The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The Southendomish live in government housing in the fishing grounds they once had a name for but don’t anymore. All of us on the South End would live there if we could imagine a reservation or remember our elders or if television wasn’t invented because we’re all part of the same tribe, we just don’t know it. Charlie Johnson, who owns the South End Trading Post, who sells us our cigarettes and canned meat and our 24 ounce high alcohol beer, he knows we’re all kin whether we’re great grandsons of immigrant loggers or the grandparents of native babies left in our care by drug addict parents. We all would dream the Ghost Dance but the ghosts are all us now and the drums long ago stopped beating. Charlie, just like the rest of us, stopped Spirit Chasing and went after the money.

There’s a playground in the center of the dilapidated government houses, mostly rusty chainswings and a slide that’s tilted toward Saratoga Passage where the concrete beneath it heaved over and cracked. Walking by the other evening, I watched Jimmy Walks-the-Talk sitting on the rotted seat of one of the swings, head bent forward, pushing himself slowly back and forth in the fading winter light which looked to him like his future. Laughter left this playground a long time ago and took its friend Hope with it.

Maybe if the reservation had been nearer the freeway, we could’ve built a casino, sold cheap gas and untaxed cigarettes. But we’re a world away from an interstate teeming with gamblers and chainsmokers. No one would come to our Las Vegas. But those are the dreams we dream now, not the ones we’ve forgotten. The kids have computers now and their own cellphones. They live where the river has dried up and the mountains have crumbled and the skies are grey with microwave grids. So do we. The real world is dissolving into the past. We don’t see it yet, but so are we.

Jimmy, I know without seeing him now, is swinging in the dark, eyes closed, sightless as the windows across the unmowed football field with no curtains and the flickering blue electronic lights. He should go home. I should go home too. We’ve just forgotten where it is, is all.

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Open Mic (I have to host a new Open Mic tonight at the Family Resource Center in Stanwoodopolis so let me practice on you folks first)

Well, I want to thank all of you for letting this old geezer be the first yahoo to introduce the Open Mic Program. When I was a pup we didn’t have anyplace like the Center here, a place for kids to go to after school. A place to meet up with friends, maybe learn how to play a guitar, listen to music, all that stuff you folks do. Naw, my backwash town had a pool hall, that was about it.

Big Fred ran the place. He didn’t allow fighting — you had to go out back. He didn’t allow smoking or drinking — you had to go out back. Gambling was okay. I mean, it WAS a pool hall, not a knitting circle. Big Fred was like a father to some of us juvenile delinquents. Not a good father, don’t get me wrong. Kinda like the Dad from hell, now that I think about it.

A lot of the kids that hung out in the pool hall, well, I’d say it changed their lives. Not really for the better now that I think about it. Kind of a school for criminality. Me, I did learn to shoot pool without going to jail. Some of my buddies, they didn’t learn pool and they still ended up behind the 8 ball. And prison bars.

I’ve never played before at an Open Mic. Too shy, maybe. Too scared, probably. I got a little band, the South End String Band, used to have eleven of us, now we downsized to 5. Easier for me to hide in the back. Still scary, though.

Our first public appearance we set up in the Tyee Store parking lot. You never been to the Tyee Store parking lot, it’s not much bigger than this room. Half the customers left their rigs running so we’d play to empty cars pumping exhaust fumes on us. Next gig we set up at Elger Bay Store’s picnic table, just OFF the parking lot, saved us carbon monoxide poisoning and the crowd sometimes swelled to 3 or 4 curious shoppers.

We thought we’d made the Big Time when we hit Haggen’s at Christmas. Big box grocery. Indoors even!! Course, they stuck us next to the ATM machine and folks wanting to get cash for the big tips they were probably planning to leave us had to wade through eleven yahoos. And a partridge in a pear tree….

We played for some fundraisers on Camano and then we played a benefit to Save the Grange in 2004. 700 people came to help us. $5 spaghetti dinner and music by us. We raised enough to keep them afloat and the rest is history. Well, okay, not much history but hey, we’re still here. And so is the Grange.

What I’m trying to say is this: if you never put yourself on the line, never get up and play your song, that’s okay. What matters is you play it for yourself. But … if you want to share it, this might be a good start. And who knows, someday you might get that life-changing audition for the South End String Band. Anyway, lI’m going to give it a try. If I seem nervous, it’s because I am….

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