Lake of the Ozarks Page 5

  “Chappell!” he’d yell at Jim. “There are three big, ugly cardboard boxes outside the front door! Looks like a shipping depot. Put ’em out back! Do I have to do all the thinking around here?!”

  “Good morning, Puggy,” he’d say to the desk clerk. “Everything copacetic?”

  “Fine and dandy, Mr. Popkess,” she’d reply, always accentuating the positive, which seemed to work,

  Ed was very efficient. He would inspect, noting things that needed attention and dressing down those who weren’t doing their jobs. Then he was off, heading back down to the house, mixing himself a drink and backing the Arrowhead out of the dock on a lunch, and, need I add “booze,”cruise, with a few guests aboard.

  From many a cruise with Cap’n Ed, it was my understanding of Missouri maritime law that each vessel was to carry one life jacket and a fifth of liquor for every person aboard.

  Hey, this wasn’t ocean boating, where you had to pay attention. Lakes make sense. Shallow by the shore. Deep in the middle. No rocks or sandbars lurking just below the surface to knock holes in the hull and shear off propellers. No tides to monitor, No depth gauges or ship-to-shore radios. No red-right-return. None of that.

  Vigilance? Sobriety? Not all that necessary back then.

  He’d return about three for his afternoon nap, which I always thought was alcohol related but have since discovered is also a symptom of age. I work at home a lot and have noticed that my twenty-minute naps have ballooned to sixty. Ed’s were about an hour. He’d rise, pour himself a drink as naturally as putting on his pants, and head back to the lodge, where he served as official greeter for the dining room.

  He was a born politician. He seemed to remember the name of almost anyone he’d ever met. He’d ask where they were from, and no matter how small a town would say he knew it well, and would prove it by asking about a person, place, or thing. Amazing. Think it came from traveling the boondocks for the Dairyman’s Journal.

  * * *

  Every morning when he arrived at the lodge Uncle Ed would take his seat at the front table for yet more coffee and two poached eggs. He snagged every employee who came past to interrogate them about the social events of the previous evening, about who was with whom, and just how “with” them they were. Piecing together this ever-changing social puzzle was his hobby. He enjoyed astounding all of us with all he knew.

  This day, Jim Chappell was the first to be questioned.

  “Party at the pool last night?” Ed asked.

  “Yessir,” Jim answered.

  “You with Gina?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Gettin’ any of that?’ Ed probed.

  Jim laughed and said, “Do I have to answer that?”

  Ed was a matchmaker, and a good one, with the record to prove it. Short term and long. Countless summer romances and several marriages. There’s something to be said for matchmaking, whether by parents or dating services. Arranged marriages enjoy a high success rate worldwide, but then so do drive-through Vegas marriages with an “Elvis” presiding. So they say.

  One of Ed’s great matches was Gina, a willowy waitress, and Jim, who met at Arrowhead one summer when she was a lowly housekeeper and he was an even lowlier weed cutter.

  Gina and Jim were married just down the hill at Our Lady of the Lake Church. Ed went all out on this one. If Jim was driving up to the lodge from Drury University in southwest Missouri to work a fall weekend, Ed would fly his plane up to Northeast Missouri State to pick up Gina.

  Ed wasn’t just a hopeless romantic. He desperately needed help on busy fall weekends. He sometimes flew to Bolivar, Missouri, to pick up another waitress, Marilyn, at Southwest Baptist University, then on to Drury University in Springfield to pick up Jim (on weekends Jim wasn’t driving a hundred miles to the lake), and yet another waitress, Karen.

  Like all things, flying with Uncle Ed was a little different. He piloted a small Cessna and allowed smoking. Back then all planes did. Hard to imagine now, sitting shoulder to shoulder with passengers puffing away.

  When I flew with Ed, he’d light up a cigar and, intent on his flying, he’d unconsciously flick the ashes onto my lap. I’d only bring this to his attention when my pants began to smolder.

  Gina and Jim’s marriage has lasted more than fifty years. Photos show that Wheezer, a friend from Champaign, and I were in the wedding party, although neither of us remember much about it, probably owing to the prolonged open bar reception Ed held in the Pow Wow Room after the ceremony.

  Gina and Jim’s wedding. Ed is next to Jim, Wheezer is on the far right, and I’m next to Wheezer.

  He gave the newly betrothed couple a credit card to pay for their honeymoon and sent them on their way toward Kansas City. But they continued westward all the way to the Broadmoor, the five-star resort hotel in Colorado Springs—making Ed’s wedding gift more extravagant than he’d perhaps intended.

  Ed put together even the most unlikely matches. Sharon, a cute waitress with a sunny disposition, and Slugger, an often hot-tempered bellhop, a nephew on Ed’s side of the family, who was fired every couple of weeks. But Ed always took him back. Sharon and Slugger have also celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.

  He was also responsible for joining in holy matrimony Jim Murphy, the tall, ultra-thin cook who was our straw boss, and Sandy Sinclair, a blond waitress, the daughter of Boofie, a genial cook from Lawrence, Kansas. Jim worked at the lodge year-round, taking the lodge station wagon to classes at Lincoln University in Jefferson City.

  He served as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He returned unharmed to the States only to commit suicide. I asked Ed why he thought Jim had done that and he snapped angrily: “How the hell should I know?! Maybe he just didn’t want to live anymore!”

  Ed was not keen on reflection, particularly on such an unpleasant subject.

  As you might imagine, with Ed doing the hiring, the waitress corps was an attractive lot, with Betty Selby oft mentioned as the fairest of them all. She acknowledged she once received a hundred-dollar tip. (The other waitresses said it was more than once.) She babysat for guests and played bridge with them. One couple who gave her a hundred-dollar tip told her to buy a dress for her first day on her new job. She wore that new dress to teach her third-grade class in Oak Park, Illinois.

  Betty had to ward off the unwelcome advances, to include suggestive comments and occasional touches, of male customers, often businessmen in small groups acting as though they hadn’t been away from home in a long, long time and were, in addition, three sheets to the wind.

  “We didn’t complain,” Betty recalled, “we liked our jobs and needed the money.” That was then.

  She had a plan. On a shopping trip to Eldon, she bought a “diamond” engagement ring at the five-and-dime. She put it in a handy spot in the kitchen and when necessary slipped it on her finger to show to aggressive male diners. She’d tell them that she was the fiancée of that big guy behind the front desk (Ralph), who she’d clued in to cross his arms and give them a stern stare. All the waitresses used the ring at one time or another.

  As fate would have it, Betty did marry Ralph, who became a doctor.

  Van was a middle-aged waitress and self-described gold-digger. She married an aging, well-to-do dining room regular from Mexico, Missouri: J. B. Arthur, described in his obituary as a “brick magnate.” Not quite gold, but many, many bricks.

  Another waitress, Karen, married into Lake of the Ozarks royalty. Karen had a sparkle in her eyes, was quick to laugh, and up for anything. Some nights a group would head out to a Mexican restaurant across the dam, El Sarape, where one evening she chugged a small container of habanero sauce on a ten-dollar bet. She couldn’t speak for nearly a week. Severe esophageal inflammation.

  She married Larry Fry, who was a dining room regular. His father was the postmaster, who was usually stripped to his T-shirt on hot days behind the counter. An unassuming look for a man who owned vast swaths of property on the strip. His son, Larry, who was in fact the Larry of t
he fabled Larry Don cruise boat, passed away some years ago, after which the Larry Don sank.

  Quite a record Ed had, and he wasn’t about to rest on his laurels.

  Ed’s waitress this morning, a fetching young woman, came over to ask if he’d like more coffee.

  “Yes, darling,” he said to her. “Let me take a look at you,” he said, gently grasping her free hand while looking her up and down.

  “You have big beautiful eyes,” he said. Check. He was right about that.

  She blushed. “Thank you, Mr. Popkess.”

  “What a great smile,” he added. Check.

  “And…look at that body.”

  Awww, Ed! Did you have to say it? He did. He was Ed.

  Sorry! I should have warned you about Uncle Ed. He could be rather crude at times—a lot of times. Maybe most. Those of us who knew the man were always braced for him to say something of the sort, something untoward. We cringed as we always did when we sensed one of those gems coming.

  “Have you met the great Billy Geist?” Ed asked, with me standing right there.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Seems nice. We don’t know each other very well yet.”

  (I liked the “yet.”)

  “Why don’t you get to know each other better,” Ed suggested. “Break away and head up to the Oaks tonight.” The Oaks was a beer joint just up the road, frequented by Arrowhead employees.

  “Would you like that?” he asked her.

  “Sounds like fun,” she answered. (I could not speak.) “You two might wind up having a summer romance,” he said, brazenly, totally jumping the gun. I don’t know if she blushed but I did.

  Notably, at least to me, she said nothing to deflate or refute his “summer romance” comment. As for me, I was thinking it was one helluva good idea.

  I was excited about our date at the Oaks. I think she was too. We smiled whenever we spotted each other that day. She did indeed have a great smile and big brown eyes and that other thing.

  Her name was Dana. She was eighteen, had grown up on a farm not far from here, just graduated high school, and was heading off this fall to nursing school in Springfield. I was two years older, but still too young to buy beer. However, I’d had the foresight to hold a premature twenty-first birthday party at the Oaks, complete with a cake, candles, and a group counting down to midnight when I would, ostensibly if not actually, come of age. That was all the proof the bartender needed.

  Dana and I sat in a booth, which was good, more intimate, provided I had anything to say, which was not much at first, but more and more as the level of Falstaff in the pitcher dropped precipitously. The beer seemed to me to be making my conversation not only more plentiful but more fascinating, as well. She even laughed a few times.

  We got a little tipsy. We played the shuffle puck bowling machine. As I pushed the silver metal puck down the two-foot alley she grasped my arm tightly as if she had money riding on the game. She cheered strikes. When it was her turn I stood closely behind her. So closely it seemed my denim pants and her polyester shorts might synthesize into some new miracle fabric. This seemed to be fine with her.

  This was good. She was most attractive. I hoped this wasn’t going to be a problem. I mean she could have been way less attractive and still have been plenty attractive enough for me. Know what I mean?

  I was scared to death of girls, especialy attractive ones. Had been for years, since I was scorched by the all-too-atractive girl next door. But this could be a whole new beginning, thanks to Uncle Ed, the matchmaker. It would have taken weeks or months for me to summon the courage to ask Dana to go with me to the Oaks. It took a bold, offensive, crude force to get the ball rolling. Uncle Ed. Matchmaking isn’t always pretty.

  After dropping Dana off at the She Shack, where the waitresses lived, I went home to bed, but was unable to sleep, thinking about our fresh, budding relationship in that special libidinous way that sort of ruins everything.

  Chapter Five

  The Chili Pond

  Now I don’t want to say that working at a resort the first summer wasn’t all I dreamed it would be, but: Where were the girls in bikinis? When do we go water-skiing? Why hasn’t the nepotism kicked in?

  Such dark thoughts filled my head as I sloshed in high, black rubber boots through fetid waters collecting on the surface of the lodge’s open-air septic system, twelve red tile sewer pipes emptying into a forty-by-forty-foot sandbox known as the Chili Pond.

  The theory of sanitation engineering and sciences behind this system was that noxious fluids would flow down from the headwaters, or commodes, seep in and flow through the sand until the saturation point was reached and the contaminated waters could seep no more. The theory posited that somehow in all this flowing and seeping the water would somehow be purified. You take the first sip.

  The discharge, about the shade of stout English breakfast tea, would begin collecting on the surface and the warm summer sunshine would bring out the rich, full-bodied aroma.

  Who you gonna call? The Septic Solutions Squad. Us: Two of the lowliest on the organizational chart, two with the least time of service, were issued rubber boots and armed with shovels to churn the sands, for what our straw boss, Jim Murphy, called “a day at the beach.” Funny guy, that Jim. It was always two guys—the buddy system—in case one was overcome.

  “Look!” shouted John, my partner, hoisting something that looked like a six-inch translucent version of a boot dangling on the end of his shovel. A gift from the sea.

  “Hold it up to your ear,” I replied, “and you can hear the sound of flushing.”

  Today, the Chili Pond would probably be declared a Superfund site, crawling with EPA crews in haz-mat suits. (Disregard this remark if we don’t have an EPA anymore.)

  Just as Jim called this “a day at the beach,” so too did he refer to swinging a long-handled weed cutter back and forth for hours on the back hill “practicing your golf swing.” That Jim. He had a million of ’em.

  John was a friend from home, who joined me at the lodge my first summer, envisioning the same bikinis and ski boats I did. His mom came several weeks early to pick him up after too much sun ’n’ fun in the Chili Pond, weed wacking, and spending most of his meager salary on jumbo bottles of calamine lotion.

  He let out a yell one morning as we were cutting on the back hill when he came upon a big black snake. I couldn’t stand snakes and lived in fear every time we cut weeds from then on. We didn’t really have snakes in Champaign, just the very rare short, skinny green “garden snake” not much bigger than a worm. Even today I prefer an urban environment where all the world’s concrete and you can see what lies ahead even if it’s a mugger.

  (Here’s how I feel about snakes: In Vietnam, when our base camp was under nightly rocket attacks, everyone slept in a sandbagged bunker except me. I’d seen a snake slithering out of the bunker and never went back. I knew then that I would rather die than see a snake.)

  There were also special projects, such as diving into the lake to force empty fifty-five-gallon drums under Ed’s dock for added flotation. The barrels had been previously filled with gelatinous creosote, a toxic substance now banned in many states. Pete and I were covered with the stuff. When purple and red patches broke out all over our bodies, Jim thoughtfully washed us down with gasoline.

  In the afternoons, we’d collect dirty laundry from the linen closets, wrap it in bundles twice our size then stagger under their enormous weight to the pickup bins on the She Shack porch.

  Chapter Six

  Extreme Dishwashing

  Sometimes our workdays were extended to include night dishwashing. What was this? The Decathlon of Degradation?

  Arrowhead’s dishwasher was not something manufactured by Maytag’s industrial division. It was us. Two-man crews.

  Waitresses crashed through the swinging kitchen doors, precariously balancing metal trays heaping with filthy, greasy, scummy—and quite heavy—Frankoma dishes, th
en heave them into the rack. Wheezer (an asthmatic given this nickname by junior high classmates, a group not known for their sensitivity) would scrape the scraps into a barrel, then throw the dishes into a large tub of scalding, soapy water. He’d wash them, then gently lower them (if business was slow) into the rinse tub, or toss them (if it was busy).

  Glasses went into a third tub filled with cold water (to make them sparkle) and all of it went helter-skelter onto a towel-covered counter to dry.

  On, say, a Saturday night in August, you had to be ready for Extreme Dishwashing. Psyched. With a warrior mentality. One night Wheezer and I bound our heads in dish towels in what I would call a vaguely Arabian-ninja (or possibly two-guys-suffering-from-extreme-head-wounds) look. I took to calling him “Larry,” because “Lawrence” seemed overly formal. He called me “Saudi.”

  The dishes came in at a fast pace, but we handled them, no problem. The pace accelerated but we were still fine. A couple of bad-ass dishwashers, I tell ya. Then suddenly we were hit with a tsunami of dirty dishes that came flooding through that damnable, heartless swinging kitchen door.

  Code Red! We were losing ground! Suddenly the Wheez and I looked like Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line at that chocolate factory. Within a minute, the rack was completely filled with trays, stacked, precariously, atop one another when Sharon, a petite waitress, staggered in with a big tray of about her own weight. There was simply nowhere to put it.

  Chef Glen took notice, calling out to Wheez and me: “What the hell are you two doing over there, playing with each other?”—a remark audible to those at the closest tables in the dining room.

  Glen would be Glen Clymore, Arrowhead’s longtime chef, who packed up every fall when the season at the lake was over, and headed out to California—Van Nuys, was it?—where he worked as a chef all winter until his return here every spring.