 5 minute speed snip. I leave a nice tip, say adios, then slap my beat up hat over their artistry. By the time I come back my salon will have closed or been bought up by another carnivorous chain. One free haircut after the 10th, they like to tell me, handing me a coupon card with the #1 circled. Right…. Talk to my undertaker.

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Down at the Cupcake Hut, the South End’s only bakery, the talk over the Hobart bread mixer consists mostly of yeasty gossip and glutinous outrage over fears of being asked to bake a gay wedding cake. Rita Mae, the current owner and born again Christian, was slapping dough down on the kneading table the way a sado-masochist masseuse would pound a hated client.

“No way,” she was fuming for any and all of us pastry lovers standing in front of the display case filled with bismarks and jelly rolls, danishes and apple fritters, muffins and doughnuts, worrying we’d never get our orders until Rita Mae was finished slapping that loaf silly. “I won’t do it. My beliefs come before the law and my law is Higher than theirs and that’s the real truth,” she grunted with a ferocious fist to the lump on the table.

But she wiped the flour off her hands on her apron and slid behind the pastry case to take our orders. Ronnie took a few doughnuts for his landscaping crew and I ordered a fritter and a cup of coffee. To go. I sure didn’t want to sit at one of the little round formica tables while Rita Mae was in one of her Full Rants.

“What’s next?” she shouted and at first I thought she meant what else did I want. “That’ll about do it, Rita,” I shrugged, wishing I was already out that front door.

“Boy oh boy, that’s the truth,” she retorted, ringing up my coffee and fritter. “Next thing’ll be wedding cakes for polygamists. Who knows where this is going? Sodom and Gomorrah right here and I’m supposed to cater the orgies??”

I could feel my sweet tooth going rotten, decaying faster than civilization. “I don’t know, Rita, maybe it’s not really that big an issue. I mean, you don’t get all that much call for wedding cakes, do you? Much less same sex ones.”

Rita Mae shot me the evil eye and I shut up. Ronnie, always the provocateur, turned at the doorway, his bag of pastries held high. “Love thy neighbor, Rita Mae!” Rita Mae grabbed a day old muffin from the tray beside the register and just missed Ronnie as he slammed the door on his way out. The muffin exploded against the back of the sign that said WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. That was probably going to my last fritter, I decided. I can read the writing on the wall about as well as Rita Mae can read her Good Book. “You have a nice day,” she frowned as she gave me change and somehow I knew I wouldn’t.

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Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crack—up,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.

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The South End Suds and Duds, our local laundromat and gossip center, advertises as OPEN 24/7, but for us Maytagless residents, we know it’s open maybe only 5 or 6 days, the other two they’re closed for repairs and plumbing catastrophes now that Wanda , the current owner, lost her husband/repair guy to Cindy, one of the regulars, at least until she ran off for a new life in Phoenix. Wanda took Fred’s betrayal hard, especially considering Cindy was young enough to be their daughter. If she was a bitter chainsmoking woman before, she doubled down after. And consequently lost interest in the Suds and Duds.

I happened to be washing a week’s worth of dirty clothes and sheets when our washer refused to drain. Wanda was interviewing Tommy Wilson for the position of Head Roto-Rooter. Tommy barely knows which end is the working end of a toilet plunger, but Wanda obviously was short on applicants. “I got a guy yesterday,” she said through a haze of Pall Mall smoke, “probably illegal. I said I’d need to see a green card. He could barely speak English. Said he had a family to feed. I told him I was hiring him, not his whole damn family.”

Tommy swore. “Takin our jobs. They’ll own America before long.” Tommy’s jobs disappeared a long time ago. If Wanda hired him, it would break a streak of decades. “We need to deport these people,” he growled darkly. “Just leeches on the rest of us.” Wanda shot him a long exclamation point of smoke. For once I kept my mouth shut. It’s hellish enough doing the laundry here without debating the owners and clientele. I vowed to get my washer fixed ASAP or die trying.

Tommy lasted about half a week, near as I could tell, probably until the first breakdown. Wanda hired an hombre named Carlos to replace him. They say he can fix about anything. Except maybe Wanda’s broke heart and bitter life. I bought a used washer at the 2nd hand appliance place up north. A very polite Hispanic kid helped me load it into my truck. I noticed he spoke perfect English.

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