The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crack—up,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.

The South End Suds and Duds, our local laundromat and gossip center, advertises as OPEN 24/7, but for us Maytagless residents, we know it’s open maybe only 5 or 6 days, the other two they’re closed for repairs and plumbing catastrophes now that Wanda , the current owner, lost her husband/repair guy to Cindy, one of the regulars, at least until she ran off for a new life in Phoenix. Wanda took Fred’s betrayal hard, especially considering Cindy was young enough to be their daughter. If she was a bitter chainsmoking woman before, she doubled down after. And consequently lost interest in the Suds and Duds.

I happened to be washing a week’s worth of dirty clothes and sheets when our washer refused to drain. Wanda was interviewing Tommy Wilson for the position of Head Roto-Rooter. Tommy barely knows which end is the working end of a toilet plunger, but Wanda obviously was short on applicants. “I got a guy yesterday,” she said through a haze of Pall Mall smoke, “probably illegal. I said I’d need to see a green card. He could barely speak English. Said he had a family to feed. I told him I was hiring him, not his whole damn family.”

Tommy swore. “Takin our jobs. They’ll own America before long.” Tommy’s jobs disappeared a long time ago. If Wanda hired him, it would break a streak of decades. “We need to deport these people,” he growled darkly. “Just leeches on the rest of us.” Wanda shot him a long exclamation point of smoke. For once I kept my mouth shut. It’s hellish enough doing the laundry here without debating the owners and clientele. I vowed to get my washer fixed ASAP or die trying.

Tommy lasted about half a week, near as I could tell, probably until the first breakdown. Wanda hired an hombre named Carlos to replace him. They say he can fix about anything. Except maybe Wanda’s broke heart and bitter life. I bought a used washer at the 2nd hand appliance place up north. A very polite Hispanic kid helped me load it into my truck. I noticed he spoke perfect English.

Some of the ladies down at the Salon were engaged in a Round Table discussion during perms and touch-ups. It’s a mixed clientele at the Salon, partly the result of stylists who run the gamut from tattoos and piercings with rainbow streaked hair to the primly permed. It does make for lively debates under the blowdryers. Ronald, the token gay guy, he of the nose ring and silk puffy shirts was listening to Carol Wanderman’s diatribe on the Pope’s call to tackle global warming as a moral issue. She was deeply Catholic and she didn’t want the Holy See stepping into politics, especially when she disagreed with him. “What does he know about science?” she asked the room.

“Oh, sweetie,” Ronald sniffed, “you are SO right on. Didn’t they send Galileo to the Inquisition?”

Carol shook her curlers like evil talismen at him, started to respond, but Jill in the chair next door, jumped in first. “I don’t mind the pontiff piping in,” she said while Brenda snipped and clipped Jill’s new bangs. “But if he thinks global warming is a moral question, what about population control? You think all these new people in 3rd world countries aren’t the REAL problem?”

Mrs. Ketchum arched a penciled eyebrow from above her apron. “The world has to grow, dear. You can’t dictate morals in the bedroom.” To which Ronald snorted wildly, tossing back his newly curled coif. “Tell THAT to the queer haters.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that word, Ronald,” Mrs. Ketchum protested. “It’s unbecoming.” Ronald giggled. “The Q word, you mean. Well, darlings, that’s a word of pride now.”

“Oh Ronald …” Kathy at the far chair sighed.

“And,” Ronald continued, “you ladies should thank us for NOT contributing to population growth. Talk about cutting down carbon footprints! I mean ….!”

“Oh we do, Ronald,” Jill laughed, “we do. We broke the mold after you.”

“All I ask,” he smiled, “is the proper appreciation.” He handed Betty, his walk-in client who must have thought she was getting styled in Oz, a mirror and asked, “How do you like the New You?”

I’m flying the friendly skies once more. For a yahoo who hates to fly, I sure seem to be doing a lot of it lately. Someday … probably sooner than later … historians will look back at jet travel the way we look back at big fin Cadillacs, giant carbon footprints. Political correctness will dictate that Frequent Flyers be denigrated for the culpability they share for turning the planet into a hellbroth of CO2 and acid rain. Meanwhile, I have to get to Utah.

Down here at South End International I’ve passed by the sniffer hound, a couple of TSA agents and managed to get through X-ray. X-ray is the government’s tactic to irradiate frequent flyers, thereby inducing various cancers and reducing multiple future flights. I’m sure there are already folks who believe this implicitly. Has the same result so I guess the government strategy works.

Security, even though I’m traveling more often, is amazingly fluid. We have now a TSA pre-check, which means somehow, probably random, the air passengers selected can keep their shoes on and dispense with fluid checks and various other scrutinizing. Apparently the traveling terrorist will not receive a TSA pre-check. I’m sure there’s a mathematical calculation on probability PhD’s have worked out on government super computers.

Today I took my shoes off but kept my belt buckled. The lady in front of me could leave her laptop in her bag. Last time she had to take it out. But she had to take her belt off. My pocket debris had to be stowed in my pack — no plastic tray in my line. Sometimes my handkerchief has to be taken out of my pocket, sometimes not. A recent test of TSA security found that knives, guns and explosives hidden to check the agents’ effectiveness, went through about 90% of the time, meaning, I suppose, terrorists would be thwarted in at least 10% of terror attempts. Statistics don’t lie, mister!

What I deduce from this is that if they would succeed 90% of the time, there must not be much terrorism being attempted. After all, why risk it if there’s a 10% chance of failure? I wanted to run that by a couple of this morning’s agents … but, I do want to get to Utah this week sometime. I might slip a gun through, no way I’m sliding a wisecrack by ….