The Day A Duck Hit Me In the Face

If you hang out with Ray and me long enough, one of us will tell the story. My version is a mildy amusing short tale of semi-masochistic animal cruelty. Ray makes it an epic. His eyes ignite and pull closer together. He spreads his arms wide, embracing the listeners. It begins.

"A few years ago, J.J. and Joey came out to my place to waterski. The three of us were on the boat, knocking back beers and shit."

The words burst out of a lifetime of perfect Saturdays. Ray's house, the house he grew up in, is on a shady bluff overlooking Long Island's Port Jefferson harbor. Chris had the truck, Ray had the boat. The ubiquitous lobster pots had lunch if you were brazen enough to take it. Everyone had water toys, fake IDs and a native's disregard for harbormaster rules and weekend warrior courtesy.

They crashed a Jeep into the water one night and pulled it out before the police came. They sped through the no wake zones, with Ray once misjudging a turn and skiing nose first into the bow of a moored boat. Another skier tried to leap a swan and landed on its back instead. They went out on the water every day and never paused to consider how lucky they were.

The first time Joey and I were there - the story happened on our third trip - we were bored on a beautiful day. We called every friend we knew who had a boat. Ray was the first to answer. An hour and a half later, it was all water, sunshine, and laughter. After, Ray's Mom cooked us dinner. We ate lobster on the screen porch and drank cans of Bud while gentle waves crawled among the reeds and docks below.

"We all took a couple of turns skiing. The weather was awesome, nobody on the water. We decided to tube."

Every boat ride with Ray involves a round of innertubing. The idea is to go faster and faster, making tighter and tighter turns and circling back on our own wake, until the guy on the tube goes flying. The more spectacular the wipe out, the more heroic the moment. I once saw Joey do three complete cartwheels before spinning head first into a wave. He hurt his back a bit. The rest of us laughed for hours.

"We went over to Conscience Bay." If there is somebody listening who knows the area, Ray will stab a finger at them and say, "You know Conscience."

"Joey and I both went on the tube and then it was J.J.'s turn. He gets on the tube, and I'm steering the boat. I've got the thing floored and I'm turning all over the place." His arms spin an imaginary wheel left and right. Sometimes he turns to look behind him, surveying the bar or dining room like the sun-spattered bay in his mind. "He's flying."

Ray is one year older than me. He was our fraternity president and one of the only people I knew who came out of college with a career in mind and a job in hand. Today he's a managing director at one of Wall Street's top investment banks, making more money than I care to know about.

As a general rule, if Ray's around, you're having more fun. There's also a good chance that somebody is about to get hurt.

"And then I looked at Joey and said, 'Oh look, Joe, a family of ducks.' Joey looked at me and said, 'Don't do it Ray.'"

"But I had to. I spun the wheel. We're going like 37 miles per hour, and J.J.'s in a full whip."

A whip is when you turn the wheel as hard as you can so the guy on the tube accelerates wildly and is forced outside the wake.

Ray grips an invisible tube and shakes and bounces like it's happening to him right then.

The physics is simple: When the boat turns, the tube swings wide and, therefore, speeds up – it has to cover more distance than the boat in the same amount of time. If it doesn't, the rope breaks. In this case, with the boat was going over 35 miles per hour in a circle, the 75 foot rope held. I was crashing along the surface of the water at more than 50 miles an hour.

"He's just flying along. All the spray is kicking up and he's spitting and squinting and trying to hold on." Ray's got his fists clenched around phantom handles. He's writhing around, head back and eyes barely open, as if a firehose is pointed right at his face.

"The ducks are just paddling along." His hands do a leisurely duck paddle, immersing us all in a few seconds of mallard bliss.

"And then they look back and see this thing coming at them at a hundred miles an hour. They start paddling faster and faster." Ray paddles his hands furiously. "Two of them take off." His hands flap off to the right.

"J.J.'s still hanging on and the one duck's trying to take off and he's flapping." Ray's long, lean runner's arms unfold; he becomes a pterodactyl. "And he's flapping and flapping, but he can't get up fast enough. And J.J.'s still coming. He's like. And the bird's like." Ray is switching frantically between the pterodactyl and the clench-fisted hose face.

"For just a second, the spray stops and J.J. sees the duck." The hose face disappears briefly for a bug-eyed J.J. impression.

"He can't do anything. The duck is only about two feet off the water, flapping and flapping and J.J.'s flying and trying to move but we're going too fast."

"BAM!" He smashes his hands together.

"The duck hits J.J. right in the face." He smacks himself just above the right eye. "It goes straight into the water and disappears. J.J. goes flipping backwards off the tube."

By the time I got my bearings and swam back to the surface, a second or two at most, the boat had stopped. Ray and Joey were bent double, grabbing their stomachs with one hand and pointing at me with the other. They laughed too hard to breathe, let alone ask if I was OK. The swelling had already begun.

"The duck goes all the way under water and then pops up again and tries to fly." A drunken pterodactyl wobbles into the air. "J.J. swims to the boat with this massive shiner and a welt that's out to here." His finger's about an inch in front of his eyebrow.

Then, the inevitable question.

"I don't know what happened to the duck," Ray answers. "He had to die. I mean, J.J. fucking nailed it."

Nobody ever asks about me. They just laugh and wait for the next story. My shiner healed in about a week.