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….

Hits: 36