The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I had an old friend ask me late into our New Year’s Party last year if I had a banjo she could borrow so she could learn to play one. Since I had 5 of them hanging on various walls, I could hardly say no without seeming like some selfish materialistic you-know-what. Four were handmade by me, three of them within the year so I didn’t want to loan those. Another is my concert banjo, mostly rebuilt by me, so no on that too. And another was a 1920’s vintage Sterling, nice inlays, sweet action, pretty sounding little 5 string.

So I loaned her the Sterling. Reluctantly. And I still felt like a selfish materialistic you-know-what. I mean, jeez, she was a friend and I could help out and maybe she’d even learn to play the thing and maybe love playing it and the world would be a better place with another banjo picker. Stranger things have happened, believe me.

Two weeks later I get a call. The banjo, she says, has problems. Won’t hold its tuning. The 5th string peg is glitchy. She’s had her luthier pals look at it, but they don’t want to make adjustments. She wanted me to pick it up, fix it and return it when I had it ready. She sounded a little put-off that her loaner wasn’t up to snuff. I said bring it down and I’ll see what I can do, but I’d been playing it and I sure didn’t have those problems. She said snippily, it does now.

I adjusted some tuning pegs and glued the 5th string peg and she took it on home. It was clear she wanted a replacement banjo, but I was … well, you already know what I was. A week later she called to say the banjo was no good. Her friends had looked at it and they said it was no good too. She was bringing it back. I said okay. I was leaving but just leave it in the shop, door is unlocked.

When I got home, it was raining cats and puppies. There was a message on my answering gizmo telling me my banjo was leaned against the shop back door, outside, and it was raining so if I got this call, I might want to bring the banjo inside. At which point she laughed and hung up. I raced down and sure enough, my vintage 1920 maple banjo was soaking wet, the pot full of water, the tuners ready for some imminent rust.

Maybe a better man, a less materialistic you-know-what man, would’ve shrugged and said c’est la vie, it’s just a banjo, probably only worth $500, no big deal. But like I said, I’m not. And my friend, well, she isn’t my friend anymore. With friends like that I could start another band. Course, it would be mostly blues.

G.I. George is positively apoplectic watching the news on the flatscreen over the bar at the Pilot House in the South End Marina. “Torture?” he’s snarling, “they can’t HANDLE torture!!! They’d rather see those *&%!!* Arabs blow us up in our sleep than interrogate the ?!!@*^’s!” Jerry, the night bartender, hits the channel changer and the Senate committee’s report on the CIA becomes Two and A Half Men, Charlie Sheen smirking with a cocktail in his hand and a girlfriend with 38’s spilling into the camera, usually a Pilot House pacifier, but not tonight.

George is threatening to waterboard Jerry if he doesn’t turn the station back to Fox News. Little Jimmy votes with his empty beer bottle for Charlie Sheen and his lady friend and out of sheer contrariness I second the motion. “Who’s with me on this?” George shouts. He’s standing up and he’s ready to hit Omaha Beach – or Tyee Beach in this case – but he’s getting no Takers.

“Call up Dick Cheney,” I prod, “see if he wants any more sunlight on the subject.” Jerry shoots me a warning as he wipes a glass with his bar towel. Politics and liquor, a flammable cocktail. He’s seen too many fires. George is scowling at me now. “You creepy little draft dodger,” he growls.

“Too old for Iraq, George, too young for Korea. I missed all the good ones.” I watch George calculating my age, see if maybe I should’ve been in Viet Nam like all the other drafted patriots, but he’s not certain enough to go for my skinny jugular. George, we all know, lost a brother those last days of the Saigon evacuation and he’s bitter, even after forty years. He’s got two American flags on little antennas off the roof of his Hummer that look like the Star Spangled Banner after 200 years of Hurricane Sandy.

I can see if I say one more wiseass thing, he’s going to waterboard me in the men’s room so I say, “George, let’s agree to disagree, okay?” I know, it’s a stupid cliché and I feel small for saying it, but George heaves himself back down at the bar and sighs. “Jeez, Jerry,” he finally says, “that Charlie Sheen is a total %!@**#.” Jerry pours him another whiskey sour, on the house, and says, “Yeah, but he’s a funny %!@**#.”

I’m parked right now in a heroin den. Don’t be alarmed, don’t call Nine One One — I haven’t succumbed to the siren call of narcotics. Yet. We had a couple of neighbors renting the low rent house next door for quite a few years and if I’d been more alert, I might’ve realized the discarded syringes I occasionally found by our property line weren’t from diabetics littering from passing cars. Call me naïve, but I’ve never tuned into the ‘needle culture’. Turns out our boyz were what their counselor — a friend of ours — refers to as Heavy Users. And here all the time I just thought they were Hopeless Losers.

When I moved to the South End, I was figuring I’d be leaving the city and my ghetto neighborhood behind. Course I realized I’d substitute urban gangsterism for redneck reality, but … there were way fewer rednecks than pimps, prostitutes, gun runners, thieves, drug dealers and white slavers that populated my street in Seattle and Gomorrah. Give me a few NRA anti-government racist whackos in exchange for all the capitalist creeps next door to me in the Big City and I was happy to decamp on Camano Island.

Little did I know these urban lowlifes were going to follow me out to Nirvana, no doubt assuming our sleepy island deputies were related to Barney Fife. Even Mayberry is pockmarked now with meth dealers, crackheads and smack addicts. And for certain they’re here on the South End. Although … we’re rid of two. The renters next door moved on. One to the afterlife and the other to Oklahoma. You won’t hear me say HELL. I suspect the survivor will do real well in Oklahoma, a gay junkie in a Red State. Couldn’t do much worse than here. The last month he was sequestered in this house, no power, no lights, no heat, the curtains pulled, no visitors, no sign of life. I thought he’d moved away … until the day he was hitting the electrical panel box with a hammer, hoping, I guess, PUD was joshing about non-payment disconnections and a few hard blows would do the trick to restore juice, probably a fairly common mistake among urban refugees.

His landlady, good hearted soul that she was, gave him an extra month free of charge to find a new lair. In the end she even helped him pack, rented him a storage unit, moved his stuff and gave him a ride to the airport. I think it was the straw that ruined her dream of renting the place anymore.

So … we ended up buying the place. I’m not too hot to rent it just yet. Maybe clean up the discarded syringes, fumigate the joint and let the little house breathe for awhile. I think it deserves a rest. And … so do we.