The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Somewhere just shy of the tail end of the Last Century, we built the Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center and Art Park. Even won some architectural awards when we finished it. Got a post-modern building, a huge Matzke stainless steel sculpture, a Paula Rey sculpture, a Gunter painting, a David Maritz sculpture, another by Debbie Rhodes and a big-ass stained glass window. We planted trees and shrubs, laid a walkway, redid the signboard and map and striped a parking lot. We even managed to obtain 3.5 acres behind this for a continuation of our sculpture park. You want to know if something like that is inspirational, an art story where art wins at the end, I can tell you. It is!

A bunch of us artists spent a year on that project. Plenty of headbutting with the Chamber Board, mostly folks who felt like us artists had pulled a fast one on them, turning an information booth into a celebration of art. I finally had to join up myself so we could get the thing done, about as appealing a notion to me as signing up for the NRA. Half the Board wondered who the hell the guy in the hat was who worked every day down there 7 days a week all that spring and summer and into the fall. Some unemployed sucker, they probably thought, who we don’t need to know who he is or stop by and maybe say thanks for the free labor.

Fast forward a few years. Maritz’s sculpture was stolen for scrap metal. Debbie’s ‘Diver’ sculpture was stolen for the same reason. A decommissioned Seattle copper and bronze sculpture by Glen Alps we’d hauled up to reinstall was hauled off in the middle of the night by metal thieves. The stained glass window was riddled with bullet holes and broken by bottles thrown from passing cars. I got a call last week from the guy who’s going to rent that Visitor Center from the current Chamber now that they decided they’d rather set up an info booth around the corner in a trailer and rent the empty building at the most strategic location on the island for a few miserable pesos. I spoze I could’ve been pissy with him. I spoze I could’ve gone to the county and asked if maybe a commercial building meets their codes. I spoze I could’ve gotten on my High Horse and gone to the papers, see what people think of folks who take all our volunteerism and turn it into a cash register.

But … Don Quixote here has tilted too long at windmills, even if it’s one he helped build. I must be getting old and tired. I wish I was getting wiser. Although … if dealing with the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t smartened me up, nothing much will. Most folks don’t know the history of that Art Park and most wouldn’t care anyway. I like to think — and I certainly say it enough — all I want is to move on to the next project. The past, dammit, just is. Past. I can’t spend time fighting battles to save it. I’m not a historian, I’m a South Ender.
They want me to say it’s fine, it’s okay. Just a new wrinkle in the old Center. They tried to put the President’s retail shop in there back when we first built it. So maybe the way to look at it is we held them at bay for 15 years at least. But capitalism has won now, why not shout hurray! Join the Chamber. Salute the real estate offices. Pledge allegiance to Money.

But! For a brief time, maybe not forever, art won. I think maybe the battle is lost, but the war isn’t over on Commando Island, not by a long shot. We’re leaving a silver bullet on the table when we go even though they’ll smile and figure it’s just something they can melt down and cash in. Like an old pal of mine once said, “They don’t know what to make of me …. but I know exactly what to make of them.”

Je Suis Fred

Francophobe Fred was lecturing with a cold limp French fry to a few of us malingerers at the newly christened Leatherhedz Pub and Swill. Admittedly, we were deep in our cups, not quite ready to face the music at home, although … a few more flaccid fries with ketchup dripping noodled in our faces, anything would look better.

“They’re ALL terrorists!” he shouted. A fat splotch of ketchup put an exclamation point on Ralph’s Carhartt jacket. Another stain only added to the ‘worn’ look of it, but even so, Ralph rubbed at it as if it were acid eating through to his chest. “Jeez, Fred, watch where you’re shakin that fry! This coat’s American made.”

“The hell, you say.” And for a moment, I thought the invocation of jobs still in this country might swing Fred onto another of his favorite rants, illegal immigration and jobs going overseas. But no, he popped the accused fry into his mouth and said between chews, “A few more boatlads and they’ll ram Sharia Law through. The French won’t know what hit em til it’s too late. Maybe,” he wondered aloud, brandishing another greasy potato stick, “they’ll get the message now.”

Ralph was muttering. He’d poured part of his beer on a napkin and was furiously scrubbing the ketchup stain deeper into cotton grown in Bangladesh and sewn in Mexico by workers who hadn’t yet smuggled themselves north. “I’m getting the message, Fred. Jeez, settle down.”

“It’s about Free Speech, Ralph, can’t you see what’s happening?” Ralph shook his head sadly. “I see this ketchup isn’t coming out, that’s what I see, Fred.” Ralph looked like he’d been shot in the chest, blood oozing above his right breast pocket. Jerry, two stools down, laughed out loud. “He means that cartoon of Muhammed, Ralph. They got a right to make fun at someone’s religion, that’s what he means.” None of us waiting for Last Call were particularly religious.

“Damn right that’s what I mean! They don’t like it, lump it … or leave the country. All of em!” “Or what?” I asked, breaking off from watching Ralph washing his coat with Budweiser.

“Round em up! Send em home where they belong! Why the hell not?”

“Their free speech?” I asked. “Freedom to live where they want?”

Ralph stood up suddenly. Fred drew back as if expecting the worst. “I gotta go,” Ralph blurted. He lurched out of his booth. “I don’t want this to set. Maybe I can still soak it in cold water.”

“Soak yer head too,” Fred called after him, although not loud enough for Ralph to hear. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to call it a night. Facing the music looked like a real good plan. “Wait up, Ralph,” I hollered. “I’m right behind you.” Sometimes freedom isn’t at all what you think.

Those of you who think the Wild Wild West is gone from the gentrified South End, I’ll tell you a story. I got a call this morning at an uncivilized hour, something that the mizzus really hates, especially when it’s a threatening phone call, another victim of Skeeter’s satire taking serious umbrage. The Barefoot Bandit’s demented mom called one time while I was on a field trip and she didn’t sleep until I got home to take care of my mess, figuring, probably for good cause, someone might want to knock the door down to discuss matters. This call, however, was from a neighbor pissed off I had called him out in the widely circulated Crab Cracker for poaching crab. “You must have a guilty conscience,” I laughed in the pre-dawn hours.

Bingo. Sometimes Skeeter’s right on target. Rare, but it happens. My pal had been poaching crab, the police had been summoned and …. well, no point repeating the tale. I said I had someone else in mind, happened to use your given name, purely coincidental. He was unconvinced until I mentioned I’d written the story six months before his transgression.

“Well, okay,” Poacher Paul sez, still not totally sure I wasn’t conning a con. “But I got a better story for ya….” This, dear reader, is how reporters work. We develop contacts, undisclosed sources, ‘anonymous’ insiders. And then we wait for them to call us, why go hoofing around the nettlebottoms looking for leads? They’re dying to tell their story.

So maybe you remember the heroin addict up the road stealing from my neighbors I wrote about this past month? Or maybe you don’t. We got this yahoo addict living in the ‘hood, sheltered by a buddy’s neighbor. My buddy was robbed three times. He goes to see the neighbor and the neighbor won’t even talk to him. He sees the pilfering addict and the addict runs into the woods when he’s approached. It doesn’t take Perry Mason to figure who’s guilty here. But the cops can’t do anything but take reports and hope for a break in the case.

Down on the South End, we don’t like to wait for the break in the case. We like to be a tad more hands-on. So my neighbor and Poacher Paul and an ex-cop they bring along, go to visit our thief, ‘alleged’ not really applicable at this point. Did I mention it was 3 in the morning? And they brought a shotgun, a semi-automatic assault rifle and — my favorite part! — a video camera to record the whole thing. They commence to banging on the doors and bedroom windows, yelling to come out with hands up, guns drawn … and hear screaming that ‘they’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill us!’ If you’ve lived here as long as me and Dave, the guy now sheltering Needleboy, you would know the sheriffs shot a man to pieces wanted on warrants same time of night a house or two away back in the ‘80’s. Threw in a stun grenade, then shot him up like Bonnie and Clyde. He’d been seen firing his assault rifle on Bernie Road, a peaceful little cut-off to pretty much nowhere back then. We don’t cotton to that down here, I don’t care how much we seem to like firearms and the NRA.

Dave probably figured sleepily what his options were here and came out on his porch in his BVD’s blasting away with a sawed off shotgun. Events involving weapons have a way of getting out of hand…. By now my neighbor is in Dave’s house with his shotgun, waving it around like a can of aerosol air freshener. He wants his stuff back and he wants it right %$!!?**#@ NOW!

Course you know and I know that stuff is long gone, sold for peanuts and used to buy a few more fixes. I’m assuming our vigilantes knew that too, they simply wanted to put an exclamation on their point. Which was …? Well, hard, really, to say. I’m just a reporter, not a psychologist. But I’m guessing they wanted him to move up the line, maybe the North End. If you’re from up there, you might want to think twice before taking in boarders.