The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Fat Jack’s was the Second Hand shop half a mile down from South End Realty. Jack wasn’t fat and the second hand furniture and tools were mostly 9th or 10th hand. You wanted a kitchen chair all the glue had dried up, Jack had a couple. Dull chisels, hammers with half a claw broke off, screwdrivers with a broken handle, saws missing teeth, power tools without a cord, Jack had the tool for you. “Better’n that crap you buy new nowadays,” he’d say if you mentioned the defect, hoping to get a better price. You never — and I mean Never — got a good price at Fat Jack’s.

Fat Jack’s was a garage with the sliding door seized in the overhead position, a shed off the side and a small barn leaning precariously into a predictable future. Jack lived alone in the house where a few rooms were filled with artifacts, clothes, antiques and nondescript items he apparently thought enough to haul inside with him. Us customers could look past shelves of unpriced housewares, knickknacks and baby toys right into the dirty pots and pans breeding in the sink and on the filthy peeling countertops. Only the insane or the hideously desperate, would ask to use the public restroom. It was rumored even Jack used the woods behind the barn.

The year Jack called it quits, he had his Going Out of Business Sale. Three quarters of the South End showed up on a rainy windy December weekend and by Saturday Miller Time, most of the barn was empty, the shed bare to its dirt floors and the garage was ready for a couple of cars to come home. What he didn’t sell, he burned Sunday out back in the tall wet grass of the field. What didn’t burn, well, it’s still there, waiting for the 30th Century archeologists.

Fat Jack was the last of a breed, although we didn’t know that then. He was a salter of mines, a bait and switcher, a snake oil salesman, a Tennessee horse trader. He lived for the deal and he rarely wound up on the thin side of one. E-Bay and the internet pretty much ended services like his, relegating him and his con artistry to rural backwashes far from the nearest pawnshops and the perforated memories of geezers like myself.

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