The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

My old landlord was building a plane in his basement. We were renting the walk-up 2nd floor apartment above Sky Pilot Phil and his long suffering mizzus. I don’t know what Phil did for a living, but I’m fairly certain he wasn’t an airline pilot. When we first moved in, he took me down in the cellar to see his pride and joy. His pride and joy wasn’t his wife, I could tell that right off the bat. He treated her not much better than his cocker spaniel that filled the backyard with landmines we tried to avoid without much luck.

Maybe you’ve never built a small airplane. I sure hadn’t. But I can tell you, it wasn’t small crammed into that basement of his with all the stuff you usually find in a basement. Plus all the stuff Phil needed to assemble this contraption. “Wow!” I said. “How long you been AT this?” He told me he’d been working on this five years. It had a fuselage and I guess he had the motor or engine or whatever aviators call it, mounted on the front, but no propeller yet.

“Wow,” I said again, a little at a loss for words. All I could think was you couldn’t pay me enough to crawl in that flimsy mess, sit in the cockpit and take off to a certain death by gravity. “How much more you got to go, Phil?”

He was close. Real close. I thought of Icarus, maybe too close. “It’s really something,” I said lamely. Like a lot of places I lived during my roaring 20’s, I felt like I needed to move on. Phil’s family life was a wreck and I didn’t care to share it through the heating vents so the day came when I gave notice. “Sure hate to leave before you take her up,” I said, like I really wanted to be a witness to another Hindenburg.

Phil shook his head sadly. “I don’t know if I can get it out.” “Up, you mean….” I asked. “No, out. I didn’t think about getting it through the basement door. It’s a little too big, even disassembled. I may have to cut through a wall.”

We all have our dreams, I suppose. Some realize those dreams and some … well, some are like Phil. Just lucky. My suspicion is he’s still taking renters down in the cellar and still imagines a day, not too distant, of his own personal Kitty Hawk. I’ll give him this: he built a plane. And he lived to tell about it. His wife, I’m betting, probably has a better story.

In 1973 I worked at a dog pound in Madison, Wisconsin. What we called a Humane Society. We adopted 40 % of our mutts … meaning, we killed 60% of the animals, the correct euphemism being euthanized. The national average was 25% adopted so we patted ourselves on the back. My minimum wage job was to clean puppy cages and help kill critters. Let’s just say it’s a short career track unless you’re a practicing sadist, which I am not.

In fact, I adopted three dogs myself, maybe not a big deal if I lived on a country estate with acreage for the hounds to chase rabbits and deer for days on end, but I lived in a second story one bedroom apartment over a TV repair shop. Hard to believe now, looking back. No, not three dogs in a small apartment. That there used to be TV repair shops. When’s the last time you remember fixing a television rather than buy a new one?

One day at the pound they needed me to man the front desk, something I’d never done previously, something that might just lead me up a rung on the promotional ladder. I asked what was expected of me up here at the front door and was told I would direct folks to the kennels where could inspect their future pets. Beats shoveling shit, I thought.

My first encounter with the public was a woman bringing in her old dog and its 4 new puppies. “I can’t take care of these,” she said, pointing at the little wiggling pups in a cardboard box. I asked if maybe she might’ve considered spaying as an option. She shook her head. “Costs money,” she answered. “So you want to leave the mother too? Hasn’t she been with you awhile?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m tired of her too.” Oddly, this pissed me off.

I picked up the phone to our intercom. “Larry,” I said, “fire up the incinerator. We got five to torch.” My dog whisperer seemed suddenly alarmed. Shocked even. “You gonna just kill em?” she cried.

“Whadja think?” I said cruelly. “You think people are lined up for an old dog and her litter?”
About this time Larry emerged from the back, looked at the box of pups and asked, “These?” I nodded. Larry looked at the woman with measured contempt, picked up the box and went into the back where I knew he’d unload them into the puppy cages. He’d be back for the mother shortly. I started filling out the paperwork the way a guard at Dachau would, dispassionately. Name. Address. Reason for wanting your pet killed. Basic stuff.

I guess the woman called later to see if her dogs were toast because Mike, my supervisor, called me into his office. He explained — patiently — how our job was not to judge, our job was to take in unwanted animals so they weren’t drowned in pillowcases in the lake or shot behind the barn. “We want them to bring them to us,” he sighed, painfully aware I was unfit for further front desk duty.

I lasted a few more weeks. Larry lasted a month. There are, I’ve learned, some jobs that aren’t a good ‘fit’. My trouble, of course, was that was pretty much true of all jobs.