Lake of the Ozarks

by Bill Geist

  They’d hang these weighty, bedazzling garments on the backs of their chairs and proceed to partake in straight, room-temperature Kentucky and Tennessee bourbons and straight five-card-stud poker late into the night. We could watch, but not from directly behind them. They didn’t want our facial expressions to tip their hands. There were no groupies and no cursing.

  One memorable night, a staff party was raging in the Pow Wow Room and in walked Roger Miller with his guitar.

  He sang all his big hits—“King of the Road,” “Dang Me,” and “Chug-A-Lug,” which we all liked. Wheezer picked up a guitar and, though he’d never picked one up before, accompanied Roger.

  Roger, known for his sense of humor, looked over at Wheezer and remarked, “Man, you’re good.” The Wheez smiled and nodded his head in recognition of such a fine compliment.

  “And I’ve got something new for ya,” Roger announced to the group. “A song I wrote on a trip to London. I haven’t even recorded it yet. Tell me what you think.”

  He sang, “England swings like a pendulum do…”

  “Whadaya think?” he said.

  Well, it was probably his own fault for using rip-roaring drunks aged eighteen to twenty-two as a focus group, but since he’d asked:

  “Not good,” I heard someone say, possibly Pete, a music major from Oklahoma. Pete and I agreed it sounded like a jingle written by the London Chamber of Commerce.

  And then the coup de grâce, from Jill, a maid and sophomore at Northeast Missouri State University at Kirksville: “You’re a dumb ass, Roger!” But he took the feedback well, going on to record the song, which immediately went to number 3 on the country charts.

  * * *

  How the Pow Wow Room became the Pow Wow Pub, with a liquor license, will never be known, but it may have had something to do with a meeting Ed had with someone in the state capitol building in Jefferson City. I accompanied him on the day trip.

  Ed carried a brown leather briefcase. Who knew Ed had a briefcase? He put the Caddy convertible in a parking garage across from the capitol, which cost ten cents an hour. (How did they even pay the guy in the booth?)

  It was August. There were about eight lonesome cars in the garage. (Hey! That’s eighty cents right there!) The legislature was not in session. No one was around. We walked across the street and entered the capitol by a side door. Inside, Ed said, “Take a look around. You might learn something, El Stupid. Meet me back here in thirty minutes.”

  The capitol itself was empty except for a tour group of about ten campers aged eight or so on a field trip to learn about democracy and such.

  The Ten Commandments were displayed on a seven-by-ten-foot pink-and-gray marble slab.

  “Now, who can tell me who Jefferson City was named after?” the guide asked the group of kids. Some of the kids stared at the floor, but a couple of them raised their hands, one particularly annoying youngster jumping up and down, begging “Oh, oh, me.” But the guide picked a boy with eyes glued to the floor. “Matt?”

  “Jeffer Davis?” he said.

  “Good guess, but I’m afraid that is incorrect,” the guide said.

  “Thomas Jefferson!” the me-me boy answered, correctly. Later the group would walk outside to see a large statue of Thomas Jefferson facing the mighty, muddy Missouri river.

  “This capitol building,” the guide continued inside, “is where our democratically elected representatives gather to discuss important issues and vote on new laws to improve our way of life.”

  The children were by and large awestruck, looking up into the soaring and ornately decorated rotunda. It was not unlike an old cathedral.

  I watched as they wandered past the Thomas Hart Benton murals depicting the history of the state, somewhat controversial because there was some bad (slaves) sprinkled in with the good.

  Ed and I met at the base of the staircase, flanked by statues of Lewis and Clark.

  I never asked what his meeting was about and don’t mean to cast aspersions, but when I returned the next summer, the Pow Wow Room had become the Pow Wow Pub. State liquor laws had changed, I was told, to allow somewhat smaller hotels to serve alcoholic beverages—hotels that had forty or more rooms. Arrowhead had forty-one.

  Maybe, just maybe, Ed should have been the one conducting that tour back at the capitol explaining to those kids how democracy works.

  Pete at the bar in the Pow Wow Pub

  Chapter Twelve

  La Noche de la Larry Don

  I fell in love on the Larry Don. But first, I had to get aboard.

  It wasn’t easy. I was working the evening shift on the front desk while most of my coworkers were already at the dam, jubilantly boarding the queen of all sightseeing boats for a party on its Moonlight Cruise.

  The Larry Don was an old barge-like vessel, akin to a wide World War II landing craft, or maybe a scow. But painted up brightly and festooned with strings of colored lights it took on a festive air. At twenty-four-feet wide and sixty-five-feet long, with a second observation deck on the roof, there was plenty of room for a good-sized crowd plus a band. There were weddings on the Larry Don.

  I was ready to fly out the door to join the party if only this one last couple would just get the hell out of the dining room, which had closed a good half hour ago. The two were sipping wine, laughing, and just generally pissing me off.

  I tried to plant a seed by shutting off the lights, something I do only in extremis.

  “Hey!” the man howled from their table in the back.

  “Sorry,” I answered. “Didn’t realize you were still back there.”

  Their waitress, Gina, I believe, who had been leaning against the ice machine, arms crossed and scowling, hauled out a vacuum cleaner and began vigorously attacking the carpet near their table. I can’t recall if she asked them to please pick up their feet or not, but I like to think she did. Wouldn’t put it past her. This was a moment that called for drastic measures.

  “Would you like doggy bags?” she asked them almost politely.

  Finally, the couple stood up slowly and strolled up to the desk to pay their check.

  “Sorry about the lights,” I said as I rung up their bill.

  “Bullshit,” the man replied. “You did that last time.”

  Guess it was time for some fresh tactics.

  The Larry Don was by then already leaving the dock down at the dam. But there was a backup plan. The few of us still on duty were to rendezvous with them in the middle of the lake in some dramatic fashion I couldn’t quite picture.

  Jim Murphy waited for us out front in the lodge station wagon. I jumped in next to a couple of waitresses who’d shed their squaw dresses for more suitable party wear, which could have been just about anything, frankly.

  Also along for the ride was a young dishwasher who’d left a few dirty ones behind.

  Jim spun the tires in the gravel parking lot and we were off down the dark, narrow, winding road to Ed’s dock. Despite being reckless behind the wheel and a heavy drinker, Jim had been given Ed’s permission to use the speedboat. Approaching Janet and Ed’s house, Jim went into stealth mode, cutting the engine and dousing the car lights.

  We tiptoed down the hill, untied the boat, hopped in, and immediately went to work on some six-packs with a beer can opener (see: “Primitive Tools of Early Man”). We idled out to the breakwater, then opened her up, all the way. The bow jerked up and we were pinned back in our seats like aquanauts on blastoff, our wake glowing white in the darkness.

  We whooped and hollered, “Wahooooo!” This was exhilarating, about as exhilarating as life would ever get now that I think back on it. The lake was smooth and fast with few boats to stir it.

  The eighty-degree summer air felt cool at thirty miles per hour. A sliver moon gave just enough light to clearly show the shoreline but not too much to drown out the fusillade of stars.

  We passed the small purple neon cross that marked Our Lady of the Lake Chapel and served as a landmark for night boaters. Then by the high b
luffs, where on a previous night excursion we had witnessed a car take a ninety-foot plunge, its headlights beaming hauntingly up from the bottom. We’d rushed to the scene, but neither heard nor saw anything above and saw nothing floating on the surface, dead or alive. Never did hear or see anything about the incident. Weird. Just another unexplained mystery in the Lake of the Ozarks files.

  After the bluffs, there was only darkness for a while, no lights to the left along the south shore in those days and few to the right until we rounded the tip of Horseshoe Bend with its small, rustic mom-and-pop spots for families that came for the fishing. Breezy Point, Clem’s Cabins, Sun ’n’ Fun. No condos yet, no expensive resorts with golf courses.

  It couldn’t have been more than a Schlitz or two later that Jim shouted: “Thar she blows, mateys! The USS Larry Don!”

  And what a vision it was, ethereal, slowly towing the reflections of its colorful lights that danced on the inky water.

  Jim, not one to be enchanted, was. He turned off the engine and we sat there, bobbing slightly, taking in this apparition. What’s more it was accompanied by dreamy music. Not the rock ’n’ roll that we relied on at home to transport us to more exciting states of mind. Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and Jerry Lee Lewis were not called for here. The band on the Larry Don was playing “It Had to Be You,” a mellow number for slow dancing, designed to make you swoon and sway.

  Jim pulled the speedboat alongside the Larry Don and tossed a rope to a deckhand. The six of us leaped from the speedboat to the mother ship, into the arms of our colleagues.

  They cheered us as heroic partiers willing to do whatever it took.

  Dana gave me a big hug and her best kiss yet. “You did it!” she cried. “What an entrance!”

  The band played “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” and couples on the dance floor melted into each other’s arms.

  Dana and I climbed the stairs to the second deck. We sat and hugged in the summer breeze, in the moonlight that glistened on the water. And I fell in love. With love. With having someone to hold. With the summer breeze, with the moonlight. With that moment. All of it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sisterhood of Servers

  Waitresses

  We were all coming of age and learning about life, and a most unusual life-form it was at Lake of the Ozarks. Many of us did wonder if what we were learning had any application to the outside world. Kind of like guys who “Join the Army and Learn a Trade” and wind up learning how to fix malfunctioning tank treads. You never see want ads for that position.

  Marilyn probably had the greatest adjustment and the most to learn. She was a Missouri farm girl, raised as a strict Southern Baptist, and, at just sixteen years old, the youngest of the summer staff. She was hired in a housekeeping emergency when someone quit unexpectedly.

  She said except for going to school or to the store, she’d only left the farm once on a day trip to St. Louis, I worried that she’d think life at Arrowhead Lodge represented life in the real world. When I asked how things were going she said, “I’ve seen things I’d never seen before.” I braced for what might come next. “I didn’t know that everyone on vacation cuts their toenails and fingernails and leaves them on the floor.”

  “Oh,” I responded. She said she was appalled that girls as well as boys could go for months without changing their sheets. She’d seen three girls sneak out of a room where three boys were staying and run down the fire escape. “When we cleaned the room it was obvious there had been some kind of orgy,” she said, too shy to share details.

  Things like this just did not happen on the farm. She felt she had to tell her parents but worried they’d tell her to come straight home. But when she called them, her mother laughed and said: “Honey, you’re finally finding out about the real world.”

  Some of the guys would try to embarrass her. She was responsible for cleaning the men’s room three times a day. And Fred from Oklahoma would go in there, sit on the commode fully clothed, and make grunting and farting noises. “I turned as red as my hair,” she said.

  Noble the all-purpose handyman/engineer at the lodge would put an electric cord that felt like a snake under her sheets and stand outside waiting for her to scream. “I always did,” she said.

  One afternoon, after being promoted to waitress, Marilyn was in the She Shack getting into her squaw dress for a dinner shift. Squaw dresses were the waitresses’ uniforms, which came in a variety of pastels adorned with glittery golden or silver stitching and cinched at the waist with silver Indian-esque belts. These days this might be called “cultural appropriation,” but frankly the dresses weren’t close enough to anything ever worn by any Native American to qualify.

  It dawned on Marilyn that she was the only one getting ready for work. She walked briskly out to the pool and saw all of her fellow waitresses on floats holding nearly empty bottles of champagne.

  When she asked why they weren’t getting ready for work they replied, “Work?” At this point, most seemed unsure of where they were or why. They tripped back to the She Shack where some passed out and others took turns driving the porcelain bus.

  “Thank God,” said Gina, “Marilyn was a teetotaling Southern Baptist. She saved us.”

  “My mother,” Marilyn said, “preached the evils of alcohol as well as other tips on behavior before I came to the lake. She’d say: ‘Do with your knees what you please, but keep your thighs a surprise.’”

  Marilyn served almost every customer in the dining room single-handedly that evening, aided by a few off-duty bellhops and busboys. A few things even Marilyn could not do. She tried and failed to keep a man and his great Dane from dining together.

  “There are AA meetings in the dining room,” Marilyn said. “Women tell about getting drunk and lying on their backs looking at the stars with their legs spread. It’s amazing what you hear pouring coffee.”

  The girls, more so than the boys, seemed to have great camaraderie and esprit de corps. Once each summer the waitresses had to remove all the tables and chairs from the dining room to strip and wax the floor, a task that took almost all night. Toolie, Fergie’s daughter and a real pistol, brought some kick-ass rock ’n’ roll albums (vinyl), others brought beer. Noble volunteered to man the polisher, a powerful, heavy-duty rogue beast that seemed capable of flinging waitresses through the front window onto US 54. “Somehow,” said one, “even that turned out to be fun.”

  There were rites of passage upon entering the waitress-hood. Willis, who was married to Alice, took them on wild rides in his Jeep down the hill through all the rocks and trees and brush. “He drove very fast and the limbs whipped across your face,” Marilyn said. “You had to duck and dodge as best you could. He’d hit a log or a deep ditch, slam it into reverse, and back up at full speed.

  “We didn’t know those woods that well,” she said, “but we knew there was a cliff out there and not too far away. It was a hair-raising, pants-wetting, nail-biting, praying experience.”

  Other rites involved drinking. I advised a few of the younger, inexperienced drinkers that I ate saltine crackers spread with butter before I drank alcohol—“butt and crack”—on my unproven theory that it would coat my stomach and block the absorption of alcohol. Field tests failed to support this theory.

  “How did we all get there?” Ellen asked. You had to have a connection. Gina was Marilyn’s sister, who was Ina Kay’s friend, who was Carolyn’s niece, who was brought by a friend, Betty, who was a girlfriend of Ralph Robinson, who was Jim Robinson’s older brother.

  Willy was Helen’s sister. Tom was Gina’s brother. Gina and I were friends from Louisiana, Missouri, and we were both freshmen at Northeast Missouri State.

  Rich was from Sabetha, Kansas, and Ed was his younger brother. Roger Popkess was, obviously, related to Ed.

  Toolie was Fergie’s daughter and Dixie was Toolie’s friend.

  Pat was Ed’s sister. Slugger was her son, Bebe was Slugger’s sister, Teddy was their younger brother. I was Ed’s nephew.
Bill, Ed, and Tim (aka Wheezer) were my high school buddies from Illinois.

  Blood relatives received no special treatment. In fact they were often first to be fired. Slugger, for example, was fired several times.

  * * *

  “Ed was a good boss,” Ellen said. “He took us out for a party on his cruiser and let us use his speedboat sometimes to go skiing. And he supported us. When guests complained that the employees were using the pool he told them if they didn’t like it they could leave.” At Arrowhead the customer was not always right.

  Ed had a temper. There were heated moments when he threw one or more guests out of “my hotel.” A couple brought a dripping watermelon through the lobby and up to their room. Janet thought that was tacky and told Ed to throw them out. The incident ended with Ed saying “Get the hell out of my hotel.” He always referred to the lodge as “my hotel” when he got worked up and tossed someone. After the watermelon couple left Ed remarked: “They were probably pretty nice people.”

  Another time it was an entire convention. The conventioneers objected to the employees fraternizing with them in the Pow Wow Room. Ed told them to get the hell out of “my hotel.” He wouldn’t let bellhops carry their bags or waitresses serve them in the dining room. They had to walk, carrying their bags down the hill to the chapel to catch a bus.

  On another occasion, Ed was summoned to the hotel, which violated one of his cardinal rules: Never bother him at home. He barged in the front door and yelled, “Who the hell wants to see me?”

  The complainant was sitting at a table in the lobby and identified himself.

  “What the hell do you want to talk about, pal?” Ed queried.

  “First of all—” the guy began.

  “Hold on,” Ed commanded. “‘First of all’ means you have a lot of complaints and I haven’t got time to hear ’em all.”