Franklin Delano Roosevelt State Park. That’s where it all went down. A very large state park in my hometown of Yorktown NY. It also happens to be directly across the street from my neighborhood. FDR is the closest state park to the north of NYC’s boroughs, and contains the second largest outdoor swimming pool in the United States. Those two elements alone are a recipe for hilarity, but those tales will not be told in this story. The only thing I know about the pool is that it averages at least one, if not more than one riot per summer, and sometimes lifeguards are attacked.

After my freshman year of College my family took me out to dinner to a restaurant in Cobleskill, NY where I attended SUNY Cobleskill. During a conversation with my father he told me that he put in an application for me for summer work at FDR. I immediately thought “dammit I really don’t want to work there” to myself. But soon after my father said there was an opening at the boathouse. Immediately a light bulb went off in my head. I had heard many stories about working in the boathouse from people I graduated high school with. All of them being pretty classic. I knew that this was the job for me, and a couple of days after I got home for the summer I was interviewed for the job and hired. Money.

I’m going to skip the entire summer of 2003, and tell you about the fateful summer of 2004. Wait a second, I have to acknowledge some shit from 2003 because some of it is way too classic. The job requirements of the boathouse, were to get a 25-dollar deposit for each rowboat or paddle boat (The gay ass boats people adored, that you could pedal like a bike). This often caused mass confusion, or totally boggled the minds of customers. You had to explain to them that they would only be paying 5 dollars an hour, and that the deposit would only be revoked if they were to fuck up the boat in anyway, or go swimming off the boat. But still the deposit still baffled many.

During the week all you would do was sit around in chairs and do whatever you wanted, barely anyone came during the week, but weekends were a different story. Whenever I would wake up on the weekends during the summer I would always check to see if it was sunny or not. If it was raining your ass had lucked out because you probably were just going to sit around on your ass all day long. If it was a beautiful day, you had hell to pay. Every single minority group you can think of, mostly from the Bronx and Brooklyn would mob FDR on the weekends. Every immigrant group was represented and they all wanted to rent a boat.

From Muslims to Hispanics, Indians to Africans, Hasidic Jews to Eastern Europeans. The melting pot was represented in full force. The best part about it all was that they acted like water was lava, and most people were terrified to even step into the boats. They would act like the leisurely activity of a Sunday rowboat ride in the park was like going on a crazy ass roller coaster.

During my employment down at the boathouse I fielded many hilarious questions. One time some black girls approached me very seriously and asked “Them sharks in here??” so of coarse I answered “Yes, but they don’t bother people too much.” The girls freaked out and demanded their money back, and it took a while for me to convince them I was kidding.

One time one lady asked me “What Ocean is this connected too?” I felt too sorry to come back with a sarcastic answer so I said, “It’s a lake lady.” She still seemed confused. The most classic quote ever from my boathouse experience by far is when we had just pushed out a Spanish family into the water. The father said “this is like Robinson-Caruso,” and the little Spanish kid said, “NO WAY!! THIS IS LIKE CROCADILE DUNDY!!!” He pronounced it Dundy instead of Dun – Dee which made it even funnier.

The coolest part about the job was the motorboat that we could cruise around in at anytime. My favorite thing to do was to go on rescue missions. If someone lost an oar or wanted to come back in, I was the man to rescue their asses. I would cruise out to them and tie my anchor to the front of their boat and tow them to shore. The best rescue mission, and there are dozens of them, was when this huge fat black guy and his girlfriend took out a rowboat.

I knew when I was getting them into their boat that the guy was scared. He asked questions like, “How deep is the lake?” and “Would this life preserver save me?” I answered “yeah it will save you, and the lake is 70 feet deep.” I would say this same answer to every customer who asked how deep the lake was, just to see the expression on their face, which was always a look of sheer terror. The lake was really only like 25 – 30 at the deepest.

After I had sent this couple away I knew deep down inside that I would eventually have to rescue them. Sure enough one of the guy’s homeboys who was hanging out watching from the shore got a call about 20 minutes later. He came up to me and told me that his friend wanted to be rescued. So I hopped in the motorboat and went to go look for the couple. I found them floating in the middle of the lake, just sitting in the boat. I pulled up next to them. Right away the guy said to me “She got scared, she wants to get brought back in.” His girlfriend replied, “SHUTUP NIGGA, YOU THE ONE THAT GOT SCARED!!!” He then yelled out “SHUTUP BITCH!!!” After I tied the anchor to the front of their boat I decided to have a little fun at their expense. I gunned the motorboat a full throttle right away and the front of their boat got pulled into the water and the back of the boat went up into the air. They looked like they were gonna shit their pants. It was maybe the funniest thing I’ve ever been a part of. When they got to shore all they could say was, “Never again, never again.”

So lets fast-forward to this past summer of 2004, I was rehired for work at the boathouse for another summer. The same boat crew was also coming back, my friend Vin who I graduated High School with, this kid Anthony who liked to act like he was in charge of shit, and this little prep school tool bag Justin who was 17 and looked like “It’s Pat” from SNL and treated the boat house job as if it were as important of a job as being head of anti-terrorism.

As soon as I arrived for my first day back I saw that there was actually a new and improved boathouse. It was probably four times the size of the previous boathouse last summer which was actually a small tool shed placed by a lake. It was very dead when I first arrived, and my two co-workers that day Anthony and Justin are about as entertaining as watching paint dry. So I decided to schnazz up the boathouse a little bit with all of the posters that were up in my college dorm room since I had yet to unpack my car from college. Posters like the classic Jack Daniels label, Guinness and a Budweiser Jets banner made the boathouse seem like my dorm room.

I had yet to have seen one of my bosses Matt, who was the biggest prick of a boss ever, until he had come down a little later on that day to drop off a dump truck full of rocks to line the beach. I was helping a customer into a boat and I turned around to see Matt staring into the boathouse. He immediately asked whose posters were all over the wall. Justin and Anthony immediately pointed the finger at me, and Matt slowly approached me. “Bryan, what do you think this is a fucking frat house. I want them down by the end of the day.” “Okay I will,” I replied back. That was strike one with Matt, and on my first day back too.

Strike two came a few weeks later on. It was kind of a rainy weekday and one of the kids on the boat staff had called in sick. So a funny black kid named Darrell from Yonkers was taken from the maintenance crew and put on boat duty with me. It was early in the morning, and the first thing I did after signing in was to rent out a brand new electric powered golf cart to drive down to the boat house which is pretty far away from the park house. These things were pretty sweet looking, and they were state of the art brand new. The park had about 20 of them donated to them by Ford. So Darrell and me hop into the golf cart, I drove because he did not have his license. Matt was standing right there watching as I backed the golf cart out of a row of many carts being recharged.

I cut the wheel too soon and the side view mirror caught on to hood of another cart and it ripped right off. I looked up to see Matt staring at me in disbelief with his two huge buggy eyes (Imagine Keefer Sutherland with buggy eyes and a military cut). I looked over to my right and saw Darrell with his arm covering his face, trying to desperately hold in his laughter. I parked the cart and got out and was scolded by Matt. He told me that later on I would have to come back to the park house to meet with a police officer to fill out paper work. After I got back into the cart and drove away Darrell immediately burst out into laughter shouting, “DID YOU SEE THAT NIGGA’S FACE HAHHAH!!!!”.

After a couple of hours had passed I got a call over my walkie talkie that the police officer was at the park house and that I should come up now. At that same time Darrell was doing donuts in the golf cart. As soon as I stepped outside I saw the back of the cart go flying into a ditch. Darrell’s face explained it all as he tried to gun it out of the ditch. We tried everything to get it out but it just would not budge. How bad of a situation was this. I was going to go meet a police officer about fucking up a cart, and Darrell a kid without a license who was not supposed to be driving the cart at all had got it stuck in a ditch.

After literally trying everything to solve our problem we went to our last resort. We walked up to the main road and tried to flag down a park truck that was driving by. Luckily for us the first park car we found was a cool, jacked black guy Fletcher and my friend Fairweather. They drove down to the scene of the crime and Fletcher, Fairweather and I got the cart back on four wheels on our first try as Darrell gunned it. Fletcher said “None of this ever happened.” Luckily we got out of that situation, but little did I know my boat house doom would be waiting for me in the next couple of weeks.

To be Continued …

MERRY CHRISTMAS MOTHERFUCKERS. GOD BLESS YOU, GOD BLESS ME, GOD BLESS AMERICA.

Questions or comments? E-mail Bryan at Itsbyrne@hotmail.com