by Mike Stangle
Mike: Let’s get the facts straight here, Dave. July 13, 2013. Brant Lake, the Great Adirondacks. Nature everywhere. Just how long had it been since you’d last been . . . romantic?
Dave: About forty-five minutes, maybe an hour.
Mike: No, not with yourself.
Dave: Oh weeks. Three, maybe even a month. I know that a month isn’t really that long, but it was the summer. There were gals in ’kinis everywhere I looked. And it was hot. People all around me were having sex with one another at an alarming pace. Everyone but me. So it was a long month. If a meteorologist had assessed the situation at the time, he would have given it a “real feel” of seven to nine weeks.
Mike: That has always been your biggest flaw. When you get backed up, you go crazy and become a deviant. I’ve never seen horniness create such a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde transformation over someone like it does to you. It’s like the minute after you sleep with someone, you’re the best guy going, then every additional day that goes by, your thoughts get darker and more fucked-up. Does Brant Lake bring back nostalgic feelings of high school ’gasms?
Dave: I would compare getting funky up at Brant Lake to getting funky in a nice hotel room. Hotel sex is crazy. It’s on a different level than normal sex. You can’t compare it. Is melted cheese the same thing as regular cheese? No. Add that one word—melted—and everything changes. Add hotel or Brant Lake in front of sex and you’ve got a different animal on your hands. That sort of environment is the last place a dangerously horny twenty-eight-year-old fella needed to be. Everywhere I looked, every step I took, all I saw was places around the campgrounds where I used to finger my high school girlfriend.
Mike: Set the scene up for us. You and I had just come off a pretty wild few days in Nantucket acting like frat boys, if I recall. Did we go straight from there to Brant Lake? Paint me a picture here.
Dave: We got up to camp after a really swell island bender in Nantucket, during which you were constantly surrounded by women while playing the “local cool guy” shtick. Meanwhile, across the bar, I couldn’t form coherent sentences and accidently called this cute Asian chick an “Oriental.” I couldn’t have been striking out more. I think my pants were too tight. The gals didn’t pick up what I was putting down. Camp seemed like the best place to be next, so we headed there for relaxation. We greeted our folks, a couple relatives, Denny poured us some bucket-sized glasses of wine, and we watched the dogs run around and play. They even humped a little bit. I knew things weren’t right when even that revved my engine. It was great to be back at camp, enjoying good company and cheap wine, taking a cruise on The Entertainer. The next several hours and several days rolled on, as they always did, year in and year out. Family time, the Forrest Gump sound track blasting at all times, lawn games, really huge and over-the-top meals, cocktails to match those meals, laughs for days, JT starting massive fires the second the sun set every night. We were getting mileage out of The Entertainer like you wouldn’t believe that year. After twenty-five years of service, he had just been reupholstered and was looking mighty fine. It was like that boat was just always welcoming us with open arms and stocked coolers. Come on board, fellas, have a few drinks on me. Literally on me. I’m a boat.
Mike: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Rewind. I’ve got to give some background here. We didn’t do any of that until we headed next door to greet the neighbor, Jim. Jim is crazy. He should be crazy, by all means; he is ninety-four years old. He has lived next door to the lake house forever. The guy has the most insane crush on our mother that any man has had on any woman. It would be over the line if he wasn’t so darn cute and bashful. Plus, can you blame him? Denny has been a babe for decades now. She’s like a lady Pierce Brosnan. Now, to be clear—Jim is 100 percent senile. Our entire family has watched it slowly develop over the last five or six years. Every summer we get up here, he has one foot just a little further off the merry-go-round. Alzheimer’s, dementia, flatulence, you name it. It was sad. My dad will claim Jim has been crazy for years, but I’m certain that before all of that health stuff really started affecting him, he just pretended it was way worse than it was. Why? So he could be all handsy with Denny and not have to answer for it. What a sick pup! I’ve got to respect that move, though. What old-man balls of steel he had. One time, he actually brought a package of men’s tighty-whitey underwear over as a “welcome back to camp” gift to my mom. Hanes eight-pack, XL. Well played, Jim.
Mike: Anyway, we know you were lonely and horny that night . . . but just how horny and lonely?
Dave: Lonely and horny are like two dangerous drugs you should never mix together. They are a lethal combo. The difference is that with drugs, you can choose to do just one or the other and keep things under control. You can’t control how horny or how lonely you are, so when they both come at you at the same time, you’re totally fucked. You know when it’s coming, too. You can hear Egon from Ghostbusters in your head yelling “Don’t cross the streams!!!” It’s the perfect storm of male vulnerability, and there is simply nothing you can do about it except hope you come out on the other end without making too many regrettable decisions. Oh, and that never happens.
Mike: When your streams did finally cross, what made the Stay Puft marshmallow man come marching down Central Park West?
Dave: It was the booze. It wasn’t like pouring gasoline on a campfire; it was like pouring jet fuel on the Springfield Tire Fire. The more I drank to suppress my emotions (always a solid plan), the worse it got. The more bourbon that went down the hatch, the more ballsy I got with my texts, the more two-plus-year-old Instagram photos of exes I liked, the more deep sighs I took. By dinnertime, I couldn’t even eat. I remember thinking, No. No ribs for you. Ribs are for closers. It was code red. A thousand. A thousand what? No idea. Just a thousand. I was texting every girl I’ve ever known. I was texting gals I didn’t even know. I texted a random number saved in my phone as “BIG OL’ GOOD GIRL.” I have no clue who it was, when I put it in my phone, or why I decided those were the best four words to describe someone whose number I was obtaining. Naturally, I gave her the late-night classic “You up?” No response. I tried to text contacts in my phone that were so old that they were landlines. Remember dealing with those? Hi, this is Dave, how are you? Great, thanks for asking! Say, is Jenny around? The only text I sent that night that didn’t originate directly from my penis was the text to lawyer and good ol’ boy Nick Braman. I wanted to make sure my retainer was fully paid and my affairs were in order. The only words I could get out to him were “Buckle Up.” By now, he knows what that means.
Mike: So . . . you texted every gal in your phone and the fish that ended up on the hook was the bisexual architect? How did you even know her?
Dave: Well, technically, I didn’t know her. I had never met her before that night. Ever. Remember during the Craigslist fiasco when we were getting more attention from females than two guys have ever deserved in the history of Earth? Back then there were so many emails, Facebook requests, and AOL IMs (yup, still use it) we couldn’t keep things straight, so we resorted to text. Huge mistake. Talk about getting streams crossed. I was texting with all of these random numbers all the time, not knowing who was who or what was going on. I was just going with it and seeing what happened. Months later, the gals who were wise lost interest, but a few stuck around.
Mike: As I remember it, she agreed to drive the hour and a half from the Albany area up to Brant Lake after you dropped her a pin of where we were on Google Maps. It’s pitch black out, there was a full moon (never helpful when horny), and she arrived at the stroke of midnight. The entire time she had been driving up, we had been working our way through our Montana Coolers (if you don’t know what that is, Google “Bill Murray Montana Cooler”). When she arrived, we made an alarmingly small amount of small talk before settin’ sail on The Entertainer for a late-night booze cruise. She wasn’t the slightest bit uncomfortable. Not the least bit weirded out by the circumstances. There was funny business brewing from the start, and we needed to ge
t offshore. That is my last lucid memory of the night. After that, the Montana Coolers were basically in charge.
Dave: Weren’t you driving The Entertainer?! Was it driving itself? Where was I?
Mike: Fuck you, man. Yes I was driving, but it didn’t really count as drunk driving, because we were on a boat that couldn’t exceed fifteen miles per hour. Anyway, I didn’t have the luxury of a bisexual architect with librarian glasses sitting in my lap. With a full moon casting ample light on the whole scene. See what I’m getting at?
Dave: Things did start out innocent enough. We smoked some of that funny grass you like; BA [bisexual architect] and I slowly got into some cupcakin’ and honey-holdin’ as the jam box was playing all the right tunes.
Mike: It’s time to tell us about the ’9ing playlist. You owe it to us.
Dave: All I’ll say is that over the course of several months, I might have crafted the perfect private playlist on Spotify, titled ’9ing, and it might do an incredibly effective job of getting the natural pheromones of anyone listening on the same page.
Mike: I want that playlist, Dave.
Dave: One day, when it is published, it will be my greatest contribution to mankind. The world doesn’t need that kind of heat right now.
Mike: As we were floating in the middle of the lake, you two started smooching pretty hard. I know you’re not a big PDA guy, and I can understand you letting your guard down when the only P watching the DA is me, but you were really going at it. I was surprised. Soon that surprise turned to disgust, then it turned to alarm. I couldn’t believe what I was watching develop. I knew you were horny, but I didn’t know it was to the level of what I was watching.
Dave: It became one of those “I’ll stop if you stop” scenarios with her, and you know neither one of us ever comes out on the right end of those. It felt so good to touch someone, especially someone who was as able to ignore your presence as I was. When she took her shirt off, I thought, This is happening! Do you remember what you yelled aloud when she did that?
Mike: “Holy mackerel!”
Dave: It didn’t matter that you were screaming phrases our parents used so they wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain; the heat was on when that shirt came off. I will say that there were parts of me that felt weird about it with you right there. I was barreling toward a stop sign I knew I’d blow through, though. I did, very briefly, think about how strange this was about to become for you.
Mike: No, you didn’t. The only considerate thing you did was position her naked body in between us, so I at least didn’t have to see your nudity.
Dave: You’re welcome.
Mike: At that point, I still thought she was just going to get naked, and I was telling myself that was it, and this would be a pleasant treat for the both of us. When did it turn the corner?
Dave: This entire experience was so blurry, but the one lucid memory I do have was this: I was wearing these highlighter yellow shorts with an elastic waist. She pulled the waistline out away from my stomach and looked down, then looked back up at me as if she was saying “For meee?” I don’t know what made me say what I said next, but out it came: “Go for it.” You know what was funny? When her head and torso bent down at a ninety-degree angle toward my wiener, all of a sudden you and I were staring at each other! That was some awkward eye contact, huh? I didn’t know where else to look!
Mike: Gross! I’m having flashbacks. It’s burned into my skull. I can’t believe at one point I was thinking about trying to steal her from you. Or weirder, maybe try join in, just to see how much crazier it could get? I don’t know! We were in the middle of a lake, man. All sorts of stuff goes through a guy’s head.
Dave: Had I known then what I know now about BA, I’d have put my money on that happening with little to no resistance.
Mike: I wouldn’t have had the chance, anyway. You lasted what . . . ten seconds?
Dave: Real feel? Twelve seconds.
Mike: And I thought you stopped because you came to your senses when you remembered how strange it is to hump a total stranger in front of your younger brother in the middle of a lake. Had I known you stopped because you were finished, I would have made fun of you way harder.
Actual Live Notes
I just watched you have sex. For like ten seconds. Were you done? What WAS that? Then after, I am pretty confident she was about to literally move on to me, but your cupcakin’ bonds were too strong. I probably had 6 drinks just now on the boat because I didn’t know what else to do. This stinks! I don’t know whether to write about it so I don’t forget, or just actually try and forget that I watched you give that gal a pussy job. Shit. I feel like we’ve crossed a line (BECAUSE OF YOU) that we just can’t turn back from. I’m calling it quits on our partnership/brotherhood.
“Mike, can we fuck in front of you if she gets naked and blocks my body and penis?”
This is ridiculous. I’m captain of the fucking love boat and you’re over there taking advantage of your undefeated “9in’ ” playlist. You’re finger-banging a bisexual architect in librarian glasses, while I stare at you guys and lament out loud about how horny/disgusted I am—she’s even sympathizing with me! I bet I could bang her during/after you. Ugh, gross. I just poured the strongest drink of all time. There’s no turning back from this, Dave.
Molly. Roofalin?
(Dave)
I just woke up. It’s 11 something a.m. on a Saturday. It’s the fall of 2012 in New York City. I’m immediately overcome with one of the few feelings I both hate and am consistently unable to avoid: waking up and having no idea what the FUCK happened the night prior, combined with not being able to find my phone to piece it together. The longer I have to wait for the forensics, the worse I assume I behaved. It happens here and there with me, mostly when I drink too much. Actually it only happens when I drink too much, but this time I mean I didn’t remember drinking that much at all. I also usually have a pretty reliable drunk fail-safe. The damage is never that bad, because once I get to that level, I pretty much have twenty minutes of being a raving lunatic, then go directly to bed in a compromising position. It’s like clockwork. Once in a while, I’ll grope a buddy’s girlfriend or puke somewhere public. But usually the feedback is along the lines of “Oh, you weren’t too bad. You were real fucked-up, yup, but didn’t do anything too bad.” Still, I have to be able to assess the potential of the previous night’s missteps by analyzing the forensics, and I can’t do that without my phone. I can’t find it anywhere, and I start to freak out. I barely trust myself when I’m sober.
My mind was racing as I realized how little I actually remembered. In fact, I didn’t remember anything. Why were things so foggy? Put it together, Dave. I had to actually turn on the TV to see what time it was, since I couldn’t find my phone. Okay, let’s see, 11 something a.m. on a Saturday in the fall of 2012 in New York. That means I had a Button Hooker1 flag football game in less than an hour. I decided to do a full sweep of the apartment for my phone before heading out for the game. As I declared my shoe-box-sized bedroom “clear” (aloud, like a SWAT team leader), I moved into the living room. I immediately noticed some weird colored shit on the floor. As I explored the apartment looking for my phone, all I could see was more weird colored shit. It was everywhere. Everywhere! I gave my eyes thirty seconds to focus and began investigating. Once I found my glasses, I picked some of it up and held it closer for examination. They were feathers. Very distinct feathers. Peacock feathers. It looked like someone ran over the NBC peacock with a lawn mower, in my living room. My first thought was that Matt Lauer was somehow involved as revenge for all those selfies we took on his phone. Then I remembered Matt Lauer is a sweetheart and revenge isn’t his game. My next thought was a bit more rational: was it part of a costume? They really didn’t feel fake, though. If this was part of a costume, it was very high-end. You cannot imagine my confusion at this point. I picked one up. Fucking huge. I thought maybe, just maybe, I ended up at some sort of Eyes Wide Shut–type party where everyon
e was fucking each other while wearing masks? And maybe I met a gal in a peacock mask and we did a bunch of freaky stuff, so the feathers went flying everywhere? After realizing how ridiculous this sounded as my first assumption, I started doing some real investigating. I smelled the feather. Gamey. Son of a bitch, I don’t have time for this. And where is my iPhone? I can only answer all of your questions the same way I answered them myself at the time: in the most confusing manner possible.
11:40 a.m.: Hungover, confused, and curious, I managed to pull myself together, put on my Button Hooker gold jersey (I lost my original jersey, so I now rock a yellow T-shirt I found at No Relation Vintage in the East Village; it has a Rastafarian guy on it who says, “Jamaican Me Crazy!” It’s so on point) and rush out the door with Frank in tow. Frank is the team mascot for the Button Hookers, which is ironic because he isn’t physically capable of running an actual button-hook pattern and he hates footballs. He steals every single one he can and then destroys it. What a shitty mascot. Frank and I got to the field within ten minutes of game time. Fellow Button Hookers rejoiced. I felt good, like they were genuinely happy I was there. My teammates on the Button Hookers are also my best friends. I tried asking everyone about what had happened the night before, but everyone gave me that look that said you know what you did. Are you guys being ironic? I don’t know what I did. Honestly!
12 p.m.–1 p.m.: Game time. I wasn’t feeling so hot. I had the spins, then took a personal time-out for a quick sideline spit-up. You know those spit-ups when you aren’t quite throwing up, but your body is still telling you something has to come out? I had those for a while, then I drank all of my water, then all of my teammates’ water, then I stole some from our ref. I was hurting. At halftime, I started fishing for clues from my friends. Steve immediately informed me that he could not believe I was still breathing and that he had already been writing my obituary. Okay. Good start. Apparently, attempts at reaching me all morning proved futile, and he had been telling anyone who would listen that I was dead. The last he saw me was at 11 p.m. He could only say I was drinking “like you had a bone to pick.” And he left me shortly thereafter. Tim didn’t provide much more insight. He walked by me, looked me in the eye, threw his head back with one stiff laugh, slapped me really hard on the back, and kept on walking. That’s all he could offer.