The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I spend a lot of time behind the wheel of a grocery shopping cart. Since I don’t own a cellphone to check with the mizzus what size or brand of mayo or dressing she prefers this particular afternoon or to chat it up with some friend or relative to while away the lonely hours on Aisle 6, I find my entertainment studying the purchasing patterns of my fellow South End shoppers.

I was behind Ginny Sprague this morning. Ginny’s a mom of 3, 4 if you count her husband Morty who’s been unemployed since before the Great Recession. Her cart was a veritable shrine to General Mills, Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola. Now, I grew up on morning cereal, but I was a teenager before Kelloggs and their corporate adulterers began to hook us kids on Count Chocula or Cap’n Crunch with mostly sugar additives. That’s why we have moms, I figure, but Ginny either got addicted too or else the kids rule the trailer at mealtimes. Box pizzas, candy bars, diet Coke, canned Spaghetti-O’s, white bread, processed meat. Maybe her root cellar is still stocked with vegetables and fruit which would explain their absence in the cart, but … I’m betting the children and Morty hate broccoli and apples.

Her pile of groceries wasn’t a lot different than half the shoppers bumper to bumper at check-out, I know. We’re the wealthiest folks on earth and we eat like it’s Halloween every day. Ginny’s kids are little blubberballs at age 7,8 and 10. Ginny’s no toothpick herself and yeah, I know, it’s none of my damn business. I’ll be dead of malnutrition before they glut the health care system with diabetes and poor circulation and hopeless obesity. Not my problem, I spoze, but when I hear Ralph next door bitching about the ‘nanny state’ intruding on his freedom when schools serve nutritious food instead of a slice of pizza and a Coke, I think, hey, I’m paying for their lunch with my taxes too.

But arguing with Ralph is a proven form of masochism. I just nod in agreement. “Let them eat cake, Ralph,” I say. “And wash it down with a supersize soda.” Ralph’s just glad we can finally agree on something.

Jihad Jack was parked in his usual spot at the beer-stained bar in the Pilot House, the South End Marina’s answer to marriage counseling. Any divorce attorney worth his margarita salt would drink nightly down there and write off his bar tab as a legitimate business expense. Jack was twirling his plastic trident in a concoction he’d gotten Brad, the usual bartender during Happy Hour, to ‘create’ for him, something with multiple boozes, eye of newt and a dash of habanero sauce. Jihad called it his Fox News Cocktail since he always watched it on the big screen directly in front of his customary stool.

“There it is,” he hollered so every manjack of us would halt our own conversation for his. “Measles!” he cried. “First E-bola and now it’s measles! You tellin me it’s a coincidence?”

As usual us assembled drinkers began to choose sides, sort of touch football without a football, just fire a pass out over the seating area and see who wouold risk catching the hot potato. “What’s your point, Jack?” Jesse asked, as if he didn’t guess. “You think the government brought this here?”

“Damn right they brought it here,” Jack replied, “just like AIDS.”

Pete set his beer aside and asked, grinning, “What would be their strategy, Jack?”

“They want to inoculate us, can’t you see?? They want to make you bring your kids in and shoot them full of vaccines and autism. Who knows what’s in those shots?”

Dave, two stools downriver, who’s a Physician’s Assistant at the South End Clinic, took his glasses off to study this guy Jack. “You kidding me?” he finally asked. “We got measles cured. We vaccinated kids and it worked. That’s all you have to do. Vaccinate the population. It’s like polio. There’s a cure!”

Jihad Jack smirked. “Yeah, and you want to fluoridate the water too, I bet! The government’s got no right — NONE! — to tell me what to do.” Dave shook his head. “It’s like living in the Dark Ages, that attitude,” he muttered and returned to his beer.

“At least they didn’t have to study propaganda as history, Doc.” Dave half finished his glass and headed for the door. The Pilot House, most nights, is pretty rudderless. Trouble is, it’s the only watering hole for a long ways.

Joe Crosby was watching Brenda, our waitress, as she took our drink order. He and his wife Jenny had recently moved down to the South End from Minnesota now that he’d retired. “Jenny was a stewardess for awhile,” Joe was saying, dipping a chip into his salsa. “You know, back when it was considered glamorous, not just a sky waitress. She loved it for the first few years.” He poked a finger in the ice of the margarita he’d finished, gave it a twirl, I guess to chill his digit.

“One flight she got a woman in first class, asked her what she’d like to eat and the woman never made eye contact, didn’t answer. Jen thought she hadn’t heard her so she asked again. Same thing, just stared straight ahead. Maybe she was deaf, ya know, but finally the woman’s husband said, matter of fact like he was used to this, ‘She doesn’t talk to the Help.’”

“Nice,” I said before thanking Brenda for the second round she’d brought us. Joe nodded appreciatively. “ Yeah. The glamour went out of stewing real quick, I mean to tell you. Jen never got over it. I said screw those people, but she looked in a mirror after that and saw someone else. Quit a few months later.” We both shook our heads. “And you know the funny part? Sad, actually. She treats waitresses bad herself. Stewardesses too. Like I guess they’re just the damn Help. Go figure.”

The Pilot House was pretty dead this Happy Hour, just Mudflap Mike and some pal I’d seen around and us, not all that happy a crowd. Joe swirled his finger in the new icecubes. “Yeah, Jen and I don’t go out much. I hope that woman in first class needs a medic someday. See if she’ll talk to him when he asks if her symptoms are heart attack or stroke….”

“Strange world,” I said, pretty sure we’d be leaving Brenda a tip big enough to put her kid through college.

Arizona, for me, was a lot like the South End is for most Camanoites. I really didn’t have much more than stereotypes to go on. Desert everywhere, snowbirds on a migratory flight path, illegal immigrants behind every saguaro cactus, Republicans on steroids and Viagra, eternal sunshine of the mind, epidemic melanoma.

We headed into the back country, not much in the way of work or water or food. My brother and a buddy wanted a roadtrip so we took the rental rig and beat it like a bad burro off the mainroads. Put about 1500 miles on it, covered it with mud, probably ruined the suspension and gave it back to Budget as payback for the time they charged me for a new tire after I’d blown one down in Arkansas that had 32,000 miles on it. After about four days of hard travel through the backroads only coyotes and the border patrol use, my impression of the state shifted appreciably. We didn’t see one single sombrero peeking out from the arroyos. Folks were universally friendly. The sun was only out about half the trip and the dry washes ran red with flash floods that forced us back to pave roads the last day. We even got turned back by a snowstorm in the mountains, barely getting to the nearest town before our car ran out of gas miles from anywhere.

Arizona is like a lot of the west, varied and beautiful. Mountains, desert, buttes and mesas, dry gulches and reservoirs, geologic wonders and archeologic sites — it had enough to make every day surprisingly different. We passed through Tombstone and the OK Corral, took pictures of the steel border wall at the Mexican border, climbed into cliff dwellings, 4 wheeled through the Saguaro National Monument, touched a toe in New Mexico, gambled with the locals in a desert watering hole, had dinner with the man who gave Obama is first job as an attorney, forded flooded gulches and wandered once abandoned mining towns that are tourist traps now. And we still only saw a small part of Arizona.

We went through more than a few towns on their way to ghost status and we crossed hundreds of miles where the only sign of life was cacti and sagebrush. The west is still wild here even though Wyatt and Doc are long dead. It’s a Big Land, too big for this short trip, but I’ll be going back, not to escape the winter here on the South End, but to see a different South End, the one at the end of America.