The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When the Flatheads got to the door of the South End Diner this morning, they were greeted by Anita’s handwritten placard:
No More Political Arguments
Until After the Election
No Exceptions!!

The vintage car guyz were flabbergasted. What’s it mean? they wanted to know. What about Freedom of Speech? Walter particularly wanted to know. Brenda was pouring the first rounds of coffee to about ten perplexed Flatheads. “We’re sick of it, all of us,” she explained. “Anita’s had a dose. She’s ready to close the diner until after next Tuesday if she has to.”

“Who does she think she is?” Walter demanded, waving his porcelain clay mug in a moving target for Brenda who finally grabbed his hand to hold the cup still. “She’s the owner, Walt, that’s who. No shoes, no shirt no service. You want breakfast, no more of your Trump talk.”

Jerry clapped his hands. “Okay with me, Walt. Maybe my appetite will come back.”

“What’ll we talk about instead,” Charlie moaned, only half serious. “How about cars?” Brenda suggested, starting now to take orders. “You’re a car club, not a political action committee.”

“Anita gonna ban that next?” Walter shouted, which brought Anita herself out from behind her register. Walter had his back to her and never saw the menu before it slapped across the back of his head, knocking his Make America Great Again ballcap onto the formica tabletop. “What the …?” he sputtered and turned to find Anita rearing back for another swat.

“Holy cripes, Anita,” he stuttered. “I’m just kidding.”

Anita whacked him anyway. “Jeez, Anita ….”

The rest of breakfast the boyz spent discussing the virtues of dual exhausts, twin carbs and rebored cylinders. Next week they’ll probably argue who stole the election. Or try, anyway ….

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I was down at the Diner a couple months ago. Anita, our morning waitress had let slip the news they were going to change the menus. Some of the regulars were instantly agitated — and this was before their second cup of Black Tar coffee, a high-dosage distilled caffeine that would prop a trucker ramrod straight behind the wheel of a Kenworth hauling from Stanwood to Berdoo.

“Why tamper with perfection?” 3 Putt Pete was asking the entire assemblage of us Late Morning crowd, although purportedly he was aiming his alarm at Brenda behind the cash register. When she’d finished ringing up Little Willy, our ex-commissioner who served one term before half these yahoos sent him packing over a detour during a months long road construction, she turned on 3 Putt and scowled her Early Morning No Nonsense scowl that sent half the boyz back to breakfast lest she shot a laser blast at them, ruining way more than some suddenly overcooked omelette smoldering on a charred plate. 3 Putt wasn’t looking her way, unfortunately for him, sort of like Bambi hopping happily in the meadow before Godzilla makes venison toejam out of our cute critic.

“Why, oh why,” he was lamenting, maybe imagining this was his Big Chance at a thespian breakthrough, play to the Imagined Producer who might be taking breakfast Off Broadway, “why can’t we just accept things as they are, not ruin em by pushing the limits to what might never be?”

By the conclusion of his soliloquy, Pete was practically standing on his chair, fork and knife dancing in a grand flourish of stainless and saliva, the expected applause, the cries of ‘Author’ and ‘Bravo!’ soon to follow …. when Brenda slammed the register shut to steal the finale while shaking a receipt in 3 Putt’s direction. You could’ve heard an egg break back on Big Larry’s grill as total silence descended on the café heavy as that chlorine gas leak the previous week when a welding torch opened a mystery tank and set off a South End mustard gas evacuation.

“For the luvva Grease, Pete, will you sit down!? We’re not changing the food, you fool, just the damn menus. These old ones are tattered and stained. You’ll still get your chicken fried steak and that heart attack that can’t come quick enough, you ask me.”

3 Putt, you can rest assured, left enough tip to pay half the printing costs. And when those new menus arrived a few days later, it was Pete who admitted they were a fine addition to the Diner and asked meekly if he could take one of the old ones home. As a special keepsake. Historians, it seems, are made, not born.

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Down at the Diner normality is slowly returning. Well, the New Normality, I guess. After being shut down briefly for non-compliance with plague masking, the café began to adhere to the governor’s edict that masks must be worn by customer and staff alike. As soon as some of the quarantines lifted, the Diner was first in line to rip those N-95’s off their ears and breathe free once again. Eager to recoup the winter’s lost revenues, they built a makeshift beer garden out by the parking lot next to the building, fenced it off and offered tourists and residents adult beverages near the gas pumps. Even brought in music, small groups and a night of open mic.

Course, they had forgotten about checking with the Liquor Board for permits for a beer garden, or if they had checked, went ahead without them. So for a time the music by the pumps and the open mics went on hiatus until the snafu was corrected. Damn government regulations! Last week I drove up to hear what the open mic folks might have to offer, maybe catch a beer and sit in the sun. And while it’s not Margaritaville or a sunset rich view of the Puget Sound, it’s pleasant enough. Unless you happen to be sitting next to the air return for the café’s HVAC system, 95 degree breezes fluttering your hat, although, to be fair, there are a few more seats further from the desert breeze.

I lasted one cold beer, at least until the guy with the saxophone stepped up to the microphone and butchered Duke Ellington. I was in 5th grade band classes with kids who could play like this, but I’m not in 5th grade anymore and I honestly believe before you perform in public, you ought to learn to halfway play your instrument. Just saying….

Saturday night the mizzus and me went to hear a very good fiddler play old time music, solo and then with friends. It was indoors after the only rain of the summer soaked the beer garden, all very convivial for a small super spreader event, the beer was good, the place was packed. After a dozen songs or so a 30 something woman parked next to me who started yelling in my right ear GET CLOSER TO THE MICROPHONE!! or YOU NEED TO TURN UP THE AMP!! or SING LOUDER!! until finally I got up and moved away from her. She immediately charged over to ask AM I ANNOYING YOU??

Now, a bigger man, a more mature man, a man mellowed by the South End laid back lifestyle might have said, no, ma’am, I just had my right ass cheek going dead so I thought I would move to a different seating position, nothing at all to do with the new tinnitus in my right ear … but, of course, that would be a different man than myself. When she took umbrage to my telling her hell yes you’re annoying me, you’re screaming in my ear louder than the damn band, she seemed suddenly enraged for some reason. To which she spluttered and told me YOU NEED A NEW HAT!!

I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was a new hat, figuring it probably wouldn’t lower the volume. I started to tell her she needed a …. stopped myself, then said, aw, let’s quit here, why don’t we? When the song ended, I grabbed The mizzus from across the room and left. Good times at the diner, obviously, are back.

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