The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A few years ago Guitar Bob’s beater car gave up the ghost so he asked if I would drive him north to the used car lots to buy a replacement jalopy. Reluctantly, I said okay even though I had to go after my graveyard shift with no sleep. He was, after all, a friend. And one without wheels to get to work….

Walking into a used car lot is vaguely similar to driving the streets of Baghdad in an unarmored HumVee. It’s a landmine. You might make it back out, but you’re going to take incoming and there’s going to be casualties. At some point you’ll ask yourselves is this war worth it? Did you have an Exit Strategy? And who, in the end, is really the enemy? Or like General Sherman famously stated as he torched the South: car buying is hell.

Bob started out hoping to buy a vehicle for under $500. Not wanting to bust his bubble, I decided to forego the story of my last expedition into the minefields. He would learn soon enough. The Hard Way. The lot in Stanwoodopolis, just prior to closing its doors forever, showed him a $2500 wreck, bad tires, 175,000 miles on the odometer, a tranny that slipped, burned a little oil. Savvy buyers that we were, we moved on.

At a fly-by-night used lot in Burlington we found a nice little Honda, 200,000 miles, ran good, only $6500. Obviously they could rob you without a gun. Bob offered the nice salesman $5000 and he said wait right here in his office while he conferred with the manager. Bob was concerned the nice salesman would think we were gay. I said you got way more to worry about than some yahoo with a bad toupee’s opinion of your sorry manhood. In a minute, you’re gonna meet the manager.

Which we did. The manager said we seemed like nice boys and he sure wanted to work with us on this deal, put us in that car, ‘but fellas, I have to make a little money too. I can’t just give this away at a loss.’ He showed us paperwork that proved he was rock bottom on that $6500. But seeing’s how we were nice boys, he’d take a couple hundred off and take no profit. Bob said let me think about it and the manager said sure, sure, but don’t take too long, this beauty’s gonna sell today at this price. Outside Bob worried he’d thought we were parnters. I said I’ll sit out the next negotiation.

By late afternoon I’m fading from lack of sleep and food. It’s late, we’ve hit every shyster and crook up and down the pike, nothing is even close to reasonable and the notion Bob is going to shop for a week or two sends me into adrenaline-fueled panic. I drop down in the Toyota lot and forgetting about promising to stay out of negotiations, march up to a salesman coming out of the showroom side door. “We’re looking for a Toyota or a Honda,” I rapidfire. “$5000 or less, under 100,000 miles. The salesman doesn’t blink, he doesn’t hesitate, he smells the blood in the water and he knows instinctively exactly what to do.

“Your lucky day,” he smiles. “Just came in, hasn’t been detailed yet, but you boys won’t mind saving on that, one owner I’m pretty sure and the boss wants to move inventory, make you a helluva deal.” He points us over to where we just came from, past a line of cars with prices on the windshields and in my sleep deprived fog I realize he’s pointing at MY car. “Give me a minute and I’ll grab the keys from the office. Be right back. Go ahead and kick the tires.”

I regret, even to this day, we didn’t tell him we found the keys in the ignition and take him with us for a test drive. “These two gay guys, see, pulled over on the shoulder …. I thought maybe we’d run out of gas. Then I thought, oh my God, they’re going to do unspeakable things to me. But no, they said get out. Here? I asked. Here, they said. I called the lot and told them to call State Patrol, report a stolen car, even gave them the license number…. Ya know, I always said I could sell snowballs to Eskimos. But those two gay guys, I couldn’t close the deal on selling them their own car. I’m good, but I guess I’m not that good.

For the past 25 years or so the mizzus and me throw a big New Year’s Party here on the South End, partly so we don’t get to know the sheriff’s deputies any better than we do now, which is what we tell the neighbors, but the real reason is a bit more shrouded in the mists of lost memories. I got a call today from Brent, an old friend now in Alaska, and it triggered a couple of neurons into firing spasmodically once more and voila, I was back in, oh, 1985 down at the shack with just a few of us struggling mightily to make it to midnight so we could toast the new year and pass out in our bunks.
My brother was here with his wife Judy and we had Brent and Liz visiting from Portland. My brother is what you’d call a spark plug for party stuff. Meaning, when conversations lag, he springs into instant action. ‘Let’s go around the room,’ he says, ‘and tell what the best day of the year was for each of us.’ So Brent goes first and he relates a warm summer day when he and his collie were at the park and the sun was shining and the Frisbees were sailing and it was just a golden day, a boy and his pooch, fetching the Frisbee. Not maybe what my brother had in mind, I bet, but just a hippie dippy zen day that stood out for Brent more than some birthday or Christmas or the day he got a raise or the usual dopey stuff we trot out when you play Name Your Best Day.
I don’t remember what my favorite day was. I don’t remember Karen’s or my brother’s or my brother’s wife’s favorite day. But I remember Liz’s turn, Brent’s girlfriend who I’d know a long time. A real long time. A way too long a time. And as the clock ticked glacially toward 1986, gears needing oil, glasses waiting for that toast and then goodnight everybody, my brother sez, ‘Okay, Liz, what was your favorite day?’ And to this day I can remember Liz turning to Brent who was rubbing his collie’s head, probably still warm in his remembrance of a summer day in the park, and the clock’s hands stopping forever, the wood stove throwing a heat nothing like what she was focusing on poor Brent with a laser look that would burn through titanium like it was cheap plastic, and our glasses with champagne broke in the sudden stillness before she said, ‘My favorite day …. (and the ‘my’ was a small caliber bullet) My favorite day was the day we got back together, Brent.’
Maybe you’ve had a New Year’s ‘Party’ like that. The room emptying of air and sound and mirth, as if a stopper had been pulled from the tub of our happiness and no matter how hard you try, and Brent desperately tried, that stopper won’t go back in and all the merriment drains out by your feet and deep down in your cold curling guts you know, you know absolutely this is not the way you wanted to ring in the next year. You know what they mean by ill-omened now and all the months to come you will dread the next New Years’ Eve the way you would dread death itself. And of course Liz and Brent broke up and Brent moved to the furthest corner of the earth and my brother admitted maybe that wasn’t the best holiday icebreaker of all time and we decided either to forsake New Year’s altogether or bring so many people in we couldn’t possibly go around the room and play parlor games like Stab Your Lover.
And that is how the South End got its gala New Year’s Extravaganza Potluck and BYOB Party. And of course, you’re invited! Unless you got some serious issues with your girlfriend or boyfriend, lover or husband, wife or mistress. Then I think you got a new parlor game for you and a few select friends. Happy New Year anyway.

Some of the boys down here on the South End were deep into a night of nog over at the Marina’s Pilot House when the subject of New Year’s Resolutions reared its ugly head. We’d pretty much solved most of the burning issues of the day that Congress can’t or won’t address, and with world peace close at hand and a solution for global economic recovery looming in our fevered LED’s, we naturally turned to self-improvement, the final obstacle to Nirvana.

Self-improvement, in case you’ve never met a dyed-in-the-alpaca-wool South Ender, isn’t high on his Honey-Do List. If it’s on the list at all….. I’m not saying we don’t think we could use some polishing, but all those so-called vices other folks resolve every January One to curb or cut back on or eradicate completely, are those very traits we hold in high esteem. We sure aren’t in any hurry to canonize ourselves. We aren’t aiming for perfection. Okay, maybe we could stand a bit of sprucing up, but we all know what a slippery slope that is. Mabana Mike quit the bottle for 13 weeks two New Years ago and by the 3rd week he was an insufferable convert not only to Sobriety but worse, Piety. Every day was like an AA meeting with Mike and he might as well have started his own church, passed out nicotine patches and offered up 3 more cups of decaf coffee to the gods of abstinence.

No, we decided long ago it’s better to accept our little blemishes and move on the best we can. You live in a Shangri-La-La like we do, you don’t want many more monks claiming blissful enlightenment. Next thing you know hordes of tourists seeking Truth, Wisdom and the South End Way will be clogging our backwash blacktop. Plus, the Pilot House isn’t legally zoned for monasteries or temples. We’ll probably just save everyone the grief and skip the resolutions again this New Year. Good luck, though, to the rest of you….

I gassed up the pickup yesterday. $2.19 a gallon. Whoo-hoo! The price at the pump is going down faster than a horny snake courting a garden hose. Russia, who was courting crony capitalism, is doomed, dependent as they are on oil exports. Ditto Venezuala and Iran. Folks maybe wanted a military solution to the Crimea and Ukraine take-over, they can skip the shooting part, except where the Russkies shot themselves in the foot.

We’re awash in oil now. Might not even want to fight wars in the Middle East anymore, just frack our way to energy independence. Dig a shaft in every backyard and shoot down some chemicals we aren’t allowed to know what they are, probably benign, right?, just a secret is all. Like Coca-Cola’s formula. Might even taste good in your well water, but don’t light a match by the faucet if the concentration gets too high.

They aren’t fracking on the South End. Not yet. But we sure use gasoline like it was going the way of coal. Takes a tank just to commute to work. Those of us unemployables are obviously Unsung Heroes, low carbon footprinters. No need to thank us. Sloth, sometimes, is its own reward. Historians will no doubt re-evaluate our rightful place in society and we’re willing to wait. Part of those low gas prices is low demand. Yup, us again!

Pretty soon gas should be cheaper than water. Well water, I mean. It’s always been cheaper than the bottled stuff and nobody’s complaining about the price of bottled water. When fracking is done, well water might very well reach concentrations that work in an internal combustion engine. That mandatory health care folks have been complaining about might make a lot more sense then. Drink up … and drive safe! Or drink safe and stop driving. The way we do down here.