Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (13 page)

Considering the circumstances, the sex was actually pretty great. After all of this anxiety, Team Player's drool face actually helped me get over my original fears/intimidations. It was like the Novocain from the condom knocked her down a peg in my fantasy draft, and I was able to relax, connect, and have some fun with this drooling-and-babbling bombshell. We were able to have a good laugh about it once the dust had settled. As an added bonus, with her help I was able to convince my roommates not to call the police.

Team Player didn't end up being my girlfriend. We didn't even really end up “dating,” exclusively speaking. What we did have was one of those classic college-fling-type situations. Yeah, my counter went back to zero days, but so what! From this disaster forward, Team Player and I had an incredibly honest, open “friendship” (college-style). Yes, we each humiliated ourselves at different points in our roller-coaster ride of a sexual encounter—but yes, we could relax around each other, because we'd seen each other at our worst.

(
Mike)

One time when Dave and I got Craigslist-famous for a week and people were actually paying attention to us, we got into some real weird shit. If you go viral, you're automatically playing with house money. Don't waste it. When the next viral craze breaks two days later, and you have to go back to being a normal person, you're going to regret not taking advantage of all the eyes on you. Me and Dave? We got downright silly. We went looking for trouble and found it. A lot of crazy shit started to happen all at once. How many times have you thought of a brilliant idea, only to later forget it because the brain cells previously allocated to remembering it had to be reassigned to keeping a bunch of Twisted Teas at bay? We found the best way to remember an idea to expand on is the “notes” folder in our iPhones—which you can share, by the way. Welcome to 2015, motherfuckers! It is
sick
! In fact, I'm writing this from our notes folder right now. I'm on the subway, I've got no service, I'm listening to John Mayer, and I'm deep in notes. Dave's at work right now, definitely moving an afternoon bowel, typing away in our “notes” on his phone. Good for him! That's actually where the Craigslist ad was born, in a stall over at Discovery Channel on the seventh floor. If he wasn't going to get fired before, that disclosure should be the nail in the coffin. Sorry, Dave. You were poop-grunting while being creative—that's multitasking. You're a real company man; they'd be foolish to let you go. Anyway, this past summer, Dave and I were hitting “notes” pretty hard.

Every time you opened up “Stangle Notes,” you read the last person's disgusting and disturbed thoughts, experiences, and ideas. We had a lot of them, too. It was a strange time. Stangle Notes became our drawing board, message board, and
Real World
–style drunk confession room. After you finish reading this chapter, think about finding someone to share a notes folder with. You two will learn so much about each other!

I was thumbing through Stangle Notes recently and came across a pretty strange, pretty disturbing entry. And that's saying something. This entry really struck a nerve. I honest to God hadn't remembered writing it. . . . I didn't even really remember the night it was
written,
until I checked the date of the entry and reread the post a few times.

After reading this entry, I tried six different times to figure out how to put it in context for you. But you know what? I give up! I shouldn't have to sit here and struggle to make Dave sound normal. He isn't; he's a freak who is really good at coming off as normal to most people most of the time. I emailed Dave a copy of what I reread in the notes and told him I was having trouble writing the piece and thought a thorough Q&A might jolt my memory. Then it occurred to me—did Dave even remember this? I dove in headfirst with the Q's, and couldn't believe how well he remembered the A's. What follows is our attempt to put together the pieces.

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 get 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.