Lake Day

**Chronologically, this story should be directly before the 'Breakfast Burrito' story**

It is one thing to have the token dumb friend in a group. It is another thing entirely to have a group of friends who become progressively dumber the more alcohol you feed them. In my case, we are the latter. My friends are the type that once you get a few beers in them, they will agree to anything.
One weekend over the summer, we had a few friends with the day off of work and nothing to do. We all decided we’d meet at a buddy’s lake house and take out the boat and jet-skis for the day. Most of us had woken up at Blake’s after partying the night before and most of us had also started drinking at Blake’s early in the afternoon. Actually, by the time we reached the lake, everyone in Blake’s car was plastered with the exception of Blake himself, who was driving. He quickly remedied that by popping his first beer the second his truck was parked in the driveway of the lake house. It was late Saturday afternoon by the time the rest of our friends arrived so we decided to load up a cooler and head out to the dock to start partying as soon as we could. After a few hours of drinking games, and swimming, and teasing the girls, and a few drunken laps on the jet-skis, we were all feeling like gold and the beer was beginning to run low. Brandon had just arrived back on the last jet-ski and wanted another beer, but the last of the cans had just been given away to everyone sitting on the dock. Blake, always quick to fuck with a friend, came up with a great plan to make Brandon EARN his last beer of the afternoon.
“Hey Brandon, you see that tree over there?” Blake yelled at him. Blake was pointing at a tree that had fallen into the water and was about half exposed above the water line.
“Yeah, it looks like its dead,” Brandon yells back.
“Would you climb on it for this last beer?”
“I’d give a baby elephant a hand job for that beer.” Blake and I looked at each other. That was a pretty weird thing to say, even from Brandon, even if he was drunk. Blake shrugged and turned back to Brandon.
“Well, sir, you don’t get to touch an elephant cock, but hop up there and run across it and I’ll give you this beer.” Blake looked at me. He had one of the most scheming, evil looks on his face.
During the conversation, Brandon had tied up the jet-ski and was standing on the end of the dock, about to walk over to where we were sitting. Upon hearing his dare, he spun on his heel, tied his swim trunks tighter, and took a two step dive over the parked jet-ski and into the water. He flailed his way over to the tree, and I got my first pang of conscience. Brandon looked like a toddler trying to swim with another toddler on his back. He wasn’t a strong swimmer with as much alcohol as he had in him and I actually feared for a few seconds that he might drown. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when he finally made it to the tree, and after a few tries, managed to haul his ass up onto the top, straddling it like he was riding a horse. He shakily stood up and started to tip-toe down the trunk, which wasn’t to Blake’s liking at all.
“Oh hell no…” Blake muttered before yelling,

“I SAID RUN LIKE A FUCKING LUMBERJACK YOU SHITBAG!”

Brandon looked over to where Blake was waving the beer in his hand, broke into a full sprint and made it just past the halfway mark when his front foot slipped out from under him. He must have stepped on a slick spot of the trunk because one second he was running and the next he was suspended in air with a terrified look on his face. He fell onto the trunk of the tree on his stomach with his body laying perpendicular across it. He slid for probably about ten feet through the branches sticking out of the trunk and the ones tangled over the water before rolling off. He fell into the water with a splash and came up gasping for breath. I’ve never seen so many people on the ground laughing at the same time. All of us on the dock were in tears, rolling on the wood planks with side-splitting laughter. Brandon slipping and eating shit on that tree trunk was the funniest thing any of us had ever seen, or at least it seemed so at the time. Blake finally forced himself to stop laughing or risk pissing his pants and he looked over at Brandon, who was bobbing in the water still trying to catch his breath. He started to paddle back over to the dock and received applause and cheers when he finally pulled himself onto the dock. His entire stomach and chest were covered in scrapes and cuts from the tree branches, and bruises were already forming on the side that had hit the tree first. He looked at Blake and asked for his beer. Without missing a beat, Blake pulled it out of the cooler, held it up to Brandon, and then hurled it fifty yards out into the lake.
“Go get it,” Blake told him, starting to laugh all over again. Brandon turned, muttering plenty of colorful language under his breath, grabbed a minnow net from the boat, hopped on the jet-ski, and buzzed his way over to the beer. It was still bobbing in the waves when he got to it, and he used the net to scoop it out of the water. He got back to the dock, tied up the jet-ski, cracked open his beer, and headed back up to the house to get cleaned up. The rest of us, still fighting back laughter, packed up the cooler and followed a few minutes behind him to get ready for the party planned for that night at the lake house.
We walked back up to the house and Blake ran out to grab something out of his trunk. He came back with a jug of brownish liquid that looked like it had dirt floating in the bottom of it. I would later learn this dirt was called “the good stuff” and the jug contained a gallon of his grandfather’s recipe of “homemade rum”. It was rumored to be around 170 proof, or 85% alcohol. I will tell you this stuff tastes so sweet, like sugar water, but as soon as you swallow, it turns into molten fucking lava running down your throat. I thought if I tried to smoke a cigarette, that I would breathe fire every time I exhaled. Chasing it with sprite turned out to be the best combination for me and we sat around on the porch at the house, watching the sun set over the bay, passing the jug around taking gulps. We built a bonfire down near the water, and a few people started wandering over from the houses on the inlet. This was the same as any normal weekend. They’d bring over a bottle of liquor or some beer or sometimes even some food, and in turn we’d let them hang out and party with us. It was great when they’d bring friends over, specifically girls, and we’d have a really good ratio at every one of our parties. For the next few hours, we hung out, enjoying each other’s company, listening to music on the outdoor speakers, and always passing the jug around. And let me tell you, that shit was potent. We started getting more lively around halfway through the jug. A glow in the dark Frisbee started making its way around the yard, and we made the bonfire even bigger. A game of beer pong started up underneath the porch lights, and a few more people had shown up. We all crowded around the beer pong table waiting for our turn to play, when an argument arose about a ruling during the game. The argument over the rules turned into a competition of who was tougher, which turned into who could chug their beers the fastest, and it went downhill from there. Somehow in their drunken stupor, the two guys arguing, Sean and Lee had decided there was only one way to decide who was tougher. They planned on running at each other from across the yard holding inflatable tubes and slamming into each other sumo style until one of them quit. We all knew this was a terrible idea, but we were too drunk to give a shit, and it sounded like it was going to be hilarious, so we let it happen. They paced off about twenty yards each, making them forty yards apart. They stood and stared at each other for a long time, both talking shit and telling the other how they were going to knock them into next week. Derek stepped up and decided to make himself the ref for the event. I told him not to let them kill each other, and he said he had a plan to end the argument. Sean was a bit bigger than Lee, and Lee was technically in the right about the original argument, so he was at a disadvantage when the contest turned physical. I didn’t give a shit about the argument, but it was holding up the beer pong games and the rest of the party was beginning to get sick of it. Derek counted down from five and the guys took off running. You could see in their faces just how hard they were struggling to sprint with all the alcohol in their bloodstream, but they still both managed a pretty good clip. Lee, being fresh out of basic training in the military, was used to taking orders without question, and Derek, a former Marine, knew this. When they got to about ten yards apart, Derek spoke up, yelling at Lee.
“AIRMAN HIT THE DECK!” Derek barked at him. Instinctively, Lee went into the fetal position mid-step and dropped to the ground from a full sprint. Sean, also at a full sprint, didn’t have time to stop running or avoid Lee, only to attempt to turn sideways. Lee’s curled up body hit Sean right above his knees as Sean tried to spin out of the way. He flipped over Lee’s body, rotating a full flip and a half in the air before crashing to the ground flat on his stomach with a thud. He popped up gasping for air. The wind had been knocked out of him. Lee, once he realized what had happened, popped up laughing his ass off. Once he regained his breath, Sean punched Derek in the chest for the indirect cheap shot, and went to go get cleaned up from the dirt and grass stains all over his shirt. The rest of us finally got to go back to our beer pong games, and the rest of the night went without a hitch. We finished the jug of rum, even drinking the sediment at the bottom and all of us were pretty toasted. The beer ran out long after the neighbors had drifted back to their homes, and the fire had dwindled to hot coals a few hours before. We all trudged our way back into the house and passed out in our own beds, dreading the hangover that was sure to greet us all in the morning.