by Mike Stangle
Months after that old bag and I had our way with one another, I found out that she has a son named Jared. He is my age. Weird, right? What’s weirder is that upon finding that out, I immediately looked for, found, and friended Jared on Facebook. It has been years, and he hasn’t confirmed me yet. Maybe he knows I licked his mom’s C-section scar that she was left with after giving birth to him. Do you think he can sense it? Ironically, that scar is why I friended him. I owe him a beer for keeping her slow cooker in pristine shape by opting to take the trapdoor out. Thanks, Jared!
Step 3: Find Your Wheelhouse
You’re on a hot streak. You haven’t turned down one opportunity. Now you’re starting to put some miles on the tires, and you’re just plain tired of buying new sheets. It’s time to start thinking about narrowing down the playing field a little bit. I am by no means suggesting anyone should ever actively look for a relationship, unless your biology is ticking louder than that giant clock at the end of Hook. Remember, you can’t force or arrange these things, but you can’t be a wild mongoose forever, either. I think of it like American Idol. On each new season’s premiere, they show all the crazy, eccentric nut jobs who are terrible. They’re laughable, entertaining, funny, but ultimately have zero chance of making it to the next round. They are there purely for entertainment, for fluff, and for perspective on how good the coming contestants are going to be, comparatively. Then it’s time to bring on the real talent and let America vote, God damn it. What’s important to remember is you can’t do this forever. I think about that all the time. You should only be single long enough to remember why you want to be with someone. Don’t forget how nice romance can be. Don’t forget how fun the opposite sex can be. I think about it constantly. It’s why my go-to answer to any question involving my upcoming weekend plans is “probably just doing some laundry, hanging with Frank, and finding my future wife.”
A Coonskin Tale
(Dave)
Coming from upstate New York can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Those who live in New York City define “upstate” as anything north of themselves. Upstate could be Westchester, Lake Placid, Hudson, Albany, or fucking Buffalo. Mike and I grew up outside Albany, and one of the best parts about it was living with direct access to the Adirondacks.
If you haven’t been to the Adirondacks you should probably go. It’s untouched by all the crap around it. The Adirondack Park represents a freeze frame in history, when America was the jacked football player at the bar drinking Budweiser, attracting babes, and doing the right thing with his heart of gold. Badass, but still deep. Now America is more like the guy who is four levels drunker than everyone at the bar, is sort of out of shape, won’t stop talking, but is actually pretty amusing and a blast to party with. His moves aren’t what they used to be, and he dresses like it’s the late nineties, but oh hey, he just bought the entire bar a round of shots. Classic move, 2015 America! The Adirondacks, though? We’re talking about a big old 6.1 million–acre park that Teddy Roosevelt put aside for us so we wouldn’t forget just how far a breath of fresh air goes toward getting a fella back to neutral. You know how people toss around the term “God’s country” when they’re in a location so beautiful it makes them think they’re hanging out with God? That expression comes from the Adirondacks. God owns lakefront property there. I’m not lying to you, guys. When people used to get tuberculosis or the clap or whatever the fuck people got inflicted with way back when, doctors would insist that somebody take ’em up north to the Adirondacks and just air it out.
Rivers, lakes, streams, bridges, golf, moose, maybe the occasional meth lab, but also nature, mountains, bearded men. The ADKs have old pickup trucks, antique stores, and racism. But also bald eagles! They’ve got it all. I’d like to buy a motorcycle with a sidecar, strap Frank the Bulldog in, and ride around the Adirondacks for days looking at stuff. You can come, too. If you do go to the Adirondacks, just make sure you don’t spend much of your time in the southern end of Lake George. They call it the “gateway to the Adirondacks,” but really that just translates to the fake and gimmicky Adirondacks. It’s the southernmost part of the park, where most people enter, and therefore has the most shit jammed into it. It’s not even fun for kids: Olde Tyme photos, shitty mini golf, shitty arcades, guys with classic cars taking laps on the .5 miles of “strip,” 3-D movie theaters with rumble chairs that spray water at you, Frankenstein walking around outside of a fucking wax museum. All of that shit, with tetanus or rabies on 90 percent of everything you touch. All you’ll find at the southern end of Lake George is cheap bachelorette parties, raunchy boat-up bars, and a whole mess of tourists down from Canada. Also, tons of Asians renting boats and wearing tacky orange life vests. It’s a good time and a complete shithole all at the same time. Oh, did I mention the southern end of Lake George is exactly where this story takes place?
Way more important than the where is the who. Have I mentioned The Entertainer yet? If I haven’t, I apologize. He’s an important character, even though he’s an inanimate object. The Entertainer is our dad’s twenty-four-foot pontoon boat. It’s technically called an “Aqua Patio,” which is nautical for We made a living room fucking FLOAT, you guys! The Entertainer is made of long couches, lounge chairs, several wooden tables, a carpet, a love seat with a cooler underneath it, and eighty-eight horses of American power to push it around. My parents bought it new in 1988 and it just won’t quit. The most people Mike and I ever fit on The Entertainer was seventeen fully grown healthy adults, two large-breed dogs, and a full keg of Busch. Regular Busch, not Busch Light. We were nuts to butts on board The Entertainer that day; you couldn’t see either pontoon coming out of the water. From the distance, I bet it looked like seventeen Jesuses partying on water. Coincidentally, that’s how I picture my version of Jesus. Party Jesus is so cool, dancing on water and spreading the good news.
Back to The Entertainer. The thing has been through hell! It’s twenty-seven years old and has lived the life of five boats. The Entertainer and Mike are actually the same age. Both have endured an insane amount of abuse to their bodies and Mike seems to be the only one showing signs of wear and tear. The Entertainer is indestructible, reliable, and authentic. It baffles me to hear our folks talk about the glory days when they first bought The Entertainer and partied on it harder than we ever would. I thought seventeen dancing Jesuses was a lot, but it doesn’t break their record, which still stands to this day. They fit twenty-four people on board. It doesn’t seem possible, but for some reason I believe them. When we had seventeen dancing Jesuses on board, I can distinctly remember thinking that if the smallest fish in the lake farts right now, we’re all fucked. Twenty-four people? They tell it like they didn’t even bat an eye.
Maybe the pontoons were more buoyant back then. Maybe they were sick fucks like Mike and I are, and they actively tried to sink it. Between my folks, their friends, and then later a degenerate band of Stangle brothers and their buddies, The Entertainer has proved completely unsinkable. No seaworthy vessel has survived more troublemaking white folks since the Mayflower. The thing just won’t die. It reminds me of Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride. Remember at the end when Christopher Guest just keeps stabbing him all over the place, but Montoya won’t quit, because he needs to avenge his father? The Entertainer is like that, applied to drinking.
Despite the boat’s advanced age, I would actually argue that The Entertainer has peaked in the last five years. It’s rare to see an old-school pontoon out on the water anymore, let alone an unsinkable BEAST with eighties lettering and more than two decades of Lake George registration stickers proudly displayed across the bow like an arm-sleeve tattoo. That makes The Entertainer recognizable everywhere it goes. One time years ago, the Warren County Sheriff Department had put an APB out on it. My dad and his buddies were fishing and got pulled over by a police boat. It turns out the APB was because the police wanted to borrow it for a parade, but they didn’t know who owned it. They figured they’d pull it over the next time it was sp
otted, so the cop could ask the favor. Yes, it’s been in several parades now. Show me another boat with a more impressive party resume besides maybe, maybe, the Beatles’s Yellow Submarine.
• • •
One Fourth of July a few years back, some buddies, Mike, and I took The Entertainer out on Lake George all day. You know that southern end I was talking about? That is where most of this story will eventually take place, but for most of the day, we were bopping around miles north of there, from bay to bay. Upstate folks will recognize the landmarks by experience, but they’re all aptly named, anyway. First we hit Log Bay (the one with logs lining the bottom), then Sandy Bay (the one with sand on the bottom), and then Paradise Bay (the one with loose women everywhere). At the time, I was twenty-five, fresh off a nice dump (by Nancy, not my butthole) and in a really sick phase of my life. I was playing host on The Entertainer all afternoon, and I’ve got to tell you, it was tough. I was one of eleven people, eight of whom were coupled off. The remainder were male buddies. If you were wondering, (twenty-one-year-old) Mike had a (twenty-one-year-old) girlfriend at the time. She was awful, but she was an absolute babe. So shallow, Mike. I don’t know how my friends pulled this off, but at the time, every single one of their girlfriends was a real knockout. Good for us, we peaked!
What did this translate to? Basically, all I was doing all day was driving people around on a boat while looking at girls in bikinis. And drinking. People were cupcaking left and right. My buddy Nick was getting a hand job while floating under the anchored Entertainer. Although that sounds extremely difficult from a logistical standpoint, it can happen. Fact is, the very idea of everyone being so sexual around me was driving me nuts. It was fucking torture. You know how I feel about bikinis, you guys. Hey, everyone, let’s go to Log Bay and tie up with a bunch of other boats that are DRIPPING with bikini-clad women. Oh, Dave, are you putting a shirt on so you can hide the tip of your dick when you tuck your boner in? (Power move.) No problem! I drank slowly to stay in control and help escort everyone around. That isn’t like me, since The Entertainer practically drives itself . . . but it was the Fourth, guys. I wanted to honor our forefathers with some responsibility.
By the time an afternoon of day drinking turned into happy hour, and happy hour turned into everyone in the gang getting gussied up to hit the town for the night, everyone had gotten their sexual thrills out of their system. Except for me. A man can only be in such an environment for so long before his carnal nature takes over. Mike and the guys with the girlfriends had brought sand to the beach, so they were all set. My other single friends had branched off with those they met during the day. They were laying groundwork, at least. Me? I was right where I left off. Captain Dave, president of the boner club. I was running hot. Real hot. I didn’t know what to do. I started acting funny. It was as if I couldn’t hide how horny I was. I was a dog in heat. The sexuality was seeping out of my pores. Women around me were disgusted, alarmed, somehow flattered, and intrigued all at the same time.
I wanted to have a little Dave time, frost my belly button if you know what I mean, that would have been the natural move to take myself down from dangerously horny to reasonable horny, but I kept getting interrupted. Tried to JO on the boat, but it was too open, people kept walking up. Tried to JO in the bathroom, but girls kept knocking on the door. Tried to JO in the water even, but that just wasn’t working. Ever tried it? It’s hard having sex in the water, and even harder without a vagina in the mix. Drinking was plan B and also plan A. I suppressed my horniness the way a twenty-five-year-old male properly deals with any issue—by drinking until I temporarily forgot about it. While doing so, and while everyone else was still cupcaking with their gals, I was getting weird.
At some point, we had befriended strangers and docked at their lake house, where I found a Davy Crockett raccoon hat. Those hats are pretty on point. Why do you think it was one of the most historic bad boys in American history who put them on the map? Why do you think no one has been able to pull one off since? Maybe because no one can combine fashion with frontier pioneering quite like Davy Crockett did. Davy was close to something, but he wasn’t thinking far enough outside of the box. After some toying, I tucked it into the seat of my pants, in a way that suggested that I had myself a raccoon tail. Boom! At that moment, an incredible gimmick was born. I really pulled it off, too. I was born to have a tail. It absolutely killed with the lake house crowd. Everyone needed to talk about it, everyone needed to ask about it, many wanted to touch it. I let them. “Just please, don’t tug.” I developed a repertoire, where I explained that I was born with a tail and my parents declined to have it removed at birth. After a few years, when it was growing at a faster rate than predicted (I would later change it to “hairier”), doctors told my parents it was part of my spine and that they risked certain paralysis if they attempted surgery. The decision practically made itself—I had to go out with this thing on tonight. The only problem was my sobriety. It was gone. It was the last one to leave the party, and it turned the lights off on the way out.
We had a big van, and we were going to drive to a few bars in a town up the road, but there was no way anyone could drive at that point. I was the last one to start drinking and coon-tail-mania got me all antsy in my pantsy. I was already wobbly from unsuccessfully trying to drown out my horniness. It left me aroused, tailed, and drunk. I couldn’t drive a car, no one could . . . but we did have The Entertainer. Hell yes! It was like a lightbulb went off in my head. I don’t want to be seen at the cool bars with a raccoon tail, anyway. I’ve got a gimmick going, and I want to use it on fellow sickos who would appreciate it. I was the raccoon tail guy; I’ll drive the shit out of that boat! Southern Lake George, here we come.
If you want to have a raunchy time in Lake George, you go to one bar and one bar only—Christie’s On The Lake. That’s where people go to get wet, and not with lake water. When you pull up to a waterfront bar on an overflowing pontoon boat blasting Boy George, people turn their heads to see what they are dealing with. That’s exactly what the scene was by the time we got there. We were tuned up and we made an entrance that went further than I could have imagined. What happened next was as if the gods looked down upon me and decided to conduct an experiment to see how much pleasure the horniest guy in the world could possibly get from a best-case scenario falling into his hands—and whether he can survive this without a heart attack. We had been at Christie’s for just one drink before she approached me. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. She was short (which I typically don’t go for) and had funky blond hair (which I always go for). She was dressed differently than most of the gals there. She was wearing exclusively skintight denim and not much of it. She was putting out one cigarette as she lit her next. She was moving, shaking, and picture taking. Everything she did looked attractive to me. It was as if she was approaching me for an hour as I watched her move closer. The real kicker? On top of everything, she was French. Jackpot. Maybe she was French-Canadian, but I stuck with believing she was a purebred Frenchy, because it was sexier in my head. Canucks are cool, but not for this story. Her accent was blowing me away.
As I was halfway through my first drink, she approached me from across the bar and introduced herself. I loved how forward she was. Her name was Lisa L’Poop. Yup. Lisa L’Poop. I swear to God that is what she said when she introduced herself. Hello, I am Lisa L’Poop. I’m sorry, did you say Lisa . . . L’Poop? She had a little French accent that somehow made L’Poop sound sexy. Not if you say it like I would say it. I would say it “LAH POOP.” She said it way cooler and quicker, like LEH-POO’b. I don’t know why, but for some reason typing it in a smaller italic font with a silent b made me think it reads more like she said it. Tricky French people. How do they do that? Yes, Lisa L’Poop. She asked, How do you do? No one else had ever asked me how do I do, because it wasn’t 1952, so I was of course taken aback by her. It didn’t take me long to fuck things up. The second I opened my mouth to say something, things went so
uth. I couldn’t have sounded like a fatter, duller American dude. I’M DAV . . . IDOff. That’s what I said. It was as if all of a sudden, halfway through saying the name I’ve had, oh, I don’t know, my entire life, I decided that Dave was the stupidest name in history and I needed something sexier to counter L’Poop. I also made this decision while I was halfway through saying “Dave,” so I had already committed to the first syllable. Lisa L’Poop didn’t miss a beat, though. Very nice to meet you, eh, Davidoff? Please do tell me about this tail? Holy shit. What? The tail! I forgot about the tail. In fact, while I was busy embarrassing myself, I had forgotten altogether how incredibly pent-up I was in the first place. Now it all came rushing back to me. I’m shitfaced in a bar wearing a coonskin tail, fighting off a libido that will not cool out, and I’m talking to a once-in-a-lifetime babe who somehow hasn’t walked away after the worst introduction in the history of the United States.
