garrison beau scott

The Eastgate is that special kind of place where Bud in a longneck and Patsy Cline are not only your only choices, they’re the best ones you can make. Located in Des Moines, Iowa, the Eastgate was a refuge, a home and an adopting family for four strangers. I among them.

During the summer of 1994, at the suggestion of Keith Nordahl, a friend and classmate, I took two terms off from Brooks to live and work in Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Keith’s family had been in Door County since he was a wee lad, and he grew up in this enchanted place, summering on his family’s 80 acre plot of undeveloped land.

It was the stories Keith spun about the water and the wind, and the girls of Wilson’s that convinced me. And any preconceived notion a kid from Southern California had about Wisconsin drifted away like the clouds after a mid-west summer rain storm.

One of the jobs I had was doing the darkroom work in one of those old-time portrait studios where you can dress up like Billy the Kid or Al Capone. Part of the job, in addition to working at the main studio in Fish Creek, was doing the same job for a two week stint at the Iowa State Fair. I was to be a carney.

In all there were 5 of us. The owner of the studio who took the pictures and berated anyone who dared only buy the 5 x 7, and then there was Brian, Andy, Heather, and myself. Brian had the unenviable job of selling the photo packages, and as I said, if he didn’t sell each group at least a half dozen pictures, the owner stopped what he was doing and tried to bully or embarrass these people into parting with their hard-earned cash for multiple copies of their kid’s faces on a wanted poster.

Brian was from Minneapolis and had worked for the studio previous summers. Andy (whom we affectionately called “Big Dog” was a friend of Brian’s with no idea of what was in store for him at the fair. Andy helped Heather (who had worked for the studio previously as well) with “costuming.” Another unenviable task. These “costumes” were nothing more than a facade of clothing that were tied on much like a hospital gown. They were worn by every kind of walk of life you might find at the Iowa State Fair. In August.

I had the best job. Doing the processing, I worked with chemicals that needed to be kept at a temperature that required an air-conditioner, so my time was mostly spent in a cool, darkroom listening to Grateful Dead bootlegs on a shitty little cassette player.

The four of us developed a quick friendship, realizing that we were working for a mad man who’s one and only priority was prying as much money out of these people as possible. We also understood that if we did nothing but work the fair, go back to the motel and fall asleep, just to wake up and do it all over again, one of us (or all of us) would snap and do something to the owner that’d get us on a real wanted poster.

Enter the Eastgate. If the Eastgate was a ship, it’d be the ugliest, most pirate laden one afloat. But it’d be the ship that would make it through all the wars, the one that after your boat was sunk you’d be the happiest seeing come to your rescue.

The Eastgate was tucked away in the deepest, darkest corner of a massive parking lot for a run down mall, directly across the street from our motel. I won’t lie to you and tell you that when we first walked in there to have a few beers and shoot some pool that we felt safe and welcomed. In fact when we spoke to a few locals at the photo trailer one day and told them we’d been spending our nights at the Eastgate, we were warned to stay away lest one of us end up shanked.

But that wasn’t the case, for on our second night there, as we were buying a round of Bud, we noticed a jar set out to collect money to help with some hospital costs for the child of a regular. We threw in a couple of bucks each, not really thinking anything about it. But immediately afterwards we felt a difference in how we were treated.

The following night we were greeted by the bartenders, a few of the locals asked us how we were doing, and eventually we became locals ourselves. To the point that on our last night in Iowa before we packed up the trailer, and went back to Wisconsin, they threw us a going away party.

True to the photo studio owner’s greedy ways, he stayed open as long as he could that last night, hoping to squeeze out whatever few dimes remained. We didn’t make it back to our motel until way past midnight, the time that the Eastgate was forced to close, no doubt due to events that gave rise to the myriad of reasons we were told to stay away. Crestfallen, Brian, Big Dog, Heather and I decided to at least go and say good bye, if only from the parking lot.

But the Eastgate had other plans. They turned off all the lights, so that from the parking lot they looked closed, but as soon as we got to the door, they opened it up, ushered us in like gangsters into a speak-easy and gave us a proper send off. It’s hard to explain exactly how or why, but walking out of that place felt exactly how it must have felt for Norm to have walked out of Cheers for the last time.

It was just a bar, wood paneling, a few pool tables, Patsy on the juke. But for the four of us, during those two hellish weeks in Des Moine in the middle of August of 1994, the Eastgate wasn’t just a bar. It was that ship, the one you’d most want to see as you were hanging on to the flotsam and jetsam of your own life. A hand reaching into the water, with not a life preserver, but a Bud in a bottle.

Big Dog, come on back.