Saturday on a lake in Kansas

DATE: Saturday, August 6
PLACE: A lake in the middle of nowhere, Kansas
POISON OF CHOICE: Bottles of Boulevard Wheat and Pale Ale, cans of Bud Select, locally produced dandelion wine
CAST OF CHARACTERS: me, Jason, Melinda, Claire, David and Henri Sewell



1. Retarded Denizens

"Here." Melinda tosses a dark blue foam cylinder in my direction. "Everyone gets a beer coozie."

I'm not much of a coozie guy - I call them "coolies," besides. I consider them an invention of complacency, even amongst the drinking set. When the day comes my beer gets warm before I can finish it or the cold from the bottle irritates the tips of my fingers, I'll no longer consider myself a professional drinker. Can coolies are for hoosiers, anyway.

But we're not on my home turf this weekend. We're at Melinda's parents' summer home, in a tiny lake community 45 minutes outside of Topeka, Kansas. Everyone gets a cooley - er, coozie - no matter their preference. I reach for mine. When in Rome...

"You should appreciate that one anyway," Melinda tells me. I look down at the acronym on the coozie - TARC.

Melinda explains that I'm drinking from a can/bottle holder officially sanctioned by the Topeka Area Retarded Citizens organization. Suddenly I feel special.

"How old is this?" Rhetorical question on my part. "You know they're not allowed to be called retarded anymore. They're like 'differently abled' or 'developmentally delayed' or something that would make for a way more awkward acronym on a can cooley."

"You haven't been able to call a retard a retard since they passed the Americans With Disabilities Act," my roommate Jason chimes in. "It's a Class C misdemeanor now."

"Well, equal rights hasn't hit the middle of Kansas yet. You can call 'em whatever the fuck you want out here." Melinda pops open the cooler. "Who's ready for a beer?"

"Ooh, me," I say, reaching for the coldest-looking bottle of Boulevard Pale Ale. Kansas City's finest. "Squeeze this thing into the cooley, and then I'm gettin' in the water."

"Yeah, someone needs to get in," calls out Melinda's friend Claire. She's just off our dock, flat on her back on a large yellow raft advertising the virtues of Miller Lite.

We all kind of mumble that we're coming, we're coming, and Jason points out that, at a certain angle, the TARC on my cooley looks as if it reads "TARD."

"Obviously these retarded people don't have any balls," Jason says. "They need to just chuck it all and call their group TARDS, get in the establishment's faces."

I rack my brains trying to think of an appropriate acronym. This shouldn't be that hard; I've only had one beer so far. We're almost on another topic by the time I come up with Topeka Area Retarded Denizens Society. TARDS - I'd be proud to drink beer from a cooley emblazoned with those letters.

"Melinda," Claire's voice wafts from the water. I can only see the top of her hair. "Did I tell you about the retarded denizen we treated last week?"

Melinda and Claire work together in a hospital back in St. Louis. Melinda's a doctor, finishing up her residency, and Claire is a nurse.

"Uh uh." Melinda shakes her head.

"Well, he came in, this guy probably late twenties, very talkative. And he complained that he hadn't taken a shit in a week, only he said the word 'doodie.' 'I haven't doodied since Thursday,' he told me."

Melinda asks if Claire performed some test I've never heard of. Claire says she did, that they found excessive buildup in the denizen's small intestine that was caused by him drinking several gallons of Coca-Cola and zero water per day.

"We removed over a liter of waste from his stomach and bowels," Claire says, "and he was unbelievably chipper through the entire thing. Almost made me wish I was retarded."

"Now, how do you dispose of a quart of human feces?" I ask. "Is that considered hazardous waste?"

"Medical waste, yeah. Pretty damn disgusting medical waste."

Officially, the four of us are here to drink, swim in the lake, drink, take out the pontoon boat, drink, sit around the campfire, drink, socialize, drink and, um, consume beer I didn't pay for.

Unofficially, I'm here as moral support for Jason's crucial, long-awaited and at least partially dreaded "May I have your daughter's hand in marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Sewell?" conversation. He wants to make an honest woman of Melinda, and he wants to go the traditional route, with full permission from the parents.

--
2. '80s Air Mattress

This is the third time I've partied with Claire the nurse. She's a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm constantly pressing her for hospital horror stories as my BAC rises.

This is the second time I've been on a road trip with Claire. Both times I've sat in the rear passenger bucket seat of her monstrous Chevy Tahoe. Both times the lineup has been me, Jason, Melinda and Claire.

Last fall the four of us went to a Mizzou football game in Columbia, Mo. Apparently, one of the backseat boys - Jason or me - also left some kind of Hardee's sausage gravy oil slick on the back carpet. We were both eating the fast food chain's uber-nasty biscuit and gravy bowl, hung over at like 9:30 in the morning. And I'd like to think the uncomfortable experience of letting that shit sit in my stomach and digest was punishment enough for the mystery gravy spill.

That first trip was an easy drive, less than an hour and a half, and over before it really seemed it had started. The Topeka trip was more than three times that length, and we left St. Louis at 3:30 a.m. Lots of delirious, sleep-deprived conversation going on in the car, and way too much country music in the background.

We got to the lake a little after nine, and after Melinda's mom gave us a hasty but somehow frighteningly thorough tour of the summer house, we all split off to get some sleep.

My sleeping assignment turned out to be a queen-sized inflatable air mattress on the concrete floor of the Sewell family's large, unfinished basement. Far more comfortable than I would have expected, although I could hear every movement and snatch of dialogue and background noise from upstairs.

While squeezing my eyes shut on the air mattress, I quickly learned the Sewells' favorite radio station was in the midst of an '80s-themed weekend, and it took me two commercial breaks and an onslaught of hits from Chicago, John Parr, Kajagoogoo, Dream Academy and True Blue-era Madonna to finally fall into a fitful slumber.

I had no watch, no alarm clock and no sundial down in the basement, and I kept rolling back over to sleep thinking it could be anywhere between noon and four in the afternoon. It was actually around two when I rolled onto the concrete, changed into my swimming trunks, smeared suntan lotion on myself and grabbed a Boulevard from the cooler on the dock.

Now I'm in the water and feeling both awake and relaxed. I'm floating on an old-school, ovular-shaped net with an inflated ring/rim. My lack of dexterity forced me to abandon the yellow Miller Lite throne-looking float I had my eye on. Both attempts I made to balance on that thing had me tossed into the murky green water.

The floating net allows for a lot more verticality, and it functions in multiple positions. We're just off the dock, all four of us, floating and drinking and talking about miscellany while Melinda's mom reads a book on the upstairs deck and pours herself glasses of ice tea from a home-brewed glass vat.

--
3. Road Trip Dialogue I: Slutty Monogamy

4:43 a.m. - Somewhere between Kingdom City and Rocheport, Mo.

CLAIRE: Is everyone comfortable? Too hot? Too cold?

JASON: There's one thing... can I take off my pants?

CLAIRE (laughs): No!

ME: Does that mean I have to put my pants back on?

CLAIRE: Everyone's pants stay on. Doctor's orders.

ME: You're only a nurse. You can't give doctor's orders.

CLAIRE: I own the car, motherfucker, I issue the dress code. Pants stay on.

JASON: God, you're more of a prude than my grandma.

CLAIRE (laughs): Everyone's comfortable, though?

ME AND JASON: Yeah, thanks, we're good, etc.

ME: I'm just curious, though... is this trip gonna be five hours of country music?

CLAIRE: At least three hours' worth.

MELINDA AND JASON: Country's good, it sells shitloads of records, there's a lot of good songwriting and vocals and music there, etc.

ME: Look, I know I'm outnumbered here, and I actually admit, since hanging out with all you assholes I've come to like some of it. But after a half hour, it all sounds the same. I can't tell my Keith Urban from my Kenny Chesney.

MELINDA: No, Kenny Chesney is one of a kind.

ME: He's the one who wears the cowboy hat, right?

MELINDA: He's gorgeous.

CLAIRE: He's like four foot three, but he's gorgeous.

JASON: You're kidding.

MELINDA: I'd do him.

JASON: He's got enormous ears.

MELINDA: It's not the ears I'm looking at.

JASON: He looks like Mickey Mouse.

MELINDA: A sexy Mickey Mouse.

JASON: Look, you can have Kenny Chesney if I can have Gwen Stefani.

MELINDA: If either one of us has the chance to sleep with a celebrity, I would assume all bets are off. I don't care if we're married - it's an open marriage at that point.

ME (scoffs): "Open marriage." I always thought that was the biggest oxymoron. Like "slutty monogamy."

--

4. The Clampetts / The Wave

In between beers five and eight, Melinda's mom - Betsy Sewell - gives me the lowdown on the lake residents. She's driving the Sewells' pontoon boat (it's unnamed, and she wasn't amused by my suggestion that it be called Cirrhosis of the River), I'm sitting next to her, and she's giving me the gossip tour.

She begins with her neighbors across the street, a clan she dubs "The Clampetts." Jed Clampett, the head of the household (ME: What's his real name? BETSY: Dickhead), regularly invites 16 to 25 unsophisticated hoosier relatives to spend the weekend partying with him.

That's up to two dozen people staying in a three bedroom, one bath lake house. To accomodate this weekly family reunion, The Clampetts actually have a Johnny On The Go porta-potty in the front yard. Betsy tells me this with no small measure of contempt in her voice.

Before we got in the pontoon boat, I noticed a big group of Clampetts - all age groups represented - in and around the water two docks over from us. The only crime I noticed was their failure to use the giant yellow inflatable Launch Pod trampoline/slide combo that was floating in the water with them. I don't care how old you are - those things are fun.

We're sailing at probably ten miles per hour around the Kansas lake, which Betsy told me is shaped like a tooth. The Sewell propery is located on the left root of the tooth, in an inlet. It's a brand new house, airlifted here by helicopter not two months ago. The backyard is still all mud, no grass, and the concrete steps leading from the house to the dock were poured earlier this week.

But the Sewells have had property out here for more than two years, and Betsy knows the entire community's business. As we float by individual docks and houses, she tells me what their owners do for a living, what their kids are like and what renovations they've made with their property.

Turns out the Kansas lake community has a big Keeping Up With The Joneses complex. Everyone keeps an eye on everyone else's docks, decks and houses - when one person renovates something, three or four others immediately try to copy it. One family just decorated their floating boat garage with a three-foot red/yellow/green stoplight, and already another family has a three-foot stoplight mounted on their boat garage.

For a smallish lake (we've been around the entire thing four times in an hour), there are a surprising amount of people in and on the water. There are two other pontoon boats, a handful of speedboats and four different kids out riding Waverunners and Sea-Dos.

And when anyone in a boat passes anyone else in a boat, they do The Wave. Lake community residents are obligated to wave at each other every time they meander or speed by, which means I've already waved at the same people three times.

Betsy can't stand The Wave - it's a bunch of real people doing the same comically fake thing over and over. It's worse, even, than the rehearsed beauty pageant wave Six Flags workers give you when you pass them in the Lil' General steam locomotive. It doesn't take me long to adopt a two-handed faux wave and, the more beers I drink, to comically taunt citizens who fail to return the mandatory non-verbal greeting.

--
5. Flooded Engine

I haven't been on an innertube being pulled by a boat in probably 15 years. But here I am, splayed on a big yellow tube, and Betsy's gunning the pontoon boat.

And I'm being pulled underwater. No one told me you're supposed to lean back at the moment of take off. This sucks - I've got green-brown water up my nose, and it takes almost ten seconds for me to get myself back to the surface.

Betsy kills the boat motor when Melinda or somebody tells her I've been submerged. I'm still on the tube, coughing up lakewater and generally feeling like a moron.

Betsy goes to start the boat back up. The engine sputters and refuses to turn over. She tries again - she chokes it this time. Fifteen more attempts, and it is determined that the boat engine must be flooded.

I'm back in the boat now, being made fun of, and now we're all keeping an eye out for someone who can tow us back to our dock. "I pray to God I don't have to get help from one of the Clampetts," Betsy says.

Help soon arrives in the form of the next-door neighbor, Garvey. He's all alone on a pontoon bigger than ours, and it doesn't take long for us to tie up with his boat and get yanked back to the Sewell dock at four miles an hour.

Garvey is a big-league distributor for the Miller brewery. He was supposed to provide us with several cases of Miller Lite and Boulevard, but "forgot," perhaps due to the effects of the very product he peddles. Nonetheless, we're grateful for his help in getting the boat back home.

As we float up to the dock at an anemic pace, we're greeted by a graying, mustachioed good ol' boy. It's David Sewell, Melinda's dad. David has been at work all day and, after gently chewing out his wife for flooding the boat engine, insists that we restock the cooler. It's Miller Time for David, and he's got a lot of catching up to do.

--
6. Road Trip Dialogue II: Cooter-Flavored Blunt

6:13 a.m. - Somewhere between Boonville and Blue Springs

CLAIRE: I don't understand why there are all these porn shops in the middle of nowhere. That was the fifth one in the last hour.

MELINDA: Did you see the strip club like twenty minutes back? The building looked like a barn. I can only imagine what the strippers look like in there.

ME: I like the sex shop billboards that keep popping up. I just saw one advertising lingerie up to size 6X.

CLAIRE: That's a fucking nightmare.

JASON: It's little things like that, though, that spice up the marriage. Every man wants to have a wife who's thoughtful enough to wear some slinky red negligee with about an acre of fabric.

MELINDA: But this is Bible belt country here. Why's there a porn shop every three miles?

ME: It's for the truckers. They sit up there in those cabs all day with nothing to do, they're away from home three weeks at a time. They need their sex shops. Like her, for example.

[In the next lane, an incredibly butch-looking middle-aged woman is driving a big rig and chomping on an enormous cigar.]

ME: Now there's a lady who could appreciate a good pre-owned copy of Where the Boys Aren't Part 17.

MELINDA: That cigar's not even lit, she's just chewing on it.

ME (impersonating lesbian trucker): Mmm, you know, a cooter-flavored blunt tastes even better than a blueberry one.

CLAIRE: Never say the word "cooter." Just don't.

JASON: Did you guys ever read the Starr Report?

CLAIRE: Fuck no. Ken Starr's an undersexed jackoff.

JASON: Well, I read the whole thing, and you know what the funniest part was?

ME: Monica and Vernon Jordan in that interracial 69?

JASON: Nah, dude, it was a little scene set in the Oval Office, with Monica Lewinsky going through Clinton's humidor, finding the fattest, longest Cuban cigar in his collection and shoving it in her twat.

CLAIRE: Did the Starr Report actually use the word "twat"?

ME: They went with "beaver," I think.

JASON: So Monica's working the cigar in and out of her puss for awhile, and Bill eventually pulls it out, puts it in his mouth and says, "That tastes gooood."

MELINDA: God, you're gross. Can we talk about the weather or something?

ME: I had a roommate at the time who worked in a computer lab and printed out the entire Starr report during his shift. Something like 450 pages, all popping out of the printer while some poor freshman was waiting to print out a pensee for his humanities class.

MELINDA: Pensee? What's a pensee?

ME: Like a vignette, a short essay. I only had one professor in college ever use the word, and it always pissed me off that she didn't just say "write a short essay." It was all about the fucking pensee.

CLAIRE: You're still harboring a little bitterness here, it sounds like.

ME: Nine years and I'm still not over it.

--
7. Sunset

David Sewell gets the boat running within five minutes. Jason and I carry the fully stocked and iced cooler down to the dock, and we're back on the water. David turns on the boat radio, which is tuned to the same '80s station, and we take turns tubing.

This time I stay above the water level, and for what seems like a half an hour, I ride the tube with a big grin on my face. The pontoon boat is going maybe 15 miles an hour, tops, but David is a veteran captain - he manages to turn and pivot the boat enough to get me bouncing over baby waves, and he always hits the wake from other boats at just the right angle.

It's probably 85 degrees or so, sunny as hell, I'm half-drunk, occasionally gliding my feet over the water's surface and spraying myself in the face as a result. This is truly the life.

As the afternoon becomes evening, we graduate from the innertube to the water weenie. This is an inflatable raft that somewhat resembles a space shuttle - one big tubular shaft atop two smaller ones.

Everyone takes a turn on the weenie, and David seems mightily determined to make everyone fall off and into the water. David and Betsy are particularly interested in dropping their daughter's boyfriend into the drink. They succeed in under two minutes.

Me, I don't even make it to my portion of the ride. My 265-pound ass can't get positioned right on the water weenie. I try several different approaches before admitting defeat and an utter lack of dexterity and instead accepting another ride on the yellow tube.

As I dry off and the sun sinks from the sky, David points out a massive house that's set back from the others and actually built into a hill. The house is on top of a cave, which the owner uses as a wine cellar. Several hundred bottles, David says.

"He was just some poor nobody with a farm until he figured out that, if you have grass, you can have cows, and if you sell those cows, you can buy more cows." David takes a sip from his can of Bud Select. "Now he owns the entire thing - he sold every one of us our property."

David is no stranger to money himself. At one time he owned fifteen Napa Auto Parts stores - decided to retire, sold all fifteen, got bored sitting around the house, opened up a pawn shop and became a licensed jeweler. He's in the middle of his second successful career.

While I'm talking to David about his work and his new house, Jason and Claire are at the front of the boat (the aft end, I guess?), whispering and giggling. I hear Melinda yell, "No secrets! No secrets!"

Jason's telling Claire his plan to propose to Melinda. She knows it's coming, he knows she's going to say yes, but she has no idea where and when the proposal will come. She just doesn't want him to do it at the piano bar where he works, in front of a busy crowd on a Saturday night.

I turn back to David and Betsy, who ask me about my career plans. Tongue loosened by a twelve pack, I have no problem telling this pair of responsible, mid-fifties Republicans that I've enjoyed almost every second of being a waiter (BETSY: You need a degree to wait tables?) and partying away the last five years of my life. They don't seem to approve, but they don't condescend to me either. David is an everyday drinker himself.

We're parked at the top of the tooth, which overlooks a 180-degree retaining wall with a main road atop it. The sun is setting directly over the lake, and it's the most beautiful reddish-pink sight I've laid witness to in weeks.

Melinda gets her mom's camera - both are photography enthusiasts - and lines up the perfect picture. As she pushes the "take picture" button, the roll of film starts rewinding. We all hear it, and we all groan and laugh.

--
8. Road Trip Conversation III: Gory Nurse Stories

7:47 a.m. - Kansas City, Kansas

CLAIRE: That five-death accident last week - our hospital got all the other victims, the ones who didn't die.

ME: Yeah, that was a 17-car pileup or something, wasn't it?

CLAIRE: A lot of people and a lot of injuries. Broken bones, ruptured spleens, major head trauma, the whole works.

ME: See, I couldn't do your job. I'm morbidly curious about blood and guts, but I just don't have the stomach for it.

CLAIRE: We had a 14-month baby come in last week with third-degree burns all over her body. Her mom had dropped her into a boiling pot of water on the stove.

MELINDA: Yeah, we see it all. There's a lot of crazy, demented parents.

ME: People like that shouldn't reproduce.

CLAIRE: Speaking of, I had a patient, a guy about 25 or so years old, who had just gotten circumcised the month before. His doctor told him no sex, no masturbation, nothing for six weeks.

JASON: That's a long six weeks.

CLAIRE: He made it about three before he decided it was okay to fuck his girlfriend again. And the guy managed to rip open every last one of his circumcision stitches. It was a good inch-and-a-half rip. I took a look at his penis - you could see the muscles.

ME: Gross. Penis muscles.

CLAIRE: Another time there was a drunk driver, I mean really drunk, who was riding a motorcycle and crashed into a wall. The whole bike exploded, and he survived.

JASON: That's 'cause he had his helmet on.

CLAIRE: I get a look at this guy, severe burns covering 90 percent of his body and a stump for a leg.

ME: I wonder if there's an alcoholic amputee biker club. That'd be kind of a fun meeting to go to.

CLAIRE: And I say to the attending physician, "Wait, this guy was missing a leg and he got on the bike? What a fucking idiot." The doc said, "No, his leg's over there on the floor," points over to a three-foot-long, lumpy mass under a towel.

JASON: Shit.

CLAIRE: So me, being the gory one, I go lift the towel and look at the severed leg. His femur was shattered at the shaft - he ending up coding six hours later.

ME: Coding?

CLAIRE, MELINDA AND JASON: You don't know what coding is?

--
9. Hand in Marriage

It's probably nine at night or so when Jason tells me and Claire to wish him luck, he's going in. Fifteen or so beers into his day, Jason is going to initiate the May I Have Your Daughter's Hand In Marriage, Mr. And Mrs. Sewell? talk. They're upstairs preparing dinner, and Jason ambles up the newly installed wooden staircase to join them.

Claire and I, meanwhile, are lounging on two of those bright yellow Miller Lite throne-shaped promo floaties that are not actually in the water. We're both just kind of splayed out on the Sewells' dock, making small talk. Melinda returns from the bathroom, regreets us, and immediately pivots to head upstairs upon learning her boyfriend has picked this particular moment to have The Conversation.

"He's forgetting about my mother's biggest pet peeve," Melinda tells us before she spins to return to the lake house.

"What, don't talk to her while she's making dinner?" I ask.

"No. Alcoholism. She hates drunks."

"She's done a pretty good job of dealing with us all day," says Claire. She kind of mumbles it, actually.

"She's playing the role of hostess." Melinda tosses off that remark over her shoulder while heading up the concrete walk. Then she adds, maybe to us, maybe just to herself, "He'd better not fuck this up."

We can see the silhouetted proceedings through the row of bay windows overlooking the kitchen and dining area. Body language-wise, it looks like Jason's trying pretty hard to act nonchalant about the whole thing. I don't blame him - this has to be a rough assignment, whether you're under the influence of a baker's dozen bottles and cans of prepackaged liquid courage or not.

Claire and I spend the next twenty minutes or so in a severe low-energy state of mind. We haven't eaten since we stopped at a convenience store somewhere between Columbia and Kansas City, at like six in the morning. When I learned once and for all to never, ever pick the plastic-wrapped turkey sandwich from Landshire Farms.

Now we're just plain starving, and neither of us has cracked a beer in at least a half-hour. David has promised us a hearty meal of home-caught catfish, baked potatoes and vegetables, all cooked on his brand new, monster-sized gas grill.

Melinda reports back midway through the conversation - all's going well inside. David has already claimed to have been "tickled" by the day's events, and he's offered Jason an at least half-hearted "welcome to the family."

Betsy, meanwhile, is going with the familiar-but-safe stance of, "If Melinda's happy, I'm happy." Followed by the semi-disturbing reverse caveat, "If Melinda's ever not happy, though, we have a fucking problem."

David - entrepreneurial pawn shop owner and licensed jeweler that he is - has presented Jason with a triple-deep stack of phone-book-sized catalogues of wedding rings. Tens of thousands of options and a guaranteed discount and, Melinda tells us with a quick laugh, the ring she wants isn't in any of those catalogues.

--
10. Road Trip Conversation IV: Topeka Proper

8:25 a.m. - Topeka, Kansas

MELINDA: That's the original Wendy's. We've got two Wendy's now.

ME: Dude, this one's got all-you-can-eat chili with a beverage for a dollar ninety-nine. I need to move here.

JASON: How much chili would you really want to eat?

ME: I don't know, like six or seven of those little yellow bowls with the self-ventilating lids' worth.

JASON: You would be farting for days.

CLAIRE: I'd probably end up having to treat you for gastrointestinal distress.

ME: That, and I also have an inch-and-a-half rip in my penis. Perhaps I should make an appointment.

MELINDA: And now we're in Topeka proper. Those buildings on your left, that's where I went to high school.

JASON: You know, honey, I appreciate you giving us the tour of your hometown and the Wendy's you used to eat chili at and all that, but I just want to go to sleep. I've been up for like an entire calendar day at this point.

MELINDA (ignoring him, continuing): There are two junior highs in Topeka and only one high school, so there's this big class struggle over which junior high you went to.

ME: What, one of the junior highs is on the wrong side of the tracks?

MELINDA: Yeah, there's the rich junior high and the poor junior high.

CLAIRE (pointing at sign): Are you serious? Your football team is called the Topeka Tarantulas?

JASON: That's kinda gay, baby.

ME: Is there a mascot? Like, does a guy dress up as a tarantula and crawl around at the games?

MELINDA: Nah, there's just some male cheerleader holding a megaphone and wearing purple. Over here, this street corner, I got into it with that preacher you always see protesting gay rights on TV.

ME: That's right, you told me that. The God Hates Fags guy is from Topeka.

MELINDA: He was protesting our school musical because there were male students singing and dancing in it, and he said only gay males sing and dance.

ME: I'm still kinda pissed off that he snatched up the godhatesfags.com Internet domain name before I could do something funny with it. Same with pissinggrannies.com. The good website addresses are all taken.

CLAIRE: Hey, look at that gas station sign - "Buy five gallons of gas, get $200 off a car wash." No decimal point to be found.

JASON: Christ, what's regular price if you have to entice people with a $200 car wash?

MELINDA: And these are all city office buildings. That's the main industry out here now - half the people seem to work for the government.

JASON: You know what government job I want?

MELINDA: What's that?

JASON: I wanna be the guy who drives the mammogram van.

--
11. Wine Cruise

Bellies full, we're back on the pontoon boat for what David and Betsy call the weekly Wine Cruise. The couple told us over dinner that, every Saturday night during the good-weather season, lake residents bring coolers of beer and wine onto the water and socialize at the top of the tooth.

Tonight, though, we're practically the only boat on the water. The Sewells claim the Wine Cruise usually peaks between nine and ten at night, and it's damn near 10:45 right now. On my body clock, this is like lunch time, but the average joes of the world are winding down their days.

My energy is fast-fading, too - you try being perky after drinking all day, stopping for a couple hours to pound waters and eat dinner and then starting the consumption back up with glasses of wine. Which, of all the spirits, leads to the most physical exhaustion.

All while you're sitting under the stars (more stars than you've seen in several years, in fact) and letting a softly purring boat motor lull you into a stupor. Our surroundings are chock full of peace and quiet, and not even the syncopated sounds of the radio station's '80s weekend can bring me back to life.

One promising sign, though - Betsy has finally put down the omnipresent mug of iced tea and is drinking wine with us. She downed her first glass in ten minutes, held out the empty and announced, "Wine me." I had no problem reaching into the cooler and pouring Betsy a refill.

We putt past a dock containing a dozen or so college-aged guys, sitting on a dock in swim suits, steadily putting back beer after beer. Claire and Melinda were ogling them earlier today, when half of them were out on a speed boat together.

Now one of them yells out to Claire, "Show me your tits!" Claire shoots back, "Show me your dick!" and the dock erupts in laughter. For frat guys, they seem kind of subdued - maybe the length of the drinking day has taken the same toll on them it has on us - but one of them stands up, yanks his pants down to his knees and dives headfirst into the lake. David kind of shakes his head, while Betsy remarks, "I thought they made 'em bigger than that these days."

I'm at the front of the boat with Claire, each of us leaning back in a pole-anchored chair. Jason and Melinda are lying together on the padded bench that runs the length of the boat, with Jason actually sinking further and further off the end of the bench as the Wine Cruise continues. He ends up fully on the floor with time.

Claire and the Sewell parents talk about Claire's new guy - they've been dating a couple months, aren't really serious, but so far he seems to fit all her criteria.

"He's white and Catholic," she tells them.

"Sounds like a keeper," David kind of drawls out.

We end up back on dry land by about 11:30 or so, and we spend the next hour in the Sewell's muddy backyard, sitting around a campfire and attempting to make S'mores. It takes David and Jason a good long while to even get the fire lit - eventually, David squirts a pint of motor oil into the stacks of wood and newspaper, and the flame takes hold.

Once the fire is lit, the Sewells retire for the night. David has to be up at five to set up his trio of fishing poles. His method of fishing is kind of an autopilot one, he told me earlier - he puts out the poles, goes back to bed for a couple hours and then returns to see if they hooked any fish in his absence.

I lounge in a chair, barely awake, while Claire and Jason roast marshmallows on long metal skewers. I watch two of their marshmallows ooze off the end of the skewers and plop back into the fire and one more marshmallow fall off the skewer after it's already been withdrawn from the fire. That's the marshmallow I'll accidentally step in on my way to bed and track its sticky goo all through the Sewells' unfinished basement.

Me, I end up eating a raw S'more. Something about the notion of marshmallows roasted over a Pennzoil-fueled fire rings somewhat unappealing to me.

A couple members of the Clampett clan amble by to talk to Melinda ("You're the doctor, right?"), and I get bored and take a walk up the gravel street.

When I get back, everyone's ready to pass out. I end up returning to the air mattress in the unfinished basement, and I fall asleep listening to random music picks on Jason's iPod. I wake back up at 4:30, I mean wide fucking awake, pull the string on the naked, dangling light bulb hanging from the ceiling, and end up writing and listening to more music until like eight. Body clock all out of whack, as always.