The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Dead Doug, one of my few pals in college, was an employee of mine at the University Food Unit where we met, the guy who would only work cleaning grills, the worst job in the joint but one where he could work late … and more importantly, alone. Doug was a geeky gangly partly androgynous character, quick to be offended, a too–sensitive-for-this-world kind of guy. We were friends in a contentious, squabbly sort of way, two odd ducks wandering campus late into the night, arguing politics and religion and life, puppies, really, not quite paper trained.

After college Doug moved to Nowhere, Iowa, aka Parnell, on a stint for VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, our indigenous Peace Corps. When I visited, it was like traveling to a foreign country, one where corn was the currency of the realm. After VISTA he took the night clerk job at a motel on the interstate ten miles away from the basement he rented from the landlady above ground. The town, pop. about 40 or so, rarely set eyes on Doug, this 6 foot five ghoul with dark sunken eyes, as xenophobic a character as Dracula.

So when he was elected mayor I probably wasn’t the only one surprised. But when he died two years later, I probably was. An attorney contacted me based on letters I had written over the years, said he thought I ought to know Doug had passed. I wrote back asking what he had died of and received an ambiguous reply.

AIDS was my guess. I suspect Doug was their first gay mayor. Although … he may have been one of many closet executives in that strange little hamlet surrounded by miles of corn in every direction. His attorney said Doug had left me something in his will, maybe the keys to a motel room, but later he wrote to inform me the ‘assets’ had been fully depleted to pay for his legal work. My guess was he’d need the assets to pay for his own health care. Just a guess….

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If you want to light a bonfire down at the South End Diner, bring up the subject of homelessness, no quicker way to warm up a cup of coffee without a microwave, trust me. Two mornings ago the boyz were slamming down chicken fried steaks, curly hashbrowns, four egg omelettes and something called ‘the works’, which, by god, really was. Everything from bacon to eggs to ham slices, cheese and vegetables, all slathered with white gravy. Add the toast buttered heavily and what you have is a heart attack waiting around the corner. ‘The Works’ is the favorite for my pals. Wash it down with four or five cups of java and between shovelfuls, the conversations are caloric.

Four Finger Fred was wiping gravy off his tobacco stained beard before he pushed back his chair contentedly and asked our little group of sociologists how many homeless people they knew down here on the South End. “Why you asking, Freddie?” Two Toke wanted to know, hoping maybe to head off what he knew was coming. “Because,’ Fred said, ‘the County is conducting a survey, that’s why. First they’ll run the numbers, then they’ll inflate em, next thing you know they’ll be busing drug addicts up from Seattle to our island, taxing us for free housing, probably build them a damn house.”

“There was a guy once who lived in his car south of Tyee Store,” Little Jimmy said. “Cops finally ran him off.” Fred shook his head, “He’s long gone now, Jimbo.” Two Toke set his fork down and pushed his plate back plenty agitated. “What’s it to you, Fred? Folks fall down on their luck, you what, you want to run em off the island?”

“I don’t care where they go, Tom, just so long as they go. All I’m saying is there isn’t a problem here, why go looking for an expensive solution?”

I said I had met a woman this summer who was watching the eagles’ nest with me down at the Head, nice lady standing on the bluff when I walked up. When I asked if she lived around here, she told me she didn’t live anywhere and when I asked the obvious follow-up question, she said she lived in her car, moved around place to place. Her husband had left her and taken up with her sister and when their mother died, her sister had stolen her inheritance and her husband kicked her out of their house.

“Oh right!” Fred howled. “What a story! Skeeter, you are the bleedingest bleeding heart in the world. I bet you let her stay in your yard. I bet you gave her money for a motel. God, what a sucker….”

A better man than me might have done that, I was thinking. Might have asked, at least, if she needed anything. Food, money, whatever. But mostly we just talked and I listened to her troubled stories. She had some ‘mental issues’, she said. She was working to get her share of the divorce, maybe her share of her mom’s will. Fred might’ve been right, it could have all been fiction. But … I’ve known some homeless folks down here, living in the woods, hitchhiking to town, working odd jobs for food and beer and cigarettes. Harmless folks, folks down on their luck, folks with mental issues. Fellow South Enders. That’s what I told Fred anyway, who sarcastically replied, “What am I supposed to do about it, Skeeter? Throw money at your loser friends, buy em a house, what?”

“I don’t know, Fred, but what I really want is for the rich to shut up. I want you to stop your whining, that’s all. We got it made, why begrudge the poor?” Fred, of course, just laughed. “Brenda,” he called to our waitress, “how about a refill for all of us. If they haven’t got enough for the coffee, it’s on me.” Brenda rolled her eyes before coming near us with her thermos. “Just add it to the tip, Big Spender,” she muttered. Fred, of course you know, doesn’t leave tips.

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Politics

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Unless I miss my guess, most of you out there in Blogland are dreading the coming New Year. You’ve had a dose of impeachment hearings, you’re sick to death of politics, you’re probably already making a New Year Resolution NOT to watch MSNBC or Fox News this next year. You’re like the moth that vows NEVER to fly toward the candle again.

But you will. The impeachment trial is coming, the 2020 elections will heat up, Rudy Giuliani will never go back to his coffin even in daylight. A dystopian grimness has spread dark wings across the land and the warring tribes huddle by campfires in their separate valleys of darkness. A minister from our island mega church up north walked into the Tyee Store a month ago wearing a red Make America Great Again cap and immediately found himself in a verbal joust with Charlie, a self-appointed gadfly for the store. I’ve known Charlie for 40 years, back when he was a bit more spry than the arthritic old codger he is today, but I couldn’t have told you his political leanings although I would have guessed he was a Trump man. Apparently he isn’t. What that makes him, I would hate to hazard a guess.

But he took umbrage to that hat and apparently he felt called upon to berate this new customer. Shyness was never one of Charlie’s personality traits. He’s opinionated, he’s aggressive, he’s a fixture down at the store. Like a lot of South Enders, maybe too many, he’s what we call a Character. For good or ill. The good chaplain, evidently unfamiliar with our ways down here, declared he had the right to wear whatever he damn well pleased on his righteous head. Charlie begged to differ.

Well, one insult led to another and the argument spilled over the milk coolers, past the condiment shelves and onto the café tables. Charlie, I suspect, already thought America was great, or at least good enough. He didn’t need some outsider telling him it wasn’t. Finally the debate became so heated that the store personnel asked the reverend to either take the hat off his head or take his business elsewhere. Charlie, of course, offered to help him with that decision.

The man of the cloth, mightily pissed now, revealed that he was, indeed, a minister and that the store would sorely rue this day when his flock was informed of his mistreatment down here in the sin-socked South End and Gomorrah. Boycotts were hinted at not too subtly. Business would suffer from this iniquity. The wrath of Trump lovers would visit misfortune on our heads. So saith this man of the Lord.

Obviously he didn’t grasp that business was already suffering. That misfortune was something we were accustomed to. That voodoo quasi-religious threats were more comic than something to be taken seriously. That we would probably do just fine without the congregation thronging down to the Tyee Store for their cigarettes and beer. I don’t know if the coming year will make America great or if it will make America a poorer nation. But … I do know this: The South End doesn’t need anyone to tell it anything either way. So we’ll probably skip the resolutions and just muddle along in our little Shangri-La-La.

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