The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End Suds and Duds, our local laundromat and gossip center, advertises as OPEN 24/7, but for us Maytagless residents, we know it’s open maybe only 5 or 6 days, the other two they’re closed for repairs and plumbing catastrophes now that Wanda , the current owner, lost her husband/repair guy to Cindy, one of the regulars, at least until she ran off for a new life in Phoenix. Wanda took Fred’s betrayal hard, especially considering Cindy was young enough to be their daughter. If she was a bitter chainsmoking woman before, she doubled down after. And consequently lost interest in the Suds and Duds.

I happened to be washing a week’s worth of dirty clothes and sheets when our washer refused to drain. Wanda was interviewing Tommy Wilson for the position of Head Roto-Rooter. Tommy barely knows which end is the working end of a toilet plunger, but Wanda obviously was short on applicants. “I got a guy yesterday,” she said through a haze of Pall Mall smoke, “probably illegal. I said I’d need to see a green card. He could barely speak English. Said he had a family to feed. I told him I was hiring him, not his whole damn family.”

Tommy swore. “Takin our jobs. They’ll own America before long.” Tommy’s jobs disappeared a long time ago. If Wanda hired him, it would break a streak of decades. “We need to deport these people,” he growled darkly. “Just leeches on the rest of us.” Wanda shot him a long exclamation point of smoke. For once I kept my mouth shut. It’s hellish enough doing the laundry here without debating the owners and clientele. I vowed to get my washer fixed ASAP or die trying.

Tommy lasted about half a week, near as I could tell, probably until the first breakdown. Wanda hired an hombre named Carlos to replace him. They say he can fix about anything. Except maybe Wanda’s broke heart and bitter life. I bought a used washer at the 2nd hand appliance place up north. A very polite Hispanic kid helped me load it into my truck. I noticed he spoke perfect English.

Well sure, the guy had an affair with a couple of porn stars, nothing most healthy all American males wouldn’t do if they had the opportunity, right? Course I’m right. Even if they’d had a wife who’d just given birth. And if they happened to be running for President in a close race, they’d want to keep this under wraps. Buy off the women if they had the money and Donald certainly had the money. Especially if that embarrassing segment of grabbing genitals had just hit the airwaves…. Not that for most voters, even the evangelicals, this would matter. The rich are kind of immune from the morality of the rest of us. Right?

Okay, let’s admit there’s a law against hiding that payoff. Why you had Cohen make the payments, your bag man, your enforcer. Turns out he was ripping you off while he was at it and then when you threw him under the bus and he spends time in jail, he turns star witness on you. Great TV, but embarrassing. Stormy was even more embarrassing. Probably a mistake hauling her onto the witness stand when the affair wasn’t the real issue, try to make her look like a liar so it wouldn’t appear he’d had sex with her, something everyone knew he had and most would have liked to have had too. But never back down, just double down, isn’t that the Roy Cohn motto. Hit back and hit harder. Never admit guilt.

And now 12 jurors have found him guilty. On all 34 felony counts. You didn’t expect remorse, now did you? Course not, all a witch hunt. Political payback. The right wing talk shows and the Republican sycophants are screaming bloody murder. How dare they bring an ex-President up on charges? Same as those impeachments, both of them. Nothing to see here, nothing wrong. Nothing you or I wouldn’t have done in his place.

Up next, the sentencing. No way could Judge Merchan put him behind bars, no way, no how. But … here’s a defendant convicted on all 34 counts, fined repeatedly for violating the Judge’s gag order, who ranted daily about a travesty of the law and a corrupt court, who obviously has no remorse, none whatsoever, who quite possibly changed the 2016 election in his favor by his actions, who will not and cannot be disciplined. No way he’s going to be incarcerated or ordered to home detention. Right? Right????

So our President-in-Exile had his day in court. Weeks, really, and today the judge gave the jury their instructions, then sequestered them. Even took away their cellphones and wi-fi, which, if I’m guessing correctly, should induce a hasty verdict due to social media withdrawal, tempers on edge, plenty of shouting and wailing in the jury room, ‘for godsake, everybody, I need my phone!”

Mister Trump, despite declaring he would most certainly testify in his own behalf, declined to take the stand. Or the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His accuser, Michael Cohen, was a serial liar, a point reiterated countless times by the defense attorneys. As for their client, well, you be the judge.

This, ladies and gentlemen of the blog jury, is the America this defendant made great again. Divided and angry. A corrupt Supreme Court that takes bribes and flies an upside down flag supporting insurrection without shame or recusals. A do-nothing Congress. Red states vs. Blue. If anyone thinks this narcissistic phoney baloney business man, a serial liar and a rapist, a man completely devoid of morality, is the answer and not the problem, I got a bridge I’d love to sell you. To Reality.

Of course if the jury finds our Savior guilty, it will be like the last election, rigged. You can’t trust the courts … or the police … or the government. The states, the Feds, the Democrats, Joe Biden — all out to get him, to bring him down, to prevent him from saving America. Never show remorse, never apologize, never compromise, never be a loser, never stop blaming others.

12 people are sitting in judgement right now while the world is watching. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll decide if America is great again. Meanwhile, it’s a real cliffhanger of a story.

I heard a guy on the radio, some Hot Talk jock, who said he was against not only minimum wage increases, he was against minimum wage completely. He argued that the largest growth spurt in U.S. history was when the corporations took off with little tax and with no regulations to prevent them from setting wages as low as the market would bear. Capitalism at its cut-throat best, unfettered, unregulated and unapologetic. The Roaring 20’s. I guess he didn’t read the next chapter in his 8th grade history book, the one titled The Great Depression.

Down here in the laissez faire South End, a lot of us don’t have minimum wage jobs cause we don’t even have jobs. The ones who do have minimum wage jobs don’t make enough to afford health insurance or to make the monthly nut on that double-wide they’ll never own outright. To make ends meet they’ll apply for food stamps or other supplemental programs. These are the folks my Hot Talk jock calls ‘Takers’. Or sometimes ‘Whiners’. And occasionally, when he’s feeling frisky, ‘Leeches’. And when he hears some candidate advocating for tax reform or health care or income equity, he screams ‘Class Warfare’.

The South End Food Bank barely keeps up these days. Moms with kids, fathers without jobs, folks who are disabled, people down on their luck. The Little Church in the Ravine helps the poor, I’ll give em that. Pastor Bob preaches the parable of the loaves and the fish, feeding the masses. I saw a bumper sticker on a BMW going into town: WINNING DOESN’T MEAN SOMEONE HAS TO LOSE. Or so he’d like to think….

Charity begins in the home, I’ll grant you, but sometimes we need to think of America as our home. Maybe you never needed a helping hand, but I suspect most of us got one except maybe that BMW driver. You maybe can’t legislate compassion, but you can sure legislate for fair play. You think folks living on the street or applying for food stamps or welfare are all Takers, turn off your radio and stand by the Food Bank half a day. It might just soften your heart.

Two Toke Tom asked me the other day why in holy hell do I write these stories. “Live in the moment, Skeeter,” he advised. “Let the past be the past.” Two Toke is a disciple of Be Here Now, living in the Eternal Moment. I could make the argument — and I do — that I’m just allowing the Past to live alongside the Present, but T.T. isn’t buying. To him, the past isn’t prologue, it’s just prolonged, at least by guyz like me.

He’s got a point, but I long ago stopped looking for Enlightenment. The world is a mystery to me and so be it. I guess I have a fondness, though, for what came before. I keep my old shack, I preserve my old stories. I figure nobody much cares, but history means something to me. The newcomers to the South End see the mizzus and me now as Old Timers, anachronistic pioneers on an island where the pioneers vanished long ago. Who cares who lived in the old Nesje house? Who cares if the little building south of us was the Bucklin Store? Who gives a damn if Bernie Road was named after Bernie Dallman and Dallman Road was too. The man is dead and gone and so what if his kinfolks are still here? It’s not like he was a famous war hero. Just a name on some roadsigns to the newcomers.

But there are ghosts among us. There are, I tell Two Toke after the 3rd or 4th, ripples in the continuum. Toss a stone in the pond and it eventually comes back. Tom smiles his Cheshire Cat smile and chuckles from across his kitchen table. We go back a long ways, Tom and me. We go back to when we both first came to the South End, two drifters looking for a future. I guess Tom found the present … and me, I found that too. Time is the great Trickster is what I think, but Tom and I both found what we were looking for, we just took different paths to getting there.

Two Toke says, late in another evening, “I do read your stories, man.”

I give him MY Cheshire grin. “I know you do, Tom. I write em for you. So you won’t forget.”

Tom’s eyes twinkle, they’ve grown so moist, and the light from them is like stars light years away, no telling how long ago, just a sparkle that arrives right now. “You’re a crack—up,” he says in a voice I’ve heard before, a voice not so very far away.