The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I stumbled into a lumberyard the other day and noticed a sign by the 2×4’s that read $7. Last time I looked a 2×4 cost 2 bucks and some change. The sticker shock made me check the price of plywood just to see if maybe some new employee with glasses fogged by his Covid mask hadn’t screwed up the price inadvertently, but nope, the ½ inch plywood was 3 and a half times what it was last sheet I bought not too long back.

Ditto the 2×6’s and the treated lumber and the cedar decking. All I can figure is either Covid killed a helluva lot of trees, driving the prices sky high or it killed the loggers who refused to wear masks. Whatever, this is another dark side of the pandemic, no doubt another conspiracy by the damn Democrats to raise the cost of a home and ruin the American Dream for the average citizen.

My old roommate from our Slacker Years when we were content with poverty, living the Dream down at the South End, came up recently for a visit. I had the shack then and a mortgage of $24,000 with a monthly payment of $180. Easy living! If you didn’t mind shack life. And we certainly didn’t. Known to the local lumberyard as the Piranha Brothers, we built two additions to that shack, one a backroom I used as a stained glass shop and the other, a kitchen addition, room for a sink and cabinets plus a 1920’s electric stove and a 6 foot by 3 foot clear cedar slab for a table, probably worth a bitcoin or three in today’s speculative lumber market.

We built with 2×4’s and 2×6’s, probably spent a couple hundred bucks to frame both, same with the plywood siding, go Martha Stewart with tarpaper then nail on the cedar shakes scrounged from various sources and voila, you got yourself some elbow room, mister, maybe not Architectural Digest, but nice for the price.

Now, of course, I’m considering taking them apart. Gotta be worth more as vintage 2×4’s than a tax appraiser’s assessment of a deteriorating hundred year old hovel. I’ll even pull the rusty nails, only cost slightly more than what the lumberyard wants for inferior wood. And … environmentally correct to recycle. Yep, sounds like a win win to this old Piranha Brother.

We got a token Republican in the Wednesday night Mabana Poker Club. Billy Bluff, we call him, mostly because he’s a piss poor bluffer. When he’s got a good hand he makes idle small talk. When he’s got a winning hand, he talks politics. Billy might as well send up an LED signboard announcing he drew a straight flush. But in case we missed the Signs, he bets low, hoping to keep the pot filling up until he can bet the maximum at the end, suckering the rest of us into staying with him.

He’s actually one of the new breed of GOP, meaning he hates the government and wants to stop funding about everything but the military and corporate subsidies. Taxes are too high, unions are ruining profits and killing jobs, drugs are legal, men are marrying men, Obama isn’t a real citizen, all the usual rants with a few more raves completely from Right Field. We don’t mind so long as Billy uses politics to telegraph his hand. Politics are expensive for Billy, but the thinks he’s just unlucky. That, or maybe he suspects we cheat, the cards are marked or the games are rigged. I guess in a way they are.

The night Billy drew 4 kings in 5 card stud on the first deal, I had 2 pair before the next deal. Billy got going on Secession. Bad sign before we drew a card. “Secession,” he declared, betting the usual fifty cents, see who’d stick, probably all of us. I tossed my half buck in and instead of raising, asked, “The South End, you mean?” Everyone ante’d up.

“You think everything’s about the South End, Skeeter. I’m talkin about Washington state dropping out.” He didn’t ask for a single card from Flat-top Fred who was dealing. Fred shook his head sadly. Real bad sign. Still, you never know, he might be bluffing. I took three cards, Pete took three, Ralph and Walter both took two. Fred dealt himself one. Billy tossed a buck into the pot non-chalantly. “State’s rights, I’m talkin here,” he said, a little too loud, meaning he had a helluva hand. “The government becomes oppressive, we got the right to leave, that’s what I’m sayin.”

Pete dumped in his cards right then and there. “You could always go to Canada, Bill,” Walter said, tossing a dollar. I looked at my new cards, 3 queens over my 2 jacks, full house. Maybe as good or better than Billy’s. Ralph stuck and Flat-top, sitting on a fat flush, raised. Ralph cursed and folded without even waiting for the bid to get back to him. My full house looked good, maybe too good, maybe not enough. “We already fought the Civil War, Bill,” I said. “You want slavery back or just lower the minimum wage?” I tossed my money in without raising, not real confident now.

Billy chuckled and raised us 5, the maximum bid we’d agreed to years ago. “I want my goddamn country back, Skeeter, even if we have to start over.” Flat-top groaned. “You could go to Quebec, Bill. They want to secede. You’d be in good company if you learn a little French.” He tossed a five in and raised a five. Ten to me. Those queens over jacks were looking weaker and weaker. But it was a full house. And now I was worried about Fred’s hand. “I don’t think they’d let him in, Fred. I got turned back the last try.” I was talking about my little incident with the border guards a couple weeks earlier. I pushed ten bucks into the growing pile, knowing Billy was going to raise us again. Maybe Fred too.
“Course they didn’t want to let YOU in, Skeeter. But I’m not going up to some country that’s more of a welfare state than we are. Get a grip. And get another five bucks out if you want to see this hand.” Fred took another look at his cards. A hard look. His confidence was waning fast as mine. “I hear Quebec is nice in the winter,” he mumbled and called with another five to the pot. I hated to, but I had to see his hand, so my five went in too. “Let’s see what you got, boys, cause I got a full house, queens over jacks.” Fred flipped a flush disgustedly into the chips and swore before taking a long slow miserable swig off his beer.

Billy laid one king, then another and then the third. He smirked, showed an ace, waited a long while, then dropped the fourth king. “All I know, children,” he said, “is the rich get richer. Clean livin’s what does it.” He pulled the pot into himself with great satisfaction. The world can sure be cruel when everyone’s lucky. If I’d had a lick of sense, I would’ve seceded a long time earlier.

Walter walked into the South End Diner last Friday morning carrying his Winchester 30-30 under his arm, a rifle meant primarily for hunting deer. He’s a card carrying NRA member and he takes his membership as seriously as a truck driving Teamster or an artist in the Camano Arts Association. Walter thinks the government wants to take his arsenal away from him and apparently, to protect his right to bear arms, he intends to bear them in the Diner.

Anita rolls her eyes from behind the cash register when he walks in with his unintentionally comic John Wayne swagger. “Whatcha got there, Pilgrim?” she asks. As owner of the café, she’s basically the sheriff, judge and jury in this one horse town. She makes the laws here and Walter, well … Walter’s not sure if the 2nd Amendment actually applies in the Diner with Anita at the City Limits, but by God, he intends to make a point and the Constitution should back him up and all the other Gun Toters in America and Anita, well, Anita can just shove it, he figures.

Like usual, Walter figures wrong. Anita holds a hand up like a traffic cop stopping cars. “We already killed the meat, Walter. Bacon, burgers, chicken, they’re dead. You want to be sure, order em well done. But … you aren’t hauling that gun in my restaurant, I don’t care if it’s loaded, empty or stuck up your keester, no way, no how. Comprende?”

Walter starts into quoting the Amendment but Anita’s out from behind the counter before he can hit the ‘right to’ and she’s got him by a twist of hair, turning him like a rusty screw toward the door and he’s yowling in pain so much she lets go. “Dammit, Walt, you give me indigestion, you really do. Give me the rifle and you can have it when you’ve finished your breakfast. But I can’t have the Wild West here with families and tourists. Take your protest to Stanwoodopolis, if you need to demonstrate. I got a business to run, probably into the ground, but I sure don’t need your help.”

In the end Walter’s politics took 2nd fiddle to eggs and bacon and his usual chicken fried steak. And Walter never brought his Winchester in the Diner again. But I don’t know about the Starbucks in town. Altho …there’s probably some enterprising entrepreneur who’s opened up a Barista Balllistic just to cater to the Walters of the world.

My pal Joey who’s been laid off now, oh, about 15 years ever since the recession hit back in Ought Eight, has turned from cynical to bitter. Used to be he hated his employer for poor wages and lousy benefits, now he hates the government for no wages, no benefits and no jobs, not even ones he hates. He spends a lot of his day e-mailing buddies, myself unfortunately included, screeds against the President and Congress (mostly the Democratic side, what he calls socialists and traitors and worse) rather than look for work.

I always wonder why he doesn’t spend his bile on Wall Street and the banks who sent the economy on a wild ride of greed, which finally plummeted to terra firma, crashed and burned and pulled the economy into the smoldering crater with them, but I guess you got to blame somebody.

“Joey,” I say. “Now that you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, how come you don’t become a Job Creator? Be the capitalist you dreamed of being? Start a bizness?” Joey looks at me with pity and shakes his head in disgust. “You and this damn government, Skeeter. You’ve set up regulations and roadblocks. Too many taxes. How’s a Little Guy like me gonna get off the ground? It’s like running a race carrying a 50 pound concrete block. Guaranteed to fail.”

“Too small to succeed, that it?” I can’t help saying. “They all started out small, Joey.”

Joey’s exhausted a long stretch of unemployment compensation. He’s pulling 401-K retirement money too early to live on and that ticks him off, all those penalties. Michelle, his wife, works part time at Jolene’s Beauty Salon, but even with tips, she’s barely clearing minimum wage. Course, Joey’s against raising minimum wage because if he ever did start being a Job Creator, that 50 pound block holding him back would be 60 pounds.

Joey’s never going to work again everybody but Joey knows. He’s retired at 55, another casualty of the Recession, and for his remaining years he can aim his wrath at the illegal immigrants who take the jobs he might have wanted, at the government which ended his unemployment compensation with only two extensions, at the IRS for taxing his 401-K withdrawals, at his old employer for sending jobs overseas, at the people on welfare who’d rather take a handout than look for work, at the women who’ve joined the labor market….

The American Dream withered on the vine for Joey and his fellow victims. He doesn’t have Clue One why it all went wrong, but he’s angry and he’s scared. I don’t know how many Joeys are out there, but too many, that’s for sure. The party’s over for them. Now all they got is the Trump Party and that one doesn’t look like much fun, not for Joey and certainly not for the rest of us. Even on the South End, anger is contagious.