The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

The South End, for more than a few of us xenophobes, has always offered an escape from our past. A chance to bury the dead and make a clean start here on the far reaches of reality. For some of us it was a place to return to, lay low awhile and hope the past had a short memory.

Ruby Reed belonged in the latter category. She was born here over one hundred years ago, went to school in the Mabana schoolhouse, even lived in our old shack with her mom and sister and brother. Not many neighbors back around 1915. Not much work either. Not much to keep a young person with dreams of the city life. Not much, really, too different than today, just more so.

Ruby left the bucolic and boring South End to become a burlesque dancer. We have a full size theater marquee of her we dug out of the shack walls in one of our many remodeling jags. Black leather bra with an X across the sweet spots, black leather bottom with laces on the sides revealing plenty of thigh. Not much else other than a come hither smile. She worked the strip tease circuit from Seattle and Gomorrah to Spokane, Portland to Frisko, married a vaudevillian with the lewd stage moniker Harry Reed. We’ve got newspaper ads of Ruby and Harry at the Temples of Sin. What a time they must have had! What a wild ride! You want to leave the banality of the South End, there you go.

In the mid 40’s she and Harry were sleeping in a hotel in downtown San Francisco when an intruder burst in, hogtied Harry and raped Ruby in front of him. Maybe unpaid gambling debts, maybe promises unkept, who will ever know? Shortly after this incident was reported in the Bay area papers, she and Harry came back to the safety of the South End. They built the house next to our shack which her sister now owned, raised chickens and ducks and geese, stayed home. Ruby taught dance classes in Stanwoodopolis, lord only knows what Harry did.

They didn’t last long. Not here, not their marriage. Way of the world, I guess. We bought their house, the one they built next to ours. We’re now the keepers of their history, we’re their caretakers. I wish we knew more about these two, but like most history, theirs is lost to rot and rust and ruin. Same as ours someday. Same as most of us on the remote South End. Probably for the best. Probably what we wanted in the first place.

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