The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Fat Phil spent most of his days down at the O-Zi-Ya Auto Body Shop where all the layabouts mostly got in the way of Bondo Billy’s crew who were required to wear plague masks even though the visitors never did. Phil and the other malingerers thought this pandemic stuff was a crock and a hoax. Well, at least until Wally came down with the Covid, exposing at the Flathead Car Club who frequented Bondo Billy’s to a potential death sentence. Wally ended up in the ICU for a week on a respirator where no visitors were allowed, mask or no mask, and the boys were banned from Billy’s until their quarantines were ended, two weeks, Billy declared when they complained.
Wally recovered. Sort of. Scarred lungs, the docs said, but lucky to be alive considering his underlying conditions, meaning his obesity, his ravaged liver and his years of three pack a day smoking. If you think the boys started wearing masks, you’ve been smoking more than tobacco. Naw, they let the mizzus haul to the store for beer and food when masks were finally required.

Fat Phil visited Wally when he got released from a week’s rehab at the Mabana Sunset Home and found him propped up on pillows in his trailer’s livingroom, watching daytime TV, Fox News it looked like. ‘How ya doin’, Walter?’ he asked. Wally had lost 20 pounds it looked like and his eyes were sunk back in their sockets, making Phil fidgety and already regretting coming over, but then, after all, what are friends for?

“Not real good, Phil, not good at all, you want to know the truth. Grab yourself a beer,’ he gestured feebly toward the fridge.

“You want one, Walter?’ but Wally shook his head no. ‘Doc says lay off the sauce.’ Later Phil would tell the boys down at the Pilot Lounge Wally looked like death warmed over twice. ‘Underlying conditions,’ Little Jimmy said, sipping his drink. Underlying conditions, they all agreed. Thank god, each man jack of them thought to themselves, I don’t have those. ‘Drink up, men,’ Phil cried, ‘the next round’s on me.’

A lot of us shut-ins during this latest spike in the coronavirus are turning our attentions to the cages we’ve found ourselves locked down in these past months. Gutters need cleaning, windows need it too, closets need organizing, repairs need to be made, roof needs replacing, hell, maybe a complete kitchen remodel is in order. What else you gonna do for a year or more cooped up in the old shack?

If they had the money, they’d build an entirely new house, one with a separate entrance for the kids who have been learning now ‘virtually’, meaning, I think, they’ll be about a grade behind when sequestering ends. The grown kids are back too and a mother-in-law unit in the backyard would make everyone a little less irritable. The family that stays further apart is a bit more likely to stay together.

These are tough times on the cramped tail end of the island. No place to go, nobody to visit, only ‘essential’ services still open for business. We can take a drive to the grocery or hardware store, wear our funny face masks, but that’s about it. No grabbing a beer at the saloon, no sharing a lunch with a friend, no movie nights out, no strolling the mall, none of those flimsy trappings of a vanishing civilization. All that’s left is a desperate attempt to Martha Stewart the trailer. Mail order new curtains, fix the rotten tread at the bottom of the porch stair, grab some rocks off the beach and make a rockery for the flower garden they’ll plant next spring. Spring, you better believe, seems a million miles away right now, somewhere the other side of Venus.

Little Jimmy, half crazed from listening to his wife’s daytime TV soap operas and game shows and touchy-feely roundtable gossip, blasted the wall out in the living room and built a shop off the house where he could shut the door and escape and work on his model airplanes addiction. His mizzus was none too pleased at having a hole punched in her living room wall for her hubbie’s mancave. Ruined the feng shui, she kept muttering, and the whine of power tools and dremels and small gas engines didn’t add much to the contemplative atmosphere of her TV room cocoon either, she told him.

Jimmy didn’t help his cause much by dragging out the construction for months. Once he got it framed, roofed and insulated, his pace slowed glacially, a little molding here and there, caulking a window, lay some tile, no rush, that’s for sure. The door might never have gotten installed if Natalie hadn’t melted down in the middle of her favorite game show watching her hero dragging tool boxes around the shop for half an hour, scraping the floor, driving her nuts.

Next day Jimbo had a door on, you better believe it. With a lock. That he used. Once the beer fridge was plugged in, Jimmy breathed a deep sigh. Paradise, he said. Out loud. For awhile, at least, paradise, no pandemic. Natalie, you might have guessed, might not agree….

I have this 1% for Art project that ordinarily would require meetings that I would have to drive or fly to and usually stay overnight in some fleabag motel with the other tenants who mostly rent by the week or month or the rest of their lives. Now some folks like to travel on their jobs and I admit I thought I might too, but hauling over snowy passes in winter or navigating the freeway system of Los Angeles or trying to find something to do in fun-filled Salt Lake City, Utah took a lot of the joy out of visiting exotic places. Spend a night or two in Yakima and tell me you can’t wait to go back. I can wait.

But this year is the Year of the Plague. Meetings are scheduled now as virtual meetings. Maybe you’ve had the pleasure of Zoom Meetings, little talking heads lined up in the corners of your computer screen, an annoying delay in the sound, everything about as real as a late 20th century video game. Better than nothing, you might say.

Course, I wouldn’t. My first attempt at one of these virtual meetings was a total bust. I bought a teeny external camera, cheapest one I could find online, and when I experimented with it, the image I saw of myself on the silver screen was anything but silver, it was pink. Everything behind me was pink too. Not quite Pepto Bismol nauseous pink, but plenty sickening. When the time came to log in for our meeting, my committee informed me they couldn’t see me on their screen. I assured them they were the lucky ones. You know, a little humor to lighten the mood. You learn real quick humor on a zoom meeting is likely to fall on its pink face.

We managed to get through the first meeting without a virtual visual of the artist himself, okay with me, just a disembodied voice they might associate with some movie actor they were reminded of … and hopefully admired. Second meeting I bought a different camera, not exactly high end, but at least the image I got on my own computer was semi-natural, you know, if anything about this is natural. When the meeting started, the committee said they could see me just fine (oh swell) but they couldn’t hear me. I suspect this is the nature of zoom meetings, glitches, ignorance, fumbling, scrambling for a remedy, a comedy of errors. After a few minutes we discovered that if I turned off the camera, they could hear me just fine. Of course I wondered if this was a ruse to get me to go dark, 30 seconds of my face being more than enough for all of them.

The last meeting I didn’t go out and buy a 200 dollar state of the art video camera, opting instead for the voice-over, no visual. And no, I didn’t try the humor approach by suggesting I was wearing nothing below the belt, not after that last attempt. I suspect my camera actually has a teeny tiny tinny mic imbedded in it that I need to command to work instead of the default microphone, why they can’t hear me when they could see me. I suppose I could troubleshoot it, get tech support, schedule a test meeting and see if my theory is correct. But you know, don’t you?, that I’m not going to do that. What they don’t see won’t hurt them one little bit. Ignorance may not be bliss, but I’m happy to report it does have some advantages. And I don’t mean not wearing pants to my meetings.

Once again our intrepid entrepreneurial spirit has raised its banner on the globally connected South End. In the face of a newly invigorated craft distilling industry across the state, our own liquor suppliers have risen to the challenge. Admittedly hobbled by government laws and regulations set by the State Liquor Board and unable to advertise for fear of police intervention, they have been forced to raise the bar once more in order to compete with their well-funded and legitimate adversaries.

Just last evening I was huddled at my kitchen table with Whisky Bob, a moonshiner of some repute down here for his double distilled mashes, a white lightning so powerful Bob enforces his No Smoking ordinance with serious vigilance. If a ‘client’ ignores the admonition, Bob tells them the story of old man Jeffries who tried lighting his cigarette with a mason jar of High Octane Hooch open in his lap driving home to his doublewide in O-Zi-Ya. He survived, but his eyebrows never grew back and without going into gory graphics, let’s just say the miracle drug Viagra was of little use thereafter. For years he would relive the explosion every time he struck a match. The Post Stress became so severe he gave up smoking altogether.

Whisky Bob tells me he’s ready for the Next Stage of distilling, gonna dial back the alcohol a mite and go for the niche market in boutique boozes. I said it sounded like a great business plan, and Bob leaned in conspiratorially, afraid, I guess, Cost-Co might have the place bugged.

“Nettles,” he said. “Nettles?” I asked. “Nettles,” he repeated, louder, maybe thinking I needed hearing aids. Nettles. I pondered it a moment. Bob said he remembered that Heavy Nettle Ale I’d made two years ago, a fine year for the green crop, good crisp bite, a telltale aftertaste that tickled the tongue. Nettles, I finally agreed. Slow Food Movement, utilize the area agriculture, stop global warming, drink Local, save the planet. “Bob,” I said, tilting a glass of his double distilled, “it sounds like a winner! And I don’t think it’s the Everclear talking.”

This week Whisky Bob will begin the harvest. I told him my own organic nettles were available if he needed more than his backyard yield. By summer Bob should have his flagship mash aged to perfection. Jack Daniels, good luck to ya….

My neighbor Roy was down at the new watering hole the other day trying to decide between the 3 dozen microbeers they have going stale on tap. So many choices, so little time …. Finally, after inquiring about a couple of their options with the bartendress who really didn’t know much of anything about any of them other than reading the name off the tap, Roy asked her what she preferred. Roy is single and probably thought it would give him a leg up on a possible dating opportunity if he ordered same as her.

So what if she’s 20 years younger, drinking the same beer is one rung up the ladder of shared ‘likes’. Now, if she liked to fall asleep on the couch watching ESPN after a hearty dinner of peanuts, Doritos and vodka tonics, Roy was in like Flint, a match made, if not in Heaven, somewhere this side of internet dating.

“Bud Lite,” she told him, beer of choice. “Bud Lite?” he repeated, sorely disappointed. It was as if he’d gone to a white linen restaurant, asked his waitress what was good this evening, and been told Big Macs. With fries. Roy told me he actually considered ordering a Bud Lite so as not to hurt her feelings. Roy — as you can see — is a Sensitive Man. Although his first wife, and second one too, might disagree. He met them both in bars late at night in Stanwoodopolis. Poor lighting, I guess, or lack of competition. A relationship probably lasts longer built on more than a shared thirst, but then, I’m not a marriage counselor.

Roy finally decided he’d just go somewhere else to find a beer. Maybe he noticed her wedding ring or maybe it was just too many unknowns on all those taps. Down at the South End we like to keep it simple, but not too simple.