The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I just got done jawboning with an old friend up north, Java Jeff, who told me a little about a capitalist venture he’d had in China. He’d agreed to build what was the largest coffee enterprise in the world with their government. Yah … bigger than Starbucks. Think about that for a South End minute.

About the time they were ready to Launch, he gets notice the good Chinese are filing a securities fraud suit against him. You know, just prior to putting the corporation on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Java Jeff, who had bet practically everything he owned on this deal, hired some high powered international attorneys to defend himself. After plenty of ‘billable’ hours, they basically advised him to get ready for bankruptcy. You know, after they got paid. Shortly before the stock debut, the Maoists offered him a plea bargain: drop his 5% interest in the company and they would drop their interest in prosecuting him. His lawyers advised him to take the deal and walk away. How do you beat the Chinese government in a courtroom on their turf on trumped up charges?

Java Jeff could see the pictographs on the wall, all right, all those years and that investment stolen from him and nothing he could do. So he signed away his 5% and sure enough, the company made $15 billion when it opened first day on Shanghai’s exchange. Anyway you cut it, Jeff lost a lot of yuan.

I’m not thinking of expanding my glass empire to China anymore, that’s for sure. Hard enough dealing with architects here in America who see me basically as a Graffiti Artist who needs police intervention and remedial treatment. But I feel bad for Java Jeff. As he said, justice isn’t a word some places believe in. Not in their jungle. And capitalism isn’t necessarily a panacea for the world’s ills, is what I say. Jeff will be all right. He knows he built the biggest coffee conglomerate on earth. Now — at least I’m betting — he hopes they’ll gag on it.

And those stories about the Premier cleaning up corruption … tell it to the gullible.

Hank ‘the Tank’ Amundsen is standing up next to his barstool taking a swing for the outfield wall. “My gawd,’ he was gushing, “my gawd, it was something to see. That kid of mine is going to the majors, you guyz heard it first.” Pete, two stools down, sipped affably at his pint of IPA and said quietly, “I think you told us this last week, Tank.” Jerry nodded from a table full of empty pints he and the Flatheads had killed during the first hour of happy hour, ready for the second. “I believe Pete’s correct, Tank, but he forgot to mention the week before and last month and I think, check me on this Pete, I think you told us Jimmy was going Pro last year.”

“Aw, guys, I’m just a proud papa, is all. You can’t blame me, the kid is great. You can see it in his swing he’s got plenty of homers coming up. Practically got a contract signed. The scouts probably already got eyes trained on him.”

Little Jimmy, if he declared eligibility at this point, would never graduate Middle School. Tank has been sending him to camps, buying gear, tossing balls, all the stuff a Tiger Woods training dad would do since the kid was two and a half. If Jimmy had hoped for a normal childhood of bikes and X-box, it wasn’t going to happen. If Tank wasn’t hauling him and his bats, gloves and balls to tournaments and camps, he was out back of his shack where he’d set up a batting cage, firing curve balls to the poor kid, yelling at him when he whiffed, hollering in joy when he blasted one into the nettles past the swingset that Jimmy never got to use. His sister, pretty much ignored by Tank, got the swing pretty much to herself.

I don’t know what happens to all the Jimmys whose alpha dads drove them to be the best soccer player, baseball star, football hero or basketball idol, whose only dream was to go pro, make the majors, play ten years or less, then retire wealthy as Michael Jordan. I suspect they become sad, depressed, broken adults. Maybe they put their kids through the same nightmare gauntlet.

I had a buddy in high school who won state champ in swimming. When I saw him after we’d trudged off to different colleges, I asked him if he was still training for the Olympics. “I quit,” he said. When I asked why, he answered, “I spent half my life in a chlorine pool, before school, after school. All so I could compete in the Olympics, probably never make it, then wonder all my damn life why I didn’t do something else. I’m going to do something else.”

I suspect there are mostly losers out there. If we taught em to love the game, if we taught em to enjoy their teammates, if we taught em that sports were fun more than a path to riches, maybe we’d have a lot more winners. Jimmy, I suspect, isn’t going to be a winner. And his dad is going to take it a lot harder than Jimmy.

Some days the past comes calling. I was watering our garden this afternoon when an old friend hauled into the drive with a pack and a 5 gallon bottle of water he had lashed to a roller suitcase. Got off the bus that doesn’t run the last lousy three miles of island and walked here on his way to his brother’s cabin a mile south pulling that water along dirt road and blacktop. The cabin doesn’t have a well.

Tom’s been through some changes. Haven’t we all? I knew him back when … some 30 or 35 years ago. He was a hard drinking 20 something, distributed beer around the area, loved to tell stories of bars between Montana and California, the old saloons mostly gone now or restored to yuppie shrines. I nailed the ridgepole on the day we hoisted the 40 foot log up into position on his brother’s log cabin. Felt like I’d hammered the Golden Spike on the first transcontinental railroad. Quite an honor, definitely a privilege.

Tom moved down to Arizona, did the maintenance for the spring baseball, mowed, watered, all the stuff Mesa needs to keep a desert ballpark grassy and green. He got a bad back, developed an over-enthusiastic love of alcohol, had some physical breakdowns, went into rehab, took an early retirement on disability, discovered — or acknowledged — he was gay. He looked good today. Old, maybe, older even than me, but healthy old. Walking his gear two miles from the bus dropoff, 30 years from when I knew him.

I guess in a way we’re all old codgers now, pulling our water and our stories and our packs down the highway that runs back toward home … or some reasonable facsimile. He’ll stay a night or two, reminisce, commune with the stars and the skeeters, maybe have a campfire there under the big firs up where the dirt road to the cabin ends and something else, not memory, begins. I’ll be doing something similar, I guess, thinking of all the old campfires and the nights long ago up at that cabin. What I think is we’re all hauling water, we’re all dragging stories….

My neighbors across the road, every year now, put iris bulbs out on the highway with a sign that says FREE. Cars stop, trunks fly open and another load of plants migrates south. Over a hundred varieties of irises they brought from Oklahoma are taking over the South End, iris capital of the world.
This is a new twist on an old country tradition — passing plants to the neighbors. Look around and you’ll see our quince bush is about the age of the Nesje’s up the road. There are 3 sequoias in the neighborhood, all about the same height and age. Our mock orange is showing up from here to Tyee.
A cutting here, a few bulbs there, a piece of honeysuckle vine, a funny vegetable like our Jerusalem artichoke, some plants that make a jail break on their own like our comfrey, trees like my neighbor’s chestnuts that pop up everywhere or our filberts the blue jays plant for us and everybody else —- the plants get spread around.
The mizzus is a horticulturist. Me, I’m more of a hortichuckle-ist. I used to find plants back in the hollows, at old homesteads, by hidden ponds and muddy creek sides. I got one, a 7 foot tall monster wild orchid, a Jumpin Jimmy that spreads by spitting its seeds out of a pod. We’d find em on the roof, up in the gutter where the mulch is about a foot deep, nearly everywhere but in the house…at least for now.
You got to be careful, I guess. I suppose it won’t be long before the moralists take a swing at this. Plant swapping. It isn’t natural. It isn’t right. Ought to nip it in the bud. Stick to the native plants. Live on stinging nettle soup and quit importing foreign vegetables. Send those potatoes back to Ireland and those artichokes back to Israel where they belong….
Personally – and don’t tell Ma I said this – I’m all FOR plant swapping. Seems neighborly somehow. And saves me from those collecting trips back in the jungle and swamps now that the Jumpin Jimmies have taken over everything in sight.

Opportunity occasionally comes knocking for most of us.  Trouble with us South Enders, we don’t often answer the door.  You take Wild Bill, the South End String Band’s former bass player.  He and a couple of  buddies started up their own advertising agency down in San Francisco back in the heydays of the Grateful Dead, rented themselves an office and hired a girl Friday.  The boys came back from lunch one fine California day and their secretary Shelly said there’d been a guy in to see them, Steve somebody or other, who was starting his own company and wanted to sit down and talk publicity, promotion, advertising, just what Wild Bill and his cohorts were in business to do.

Hot damn, a client!!  They told Shelly to make an appointment to meet them at Bill’s apartment that night.  There was a ’49ers game on Monday Night Football and they figured they’d mix a little pleasure with business.  Their new client, no doubt, would get a kick out of drinking some beer and rooting for his home team, and maybe at half time they could kick around some advertising strategies before the second half kickoff.  Steve came by and the boys put a beer in his hand, told him to have a seat, kick back and enjoy the game.  Well, quite a few beers later, the game being close and all, they never really got much strategizing in.  Steve sipped at his beer, mostly to be friendly, but obviously he wasn’t much of a drinker and worse, he didn’t seem much interested in who won the football game or maybe he didn’t even understand the damn game.  Odd guy, real quiet, sober as a judge.  Finally the boys pretty much ignored him completely and by the 3rd quarter Steve excused himself, thanked them for the beer and said he probably should get on home, he had work to do.

Haw haw, work to do??  On a Monday Night Football night?  With San Francisco playing?? The boys just shook their heads when he’d gone.  Probably some poor gomer with a sure-to-fail business and they were probably lucky not to waste time on a losing bet.  They popped a few more brewskis and settled in for the 4th quarter.

Next day Shelly asked the bedraggled football fans how the meeting went with Steve.  Okay, they said, odd guy.  Great game, though, the ’49ers pulled it out in the last quarter.  “You want me to call Mr. Jobs back and make another appointment?” Shelly asked.  Naw, the boys said, Steve’s on his own and good luck to him.  Haw haw.

Last time I looked Apple was the biggest company in the world, Steve did okay without the boys and Wild Bill ended up in the South End String Band.  Nobody knows what happened to Shelly.