The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The Southendomish live in government housing in the fishing grounds they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us on the South End would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the South End Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Saratoga Passage where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

Open Mic (I have to host a new Open Mic tonight at the Family Resource Center in Stanwoodopolis so let me practice on you folks first)

Well, I want to thank all of you for letting this old geezer be the first yahoo to introduce the Open Mic Program. When I was a pup we didn’t have anyplace like the Center here, a place for kids to go to after school. A place to meet up with friends, maybe learn how to play a guitar, listen to music, all that stuff you folks do. Naw, my backwash town had a pool hall, that was about it.

Big Fred ran the place. He didn’t allow fighting — you had to go out back. He didn’t allow smoking or drinking — you had to go out back. Gambling was okay. I mean, it WAS a pool hall, not a knitting circle. Big Fred was like a father to some of us juvenile delinquents. Not a good father, don’t get me wrong. Kinda like the Dad from hell, now that I think about it.

A lot of the kids that hung out in the pool hall, well, I’d say it changed their lives. Not really for the better now that I think about it. Kind of a school for criminality. Me, I did learn to shoot pool without going to jail. Some of my buddies, they didn’t learn pool and they still ended up behind the 8 ball. And prison bars.

I’ve never played before at an Open Mic. Too shy, maybe. Too scared, probably. I got a little band, the South End String Band, used to have eleven of us, now we downsized to 5. Easier for me to hide in the back. Still scary, though.

Our first public appearance we set up in the Tyee Store parking lot. You never been to the Tyee Store parking lot, it’s not much bigger than this room. Half the customers left their rigs running so we’d play to empty cars pumping exhaust fumes on us. Next gig we set up at Elger Bay Store’s picnic table, just OFF the parking lot, saved us carbon monoxide poisoning and the crowd sometimes swelled to 3 or 4 curious shoppers.

We thought we’d made the Big Time when we hit Haggen’s at Christmas. Big box grocery. Indoors even!! Course, they stuck us next to the ATM machine and folks wanting to get cash for the big tips they were probably planning to leave us had to wade through eleven yahoos. And a partridge in a pear tree….

We played for some fundraisers on Camano and then we played a benefit to Save the Grange in 2004. 700 people came to help us. $5 spaghetti dinner and music by us. We raised enough to keep them afloat and the rest is history. Well, okay, not much history but hey, we’re still here. And so is the Grange.

What I’m trying to say is this: if you never put yourself on the line, never get up and play your song, that’s okay. What matters is you play it for yourself. But … if you want to share it, this might be a good start. And who knows, someday you might get that life-changing audition for the South End String Band. Anyway, lI’m going to give it a try. If I seem nervous, it’s because I am….

Back in 1977 I bought a HUD repo house in the ghetto of Seattle. First house I ever owned and so, being a neophyte, I thought maybe I should go whole hog and get a dog too, a companion, a man’s best friend. I always had a fondness for boxers so I looked in the paper, found someone selling pedigree boxer pups and went over to take a peek at the litter. One of the little guys was far and away the most active so unfortunately I picked that one. I named her T’Ashi, which I was told by a Sioux Indian I shared a Greyhound bus and a bottle with a few months earlier, meant ‘friend’.

T’Ashi made the Energizer Bunny look like a rabbit on tranquilizers. She was a bundle of mindless energy with legs like pogo sticks and a brain the size of a pea. A dumber dog I never saw before or since. If I threw a ball out into the Sound, she would go under to find it and if she didn’t find it, would stay down until I rescued her. Not many animals lack even the minor brain activity required for self survival.

Couple all that energy with a love of chewing, you got a recipe for mayhem whenever I left her alone in the house. She chewed through drywall, she chewed through closet doors, she pretty much chewed through a post in the basement that held up the two stories above. I drove nails into that post when I discovered it eaten a quarter way through and T’Ashi chewed through those. In despair I took her to a dog training class where the woman with the German accent told me, when I mentioned I didn’t think T’Ashi was trainable, that all dogs were trainable by her.

Great, I thought. Maybe she can save my house from being nibbled to death. Four weeks later she told me not to come to classes anymore. My beloved brainless dog was incapable of learning. In defense, I had tried to tell her. But now I was tethered to the monster I had brought into my new home.

Some months later I threw in the towel. It was the dog or the house. I put an ad in the Seattle Times: Pedigree boxer free to good home. I got plenty of calls, but when I asked if they planned on leaving the dog alone in their house, I patiently explained that that would not be a good home for T’Ashi. Not for long, anyway. People tried to argue with me, but I was firm, I was stubborn even, I was trying to protect them from themselves. A week of declined offers to take my dog for free left me thinking suicidal thoughts. And then Linda Rae Starr called.

“Would you be leaving the pooch home when you go to work?” I asked and was surprised and ecstatic when she said she wanted a dog that would NEVER LEAVE HER SIDE. “Come on over,” I said. “T’Ashi is yours. You got the perfect home.” I told her why that was, told her she was eating my own home down stud by stud, nail by nail, every time I left the house. “I’d never leave her,” Linda Rae Starr told me sweetly. “I’ll take her everywhere with me.”

Linda Rae came right over to what was left of my ghetto house. I gave her dog food and dog toys and dog dishes and dog leashes, everything she needed. “Just one thing,” she said right at the end and I felt my heart crash into my guts, figuring she was backing out at the last minute. “What?” I whispered.

“I’d like to change her name, if that’s okay.” My heart soared, my mind spun dizzy little circles of joy. I told her she could name T’Ashi anything she wanted and she clapped her hands, put T’Ashi in her beat up car and the last I saw of the two of them was when they drove away. I did call Linda Rae up a week or two later, just to be sure, just to relieve my guilt at inflicting a hound of hell on her. “Oh no,” she said in response to my concern, all was well in the Starr House. “Cleopatra and I go everywhere together. I thought maybe you wanted to take her back.”

I assured her that was not my intent. “Cleopatra is yours, Linda, forever and ever.” Linda Rae thanked me again and again. And I thanked her. Again and again. And still do…..

“Start the hearings, alert Fox News, file the subpoenas, investigate the cover-up!!! Niger Niger Niger! Where was the Sec. of State and what did he know and when did he know it??? Why couldn’t the President remember that dead soldier’s name? What’s he hiding? Who is he shielding? Look at the evidence, it speaks for itself. Niger! Niger! Niger! Lock em up, these people who are responsible, LOCK EM UP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Clyde is on a tear down at the Pilot Lounge in the Yacht Club. He just ordered his 3rd pint of microbrew and half the bar is telling him to shut up. The Pilot Lounge is not known as a bastion of liberal radicalism since most of the time, if there’s no local sports game on the 3 TV’s, Fox News offers us patrons their fair and balanced opinions. Clyde tries some days to get the televisions turned to CNN, but he’s spitting into a serious gale. Best we can hope for is Al, the usual bartender, turns them all off so we can drink in peace. Al is off tonight and his replacement is Benny, a taciturn old friend of the owner’s who subs in emergencies.

“Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi!” Clyde hollers, not once but three times in a voice that drips sarcasm. “They couldn’t get enough of that, but Niger, where’s the outrage, where’s the investigation, where’s their justice for those dead soldiers?”

Benny drags a bar rag across some spillage, grabs the TV channel changer and finds a sports station, then turns the volume up past Clyde’s. The assembled drinkers cheer and clink glasses. None of us know much about hockey, but hockey it is tonight.

Politics has ruined too many of my evenings down here. If we had another watering hole within driving distance, I’d switch taverns. But I suspect it’s the same up north and the drive back through the sheriff’s prowl cars isn’t worth the gamble. So hockey it is tonight. At least until I finish this half a pint and head for the sanctuary of home and hearth. “Niger Niger Niger!!” Benny is singing softly to himself when I drop my glass on the bar he’s still wiping up. I know I’ll be humming it too all the way home. Where the hell is Niger?

Tea Party Ted moved away from what he called the Socialist Union of the South End back when that commie Obama was elected President of the still United States. He and his angry wife packed up kit and kaboodle and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona where the weather and the politics were more to their liking. Some of the scalawags in the Flatheads, our vintage car guyz, still get virulent e-mails from Ted, sometimes ten a day, that they’re kind enough to forward to the Enemy. That would be me.

I’m not sure whether they think I’m some Fence Sitter that can still be swayed to the Trump Camp before the gulags are instituted by some imagined regime that will ‘cleanse’ the South End’s radical heresy or if they just find Ted’s wild e-mails amusing in a whackjob sort of way. Amusing is not how I receive them, but then again, I don’t discourage my pals from passing on posts from the alt-right.

It’s important — or so I tell myself — to keep a finger on the pulse of these fire breathers in order to understand what makes them so damn angry. Ted was a government employee at the top of the pay grade system. Meaning, he gets a near six figure a year pension and total medical coverage, what us South Enders refer to as Made in the Shade. He doesn’t like government, he wants Obamacare killed, he hates the welfare system, food stamps and Medicaid for the poor. Taxes are theft, people who disagree with him are elitist boobs, the Federal Reserve is a plot to kill capitalism and white genocide is ramping up.

I won’t even mention his opinions on immigration, minorities, women, gays and transgenders. He’s a white guy. An old white guy. And it pisses him to the gills that his white Caucasian nation is morphing into a polyglot melting pot mess of people not much like himself, people who are inferior, potential terrorists, job stealers and poor. He wants these others gone. He wants his country back. He wants to make America great again.

All I know for sure is he helped make the South End, if not great, one small step better. By leaving. Arizona, you’re welcome to Ted. And his mizzus. And all the other Teds on his e-mail list. You know, except my buddies and me. And Ted, keep those cards and letters coming in. Maybe some more folks will come down and join you.