The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Pity the poor men! Every day some sad schnook who was riding high on ego and money and power, gets dragged down into the mob of angry women ready to have at his sorry manhood with sharp tongues and sharper fingernails. One day it’s that creepy monster Weinstein or Winestain or whoever, the prototypical casting couch perv who not only seduces young wannabee actresses but threatens the established ones with smear campaigns that undoubtedly would ruin careers. Hugh Hefner died last month and boy howdy, that signaled the end of an era of boys having their way with girls.

Hef surrounded himself with a bevy of young talent, lounged lasciviously in his black satin pajamas and thought he’d discovered a New World of permissive sex and exploitation. Guess he missed the Roman Empire. Power brings many rewards, but as the boys at the Pilot Lounge like to say, money talks and bullshit walks. For all our lives the frat boys and the fat cats have had their way with their female counterparts. Women’s Lib opened some doors, but behind a lot of them, they still encountered the predatory male, the guy who can’t translate NO and doesn’t expect rejection, not from some pretty little underling.

Every day now another rogue molester finds his accusers shaking fists and talking to the press. Movie actors, congressmen, judges, professors, you name it, the spotlight is veering this way and that. Poor Judge Roy Moore, newly off his campaign win for GOP Senatorial nominee of the great state of Alabama, is being accused of groping a 14 year old girl. Even in Alabama this is considered beyond the usual pale, they don’t care if he WAS the chief justice of the state Supreme Court and fought valiantly for bringing the 10 Commandments into the courthouse. (Well, 9 Commandments if you throw in the prohibition against sex with someone other than your wife.)

Even Jesus’ old man Joseph was called out by the Alabama state auditor, purportedly in defense of Judge Moore, for being an adult dating Mary, an underage teen at the time. The auditor, apparently felt that what was okay for the parents of the Son of God was certainly good enough for the beleaguered Judge. My own take is that they should be glad the statute of limitations is a couple thousand years past due date. But not for the Judge.

#MeToo is a train that’s barely left the station and already the bodies are piling up under the cowcatcher. The chatter at the morning breakfasts in the South End Diner is way less vociferous, almost whispers now. It’s as if we can nearly hear the testosterone drying fast in the hot winds of this new climate. Who knows who’ll be missing next week? Who among the assembled caffeinated is without sin? Who can say where the next finger points.

Danny the Dagger, our geriatric playboy of days long past, maybe summed it up best. “If those people thought they were safe after Trump admitted groping women then got elected anyway, they better hope they own a few very tall Towers and half a dozen golf courses too. My money’s on the women now. Trump better climb to the top of his own damn Tower and bolt the doors, they’ll be coming for him too. God help us all.”

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The ill-fated Nettle Festival was conceived as the kick-off to Rev. Ralph Fisher’s tent revival for the Little Church of the Ravine. THE END IS NEAR, his readerboard sign announced months ahead of the scheduled event, THE SOUTH END REVIVAL IS COMING! The congregation might have known what was slouching toward us, but the rest of us down here were bemused or amused, depending on our degree of what the good reverend referred to as ‘heathenism’. The South End was in mighty need of missionary work itself, he was fond of preaching, but their puny tithing went instead to saving the natives of New Guinea and east Africa. I figure they were easier to convert than us locals who were fairly content to wallow in our puddles of iniquity.

The Nettle Festival itself wasn’t such a bad idea. In fact, the Tyee Store tried to revive it a few intervening years after what was referred to as ‘the tragedy’. But even today there are members of the congregation who break into sobs over their coffees when mention is made. And this is 35 years after ‘the tragedy.’ I speak of it now in hushed tones and never around Mildred’s family who still live down the road. Some events in this mean old world aren’t meant for sarcasm or ridicule, although you would have to admit, even the pious among you, that Rev. Ralph overdid it with the Nettle Maze, his Labyrinth of Itching Hell.

Stigmata wipe-off tattoos are one thing, but the Nettle Maze crossed the line. By the weekend of the Revival, the Little Church had erected a tent worthy of Ringling Brothers. Churches from as far away as Sedro-Wooley and Darrington had come in converted school buses and rickety vans, hauling the Believers and their children from far and wide for a day of righteous fun and old time religion. Pastor Philip of Pentecostal fame arrived the night before from his circuit riding, prayed with Rev. Ralph and his long-suffering wife Mildred and slept the peaceful sleep of the Godly before that morning’s first sermon of fire and brimstone-laden admonitions blistered the varnish off the old pulpit.

By afternoon the sun came out like a prophecy and the festival cranked up its volume. Chainsaw carvers sent cedar chips flying and the face of Jesus appeared in chiseled log sculpture. Stigmata wash-off tattoos made the teenager giggle, 666’s on foreheads being by far the favorite of the boys. Glossalalia crossword puzzles didn’t work out so well, but the Biblical action figures of Moses in combat with John the Baptist and Jesus himself down by the firepit were a huge hit with the younger kids.

And of course there was the Nettle Maze. The Labyrinth of Itching Hell itself! Half an acre of loops and turns and dead ends so intricate not even Jimmy Randall, the church caretaker who’d carved the trails over the past three weeks, starting when the plants were three feet tall and he could see over them, could navigate safely. Now, of course, they were higher than the tallest man’s head and impossible to survey beyond the impenetrable wall of stinging stalks that held each entrant locked into the maze. Dozens were wandering hopelessly lost in there when a foul wind came up like the cold breath of Beelzebub himself, the one Pastor Philip of the Pentecost had predicted only half an hour earlier in fiery prose. Hell had come to the South End or surely would arrive soon, the unsuspecting crowd had been informed and sure enough, a mighty howl rose from the ravine like the thousand laments of the Lost. The sun blotted out behind dark and treacherous clouds and that cold wind became a tempest and the circus tent became a shaking thing, alive and monstrous, tearing at its ropes, sending one and all running for the safety of the field before the cords tore loose and the canvas tent set sail like an ungodly wing, flapping into the distance before it shrouded the chapel itself and caught on the belfry where it ripped itself to pieces on the steeple. Torn asunder, Rev. Ralph would tell of it for years. Torn asunder!

But those inside the Maze had nowhere to turn. Children and adults alike wheeled and fled, down paths that went nowhere, flayed by the wind-whipped stalks of stinging death. Well, not death, literally, but who knows what went through those terrified minds besotted with brimstone stories? Their screams reached the field beyond, but what could we outsiders do except listen in horror. One by one the survivors stumbled out into the raging storm, rashes covering their faces and hands, tears streaming down their pockmarked faces. The Little Chapel opened its double doors to lead these blinded sheep inside, to calm them and offer balm, to offer shelter from the storm. Pastor Philip was in 7th Heaven, finding in the calamity further proof of the Scriptures. He was in fine form, everyone agreed later.

But it was later Rev. Ralph realized Mildred was missing. He went from person to person asking if they’d seen Mildred. No one had. A boy sporting 666 on his forehead said he’d seen her go in the Maze. “Are you sure,” the congregation cried, nearly in unison. He was certain. Rev. Ralph led the search party. The wind had abated nearly as quickly as it had come up. Down at the Labyrinth the nettles had been laid down in haphazard rows as if the horn of Jericho had blown and there, in the exact center, stood Mildred, stone still, a strange statue of a woman staring into the sky, not moving, not crying out, just frozen in time and space. Between Heaven and Hell, Pastor Philip would say more than a few times in the following days. Only Rev. Ralph dared approach and he did so with the utmost trepidation as everyone watched in dread.

Mildred was never the same. Some say she wasn’t quite right to begin with, but that’s uncharitable. She spoke in tongues a day later. Unintelligible garble, strange utterances, ugly curses. But I’ve never heard that from anyone who was actually there. I do know it’s hard to be with her even now. She doesn’t actually engage and looks right through you while she perpetually scratches at her arms. It may be she’s lost forever in that maze. It may even be, as the Bible thumping Pastor Philip would say, we’re everyone of us lost in that maze.

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