The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Breakfast at the Diner is usually a war zone, but the other day things heated up hotter than Big Larry’s grill sizzling with 10 pounds of bacon. Jimmy the Geek mentioned that his mizzus had heard Pastor Paul down at the Little Church in the Ravine preaching that Christmas was under attack. Walter chimed right in. “You can’t even say Merry Christmas now,” he declared to everyone in the place. “Starbucks gives you a red cup, no words, they’s so %#@>&* politically correct. It makes me want to puke.”

“Settle down, Walter,” Anita warned him as she refilled his coffee. “We don’t have anything written on our cups either.” Two Toke, ever happy to tweak Walter, asked him when he last went to Starbucks. “I thought you were boycotting the Yuppies, Walt.”

“You bet I am! This mud in a mug is all I need,” he declared, brandishing his cup like the gun he carried with his concealed permit. Walter’s ready for battle, trust me.

Down here in Holiday Central, the South End, we love Christmas. We love muzak, we can’t get enough of month-long advertising, we feed like candy canes on Bing Crosby and another viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life. We practically dress in tinsel and we don’t care who’s naughty or nice. Christmas! Most of us leave the strings of colored LED bulbs draped on the gutters and eaves all year round. So when we hear there’s a war on Christmas, you better believe we get up in arms, concealed carry or not. What Grinch wants to ruin our party? we asked ourselves. Couldn’t be WalMart. Couldn’t be the Little Chapel. Couldn’t be TV and their sponsors. Who would want to kill our buzz? Who hates Christmas???

Two Toke said even the South End Greenworks was in full holiday hype, selling faux mistletoe bundles of thai sticks. Flathead Fred’s mizzus had stood in line Thanksgiving midnight waiting for shopping sales at Elger Bay Store’s Black Friday super sale. Flathead avowed that if there was a war on Christmas he sure didn’t see one. Walter shouted “Open your eyes, Fred! The government hates Christmas!!”

Well, we boys at the Diner must be conscientious objectors, cause we couldn’t see a skirmish, much less find that war. Tyee Megastore is open early and closing late. Our stockings are hung with care as always, it’s snowing once again in Bedford and Jimmy Stewart isn’t going to kill himself this year either. Down here on the South End we’re all dreaming of a White One. The rest of you, take cover!

Don’t panic yet, but the rats are here! We killed one yesterday with a trap half the size of a bear trap. But its brethren look in the window at night and climb up the walls looking for an easy entry. Rats. Is there a more loathsome beast? On four legs anyway….?

Some years back we thought we had mice so I set the traps one night and figured we’d be rid of them by breakfast. About 2 in the morning I awoke to the rattle Thump rattle Thump thump of the trap whapping the floor again and again, a deranged clatter disturbing my precious sleep. Wearily, I climbed the stairs bollicky-bare, expecting to find Mickey in the trap still alive. I dreaded whatever mayhem would follow for the Final Solution. Imagine my naked surprise discovering a rat in the mousetrap, big loathsome longtailed rodent, bearer of Black Plagues and bubonic fever. Yiiii!

Without hesitation I grabbed a nearby broom and whacked that rat a couple of good ones. Only to see him free himself from the puny trap he’d previously had no luck escaping from…. Now it was mano y mano, two naked mammals tooth to tooth, broom to hairless tail, both of us hopping wildly, half crazed in the dim kitchen light, whap, slap, whack and then … oh sweet baby Huey, the four legged vermin jumped off the opening to the downstairs, a 10 foot drop to the slate floor and landed … I couldn’t believe it! … at the open door to our bedroom.

Where the mizzus was sleeping the unsuspecting snooze of the guiltless. I took the stairs two at a time, my heart beating ferociously as if I were being hunted, not Mickey Rat. Oh man, that cornered varmint could be anywhere. I listened for scrabbling, I waited in the dark stock still, I wished I had pants on!!! I could hear clocks ticking, the fridge gurgling, a faucet dripping … but no rat sounds. Us two adversaries waited, waited some more, waited just as we have since time immemorial.

Finally I gave up and went to bed. Pulled the covers up over my head. Tight. For the time being, I ceded territory. And sleep. Tomorrow, though … tomorrow we’d see who was boss. Tomorrow, mister, we’d see who wore the pants in this house, yessir. Tomorrow….

I was a scrawny little kid back in high school. No muscles, no particular athletic aptitude, just a tall skinny teenager with a face full of zits who moved around the country a lot, odd kid out. I ended up in a northern Wisconsin high school where the jocks ruled the roost. If we’d had a beach nearby, I’d have eaten a lot of sand. We had P.E. teachers who studied in the Hermann Goebbel School of Sadism, the sort of men who dragged kids out of the pool by their hair if they had hair enough to grab. The kind of Nazis who, on days when snow covered the tennis courts in the spring, would set up a game indoors they called Casketball. It was a hybrid between basketball and rugby. You got the ball, everyone could tackle you. On the hardwood floor of the gym. Then the rest were expected to pile on. Kids got hurt a lot in that game. Naturally, the star athletes could sit the ordeal out, no need to lose a Letterman to the instructors’ gladiatorial instincts. One of my buddies got rammed into a volleyball pole and skewered badly in the face with a bolt protruding out of its attachment hole. The game, of course, went on after one of the coaches took him to the nursing station. The P.E. teachers would bet on their classes to win. At least, I think they bet on us winning….

You might guess I hated P.E. But not as much as I loathed the two Stormtroopers who ran those classes. Every day we’d strip down and put on our little shorts and t-shirts, snug up our jockstrap and head out to some variant of humiliation. One fine spring day we headed out to the baseball field for some intramural competition. Coach Mengele took his place at third base to play with us. Bored, I guess. Coach Mengele was about 6’7” and 250 pounds of raw Aryan meat. He had blonde hair and metallic eyes. If Arnold Schwarznegger had been a star back then, this guy would’ve been his double in Terminator.

I had played some baseball back in Georgia. My old man was a semi-pro pitcher, once got to pitch against Ted Williams. He would take us boys out in the back yard and show us how to hold a bat, field a ball, pitch a curve. We weren’t very good, but he always told us it was more important to get an education than be a star athlete. We wanted to believe that, but how many honor roll kids get to be Prom King? Maybe he just wanted us to be single all our lives, I don’t know. But like I said, I’d played baseball before and when I got on base the first day, I watched the Fuhrer over there on 3rd base waiting like a giant spider for the unlikely possibility I would try to get past him. The kid at the plate slugged one into the corner of the outfield and so I went tearing around 2nd and headed for 3rd. The outfielder had put the ball perfectly in line for a tag-out where Arnold was blocking the basepath, a huge troll who wasn’t asking for a toll, he was going to bounce me back to 2nd or swat me to right field with the baseball in his glove.

I heard the ball hit the leather right after I drove at him in a slide, feet up, all 140 pounds of unmuscled boyhood, and I aimed at his ankle with everything I had. And surprise of surprises, the Jolly Green Giant toppled onto his face as if Jack had lopped off his beanstalk. I slid into 3rd safe and popped right up. And stood looking down at my tormentor. He scrambled around, wiped dirt off the side of his face, and for a moment I thought he would come up swinging. “You okay?” I asked Goliath sweetly.

There are moments you will cherish the rest of your days. There are moments that you will look back on and think that right there was a turning point of some kind, even if you don’t have the vocabulary for it. The stunned look on that man’s face when he recovered himself, well, it was worth the humiliations of countless gym classes. If small victories don’t mean anything to you, okay, I understand. But I can tell you, it changed the way that man thought of me from then until I left that backwash highschool. It didn’t change a thing, though, how I thought of him.

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 few years 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.