Perfect Day

Remembering a weekend with friends in the late summer of 2012

Back in 2012, everyone I knew was broke. I was broke. All of my friends were broke. And all our parents were broke too. But, because we were all broke, none of us felt broke. Life was just normal and beautiful in that way.

But in the summer of that year, my friend Les shocked us all when he mentioned that his parents, a pair of blue collar New Yorkers from the Bronx, had bought a weekend house in Cape Cod. “It’s not fancy or near the beach,” he said. “But it has a pool. They said we could use it the week before Labor day.”

I had never been invited to a “summer home,” or even a “summer trip” for that matter. Most of my friends at this point were college friends who had moved to New York after graduation. While we all hung out often, we had never taken an overnight trip together. The plan was to leave Friday midafternoon, spend Saturday at the beach, and head back to the city Sunday morning. It felt glamorous to me. I knew that the city’s well-heeled crowd would often “summer” (verb) somewhere with their friends. Italy, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard. Was it finally my turn to do some summering? Something that didn’t involve sweating my tits off on a fire escape? I couldn’t recall being this excited for something in a long time.

The house was an old saltbox on the outskirts of the Cape. It was cluttered and musty, but it had big rooms with enough beds for all six of us. I was impressed by that.

Friday night we grilled seafood and vegetables in the backyard. When the sun set it got terribly cold. We spent the night outside in spite of it, huddled around one of those big cheap glass tables, eating chips and drinking shitty beer. Kate had brought a case of Lionshead. It tasted like college. We drank it all the time together back then. Not for the flavor, but for the picture riddles on the cap.

Elliott had a Grindr account that he used to have sex with random men. At some point in the night, we decided to make a profile for one of the dirty white plastic lawn chairs next to the table. We snapped a photo of it and gave it a name and personality. “Looking for long-term relaxationship,” the profile read. We laughed and laughed and agreed that it was probably the funniest thing anyone had ever done in the last 100 years or so. When the profile started getting messages, though, we found ourselves doubled over on the cold ground.

Most suitors ghosted after we refused to drop the charade (chairade??) after 20 minutes, but a couple were so down bad they were willing to continue to sext with a piece of plastic lawn furniture well into the night. Jim made a solid case in favor of lugging the chair to some public meeting point & watching the rendezvous from the safety of our idling car. What would happen? Would they ask it a question, just to make sure it wasn’t alive? Maybe they would sit in it while they waited and prayed for a real human to come. But even the thought of watching some lost soul approach a supposedly sentient lawn chair for sex wasn’t enough to motivate us to do anything but sit outside and giggle under the stars.

By midnight the profile had been reported, flagged, and removed.

“What’s there to do now?” I asked. Someone lit a joint and passed it around for an answer.

Eventually Les went inside and brought back an old, tattered version of the board game “Clue.” The edges of the game board were worn down; the paint on the wooden pieces faded and chipped. Mags, always the most sober, did her best to read us the instructions and set up the board correctly. But it’s actually a fairly complicated game, particularly if you’re drunk as hell and also very stupid. After 15 minutes of earnest effort, we began sliding the game pieces into various rooms and declaring that we had “done it” with at least one, and sometimes two or three, weapons. “It was me. Colonel Mustard. With the…rope gun …. Conservatory.” We were all guilty and the game was most definitely over, though quite frankly it had never really started.

No one bothered to put the game away. Someone refilled the chips and moved the bowl on top of the board.

“Let’s make prank calls,” said Kate. Kate always had fantastic ideas. Back in college when my car broke down, she lent me her own out of the kindness of her heart. Unfortunately, it had completely incompatible fake tires on it that exploded off the car as I was driving home from my terrible waitressing job in the middle of the night.

Les walked into the house and returned with a giant phone book. I never would have thought a phone book was necessary to make prank calls, but it added a layer of legitimacy and professionalism to the endeavor that we all appreciated.

He slammed down this brick of a tome on the glass tabletop. As if possessed, he immediately flipped to PAGE ONE and pointed his finger to the very first listing: a company called “A-Z Trees.” There’s something so poetic about prank calling the very first entry in an old school phone book. It’s like a celebrity mentalist who earns $50M a year asking someone to pick a number between one and ten billion, and that person having the brass balls to choose “ONE.”

Les hushed our murmurs, put the phone on speaker, and dialed. It rang. I felt like a child. We all waited with baited breath for a living, breathing human to pick up the phone at two o’clock in the morning like a bunch of morons. When the sterile voicemail finally played, we were deflated. It really hadn’t occurred to us that “A-Z Trees” wouldn’t have a night shift. But Les just shh’d us, and when the beep hit he left the following message in the most ridiculous old timey mid-Atlantic Daniel Day Lewis “There Will Be Blood” accent I’ve ever heard:

Hello?! Is this the business of “A to Z Trees?” Yes, I’d like to place an immediate order to purchase the following TREES:

• Two young BIRCH trees. Do you have any BIRCH trees in stock?

• Five…maple-laden SAPLINGS

• Three MATURE…uh...conifers, yes, conifers

THANK YOU. Please call me back immediately. I’m very important. I’m from NEW YORK CITY.

[10 second pause]

Have you heard of it?

Thank you,

Goodnight.

After he hung up we laughed until we cried. To this day, the thought of this random ass landscaping company in Orleans, MA (which we later realized does not SELL trees, but REMOVES them) getting this voicemail on a Monday morning kills me.

The only way we could properly honor this performance was to never attempt another. We called it a night and went to sleep.

Beginning in late morning we trickled back outside one by one, pallid and hungover. Jim made breakfast. I couldn’t stomach any of it. Later, he offered everyone some molly. I couldn’t stomach that either.

Mags, my roommate, begged me to split some with her. I felt bad. A few weeks ago I had gotten home from a bar at 4 a.m. on a weeknight, ordered a veggie burger delivery, and passed out moments after completing the transaction. She was awoken by a knock on our front door (the one that opens directly into our apartment) at 5 a.m. Thinking I had locked myself out yet again, she answered in her panties and was greeted by a very bashful delivery guy. She was pretty mad about that, so I guess I owed her. I didn’t want to put her out today. All things in moderation, right?

Jim broke open a capsule and, with a pharmacist’s precision, dumped half of the brown powder onto a small patch of single-ply toilet paper. He then reassembled the soft, gelatin capsule and handed that to Mags. For me, he crumpled the toilet paper into a makeshift pill to be ingested through an unpleasant method called “parachuting.” I took the ball and swallowed it down without water. It got caught in my throat and the acrid taste made me gag.

Wait, why did Mags so easily get the gelcap? Was I a disgusting little trashpig deserving only of the terrible garbage drugs? I tried to not read too much into it. Oink Oink.

The pool was filthy. It was enveloped by woods on all sides, which meant a constant influx of leaves, dirt, insects, and other debris on the surface and, later, the bottom. The topography ensured that the unheated pool received only 3 hours of direct sunlight a day, which kept the temperature below 60 degrees at all times. But it was built directly into the ground, not like the cheap ones I spent my childhood splashing in. No amount of filth or cold could keep me out of it. I wheeled out a dirty innertube from the garage, threw it in the pool, and plopped onto it. Mags handed me my sunglasses and a beer. I sincerely thought “this must be how celebrities feel.”

No one cared to join me no matter how much I lied about the water temperature. So, I floated around silently, eyes shut, listening to my friends like they were just voices on the radio.

Mags, a vegetarian, learned that Jim had fried all the pancakes in bacon grease after she ate her fill. Jim thought it was funny; Mags did not. Elliott made a batch of magazine-perfect frozen strawberry margaritas, but Kate thought they were too sweet, and then too sour. They bickered like rival scientists on how they could be fixed (more tequila). Les thought it’d be funny if we got a picture of someone holding the tray of margaritas while someone pretended to be drowned in the pool in the background. Something about the contrast of domesticity and death. He directed Jim and Elliott with the fastidiousness of a Wes Anderson groupie. I floated in and out of the frame, invisible. The shot came out great. When I look at it now, it makes me sad.

The midday sun was hot but the air never warmed up. When the clouds moved in early in the afternoon, I paddled around the pool chasing a ray. It felt so good on my face, my arms. I still remember that feeling.

At some point, a bee landed on my chest. When I was young, my mother taught me to stay still and calm in these circumstances. “It’ll fly away soon enough,” she had said. “Let it visit and it won’t sting you.”

I lay still for what seemed like an eternity as it crawled across my chest. At some point, though, it just stopped and rested there, testing me.

I couldn’t bear it. I slipped off the float into the icy water, my right hand clasping my half full-beer above the water’s surface like some white trash statue of liberty.

From underneath, I heard my friends clap and cheer. For me, for the beer.

We never made it to the beach that day, or any other. “Next summer,” we all agreed while packing up. But next summer came and went, and we never got together like this again.

I’m still close with Jim. Once a month we watch a movie together. There’s a shop near my apartment that burns professional-grade DVDs illegally. Any film you want for $10, done in 2 minutes tops. Cover art and everything. We go and flip through the catalog together. “Ants (1977)?” he asks. “Frogs (1972)?” I respond. I bought his wife a fancy babybjorn carrier thing for her baby shower last month. She’s cool with our friendship. Why wouldn’t she be? It’s just bad movies and trading occasional evidentiary emails on Jim’s passion: the fabled existence of “dogman” cryptids. I wonder if I’ll see him less after the baby comes. Might just be dogman emails for a while, I suppose.

But the rest of the crew: some I speak to occasionally, others I haven’t heard from in years. There was no great falling out, no blowout fights or nasty texts. There typically isn’t any of that. No, it was just that creeping, slow fade. You know the one. As evidenced by this piece, I think of my old college friends fondly from time to time. Who they were back when I knew them, at least. Lovely young people, unaware of their place in my perfect day.