We make for it, dodging a couple more Lot Lizards on the way. I don’t know why this area is teeming with meth-head hookers. I suppose it’s the high population of bored truckers and easy access to the highway. The truckers pull off the road for the night, and right there are scraggly, wild-eyed whores ready to take their business. The women all have the same purposeful walk, like carpenter ants looking for crumbs of food.
It’s kind of thrilling to be out in the wild Arkansas night among them, but it’s also depressing. Who are they? How did they end up out here wandering around the asphalt at midnight doing this? Meghan and I don’t say much to each other as we walk, but we’re both goggle-eyed.
Considering the hour, the Waffle House is surprisingly crowded. Several tables are filled. The clientele is mostly young and male and mean looking. A group of boys lolls in a back booth. Two guys and a girl huddle over their food, talking quietly, their faces hard. The waitresses, none of them younger than fifty, shuttle coffee pots among the patrons. They look like ladies who say things like, “I’m not gonna take any of your guff.”
The windows are all encased in fog, giving the place the look of a steam room in a seedy massage parlor. We’re both kind of appalled
and delighted to find ourselves in these circumstances. A few minutes after we order our waffles, the door opens and a portly Asian guy, easily three hundred pounds, struts into the restaurant. On his arm is a woman stilting precariously on stripper heels, her face smeared with cheap makeup. They’re arm in arm and the guy has a shit-eating grin on his face, as if he can’t believe his luck at finding himself in such grand circumstances, as if he is about to sit down at the captain’s table on the
Queen Elizabeth
. He seems to possess not a shred of embarrassment at parading his low-rent hooker through a Waffle House in North Little Rock. For her part, she holds her head high, even haughtily, as if daring anybody to give her a second look: minor nobility surveying her duchy.
Another girl darts into the restaurant to use the bathroom. The waitresses pretend not to notice her. A few minutes later, she darts back out into the night. The threesome catty-corner to us get up and stumble outside. I watch them have an intense conversation outside their car, half expecting somebody to pull a switchblade. To my disappointment, nobody does, and they eventually squeeze side-by-side into the front seat and roar away, the car belching exhaust fumes.
Some more people come and go. The Asian guy and his friend eat in silence, his hand occasionally finding the small of her back. We have to clear away the steam on the windows to look outside, but there’s nothing out there to see.
The sadness of the place soaks into us like syrup. Watching these waitresses, none of them wearing wedding bands, knowing they have to come here night after night to serve this ghoulish parade of humanity. To see these cracked-out Lot Lizards in their miniskirts, to see these truckers who pay them. The whole thing is miserable. It is the dank underbelly of Little Rock, exactly what we were hoping to find when we tweeted out our request this morning. What’s sadder, though, is contemplating all the Waffle Houses and truck stops and lonely titty bars out in the middle of nowhere, scattered out across the country like forgotten cards in a game of fifty-two-card pickup.
As open-minded as I am about legalizing drugs and prostitution, seeing this mess is a very cogent argument against. Besides the servers, I think Meghan and I are the only ones in here who aren’t on something.
I don’t think this scene was what Meghan had in mind back in Prescott when she kept yelling at me that “freedom doesn’t come free,” but the setting here is just as apt as the Green Zone in Baghdad, or indeed, anyplace we’ve been to so far. Freedom really isn’t free, and this is the price we pay. Ideally, America gives you the freedom to be anything you can be. The flip side is that it also gives you the freedom to completely fuck up your life.
When we are finished with our waffles, we pay the check, leaving the waitress a big tip.
“You want to call it?” I ask Meghan.
“Yeah,” she says.
“Me too,” I agree.
So we call it, walking back to the hotel over broken bottles and chewed-up asphalt. All the fun has gone out of the evening. I’m super-depressed as I close my hotel room door behind me and get into bed. I lie there for a few minutes. Then I do something I almost never do: I get back out of bed and lock the deadbolt.
Branson, Missouri
What a Country!
Michael:
About forty miles outside of Branson, Meghan asks Cousin John to pull over so she doesn’t puke. The ride has been wicked hot and bumpy and Meghan is now telling us that she is “famous” for puking. That must have been a delight on her dad’s presidential campaign. Cousin John finds a roadside liquor store that promises air-conditioning. The first thing we notice for sale at the liquor store is blue jeans, which is odd. They’ve got a rack of the things right when you walk in. Perhaps it’s for people who are so drunk they’ve pissed themselves and need a change of dungarees. Also on sale: the Bongzilla Beer Bong, a height-adjustable pole capped with a giant funnel into which beer is poured. Six plastic tubes snake from the bottom, allowing half a dozen girls in bikinis to enjoy maximum beer guzzling. I know it is meant specifically for girls in bikinis because that’s what the box shows. While I am no expert on the world of retail, I can say this with certainty: this is an excellent store.
We spend close to an hour among the booze and beer bongs and snacks, waiting for Meghan’s head to clear. I purchase my wife a small plastic keychain that reads “Silly rabbit, tricks are for whores.” (When I present it to her after the trip, she does not laugh.) I purchase similar keychains for Meghan and Stephie. They feign delight, but I notice neither of them attaches any keys. Cousin John and I wander around the store a bit, chatting while Meghan settles her stomach with a soft drink. After a while she declares herself ready to go, having not puked. I am disappointed.
We clamber back into our stifling, and increasingly stinky, RV for the final push to Branson, Missouri. I am probably more excited about Branson than any other stop on our trip. Mostly because I can’t wait to make fun of it.
Meghan:
So here’s a little confession: I had never heard of Branson, Missouri, before we started planning our road trip. When Stephie first brought up Branson as a suggestion, I asked her what it was like and she said, “It’s kind of like the Vegas of the Bible Belt, except I’m not sure if it’s a dry county or not.” Out of sheer curiosity alone, I thought it sounded like a great idea. Pretty much compare anything to Vegas and I’m in.
After a few quick Google searches while on the RV, I see an advertisement for Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede, and I shout out to Michael that our Red Roof lobby research will not have been in vain after all. Vegas of the Midwest with a Dolly Parton attraction?! I worship at the altar of Dolly Parton. She is a woman who can do no wrong in my eyes and I am obsessed with everything about her. Her music, her hair, her cleavage, her movies, everything! If it’s cool with Dolly, I’m more than sure it is going to be cool with me. We are so there that it makes me grin.
The more research I do, the more interesting Branson becomes. Surprisingly it is a relatively old tourist destination targeted towards wholesome family fun. For whatever reason I kept having flashes of Clark Griswold and the Griswold family from
National Lampoon’s Vacation
. I tell Michael that we have turned into the Griswolds.
“I’m totally Russ, the smart-ass son,” I say. “And you are
totally
Chevy Chase’s character, Clark.”
Michael barely looks up from his laptop. “Only if I get to sleep with Christie Brinkley,” he says without stopping his typing.
“Christie then, or Christie now?” I say, trying to egg him out of his Twitter trance.
“Either,” he says, not missing a beat. The RV takes a wicked,
everlasting curve, and I start to feel like I might vomit again. Branson can’t get here soon enough.
Michael:
Branson has been a resort community almost from its founding in the 1880s. The first actual tourist destination was the Marvel Cave (“America’s third largest cave”), bought in 1894, then leased by the Herschend family in the 1950s for, of all things, square dances. The Herschend family then opened Silver Dollar City, an amusement park based on a frontier theme, still in operation today. In fact, it’s a major draw in Branson. The original cave is on-site and available for tours. No square dances.
In the 1960s, performers started moving their live shows to Branson. More and more followed: Roy Clark, Andy Williams, Yakov Smirnoff, the Oak Ridge Boys. With the shows came restaurants and other tourist attractions. Now the entire city is devoted to wholesome family entertainment and goofy golf. I first became aware of Branson’s existence in the early nineties, when people suddenly started talking about the place as a family-friendly, affordable tourist destination. Branson seemed like Las Vegas’s goody-two-shoes baby sister.
To me, it sounds indelibly hokey, one of those folksy “aw shucks” kind of places where people call you “sir” and “ma’am” as they extract every possible dollar they can from your wallet. No thanks. If I’m going to get ripped off, I want to at least do it someplace where the entertainment wears nipple tassels.
In all my travels across America, I’ve never had occasion to go to Branson and see what it’s really like until now. So I’m excited. I’m going to mock this place with all the snarkiness I can muster. Hopefully I will not cross the line into outright cruelty, but if I do, Branson will have nobody but itself to blame.
Stephie has booked us in someplace called Chateau on the Lake, a name so pompous it cannot help but be a letdown. And yet, as we drive up to the hotel, there is the lake and there is a giant building that looks less like a chateau and more like a mid-level Indian casino, but I’m not complaining. Not after our night in the demilitarized
zone known as North Little Rock. Here in Branson, there are no meth heads anywhere within sight. Unless the hotel has a rack of blue jeans in the lobby, I’m sure I will be pleased.
For Cousin John, it’s got to seem like a huge step up. Sure he’s still sleeping in the RV, but now he’s got a view of Table Rock Lake. It’s a little slice of Ozark heaven up here. For the record, I am not a completely heartless overlord, requiring my chauffer to sleep over the garage. In fact, just last night I suggested he sleep under the Red Roof, my treat.
“Can I offer you a nice hotel room?” I asked him. “Air-conditioning?”
“Are you kiddin’ me? I used to live in a van in a hundred and twenty-eight degrees in Southwest Texas,” he said. “I think I can deal with this. Thanks, though.”
“Offer stands.”
“Maybe another time.”
I think for Cousin John, this whole trip is a kind of vision quest, an opportunity to get out of his cozy Aspen existence, see the country, and test his endurance. What he hopes to find I don’t know, but I get the sense from him that he is a man on some kind of spiritual mission. He often says as much. His dad died last year and I think it had a profound effect on him. All of the bluster, the constant stories, teasing Meghan, all of it operates in parallel with what I think is a deep confusion about his purpose. Of all the jobs he’s had—tow truck driver, hotel porter, bouncer—the one that I think had the biggest effect on him was river guide. For a couple of seasons, he led whitewater rafts down the Rio Grande. When he talks about those days, he gets kind of misty eyed.
“Were there girls?” Meghan asks him.
“Are you kiddin’ me, Gumdrop?” he answers. Yes there were girls. And booze. And camaraderie with the other guides. But there was something else, I think. There was the responsibility he had of getting his clients down the river in safety. And I think that responsibility meant a lot to him. It was a pure expression of how I think he views himself. As a guide, but also as a passenger on the
trip. He’s doing the same thing for us, guiding our little RV down the river. I don’t think he’s as happy with us as he was out on the Rio Grande, but he’s playing a role he knows, and I think it suits him. Hopefully it won’t be so hot out for him up in the mountains. I don’t know how he’s been able to sleep in that thing. It’s been so miserably hot, and yet he does it without complaint. He’s a strong dude.
Meghan:
As much as I like being on the road, and don’t mind riding in an RV, it has begun to get really smelly inside, and my nausea keeps coming and going in unexpected tsunami waves. I already get motion sickness pretty quickly, but add in an RV toilet that doesn’t seem to be draining properly, random trash and dirt that’s kicking around on the floor, and a completely worthless air-conditioning system, and I am more than shocked I don’t vomit all over Michael Ian Black’s linen pants and Crocs, which really would not be a tragedy.
The drive to Branson is really windy, and I applaud Cousin John for doing such a good job maneuvering it because if I were driving, we would have already ended up like an accidental
Thelma and Louise
.
When I see on the horizon the Lake of the Ozarks and the gorgeous mountain views, I feel relieved. Stephie tipped us off that the hotel we will be staying at, the Chateau on the Lake, is a really nice hotel. I am running out of clean bras and T-shirts and just can’t bring myself to sink to the Michael Ian Black level of rewearing dirty clothes. The fact that we are going to a hotel that has a laundry room and a decent restaurant makes me as happy as if we were pulling up to the Four Seasons.
As we approach the Chateau I feel more and more guilty that we have not booked a room for Cousin John. He’s become a real trooper. Like everyone else, I am finally getting into a rhythm with Cousin John and beginning to understand his sense of humor. I don’t always do well with laid-back “hippies,” if you will (although “hippie” isn’t really an accurate description of Cousin John), but Cousin
John is sweet and mellow, and really just wants everyone to live and let live. Plus, he makes the peace sign anytime I get a little too aggressive with an opinion, which actually works well at disarming me. If only my parents and Michael had known this trick earlier, we’d all have been saved a lot of heartache. It’s weirdly effective.