The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End has always been a refuge for us scofflaws and scalawags, con-men and con-artists, ne’er-do-wells and downright losers. I admit it. I even prefer it to the manicured fescue estates behind remote controlled gates further north. Until they start figuring it’s easier to steal from fellow denizens. Which is exactly why I removed myself from the ghetto I found myself in before coming here 37 years ago.

Taking a walk up to a little park I tend on the east side of the island, a neighbor asked if I’d had any break-ins lately. No, I said, you? Three, he said. Know who it is? I asked and he said yeah, the twenty-something heroin addict staying two doors down at John B.’s. John B. won’t talk to my neighbor and the kid in question ran off into the woods when he tried talking to him. I said I guess you know who your culprit is. Fat good it’ll do him….

An hour ago, after chainsawing up a few downed trees in my park, I stopped in to see my old pard Guitar Bob just down the road. He was hauling wood in from a huge cedar that fell in the storm, but we took a break to catch up on news. His news concerned the neighbor woman who kept stopping by to use his phone. She doesn’t have one herself. What she has is a hard luck story for G.B., no car, needs a ride to get meds in Seattle, has cancer, undergoes dialysis, kid is in a halfway house, can’t work, doesn’t have any money. Bob, a hardened urban character, street-wise before they made cobblestones, also has a soft heart. He takes in stray cats and unwanted dogs—he took my junkie neighbor’s hound – and he gives to about 42 and half charities what little he can afford to give.

So he ends up taking her clear to Seattle one night to get a prescription filled for meds she desperately needs. Two hour drive one way. They go, not to a hospital 24 hour pharmacy, but downtown to some seedy apartment in Belltown. He waits in his jalopy and she goes up to get her ‘meds’. I know, you’d think the lights would come on for a streetsmart character like Bob, but … he felt bad for her, you know, dying of cancer and needing dialysis and well, at least she wasn’t selling a bridge.

Long story a lot shorter, she gets lots more rides, stops in frequently to use his phone, wants to borrow money. You might even say they’re developing a rapport, if not a relationship. He does think it odd that the calls she makes are from his bathroom rather than the livingroom, but hey, maybe she needs some privacy. A week ago she takes the phone into the privy and he notices his wallet is missing from the counter where he always keeps it. So when she comes back he asks her for his wallet back. She says she didn’t take it.

There is something broken in a junkie’s head. I’m not a counselor and I don’t play one on TV, but … I know this: somehow they think the rest of us are way stupider than they are. And they are seriously intellectually challenged folks. That, or desperation just takes over and they will try anything, no matter how ridiculous. Guitar Bob can see her holding his wallet inside her jacket and he says you can give me my wallet or I’ll call the cops and we’ll sit here together until they come. She reluctantly hands him his wallet. Of course the money is gone. She probably figured he wouldn’t notice.

Okay, he sez, I’m calling the sheriff. If you don’t call the cops, she sez, I’ll give you a blowjob. Now, I’m no expert on these things having lived too long down in the desolate wilds of the South End, but maybe this actually works on some guys. Bob had 3 dollars in that wallet. Don’t ask me what fellatio goes for in the city, but I’m betting more than 3 bucks. Bob, being Bob, takes Total Offense, this isn’t, after all, the plot to a porno movie. He tells her he’s not calling the police, but that money is going back in his wallet and she’s going back to her hellhole house and she can never darken his doorway, he doesn’t care if her blood is toxifying to sludge or her meds are waiting at the local pharmacy.

If you think this is where the story ends, like Bob does, I suspect you’ve never been around addicts. I wish to hell I hadn’t either, but apparently, they’re living in the neighborhood thick as the deer that eat our apples. At least the deer are cute little buggers….

Little Jimmy, a buddy of mine who’s almost exactly the same old age as me, was reflecting on what he’d like to do when he retired. He’s a glass artist – same as me – and so I know, even if he doesn’t, the kind of retirement he’s dreaming of is just that, a pipe dream. There’s as much likelihood of golden years in a hammock beside a South Seas Lagoon as winning American Idol with a tin ear and laryngitis, but like most folks who gamble on a lottery ticket, the fantasy trumps mathematics.

He’s the kind of guy who itemizes his day, schedules his week, plans itinerary into the coming months and can tell you, by rote, the exact steps he’ll take into the coming years. I can no more imagine him poolside with a Cuba Libre beside his sunglasses on the cabana table slathered with tanning lotion reading a novel than I can see him winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Little Jimmy’s a List Maker. An organized, tightly scheduled Planner. He knows far ahead what he needs to do not only this morning but the morning Tuesday first week, next month. He’s the guy who made an outline before he wrote the essay in 12th grade history class and got an A+ with the teacher’s comments: well organized. I don’t need to look in his dish cabinet to know the bowls and glasses are neatly arranged by size and color. Chaos, to him, is MY cabinet, one step shy of disaster, mayhem and death.

Little Jimmy pulls out a tape rule last visit and shows me 80 inches. “See that?” I shrug in incomprehension. “What’re we measuring?” I ask. “Time left,” Jimmy declares. “If I live to be 80, slightly longer than the average U.S. male … and I’m 64 (he puts his finger at 5’4”, then this is all you and me got left, buddy, 16 inches.” He shakes his head sadly. “Time’s short now.”

Unlike most of us and me in particular, Jimmy’s hit the End of his Calendar. No more days no more months no more years. Just inches. He wants to get more done, he’s got to speed up the Line, blow more glass, sell more stock, finish 2018 by 2017, squeeze into that retirement before the tape rule hits 80 inches. They say dogs don’t understand death. I think dogs are like me — they get the idea, all right, they just don’t carry a tape rule strapped to their collar. I guess we’re a little too busy scratching fleas.

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.