The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m back up in Anchorage, Alaska doing what half the folks I meet here are doing: looking for a job. Flew in on the noon run after getting up pre-dawn — really, post midnight — and now I’m beat, hunkered down in the Puffin Inn, a motel at the edge of town. The edge of town, at least for us thrifty tourists, is almost affordable, at least now that summer’s over and the salmon runs too.

My first visit I stayed in the Captain Cook Hotel, a downtown upscale joint with multiple doormen and valet parking. It would have been nice but I had a 104 degree fever, chills, vomiting — a good case of the flu in a city locked down by an icestorm. Second time in, I stayed at a seedy wreck of a place the reviews recently called ‘the worst motel in Anchorage’. Admittedly it was rundown and located in the worst part of downtown. When I inquired of the manager, a nice Pakistani whose young daughter studied her school assignments in what passed for the lobby, about the possibility of breakfast, he seemed confused. No, I figured but I thought I’d ask, how about coffee? Oh yes, he nodded, happy to oblige. He pointed to a thermos on a counter nearby and I said that would do nicely. Two cups of bitter java later he approached me with another cup. Crackers? he asked, holding out a cup of Saltine crackers. My turn to be confused, but finally I realized he was making the gesture toward providing a Continental style breakfast. Well, if not continental, maybe Kashmir. Or Syria.

My next visit I decided to play it safe so I stayed at a Motel 6 quite a ways from the Alaska Suites and their Saltine breakfast. Kind of felt bad I wasn’t loyal to the owner, but hey, life is change, adventure, danger! The Motel 6 was, I’m sorry to disagree with the reviewers who thought the Suites were the worst motel in Anchorage, because the 6 was genuinely creepy. Prostitution, drugs, all night parties, hallway fights, you name it, they had it. Well, no Saltine crackers. Genghis Khan could hole up there for months without garnering undue attention. There’s probably a Motel 6 Gang, an offshoot of the Crips, paying by the month and menacing the neighborhood.

The neighborhood, unfortunately, was me. So I’m at the fabulous Puffin. My window faces, well, a wall. So far it’s relatively quiet. And the lobby — half a block away in a separate building — has a breakfast nook, 5-9 am. Probably Triscuits and Tang. I didn’t come for the food, though, I came looking for a job.

Down by our Garbage Free end of the island we got about 16 trucks a week from Waste Management plying our neighborhood. Big green plastic bins get rolled out to the end of the driveway and the big green trucks stop, drop their metal arms, lift the bin up and into the maw of the trucks’ rear ends then move on to the next. The mizzus asked if maybe we shouldn’t sign up for curbside pickup, save me that awful trip to the dump.

The trip I make about every 3 months. When I arrived at the primitive South End, the dump was actually that, a dump. Roll up, toss our garbage into a pit. Frank ran the dump back then and about half what we tossed he took home. Old TV’s, busted toasters, dead lawnmowers, Frank figured they were worth keeping. Sort of recycling before recycling was cool.

Admittedly there weren’t many of us living on the island back then, but when the population grew, the county installed coin-op dumpsters. For 50 cents we could load the bin and a compactor crushed it all down. A decade later they added barrels for glass and plastics and paper. We had to sort the glass — clear, green and brown — and most weeks the barrels were full so folks dropped the stuff on the ground. The dump was a dump once again.

Now we toss all the recyclables into one place. Easy. Real easy. I don’t know why either folks still use the highway to toss their bottles and cans, maybe just the irrepressible urge to dump as soon as the container is empty. But a lot of us evidently think the roadside is their personal dump. If I thought too long about it, I’d become more cynical than I already am and none of us needs that. Litter’s bad enough.

So when folks drop their garbage in the middle of the parking lot at the park I maintain, I’ve stopped sorting through it to find a letter with their address or a magazine with their name on the label. I have to live near these folks, but I sure don’t want to get to know them. I got enough enemies as it is … so I’m real glad most of the newcomers can afford curbside pickup.

Once again, we got good news and we got bad news. The good news is I have to scoot up to Alaska on a work related junket for a possible job. The bad news is you’ll be left without your daily Skeeter fix. Okay, I know, they’re both good news. Jeez…. If you need to go the methadone blog route, scroll down and catch some old posts, see if they’re as scintillatingly interesting on the second reading as the first. If you’re like me, you won’t remember them anyway. I barely remember writing them.

I’m standing at the bar in the South End String Band’s latest hangout after the last couple of dive bars closed. If you want to know why they closed, consider I’ve been here five minutes already, enough to write this much this far. The bartender watched me walk in, the fry cook apparently doesn’t serve liquor to people with a hat so here I stand, still scribbling in my notebook.

Ah … here comes my bartender now to take my drink order.

Oops, no, she’s going to serve the guy who followed me in three minutes after I came in, a regular, surely that justifies leaving the occasional customer to stand another few minutes while they catch up on gossip. There are four of us total in this shotgun alley of a bar. Trust me, only one of us ever leaves a tip. Oops, make that none of us today….

This particular tavern has always been a rough joint. Bikers back in the day, crack users next, meth heads for a time, now just down and outers idling away their afternoons, their evenings, their lives. If you are an aficionado of such places, a connoisseur of the hard drinking, chainsmoking denizens of these inns that the Liquor Board keeps on its permanent Watch List, you can’t really get upset with miserable service when the bartender cops an attitude. After all, the whole place comes with attitude and isn’t that why you come in the first place? You want brass and ferns, muted conversations, white wine in a stemmed glass, the hushed tones of incessant cellphones (‘Excuse me, I have to take this.’) and bartenders who enquire occasionally if you’d care for a refill or a ‘freshening’, you definitely leave town.

There’s some kind of ruckus among the three regulars down the bar but it ends as quickly as it ignited, too early for more than verbal violence anyway. My bandmates eventually arrive and after a short wait Charlene takes their orders. My glass sits empty, but just as she wheels suddenly I try to signal for another beer since she didn’t connect the empty glass with a possible refill. She strides away without turning. My kind of place, I realize, and sure, I’ll leave a tip.

Down at the Little Church in the Ravine they brought in a new minister, Rev. Baxter. He’s replaced Pastor Paul’s Bible thumping, fire and brimstone, Hell and damnation sermons with ‘prosperity preaching’. Forget worrying about the eternal furnace of Hell as punishment, imagine the temporal rewards of riches Right Now. “The Lord,” Rev. Baxter intones in unctuous, perfectly enunciated promises, “will reward you with fiscal manifestations for your belief in His good works. Ask,” he tells the flock, “and you will receive.”

This is good news in the pews. The South End, never really as worried about punishment after death as the one they live daily, was more than ready to receive money, not manna, from Heaven. That bunk about the meek inheriting the earth stuff Pastor Paul occasionally mentioned paled in comparison to the high wattage of an eternity of blistering boiling retribution. Brother Baxter promised the earth and heaven too and forget about being meek and modest. Ask for the moon. Ask for more! You deserved it and when you got it, that was proof of your worth, that was the Keys to the Kingdom, hallelujah!!

“Have faith in the generosity of the Lord,” Rev. Baxter admonished with his wide gold tooth smile and his expensive watch sparkling occasionally beneath the sleeve of his purple robes, proof itself of the truth in his words. “He will bless you until the end of your days. He will make you rich. There is no shame in wealth, only evidence of your devotion and the Lord’s beneficence.”

Well, he is the minister, the congregation reminded skeptics who quoted that chestnut about a rich man squeezing through the eye of a needle trying to get into Heaven or whatever the hell it said, better to be poor and miserable, old time mumbo jumbo, suffer and ye shall receive. Maybe it was time to try Rev. Baxter’s version, they argued. Try the caviar of optimism instead of the gruel of pessimism and self- denial.

Christmas, it looks like, has come to the South End to stay and God, if Brother B. is correct, is going to be a whole lot better than Santa. Folks at the Chapel are making their lists and checking it twice. Amen to that.