The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Being an adventurous yahoo, a curious sort, I ventured up north into the Cascade Mall, our local temple of consumerism in its heyday, now … well, a fluorescent and ghoulish mausoleum, mostly shuttered storefronts with a few zombies roaming the long corridors in search of the last remaining merchandise. Scary place on a rainy afternoon. Not even the teenagers hang here for social hour anymore, no doubt preferring to sex-text from the privacy of their homes.

I can remember when the mall got built, 1989, just north of the Skagit River on the road that connected Mt. Vernon to Burlington which became, instead of a sleepy two lane stretch with dying businesses, a four lane highway to Sears and Penneys and Macys in a gleaming half a million square foot emporium of commerce. The little strip malls of Mt. Vernon emptied in the wind that sucked the life out of them and downtown too. Outlet malls sprung up with the speed of overnight mushrooms, bursting through pavement and fill dirt. Burlington was on the map. When Arcan Cetin walked into the women’s department of Macys in 2016 and shot dead five people, the mall was already wobbling from the Great Recession’s toll of nearly ten years. Scary place indeed!

But here I am, looking for an oversized Pyrex baking pan that I couldn’t find in my usual thrift stores. Well, one scratched up one that I can go back to if need be…. I am a bit stunned at the vacancies of this place, entire wings with no stores, the main corridor empty except for odd little clothing boutiques, Victoria’s Secret, nails and pedicure salons, most devoid of any shoppers, some devoid even of salesclerks. But I stumble down to Macys bestrewn with banners announcing their Big Closing Sale, 50% off Everything in the Store! Boy, howdy, my lucky day.

Surprisingly the shelves are mostly still stocked. I wander with two other people through the kitchen stuff, find what I’m looking for and announce myself at the cash register, figuring sirens and lights would clamor forth with a small celebration of a Purchase! An elderly clerk asks if I’m ready and I nod a vociferous affirmation, you bet I’m ready to save half the price of this Pyrex beauty. He fumbles for a sheet of figures, mutters that he has difficulty with the calculations for housewares and, helpful as can be, I say 50%, like all the banners all around the store trumpet. Not too hard, eh?

But no, he informs me solemnly, housewares is only 25% off. I rebut that the signs all say Storewide 50% on Everything. Got him there, I’m sure. But mais no, monsieur, he tells me, the sign says UP TO 50%. If it does, you would need a microscope to see that miniscule caveat, but I know when I’m beaten, I know a bait and switch when I fall for one, and I also know there is no way on god’s warming earth I’m paying one dime more than 50% off the sticker price, plus, I remember why I never come to places like this to shop. Or will again.

Of course I also know by the time I drive back to Goodwill for that scratched Pyrex, some more savvy shopper will have grabbed it. Time, I suppose, to shop Ebay with the full appreciation that this will be another nail in the coffin that is … or was … Cascade Mall.

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The year of the American Bicentennial I was a bit adrift. Marriage was gone to hell, jobs weren’t what I might have hoped for, the future didn’t look bright. I decided to take a Road Trip, maybe figure stuff out, maybe get myself a Plan, maybe not. I was 24 years old.

My old pickup, a rusty Army castoff, was my chariot to the Deep South, parts of which I had never been to, so I headed down through Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, headed, I had no doubt, for New Orleans. Around Little Rock I picked up a hitchhiker. My intention was to pick everybody with a thumb stuck out, take them where they were going, not as if it would be out of my way. The road was wide open, my nose was my GPS. And yeah, I know, kind of a hippie way of looking at things, but hey, when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, not that I really had, most directions look like Up. My hitcher was about my age, a little down on his luck too if I didn’t miss my guess.

“Where ya going?” I asked the guy who was my very first act of Good Samaritanship. “Goin to Little Rock,” he said, “to kill my no good bastard brother-in-law.” Now, I’m used to guy talk, rough around the edges, but just talk. Blowing off steam, nothing much more. But my rider wasn’t blowing off steam, at least not til he got to Little Rock where, he made it abundantly clear, even vivid, how he was going to dispatch his bastard brother-in-law.

Since I was just a sojourner on the road myself, both of us kind of lost souls, I gave him some half-assed advice that basically amounted to don’t kill the guy, bad karma, jail time, the usual pablum you yourself would give to the potential murderer riding shotgun in your pickup. I have no idea whether he killed that no good brother in law, but I had the feeling, by the time we reached Little Rock, he was reconsidering. I did what I could, right? Everything except call the Law.

My next hitchhiker was a 30 year old black guy standing next to a battered suitcase outside New Orleans. He was, he told me, just out of prison and the sheriff in his redneck Texas town told him he had 24 hours to get out … or else. He had a pretty good idea what that or else might be so he hit the road and here he was, on his way to Leesburg, Florida where some kin were. So yeah, we talked about the murder he committed, some white guy who was threatening a kid he was with supposedly, a white kid even, got 10 years, finally got out. Time for a New Start. You know, somewhere else.

He rode with me for a full day. For a murderer he seemed like an okay guy. Not knowing any other killers, I may not have been the best judge, but at least he wasn’t on his way to murder anybody like my last rider. Counts for something. When I pulled over to pick up two guys at a filling station, he grew extremely agitated. “No way, man, don’t give these guys a ride.” I asked why and he said “can’t you see they’re no good, man. They’re bad dudes, you don’t want to pick them up.” Maybe I was being harsh but I said “you killed a guy and you’re worried about these two?”

Well, in the end I drove past these bad dudes and felt a little bad that already I was violating my vow, my karmic duty. Looking back now some 40 odd years later, I think he was right. He knew people a whole lot better than me. You think maybe things can’t get much worse, you’re as big a fool as I was. I took my rehabilitated murderer all the way to Tallahassee, gave him an old sleeping bag since he wanted to wait til morning to go into town, wished him luck. He wished me the same. My luck eventually turned. I have a nagging suspicion that his maybe didn’t. I hope this time I’m wrong.

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KNKX’s Gabriel Spritzer interviewed a few of us South End yahoos awhile back on his show Sound Effects and yesterday (Jan. 25, 2020) put that interview on the air. If you were one of the fortunates who missed the broadcast, you still have time to inflict pain and suffering on yerself. Here’s the link: https://www.knkx.org/programs/sound-effect. Once you’ve reached the bowels of their website, click Friend or Foe, sit back with a cold one and enjoy a short ride down Memory Lane with Jack Gunter, Rev. Chumleigh and yours not too truly. Probably make you yearn for a few more days of impeachment hearings …

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I’m sitting in the local barbershop that just opened up in town humming that song ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, but apparently I’m not going to let my freak flag fly even one more day. I got mixed feelings. My hair was down to my shoulders, first time since back in about 1980 when I moved out here and drove school bus for the little felons I transported. Don’t ask me why but I got this wild hair to let it grow, see if it brought back hippie memories.

It didn’t. Just an old geezer growing his hair long in the modern era of ‘50’s crewcuts, some kind of rebel statement, not sure for who. Whom. Whatever. Shampoo bill hitting the ceiling and drying time about two days. Longer hair than the mizzus, probably confusing sexual identities, why not?

The two guyz in front of me look like they get a trim about every two weeks. My last haircut was two years ago. Probably saved me about $400. Or quite a few gallons worth of shampoo. Without possessing any superhuman strength, I still seem to have a Sampson/Delilah complex. But growing my hair long didn’t make me any stronger either. Warmer in winter, about all.

Most of my adult life, a haircut meant I was on my way to some kind of interview. Jobs, art committees, anything where I worried I might lessen my odds looking like a refugee from the 60’s. As I got older and greyer in the beard, I figured the length of my hair was the least of my worries, considering I showed up in jeans, goodwill shirts and a battered cowboy hat so soiled I might have been an Okie lost in the exodus from the Dust Bowl. Artist chic, I liked to tell myself. Right.

The thing about haircuts is that invariably I regret getting them. The upside is that hair tends to grow back, not like an irreversible decision. Another two or three years, I’ll probably be back here in the chair. Maybe for a trim….

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My recent request for a visa to emigrate to my old country, my place of birth, was turned down yesterday, no reason given, but I suspect it’s due to the fact no one knows where that country is these days. It’s been moved or it’s become invisible, you tell me. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my old nation most of my life, probably because I reached so-called adulthood during the Viet Nam War, the Kennedy assassinations, the Martin Luther King murder, the Chicago convention riots orchestrated by Mayor Daley, the Gulf of Tonkin and Tricky Dick. J. Edgar Hoover was head of the secret police and Watergate was about to unfold. It was hard for me to send Valentine cards to my place of birth back then.

But age has mellowed me. Or at least it’s made me more senile, more forgetful, maybe even more forgiving. Oh sure, there was that military mop-up in Panama, Grenada, the first Gulf War. Kind of brought back those bad memories of the 60’s and early 70’s. I guess I’d sort of dropped out for a few decades, moved to the edge of the continent, crossed onto the island and didn’t look back. Literally burned my TV, didn’t read newspapers, internet hadn’t been invented, life was, to use an overworked phrase, idyllic. The future looked okay, but I was mostly living in the present, not a bad place to live if you got a few acres, a roof, a part time job that pays the mortgage and covers the groceries, not bad at all.

You keep your nose to the ground, grow a garden, plant an orchard, build a house, you don’t spend as much time watching politics. Oh sure, there was that Iran/Contra war Reagan illegally funded with arms sales, covert for awhile. Clinton got himself impeached for chronic dickmanship, then Bush Junior invaded Iraq again after the Twin Trade Towers were toppled by bin Laden, a bad piece of intervention that will cost us and cost us and cost us again. Okay, I was starting to pay attention to national and world events, even voting, even got asked to run for county commissioner, that’s how above ground I stuck my head. You start to give a damn, you’re asking for trouble, real trouble.

Obama got himself elected right when the Great Recession started, the one where the banks and Wall Street gambled heavily with our money and lost, but even so, I got caught up in that Hope thingy of his, maybe America, if it could vote for a black guy, a half black guy anyway, as President, well, the future looked bright. Real bright. I guess I shoulda bought shades….

Well, somebody pulled the shades on that bright future anyway and his name was Trump. They’ve impeached him but no way are they gonna find him guilty with this sycophant Senate. Without a doubt the little huckster might win another four years in office and if so, he’ll want four or eight after that. My country is gone. And for some odd reason, not clear to me now, I want it back. The question I have, the one I have yet to answer, is why.

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