The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back when I first moved to the wild South End, I worked graveyard weekends at the Pain Motel in Everett, Everett General Hospital. We had maybe 3 or 4 emergency rooms in the ER, what is now 65 rooms. Most weekends were pretty quiet, good for sleeping if you were the orderly, which I was. But occasionally we’d crank it up, holidays especially, but we could never predict.

My first year there was an eye-opener. A lot of blood, plenty of horror, none of it for the squeamish. I guess you can get used to about anything. But that first year I wasn’t used to the shock yet. My job was basically gopher. Run fluids to the lab, look for missing medical records, deliver supplies, take the dead to the morgue, deliver patients to the wards, you name it, that was my Job Description.

Bout a month after I started we had this motorcycle gangbanger come into the ER. Drove himself in after he’d put his hand into the moving chain. I ran bloodwork and paperwork on him to the lab and eventually I was called on my beeper to go get him in the ER and take him to his room. He was sitting up on the gurney and said he could walk okay, but I said we got rules and one is he had to get driven by gurney. “Okay, man,” he said, which is biker talk for ‘bite me’, but he said, “Let’s ride.”

A nurse ran up to me with a cup and said deliver it to the desk on the 5th floor when I got there. The biker said, “You got my fingers in there, man. They’re gonna sew em on in the morning.” I took a peek and yeah, there on ice were three fingers a bit worse for wear.

“They told you they’d sew them on tomorrow?” I asked. He said, yeah, no problem. Well, maybe not to a drunk biker, but you know and I know, if you’re going to reattach missing body parts, it’s kind of critical to do it sooner rather than later. I said, “Hey, man, talk to a nurse when we get up there and tell her what you told me. They’re not planning to sew these on you, c’mon, think about it.”

Our hospital, being a public funded hospital, took in everybody, insurance or not, no small thing really, but I learned that night not everyone receives the same care. Somewhere along the line, maybe on an adjoining barstool, I’ll probably meet an old biker, 2 finger Fred, and we’ll have a beer and maybe a laugh over this shared memory. Well … the beer, probably not the laugh.

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Crabbers are like fishermen, only worse. They’ll exaggerate, lie outright, then tell you the most wild-eyed outlandish whoppers only the chronically gullible would believe. Three Finger Fred loves to hold up his stubs and tell any newcomer who’s unfortunate enough to gravitate into Fred’s barstool orbit, how he was pulling traps in a full gale out of his 10 foot dinghy one terrible November.

“You don’t mean …?” the poor unsuspecting stool neighbor would invariably ask in horror.

“Yup,” Fred would nod, finishing his beer in a final gulp … and ordinarily the newbie would tell the bartender to give Fred another, on him.

“Terrible storm,” Fred would continue once his glass arrived. “Worst we’d seen all year. But I had traps to pull and by god, no storm ever stopped Fred Jensen, not before, not since.” Fred would glance at his victim, raise his glass and toast the courage of a man such as himself. “I almost swamped on the first trap gettin her in. Full pot, top to bottom with the clacking monsters. I no sooner opened the side hatch than half the beasts were in the boat, grabbin on to my boots, crawlin up my rainpants. It was awful those 8 legged bastards all trying to get at me. And the wind was blowin awful too. And the rain was comin in sideways. I knew right then I’d have to row out of there, crabs or no.

“I was kickin em off me, rowing into the wind and rain was an inch deep in the bottom so the crabs were sloshin back and forth and up my legs. About halfway to shore two of the biggest buggers made it up to my chest, clackin those nasty claws, tearin at my life preserver. It was a nightmare, me tryin to row and swat at the beasts same time. I was half crazy … and that’s when the big one got hold of my swattin hand. Took those fingers right to the bone. I had to beat him with the oar before he’d let go.

“My god, man!” his listener would cry, “give this man another drink!”

Fred, of course, would drag the story out until the drinks stopped coming. Sometimes the boat went over crabs, oars and all. Sometimes the crab that amputated his fingers was kept by the U.W. Science Department, it being the biggest Dungeness ever caught in Puget Sound. Sometimes he rowed back out for the second pot, undeterred by blood loss or hurricane winds, a saltier dog than any in song or story.

Usually, though, one of us South Enders would yell down the bar, all of us yahoos laughing and hollering, “Hey, Fred, didn’t you say you lost those in a saw accident?” And another would shout, “Naw, he took em off in a nose picking incident.”

Fred would growl. Fred would swear. Fred would give us the finger … even if it was nothing but the stub. And if it was late enough and he was sufficiently liquified, Fred would tell the saga of the saw. “I was cuttin through this old growth maple, see? Harder than iron and my saw had a 52 inch blade I’d just sharpened, ran it off a Plymouth slant six I’d rebuilt the week before….”

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