Lake of the Ozarks

by Bill Geist

  There was a piano at the entrance to the dining room, and on this final night someone sat down and played “Autumn Leaves.” Ed sang along. It was his favorite.

  At checkout time the next morning, guests swarmed Puggy at the front desk—questioning an item or two on their tabs—“Who had the BLT? I never had a BLT”—and then they were gone, back to their offices, homes, and schools. Indoors. And the lobby, which had been abuzz for weeks, was suddenly eerily quiet.

  Dana and I were in a teary embrace down in Ed’s driveway, He was giving us some space to say our last goodbye. Ed wore a slightly bemused look as if to say he’d seen this scene many times before and he undoubtedly had.

  He was talking to his friends, Junior and Kathy, who were here as they often were on the Monday of Labor Day weekends to drive me to the airport and fly me home in their four-seater plane. The three of them laughed a few times about something.

  “We’d better get going,” Junior snapped, for no apparent reason. There was no schedule to keep, but he seemed a bit uncomfortable being present at our private moment. And it wasn’t going to get any easier, dragging it out.

  “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” Ed said as he put his arms around Dana and me. It’s interesting, isn’t it? How the perfectly chosen word or phrase doesn’t mean shit when it comes to matters of the heart. I’d have far more crushing goodbyes in the months and years to come and no wise or comforting words would change a thing.

  I tossed my bags in the trunk and we drove off. I waved to Dana from the back window. We passed the Oaks and other summer landmarks, crossed the upside-down bridge, and turned into the airport. We were the only ones there. There wasn’t really any there there. No terminal, no runway, just a long unpaved stretch of grass for takeoffs and landings.

  Junior revved the engine and released the brake, and the plane began to roll and bounce down the grass runway, the turf rolling past faster and faster until we popped into the air. As we rose, more and more of the lake revealed itself, vast and shaped like the Chinese dragon on the wall at House of Chin restaurant back home.

  We passed over the Grand Glaize Drive-In, and I couldn’t help grinning at the thought of Pete’s harrowing night at the theater. Then, over the lodge, too quickly, then the dam, then into thickening clouds that were the final curtain on another summer at Arrowhead.

  This same aerial view would repeat itself again and again until my last summer at the lake, the last before I met the woman I’d marry, graduated college, and went to Vietnam. I said more than once, “I’d never heard of Vietnam until I got off the plane,” which wasn’t really true but spoke to my insistence on living in the moment, not in the past or the future. Naturally, there would be rude awakenings.

  Home from the lake, life returned to near normal. “How was your summer?” was difficult to answer. “I was on Mars,” I’d say. Like Vietnam, I couldn’t even try to explain it. You had to be there.

  Dana came up for a fall weekend on campus. It was uncomfortable for both of us. She had little in common with my band of sarcastic, wry, cynical friends.

  Oddly, that’s what attracted me to her at the lake, where cynicism, sarcasm, and irony are almost nowhere to be found. Call it situational love. But don’t quote me.

  Dana was good-hearted and positive about almost all things. Life, for example. She always seemed to be in a good mood. Happy. For this, some thought her simple, easily amused.

  She said she saw no point in obsessing about problems we weren’t going to do anything about, except talk.

  “How do you do it?” I asked. “How can you always be so happy?”

  “I don’t like to be unhappy,” she said matter-of-factly.

  I laughed. And laughed.

  “What?” she asked.

  “No one likes to be unhappy,” I said, pointing out that it’s a contradiction in terms. “It’s not really a choice we make.”

  “We can try,” she said.

  * * *

  We never saw each other again. Summer love. We no longer had much in common except memories. We’d spent the entire summer together, all our waking hours, working and playing in a dream world, where I always half expected to see Disney characters scurrying about.

  Ed said not to worry: “Women are like streetcars, there’s another one by every ten minutes.” I’d heard him say that same thing to a girl except it was boys who were the streetcars.

  I went back into social hibernation. I wouldn’t call girls, then would get fixed up at the last minute with someone who was a leftover, like myself. While not great for the ego it was better than risking rejection by a girl in the semi-desirable range.

  I continued to think that I deserved better, but there was no Uncle Ed around to get things started.

  Yet! And yet! Somehow it happened, I met that girl I’d always had in mind, for years and years, even in sleep, which would make her the girl of my dreams, wouldn’t it? We met at the last moment, the second semester of my second—yes it took me an extra one—senior year.

  You won’t be surprised to hear that she initiated it. I was sitting on a stool in a campus bar guzzling beer when a tall, good-looking blonde approached with a cigarette between her fingers, struck a Lauren Bacall pose, and purred, “Got a light?”

  What the hell was this? This kind of thing just didn’t happen. Not to me.

  “I love your work,” she said.

  What work? I did no work. My father couldn’t get me to mow the lawn. My mom had stopped bothering to ask me to pick up my dirty socks.

  “Your poems,” she explained.

  Now, attractive young women in the Midwest don’t admire poetry. Girls with long stringy, dirty hair, skin like four miles of bad road, and B.O.—they’re the ones who admire poetry. Not to mention my poems were nonsensical little nothings (although kind of funny, in my opinion). Unbeknownst to me they were being posted around campus.

  The armadillo is an ugly thing,

  Unlike the song bird it does not sing,

  It won’t do tricks in your yard,

  It just lies around…and is hard.

  “The Armadillo” by Bill Geist

  Don’t feel sorry for the leaves at all

  Though they plunge from trees eighty feet tall

  They’ll return with the first breath of spring

  The likes of us would die from such a thing.

  “Why Weep for Leaves?” by Bill Geist

  I eat chocolate sundaes with my friends

  If a dollar they will lend

  One night we ate three down at Joe’s

  We laughed…and the chopped nuts came out my nose.

  “Chocolate Sundaes” by Bill Geist

  You can see why she fell so hard for me.

  Her name was Jody. Our first date was to see Timothy Leary after which we did not drop LSD but rather drank beer at the Red Lion Inn. Very Midwestern.

  That summer was my first away from Arrowhead in many years. I lived a block from Jody in Chicago. I landed a job pulling down $600 a month in the advertising department of Libby’s food company on Michigan Avenue, where armies of workers walked fast, wore serious suits, and carried briefcases. I had no ties. Jody made me a couple that were bold, brightly colored, hallucinogenic, Jefferson Airplane-ish.

  Since I was going into the army in a few months I was assigned odds-and-ends at work, i.e., tasks no one else wanted. One was accompanying the head of advertising on business lunches with people from ad agencies.

  I told Uncle Ed and he said it sounded perfect for me. “Ad guys do nothing but drink,” he said, “and you’ve been in training for years.”

  My besotted boss and I would return from lunch. He’d close his office door, lie down on his couch, and “take a nap.” I had no office. I put my head down on my desk, which was in a large room amidst a swirling sea of desks.

  The young woman who sat at the next desk tapped me on the shoulder and suggested this was not a career-enhancing look for me. She explained that her goal in life was to become
an executive at the company, which sounded very old-fashioned. This was a time, 1968, to buck all things establishment, not to enlist in it. We were just up Michigan Avenue from the Hilton Hotel, site of the Democratic convention riots that summer.

  “Why?” I asked. To me, this was a time for reading the Whole Earth Catalog, smoking dope, tie-dyeing shirts, wearing bell-bottoms, listening to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” that sort of thing. “Why would you want to dedicate your life to selling canned corn?” I asked, sharply.

  “I think it’s high time women made their way in the business world and made some money for a change,” she said. And maybe it was, but do you have to sit in an office selling niblets?

  I was of the opinion that it was far nobler to aspire to be a loving, caring person than to join the pack of materialistic, money-grubbing weasels. “People who know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” as my grandmother used to say. (By the way, looking back, I have to say my side in the culture war lost.)

  Another of my tasks at Libby’s was answering customer mail. My responses went something like this:

  Dear Mrs. McGillicuddy,

  We regret to learn that you found a thumb in a can of our French-cut green beans. Enclosed please find three 50-cents-off coupons on your next purchase of Libby’s fine line of canned and frozen vegetables.

  Very truly yours

  Beats a $100 million lawsuit.

  We were in Chicago and witnessed the Democratic convention riots. Believe it or not, that was the first time it really hit me that I was going to Vietnam.

  Both Uncle Ed and my older brother, David, counseled me on military service. Ed thought a ground war in Asia was crazy and unwinnable, but figured I’d probably be drafted so should complete the ROTC program and at least I’d be an officer. My brother concurred. He was an army officer stationed in Germany and having a fine time. Elvis was there.

  So, I stayed in ROTC, and consequently became the only person I knew who went to Vietnam.

  My dad was in the hospital with heart problems when I left. Neither of us knew what to say. He said, “Hide behind a tree.”

  Uncle Ed pulled some strings with an old army buddy still serving and I was assigned to the Signal Corps (as Ed had been), which included all army photographers. I thought that being a photographer would allow me to approach my tour in Vietnam not so much as a killer but rather as something of a journalist.

  I even volunteered to go to Vietnam six months early to ensure I’d get the photography job. But upon arrival I was assigned a job monitoring radio dials in the Delta. “What about the photography?” I yelled at the guy doling out the assignments. “Great hobby,” he replied.

  Uncle Ed hadn’t forgotten me. It’s just that these things take forever to go through channels. One day my commanding officer in the Delta called me in and said: “Well, you got your wish, you’re going to the First Infantry Division as a combat photographer. God, I wish I was going with you.” Career officers wanted to be in combat units (not radio dial watching), where they would rake in lots of medals and accompanying promotions.

  A sign at the front gate read: “1st Infantry Division. No Mission Too Difficult—No Sacrifice Too Great—Duty First.” A second sign read: “Welcome to Rocket City.” Be careful what you wish for. I’d forgotten that to be a combat photographer I’d have to be in or near combat. It was a long year. Jody sent me cookies. My comrades-in-arms learned to identify the boxes and took to hacking them open with machetes. My mother-in-law sent me a sweater to keep me warm in the jungle. Pete from the lake sent me Yahtzee score pads for which I have not properly thanked him.

  When I returned from Vietnam, Janet and Ed met me at my arrival gate, which you could do back in the good old days three decades before 9/11. When Ed saw me, he cried. I hadn’t expected that. I’d always forced myself to be in a jovial mood when I was going to see him. I was the funny guy. It was and is my currency. But seeing him, I shed a tear too. I think the whole family was just happy they hadn’t lost another William E. Geist to war.

  I was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, but Jody married me anyway. When I found I could be discharged early if I went back to school, I applied immediately to the graduate program at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. I was accepted despite my 3.1 undergraduate grade-point average, which doesn’t sound all that bad, but it’s on a 5.0 scale. Some concluded that Ed must have played a role in my admission. Could be. He’d been elected president of the Missouri Restaurant Association and had come to know a lot of bigwigs around the state.

  After college I landed a job as a reporter at what was called the Suburban Trib, the “Little Trib,” a Trib-let if you will, the lowest rung at the Chicago Tribune, covering sewer bond referenda, new left-turn lanes, and changes in school lunch menus. To boost morale I did things like putting clocks on the wall like they do at real newspapers labeled “New York,” “London,” and “Tokyo” except ours were labeled “Arlington Heights,” “Hoffman Estates,” and “Buffalo Grove”: all suburbs.

  When I next saw Uncle Ed at the lake, he introduced me as “the editor of the Chicago Tribune,” which was, oooh, a good twenty-five promotions away. He always erred on the plus-plus side. Bless him.

  * * *

  Arrowhead Lodge was gone. I knew that before I drove slowly up the long hill leading to the completely empty site two years ago. It had been purchased and torn down. I’d seen painful photographs of heavy demo equipment ripping it apart like lions tearing at an antelope carcass.

  Truth be told, the Arrowhead Lodge I knew was gone long before the wrecking crews arrived. The beginning of the end began when employees had to punch in and out on a time clock. When waitresses and bellhops had to record their tips on tax forms. When a monstrous automatic dishwasher was installed. When there was talk of minimum wage laws. When the town of Lake Ozark was founded and local codes were enacted. When much of the fun and vitality disappeared because college kids stopped coming to work summers—perhaps because they could no longer make a dent in soaring college costs, or perhaps, as some have suggested, because American kids would really rather not work anymore. When a Holiday Inn (“No surprises”) went up a quarter mile down the road.

  Bizarre new decor at Arrowhead didn’t help, God knows. In what appeared to be an act of desperation the new owner laid black and white tiles in a checkered pattern on the dining room floor, then installed a forest of heavy black wrought-iron streetlights. The overall effect was a bad acid trip in New Orleans.

  And—here in the Ozarks—a glass elevator was installed from the front sidewalk to the Pow Wow Pub on the second floor. Arrivederci, charm.

  The overriding problem was that the new highway to the lake somehow bypassed Arrowhead Lodge and practically the entire lake! Motorists would see the lake at seventy miles per hour and only as they crossed two bridges. It was a lot faster now to get to nowhere.

  Ed and Janet had moved far away, to a penthouse in a new high-rise in North Palm Beach. Jody and I would fly down with the kids to see them and Ed would take us to some dark bar in a mall—not the kind of place folks trying to escape cold, dark, gray New York are looking for, especially those with kids. Willie and Libby played on the floor underneath the table. “Kids, don’t eat the cigarette butts!” (Later, he did take us to lunch at a place with windows.)

  Aunt Janet was a few years older than Ed and died before he did. She was cremated in Florida and we accompanied her ashes back to Illinois where they were buried in a family plot next to her parents and Uncle Bill.

  Uncle Ed was carrying her ashes in a box as he boarded the plane. When he spotted a youngish blonde with an empty seat next to her, he stowed Janet’s ashes in the overhead, sat down next to the blonde, and asked if he could buy her a drink.

  Ed found new drinking buddies in Florida. One was the pastor of his Episcopal church. When we drove over to the parsonage, Ed opened his trunk and took out a half gallon of Dewar’s.

  Ed’s mailman was another. I walked into his a
partment and the two of them were sitting on the couch in the living room drinking scotch. The mailman, Jimmy, was in uniform, his bag at his feet. Ed asked him if he’d like another drink. “I can’t stay too long,” Jimmy replied, accepting a refill but still mindful of his sworn duty to the U.S. Postal Service. “Neither rain nor sleet nor hail, nor drunken stupor…” Despite their sizable age difference, the two became good friends as folks with a common interest so often do.

  Ed suffered a stroke. And the pastor checked him into the hospital.

  “Does Mr. Popkess drink alcohol?” asked the admitting nurse.

  “Yes, he does,” the pastor answered.

  “How often? Once a week, twice a week, or more?”

  “More,” was the answer.

  “How much would you estimate he consumes?”

  “Let’s see,” said the pastor, “there’s the drink around noon, then a couple at lunch. There’s the five o’clock, then a couple before dinner and maybe one during the meal.”

  “How much then would you say he consumes daily?”

  “Just under a fifth,” the pastor calculated.

  “Per week?”

  “Day,” the pastor answered.

  There wasn’t a box to check for that, so the nurse entered a notation in long hand in the margin.

  “And how long has he had this habit? Six months? A year? More?”

  “I’d say, oooh, probably fifty or sixty years,” the pastor said. Wasn’t a box for that either.

  “Wow,” said the nurse, somewhat unprofessionally and with a note of admiration.

  Doctors prescribed a shot of scotch every day so that Uncle Ed’s body would not go into shock.

  I brought a get-well card to the hospital, a drink menu from his favorite bar in Palm Beach, Taboo, signed by all the waitresses.

  He recovered enough to go out to lunch and it was then he uttered the last word I heard him say: “Scotch!” he yelled at an inattentive waitress who snapped to. Earlier he’d nearly taken off her hand at the wrist when she’d attempted to take his glass, which she viewed as empty but which he knew from vast experience still had a drop down there amongst the melting ice cubes. It wasn’t frugality, he just regarded scotch as some sort of sacred nectar.