The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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About 45 years ago I lived in a rough part of Seattle and Gomorrah, vacant lots, drugs, gun running, white slaving, stolen goods sold door to door, my introduction to life in the urban ghetto, quite a wake up call for a young idealistic hippie. A few streets over from my house was a block on Yesler Street and 12th where the cops not only patrolled but parked for long stretches to surveil a notorious tavern that called itself a club, not a bar. One day, walking by, I came across a guy with an airbrush painting the warehouse wall facing that gin joint. I asked him what was up and he told me he was painting a mural the length of the block on that concrete block wall. When I heard that I shook my head and said man, they’ll deface that before the paint dries, but he only smiled and said he didn’t think so. ‘They’ll appreciate the art. They won’t touch this.’

I wasn’t an artist then but I thought this yahoo had been eating fairy dust to think the animals down on that block wouldn’t graffiti up his monumental work in a day or two. 25 years later, when I paid a nostalgia visit to my old haunts, that mural was as vibrant and unmarked as when he painted it. Trust me when I tell you that made an impression on me. When committees would ask if I thought my own murals would be vandalized, I would tell them this story. They were about as convinced as I was back then talking to my anonymous artist.

Twenty years ago I became the project manager for the new Visitor Center on the island when our contractor finally got weary of dealing with us artists and went back to his day job. We put sculpture and art on the grounds, built a small Center with a modern design and dropped a 15 foot by 15 foot stained glass window in the front. Folks would drop by to chat with me that summer, about half just wondering what we thought we were doing, who was paying for all this crap, why were screwing up the rural character of their bucolic existence. Bottles were repeatedly tossed against the building and the glass, pellet guns put holes in the mural, a couple of our sculptures were stolen. My faith in the prophesy of that muralist long ago was a bit perforated too.

So yesterday when I went over to measure the broken window some vandals had smashed, intending to put a stained glass panel in as a replacement, figuring, I guess, that my little library in the old 60’s telephone booth would be vandal proofed if it had more art in it, not just literature, imagine my disappointment to discover the door had been shot out and another large window too. Needless to say I didn’t bother to measure anything other than my despondency. Today I’m thinking about my muralist down there in the ghetto and his art that still resonates nearly half a century later. My own mural at the Visitor Center sports bullet holes and cracked panels and the building itself has been kitsched up with posters of animal butts and adolescent humor. I tell myself someday those posters will come down and the Sculpture Park we built will be honored by the citizenry. I tell myself that as I just finished a 21 foot long mural for the island’s new Administration Building which I’m donating. This is the 20th donation of glass murals, something I do to bring an aesthetic to the island and to the area. That’s what I tell myself. And some days I even believe that. But not today. Today I feel like Don Quixote, not just tilting at windmills but moronically building them. And no, I don’t know what I’ll do with that smashed up Little Library of mine.

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The South End Little Library has suffered more than its share of indignities since its grand opening a year or so ago. Vandals the first week tossed books from their shelves in the GTE repurposed phone booth, burned a few, then painted obscenities on the glass windows. Bringing literacy to the denizens of the backwashes here, I realized as head librarian, was going to be no easy task. But really, book burning? It wasn’t as if the burnt volumes were controversial. One was a child’s book about a rabbit and … well, it was hard to decipher through the burnt cover. So who knows, maybe a gay rabbit. Or a rabbit that used curse words. Or an atheist rabbit. Or these illiterates just didn’t like rabbits.

A few months ago the shelves were pulled out of the booth and the books strewn across the lawn to spend a soggy night in the rain before I discovered the mayhem, too late for about six dozen books. For a week I closed the library, put up a sign that the closure was due to vandalism, then debated with myself whether to restock the shelves. No good deed goes unpunished down in this neck of the dark woods. Ignorance is bliss, they tell me, and maybe I was trying to bring my own brand of religion to the unwashed masses who already had Trump to worship.

My little park, a five acre tract with some nice firs and cedars along its trails, is a magnet for garbage disposal, midnight trysts and miscreant hidey-holes. We’ve had broken glass strewn across the parking area, camouflaged pits dug back in the woods with sharpened sticks waiting for unwary hikers, staging areas for stolen goods hidden in the brush, used condoms tossed nightly. Trees and shrubs I’ve planted have been dug up and stolen. Sculptures have been swiped, grills purloined, rocks thrown into the grassy areas to make mowing a shrapnel nightmare. Being the head ranger has been a study in negative human behavior.

So when I went over a few days ago to mow and found the window of the library smashed out with a bottle, I can’t say I was very surprised. No doubt the work of anitfa, left wing radicals and those pesky anarchists tired of looting the urban swamps. Federal troops would likely be mobilized to help me guard this place now, good news. Although library use would probably hit rock bottom. Price you pay for Stormtroopers protecting the Homeland, I guess.
After mowing I went home, got rakes and brooms and returned to clean up the mess. Sure, I grumbled, I whined, I shook my fist. But what are you gonna do? Indeed. Right now I have a hole in my little biblioteca where the rain and the wind can come through. I’m thinking maybe boarding it up rather than replace the glass for future missile throwers. Paint something on it maybe. You know, see if art can soothe the savage beasts on the barbarian South End. I know, fat freakin chance.

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The Flatheads were parked at the Diner, their vintage machines waxed and gleaming in the packed dirt parking lot. They meet every Wednesday morning, rain, shine or engine check warning, slide a few tables together, then hold court as they argue after-market carburetors and auto body strategies. And, of course, politics du jour. The rest of us customers either avoid Wednesdays or else come for the show as a willing audience. I count myself in the latter.

Today’s improv started out with a lively discussion of Jerry’s newly purchased ’50 GMC 5 window pickup, original paint, completely stock, nearly immaculate except for a small rust hole in the left quarterpanel. The Flatheads debated whether Jerry should leave the original paint alone or go for a new spray job, an old argument between the purists and the car show enthusiasts.

But somewhere between the spray booth boyz and the ‘let er be’ crowd, the conversation veered without warning into the deep ditch of this year’s elections. Fairlane Frank, a proponent of two tone Fords, had tossed a fork with a clatter on to his half eaten chicken fried steak, splattering white gravy across the formica DMZ. “Trump’s no Republican,” he growled in a mouthful of rage and food. “He’s hi-jacked the whole party.” Pat, proud owner of a 1972 Gremlin and recipient of countless jeers and guffaws, cheerily suggested the time might be right for a 3rd party. “The Know Nothings,” he suggested as a name.

And so it began…. Bel Aire Bobby retorted that we already have that party, opening up a wild round of just which party qualified before Brenda, coffee pot in hand, said, “Maybe you boys should stick with 4 barrel carburetors and dual hemis, leave the politics to the professionals.”

Frank started to object but Brenda stared him down with her headlights on high beam while she poured seconds and thirds. “Frank, I’m makin minimum wage here. No benefits, no insurance, no 401-K. Now my kid needs an operation. Trust me, you don’t want to get me going on politics.” And with that, she whirled to the next table. None of the car guyz said a word for a full minute. Like the man said, all politics is local. But when they left, the tip from the boyz, usually measley, was enough to buy Pat’s Gremlin and pay for a paint job to boot.

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When I first moved to the Left Coast, I had a yearning to get myself a motorcycle, learn to ride, then set myself free on the byways of the Cascades. Being poor, I bought a used Honda 350 that hadn’t run in years, wouldn’t start and looked like it was ready for the crusher. I paid $100 for the piece of junk, hauled it back to my house in the ghetto and pushed it down the basement stairs where I could spend some quality time diagnosing why it wouldn’t start over the winter months.

By summer I had the problem solved and so, with the help of my roommates, I hauled it back up and out to the backyard, kick started it into an oily smoke idle and admired the thing in the full light of a Seattle sunny day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to ride it. I called the police and asked what kind of temporary license I would need to take it for some learning spins on their city streets and was told it was illegal, no temporary licenses were to be had. I said how am I spozed to learn how to ride. The sergeant said it wasn’t his problem.

So right from the start I became an outlaw biker, stalling my crappy bike on half the shifts, careening down the mean streets of my neighborhood, searching for large empty parking lots to practice sharp turns and fast starts. Trouble was, my clutch didn’t shift right and every so often the engine would shut off in mid-travel for no apparent reason that I could diagnose. On one of my ventures I came across a fellow biker working on his Harley at Seward Park, tools spread on the parking lot and so I thought why not ask an expert about my clutch problem. He was hard at it in his Joker leathers with his tattoos bulging as he strained to his work, a fellow outlaw. I interrupted him to ask about my clutch dilemma. He looked at my battered scooter and said — I can remember it clearly to this day 40 years later — ‘Get the fuck away from me, man.’ I took it to mean us real bikers fix our own bikes without outside help.

On the way back to my ghetto house I was idling at the red light on Jackson and 23rd when a menacing group of black gangbangers roared up beside me on both sides, about 15 or so, all revving their Harleys as we waited for the green so that I thought I was inside a Boeing 747 engine. I didn’t think this was an initiation test. And I didn’t think it would end well either. The light, after what seemed like an hour, turned green and we all popped our clutches, ready for a tire burning, wheel skidding jackrabbit start … and my bike died right then.

I suppose a lesser man, a man not accustomed to the outlaw biker life, might have been embarrassed. A lesser man might have thought the laughter and catcalls from the black Banditos was too much endure. A lesser man might have junked his prized Honda 350 and succumbed to the temptation to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and show these hooligans who really ruled these mean urban streets. But me, I pushed my spray painted motorcycle ten blocks back to the basement and sold it a month later. For $100. My easy riding days had come to an end. There was nothing more to prove, I guess.

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