The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Don’t panic yet, but the rats are here! We killed one yesterday with a trap half the size of a bear trap. But its brethren look in the window at night and climb up the walls looking for an easy entry. Rats. Is there a more loathsome beast? On four legs anyway….?

Some years back we thought we had mice so I set the traps one night and figured we’d be rid of them by breakfast. About 2 in the morning I awoke to the rattle Thump rattle Thump thump of the trap whapping the floor again and again, a deranged clatter disturbing my precious sleep. Wearily, I climbed the stairs bollicky-bare, expecting to find Mickey in the trap still alive. I dreaded whatever mayhem would follow for the Final Solution. Imagine my naked surprise discovering a rat in the mousetrap, big loathsome longtailed rodent, bearer of Black Plagues and bubonic fever. Yiiii!

Without hesitation I grabbed a nearby broom and whacked that rat a couple of good ones. Only to see him free himself from the puny trap he’d previously had no luck escaping from…. Now it was mano y mano, two naked mammals tooth to tooth, broom to hairless tail, both of us hopping wildly, half crazed in the dim kitchen light, whap, slap, whack and then … oh sweet baby Huey, the four legged vermin jumped off the opening to the downstairs, a 10 foot drop to the slate floor and landed … I couldn’t believe it! … at the open door to our bedroom.

Where the mizzus was sleeping the unsuspecting snooze of the guiltless. I took the stairs two at a time, my heart beating ferociously as if I were being hunted, not Mickey Rat. Oh man, that cornered varmint could be anywhere. I listened for scrabbling, I waited in the dark stock still, I wished I had pants on!!! I could hear clocks ticking, the fridge gurgling, a faucet dripping … but no rat sounds. Us two adversaries waited, waited some more, waited just as we have since time immemorial.

Finally I gave up and went to bed. Pulled the covers up over my head. Tight. For the time being, I ceded territory. And sleep. Tomorrow, though … tomorrow we’d see who was boss. Tomorrow, mister, we’d see who wore the pants in this house, yessir. Tomorrow….

I was a scrawny little kid back in high school. No muscles, no particular athletic aptitude, just a tall skinny teenager with a face full of zits who moved around the country a lot, odd kid out. I ended up in a northern Wisconsin high school where the jocks ruled the roost. If we’d had a beach nearby, I’d have eaten a lot of sand. We had P.E. teachers who studied in the Hermann Goebbel School of Sadism, the sort of men who dragged kids out of the pool by their hair if they had hair enough to grab. The kind of Nazis who, on days when snow covered the tennis courts in the spring, would set up a game indoors they called Casketball. It was a hybrid between basketball and rugby. You got the ball, everyone could tackle you. On the hardwood floor of the gym. Then the rest were expected to pile on. Kids got hurt a lot in that game. Naturally, the star athletes could sit the ordeal out, no need to lose a Letterman to the instructors’ gladiatorial instincts. One of my buddies got rammed into a volleyball pole and skewered badly in the face with a bolt protruding out of its attachment hole. The game, of course, went on after one of the coaches took him to the nursing station. The P.E. teachers would bet on their classes to win. At least, I think they bet on us winning….

You might guess I hated P.E. But not as much as I loathed the two Stormtroopers who ran those classes. Every day we’d strip down and put on our little shorts and t-shirts, snug up our jockstrap and head out to some variant of humiliation. One fine spring day we headed out to the baseball field for some intramural competition. Coach Mengele took his place at third base to play with us. Bored, I guess. Coach Mengele was about 6’7” and 250 pounds of raw Aryan meat. He had blonde hair and metallic eyes. If Arnold Schwarznegger had been a star back then, this guy would’ve been his double in Terminator.

I had played some baseball back in Georgia. My old man was a semi-pro pitcher, once got to pitch against Ted Williams. He would take us boys out in the back yard and show us how to hold a bat, field a ball, pitch a curve. We weren’t very good, but he always told us it was more important to get an education than be a star athlete. We wanted to believe that, but how many honor roll kids get to be Prom King? Maybe he just wanted us to be single all our lives, I don’t know. But like I said, I’d played baseball before and when I got on base the first day, I watched the Fuhrer over there on 3rd base waiting like a giant spider for the unlikely possibility I would try to get past him. The kid at the plate slugged one into the corner of the outfield and so I went tearing around 2nd and headed for 3rd. The outfielder had put the ball perfectly in line for a tag-out where Arnold was blocking the basepath, a huge troll who wasn’t asking for a toll, he was going to bounce me back to 2nd or swat me to right field with the baseball in his glove.

I heard the ball hit the leather right after I drove at him in a slide, feet up, all 140 pounds of unmuscled boyhood, and I aimed at his ankle with everything I had. And surprise of surprises, the Jolly Green Giant toppled onto his face as if Jack had lopped off his beanstalk. I slid into 3rd safe and popped right up. And stood looking down at my tormentor. He scrambled around, wiped dirt off the side of his face, and for a moment I thought he would come up swinging. “You okay?” I asked Goliath sweetly.

There are moments you will cherish the rest of your days. There are moments that you will look back on and think that right there was a turning point of some kind, even if you don’t have the vocabulary for it. The stunned look on that man’s face when he recovered himself, well, it was worth the humiliations of countless gym classes. If small victories don’t mean anything to you, okay, I understand. But I can tell you, it changed the way that man thought of me from then until I left that backwash highschool. It didn’t change a thing, though, how I thought of him.

Some people are born to be businessmen. They know how to promote themselves, they understand negotiation, they embody what Donald Trump calls the Art of the Deal. I wish I had a couple of strands of those genes in my DNA. My kin, my ancestors, my genepool — all I can say is they climbed down out of the trees, but they never figured out they could sell the timber or develop the real estate. Plus we never remembered how to climb back up so now folks want to sell US the damn trees.

I actually have a business. I know, hard to believe. My right-leaning Republican relatives and in-laws shake their heads sadly to think I’m the only one in the two families who represents their bedrock GOP values of entrepreneurial get-up-and-go, job creation, small business struggles, all those virtues they hold dear. I sell goods. I buy materials, fashion them into art and then I have to sell the product. American? Well, it sticks in their throats, but yeah, as apple pie. Mom and country. Bootstrap success story. You might suppose, after 35 years, I’d be pretty good at it. I just made a stained glass entryway window for some new arrivals on the South End. Even though I’m cheaper than any glass shop in the Pacific Northwest … and even though my stuff is original artwork … I ended up giving them a discount. And they’re rich. You tell me what’s wrong with that picture.

I bought a new truck a few years ago when my old one almost caused me to miss a huge commission for a public art project down in Portland. You think I negotiated a lower price or argued for some ‘extras’? If you thought that, you don’t know me. All I asked my salesman was sell me the damn truck sitting out there in the lot, the one without any bells or whistles, and don’t screw around, I want to leave here ASAP, I don’t want to play the game, I don’t want the sales manager showing me an invoice proving you aren’t making any money on the deal, I don’t want to hear that bullshit. Yes, I’ll pay full price. No, I don’t want to take it for a test drive. Yes, I’m a complete idiot.

But …. I’m an idiot who would rather pay the full monte than get down in the pit and wrassle for a few dollars. I’m not going to lie and say money is beneath me. I’m frugal to a fault. I’m my Depression-era parents’ kid. I shop mostly at Goodwills, I buy Chinese, I’m so stingey I squeak. Money comes hard and it leaves hard too.

Sales is a tough job, at least for the likes of me. Buyer beware? I don’t think so. For me, it’s seller beware.

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 they 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.