The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Most of us, if we were billionaires (or will be soon), probably wouldn’t mind showing the world just how wealthy we are.  Sure, you could buy that super yacht, a palace or two, maybe an island in the Caribbean, but easier to brag would be just let the folks back home take a gander at the last few years of tax returns.  Okay, maybe it might prove embarrassing that you didn’t pay very much on millions of earnings, but that’s just you, the big boyz don’t apologize for deductions and deferments and carried over losses and all the rest of the loopholes in tax laws.  After all, they didn’t pay all that money for lobbyists to end up paying what you pay.  Wake up!  The rich get richer, ever hear that little jingle?

But my man Trump isn’t like most billionaires.  He actually prefers to brag about his money, not show you his money, and he certainly doesn’t want anyone peeking at his tax returns.  You might think a savvy businessman who’s gone through more than a few bankruptcies and is still a billionaire would be amused if not outright happy to let the gawking losers check out how a winner wins.  Oh sure, the trolls think maybe he isn’t as rich as he says, maybe only a one billion billionaire, not the bragging amount.  Trust me, I could get over any embarrassment over exaggerating a billion or three.  You probably could too.

So what makes the King of the Casinos, the Entrepreneur who can sell his naming rights for millions, what makes him want to hide those tax returns?  Couldn’t be fear of an audit.  After all, he claims he would show them to us soon as the current IRS audit is concluded.  Meaning, if my logic isn’t haywire, he’s already being audited.  Ya think?

If you ever wonder why the GOP fights to defund the IRS, I can’t think of a better example than Donald J. Trump.  Hire a team of lawyers and accountants, play fast and loose with the loopholes, then count on the IRS being a little too undermanned to come checking.  Maybe making these returns public might be Clue 1 that a lot was hidden, a great deal was bogus and the light of day might just be the first step in a real audit. Like the man in the movie said, Show us the Money!

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For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.

My brother was here with his wife and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.

I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’

Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.

And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

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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 decade 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.

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I heard a guy on the radio, some Hot Talk jock, who said he was against not only minimum wage increases, he was against minimum wage completely. He argued that the largest growth spurt in U.S. history was when the corporations took off with little tax and with no regulations to prevent them from setting wages as low as the market would bear. Capitalism at its cut-throat best, unfettered, unregulated and unapologetic. The Roaring 20’s. I guess he didn’t read the next chapter in his 8th grade history book, the one titled The Great Depression.

Down here in the laissez faire South End, a lot of us don’t have minimum wage jobs cause we don’t even have jobs. The ones who do have minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to afford health insurance or to make the monthly nut on that double-wide they’ll never own outright. To make ends meet they’ll apply for food stamps or other supplemental programs. These are the folks my Hot Talk jock calls ‘Takers’. Or sometimes ‘Whiners’. And occasionally, when he’s feeling frisky, ‘Leeches’. And when he hears some candidate advocating for tax reform or health care or income equity, he screams ‘Class Warfare’.

The South end Food Bank barely keeps up these days. Moms with kids, fathers without jobs, folks who are disabled, people down on their luck. The Little Church in the Ravine helps the poor, I’ll give em that. Pastor Bob preaches the parable of the loaves and the fish, feeding the masses. I saw a bumper sticker on a BMW going into town: WINNING DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE. Or so he’d like to think….

Charity begins in the home, I’ll grant you, but sometimes we need to think of America as our home. Maybe you never needed a helping hand, but I suspect most of us got one except maybe that BMW driver. You maybe can’t legislate compassion, but you can sure legislate for fair play. You think folks living on the street or applying for food stamps or welfare are all Takers, turn off your radio and stand by the Food Bank half a day. It might just soften your heart.

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