Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (22 page)

Lake Placid has a lake in the middle of town. Weirdly, it's not Lake Placid but a smaller lake called Mirror Lake. On one side of Mirror Lake was Lance Bass's party, at which I was no longer welcome. On the other side are all the fun bars, my only consolation. Unless you have a boat, having a lake between you and your destination is a real pain in the dick. That's what I kept thinking as I was walking the perimeter of the lake in my suit, drunk and alone. When I was about halfway around it, I got a call from Quack. Shortly after I had been chased out of the party, Quack had his turn, too. Have I mentioned Quack is a really fast runner for being so short and stubby? He can really scurry. It's saved his skin several times, and this was no exception.

When Angry Uncle was done with me, he came back in for Quack. Only, Quack put up a fight before he was chased out. He poked the bear just enough to give chase. From what Quack described, it sounded like the end of a
Benny Hill
episode with Angry Uncle chasing him all over town. Quack was calling me from some bushes and was desperate for a rescue. He said he could see Angry Uncle pacing in the streets in front of the party, yelling about the things he was going to do to us when he caught us. Meeting me on the road was a no-go. I told Quack to head down to the water, find a dock, and I'd take care of the rest. It was after midnight on a sleepy evening in Lake Placid. Logic suggested someone had to have a boat I could borrow to go rescue my friend. What's cooler than getting rescued by boat? Nothing. Maybe by helicopter, but I've been drinking. It's not safe, you guys.

It's shocking how easy it is to steal a boat on Mirror Lake. There are tons of them all just floating there, ripe for the picking. One dock had two boats. The first was a speedboat, but I was confident it would wake up the nice folks I was borrowing it from. The second was a fifteen-foot pontoon boat with a stationary bike in the middle of it. It looked homemade. I hopped on to get a closer look. It turns out the stationary bike was hooked up to paddles underneath the pontoons. I'd like to imagine myself as more of a steal-the-speedboat kind of guy, but when I weighed grand larceny versus getting in a solid cardio burn, I'm happy to say I made the right choice. I had three dog beers to work off, after all.

This boat could move! It was a fucking blast. It was like I was taking a Spin class, but instead of being the fattest guy in the room, I was the
only
guy in the room, and the room was made of water. I called Quack again to tell him I stole a boat to rescue him with, and he should walk to the end of the dock. He had no follow-up questions. He simply whispered that I needed to
make haste.
I made haste, all right; I was fucking flying across that lake. I had discovered that the pedals had these Velcro foot straps that would prevent any slippage, real heavy-duty. By the time I got across the lake to Quack, I was an absolute pro with this boat. I almost wish there had been more boat traffic, so I could have demonstrated a textbook parallel park. I would have nailed it.

Quack had found the longest dock in the history of docks to wait on. It came out about seventy-five feet into the water. I figured he chose that dock because it gave him the most cover in the darkness of night. That cover was immediately blown as I pulled up to the end of the dock and Quack screamed, “Permission to come aboard?!” It didn't matter if Angry Uncle heard us from the shore, though, because this ship was leaving harbor! Quack was even emboldened to shout back to the shore about how
handsome
Angry Uncle's wife had been.

As I pedaled away from the dock, I noticed how much harder it was with Quack on board. This vessel was clearly only built for one person. As I pedaled harder and harder, I knew something was off. We were going in circles, and I couldn't figure out why. I stopped and let the paddles underneath the pontoons come to rest. After trying to hear if something was broken, I noticed a fanning sound.
You hear that, Quack?
He wasn't paying attention. He had somehow gotten Angry Uncle's wife's phone number while dancing with her and was texting her about running away together. I did another pedal rotation, and the sound picked up. It was the right-side paddle. It had left the water and was up in the air. That was my first indication that the boat was beginning to tilt. My second indication was when the boat quickly started tilting. First, I felt it in my body, then I noticed it more as the right pontoon came completely out of the water. For some reason, Quack was still standing on the very corner of the boat, where he had hopped on. He was lost in his phone with a really fucked-up grin on his face.
Quack, move to the center of the boat
. No response.
Quack, this thing is tipping
. Still no response. Have I mentioned Quack is borderline illiterate? He gave up on reading and writing well before texting came along. As a result, he is forced to concentrate very, very hard while texting with a babe. Now we were really starting to tip. “QUACK!” I shouted. He looked up. “Hey, what's up Dave?” He said this as if he had just bumped into me for the first time that day. We tilted a little more and a little more and in an instant, BOOM. The entire boat snapped completely upside down all at once. What kind of boat does that? A homemade one. Turns out guys who make their own boats don't run simulations on what would happen if they had a little meatball friend jump onto one corner. Quack was thrown into the water. I wasn't so lucky. Those Velcro straps I mentioned? They kept me right where I was as the boat flipped over on me. All of a sudden, Angry Uncle became the threat I was least worried about. I was strapped into a homemade boat that was capsized on top of me. Just as I thought the last of the boat owner's design flaws had showed its ugly head, I had to deal with one more.

I'm not exactly sure how this next part happened, so I can only assume that the guy who built the boat is either the biggest retard in the world
or
he built this feature in as an antitheft device for this very situation. Once the boat was upside down, the pontoons immediately filled with water and the boat sank on top of me. Mike and I grew up floating around on
The Entertainer
, a pontoon boat. We're freshwater guys! We get the physical laws of a pontoon. What. The. Hell?

By the time I got my feet unstrapped from the pedals, it was too late. I had a water-filled pontoon boat pinning me to the bottom of a lake. It was freak-out time for Dave. I tried lifting one side, then lifting the other. Way too heavy. I tried to summon that superhuman strength mothers get when they lift cars off babies. I'm not sure why that is such a universal example, as if cars are constantly pinning infants to the ground in a race against the clock, and the only option is for a mom to do a power clean before the car crushes the baby more than it already has? Apparently this happens a lot? Those moms, they find that strength from the love in their hearts. My heart was filled with scorn and cholesterol. Soon it would also be filled with lake water. That boat wasn't moving, and I was starting to run out of air. My life completely flashed before my eyes. I thought I was going to drown on the bottom of Mirror Lake, in a full suit and tie, because I stole a boat to rescue my asshole friend who is shaped like the Kool-Aid guy. I imagined the scuba divers laughing as they found my body. I imagined the cops having no idea where to begin when they explained it to my parents.
Well, he was apparently doing some sort of black-tie-only exercising in the middle of the night. . . .
I imagined the Darwin Awards being renamed the Dave Stangle Awards and every embarrassing death from then on being compared to me, the ultimate retard. I imagined what my tombstone would say.

DAVE STANGLE: 1984–2011

Complete Idiot. Dumber than Sticky, the “Retarded Cat” (vet's phrase, not ours)

As I was ready to let it all go and succumb to the cold waters, I decided to give it one more heave. This time I planted my feet firmly on the sandy bottom of the lake, did my best chair pose (yoga pays off, you guys) with the pontoons on my shoulders, and pushed with all of my might. Nope. Nothing. Shit. Okay, time to die. Something
did
happen at the last second, though. One of the pontoons, being homemade and all, snapped under the combination of the water pressure pushing it down and me pushing it up. An enormous air bubble let out, as if Earth farted, and one side of the boat let up. FUCK. YES. I pushed off the bottom of the lake and rose like goddamn Godzilla. I ran out of air about five feet from the surface, inhaled about a gallon before I broke the plane, and coughed and choked my way over to the dock about fifteen feet away. I put my elbows up on the dock and choked up the last of the lake water I'd taken in. I was part choking, part coughing, part puking, and I
think
I might have even pooped a little bit? I'll admit that here.

When I finally got my bearings, my first thought was my dear old friend Quack. I looked around and there was no sign of him out in the water. What happened to him? Did he survive? Is he okay? Do I have to swim back down and pull his fat little body out from under the boat? God damn you, Quack, GOD DAMN YOU! I WON'T LET YOU DIE! NOT TONIGH—wait. Wait a second. What is that little blob sitting in the lifeguard chair onshore? Is that Quack? If it isn't, then it's the Penguin from
Batman
. Either way, I pulled myself up on the dock and ran in toward shore to see. There at the end of the dock in a soaking-wet suit was Quack looking down at his iPhone and tapping it, then holding it up to his ear, it as if that were how you fix water damage to electronics. His first questions to me confirmed that Quack is a complete fucking lunatic:
What were you doing down there? No luck finding your phone? Mine's busted, too. Water's nice, though, right?

(Mike)

When Dave turned twenty-one, my family celebrated with a trip to Las Vegas. Our oldest brother, Sean, had moved out there a few years earlier, so it made perfect sense. At the time, I was only seventeen years old. Up until that point, getting away with drinking hadn't really been that much of a problem. I was seventeen, sure, but I was freakishly tall, with two older brothers who looked just like me. I was able to get away with more underage partying than most.

But not in Vegas. I didn't even come close. It's not even an option there. There is just way too much money, security, and beautiful hookers out there to even begin to fuck around with fake IDs. They have a hard enough time controlling the of-age folks; they have no time for underagers like me and Nick Papageorgio. The trip seemed like a wild time for everyone else, but it was downright boring for me. I spent a week (who goes to Vegas for a
week
anyway!?) riding a fucking roller coaster outside of our hotel, New York–New York, because that was pretty much the only thing I was allowed to do. On top of that, our hotel room faced the loudest part of the roller coaster. Fuck that roller coaster. Do you know how much I hate roller coasters in general? I genuinely hate them. Try folding my entire lanky body into a tiny metal box seat. Make sure my hips are pinned between either side real tight, because I have large (some would even say childbearing) hips. Then when my knees are jammed right against the metal box in front of me, violently jerk me around a track until you're absolutely
sure
my week is ruined. Awesome.

When I wasn't actively hating that roller coaster in New York–New York, I kept busy watching Dave, Denny, Sean, and the gang tear it up night after night. Meanwhile, I was limited to acting like Spaulding in
Caddyshack,
finishing everyone's wine. I didn't even
ask
Dave or Sean what went on at night after I went to bed; I was just too incredibly jealous. One of the days they were trying to “take it easy,” Dave suggested we go for a walk down the Strip to scope some babes. He bought us both Long Island iced teas (when was the last time you had one of
them
!?). They were thirty dollars each. I drank one thirty-dollar cocktail that came in a whalebone (a.k.a. party yard). That was the extent of my partying in Las Vegas. I took all of that jealous rage and did what every normal healthy teenager should do with their emotions: bury them deep down inside so they could burst out at the seams years later.

Oh, hello, years later. Before my twenty-first birthday even arrived, I made sure I was going to Vegas. I was born in late October, and I was already planning it in August—the year before. It was like my ego and my liver were teaming up to take revenge on that town for how much I'd been stiffed four years prior. They were like Martin Lawrence and Luke Wilson in
Blue Streak,
hilariously scheming up a cockamamie plan that was just headed for trouble. Las Vegas is the perfect way to bring in adulthood, because it is filled with adults acting like children. I was so pent-up, I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to go 4-D. This trip was just the boyz—Dave, myself, and Sean. Also, my birthday is basically right before Halloween. Having your birthday near a holiday is great, because your birthday will always be celebrated even when no one likes you. Our oldest brother, Sean? He was born on Christmas Day. His birthday is on Christmas every year, and every year he gets double gifts, double booze, and everyone is always partying. If he was born in the middle of August, no one would even know he was born.