The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Us boyz competing with each other were all ponying up for our breakfasts at the Snow Café, more accurately the Slow Café judging by the hour it took to get our orders. Apparently Anchorage is in no hurry to join the frenetic rush of the Lower 48. The place was packed and just getting a table took 20 minutes. It gave me and my competition for a courthouse project one block away plenty of time to acquaint ourselves.

I’m usually reticent about these meet-ups, having met some incredible egos in my little career in public art, but this was a big project and us Chosen Few had been to a lot of these dances. The best man might not win, but whoever did would be pretty good. The odds-on horse in the race, Ray King, had amazing installations all over the world. He was leaving that night for London, then on to Taipei. Mostly he regaled us with stories of his 1750’s Pennsylvania homestead on 23 acres, an historic parcel of Americana he was extensively remodeling. Later, he told us, he’ll build his real house. After he sells the 1900 chocolate factory in Philadelphia where he has his studio.

Preston, David and I listened politely, fairly gobsmacked at Ray’s energy and the concomitant wealth. You don’t run into many rich artists, at least not on the South End. David mentioned at some point how great it was, win or lose, to be here as finalists. Ray smiled knowingly, signing his credit card receipt. “Over the years, I’ve decided it takes three things to make it in this business,” he said and all of us prepared to take notes. “Talent. Luck. And Perseverance. A lot of artists can’t handle rejection.”

I doubt Ray has experienced the same level of rejections as the rest of us, but we certainly know what he means. We all have battle scars, knee-buckling disappointments and dark periods of self doubt. Luck can turn on us, both ways. But none of us quit. And if we lose this project we’ll move on to the next.

We all wished each other good luck when we departed. You know, on the next project.

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I’m back up in Anchorage, Alaska doing what half the folks I meet here are doing: looking for a job. Flew in on the noon run after getting up pre-dawn — really, post midnight — and now I’m beat, hunkered down in the Puffin Inn, a motel at the edge of town. The edge of town, at least for us thrifty tourists, is almost affordable, at least now that summer’s over and the salmon runs too.

My first visit I stayed in the Captain Cook Hotel, a downtown upscale joint with multiple doormen and valet parking. It would have been nice but I had a 104 degree fever, chills, vomiting — a good case of the flu in a city locked down by an icestorm. Second time in, I stayed at a seedy wreck of a place the reviews recently called ‘the worst motel in Anchorage’. Admittedly it was rundown and located in the worst part of downtown. When I inquired of the manager, a nice Pakistani whose young daughter studied her school assignments in what passed for the lobby, about the possibility of breakfast, he seemed confused. No, I figured but I thought I’d ask, how about coffee? Oh yes, he nodded, happy to oblige. He pointed to a thermos on a counter nearby and I said that would do nicely. Two cups of bitter java later he approached me with another cup. Crackers? he asked, holding out a cup of Saltine crackers. My turn to be confused, but finally I realized he was making the gesture toward providing a Continental style breakfast. Well, if not continental, maybe Kashmir. Or Syria.

My next visit I decided to play it safe so I stayed at a Motel 6 quite a ways from the Alaska Suites and their Saltine breakfast. Kind of felt bad I wasn’t loyal to the owner, but hey, life is change, adventure, danger! The Motel 6 was, I’m sorry to disagree with the reviewers who thought the Suites were the worst motel in Anchorage, because the 6 was genuinely creepy. Prostitution, drugs, all night parties, hallway fights, you name it, they had it. Well, no Saltine crackers. Genghis Khan could hole up there for months without garnering undue attention. There’s probably a Motel 6 Gang, an offshoot of the Crips, paying by the month and menacing the neighborhood.

The neighborhood, unfortunately, was me. So I’m at the fabulous Puffin. My window faces, well, a wall. So far it’s relatively quiet. And the lobby — half a block away in a separate building — has a breakfast nook, 5-9 am. Probably Triscuits and Tang. I didn’t come for the food, though, I came looking for a job.

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Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

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Once again, we got good news and we got bad news. The good news is I have to scoot up to Alaska on a work related junket for a possible job. The bad news is you’ll be left without your daily Skeeter fix. Okay, I know, they’re both good news. Jeez…. If you need to go the methadone blog route, scroll down and catch some old posts, see if they’re as scintillatingly interesting on the second reading as the first. If you’re like me, you won’t remember them anyway. I barely remember writing them.

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I’m standing at the bar in the South End String Band’s latest hangout after the last couple of dive bars closed. If you want to know why they closed, consider I’ve been here five minutes already, enough to write this much this far. The bartender watched me walk in, the fry cook apparently doesn’t serve liquor to people with a hat so here I stand, still scribbling in my notebook.

Ah … here comes my bartender now to take my drink order.

Oops, no, she’s going to serve the guy who followed me in three minutes after I came in, a regular, surely that justifies leaving the occasional customer to stand another few minutes while they catch up on gossip. There are four of us total in this shotgun alley of a bar. Trust me, only one of us ever leaves a tip. Oops, make that none of us today….

This particular tavern has always been a rough joint. Bikers back in the day, crack users next, meth heads for a time, now just down and outers idling away their afternoons, their evenings, their lives. If you are an aficionado of such places, a connoisseur of the hard drinking, chainsmoking denizens of these inns that the Liquor Board keeps on its permanent Watch List, you can’t really get upset with miserable service when the bartender cops an attitude. After all, the whole place comes with attitude and isn’t that why you come in the first place? You want brass and ferns, muted conversations, white wine in a stemmed glass, the hushed tones of incessant cellphones (‘Excuse me, I have to take this.’) and bartenders who enquire occasionally if you’d care for a refill or a ‘freshening’, you definitely leave town.

There’s some kind of ruckus among the three regulars down the bar but it ends as quickly as it ignited, too early for more than verbal violence anyway. My bandmates eventually arrive and after a short wait Charlene takes their orders. My glass sits empty, but just as she wheels suddenly I try to signal for another beer since she didn’t connect the empty glass with a possible refill. She strides away without turning. My kind of place, I realize, and sure, I’ll leave a tip.

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