37. Brendan #2
Then everyone stood and raised their glasses, and a chorus of men called, “The hall stands!”
Mofongo sneezed under the table, which was not a toast but felt like participation.
Everyone broke into laughter at that.
An hour later, somewhere in the comfortable noise of the evening, Skyler looked around the room and frowned.
“Where’s Tyler?” he asked.
Jacks looked around. “He was just—”
“He was here,” Erik said. “Then he was not here.”
“Maybe he went to the bathroom,” Jacks said.
“That was twenty minutes ago,” Peter said, without looking up from whatever Erik had given him to read, because Peter tracked time the way other people tracked weather—automatically and without meaning to.
“Twenty minutes?” Skyler said. “Why does that make me nervous?”
Benji set down his shaker very slowly. “Oh, no.”
“What?” Jacks asked.
“Oh, God no,” Benji said again, which was not an answer but was its own kind of answer.
Then the music changed.
Not gradually.
Not a crossfade.
One moment it was the upbeat pop that had been playing in the background all evening, then there was a beat of silence—a single suspended second in which everyone in the room registered that something had shifted—and then the opening notes of something slow and heavy and unmistakably disco rolled through the bar.
The lights dimmed.
“Oh, shit,” Skyler said.
“Oh, yes,” Benji said, glee wafting off him at the unexpected chaos of the moment.
The spotlight—there was apparently a spotlight, which Benji had installed for the anniversary and which had not been mentioned during any of the planning conversations—clicked on and illuminated the small cleared space in front of the bar.
And Tyler stepped into it.
And he was wearing a trench coat.
The room gaped.
Tyler surveyed his audience.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Ty,” Skyler said.
“I have been vetoed,” Tyler said, “from the public event.” He paused. “This, mon amis, is not the public event.”
“Tyler—” Finn tried to regain control.
“This is a family event,” Tyler said. “And family—” He reached for the belt of the trench coat. “—gets the full performance.”
“Tyler, please stop!” Skyler shouted, a beat too late.
The belt came undone.
The trench coat flew off.
And the room produced a sound that was not quite a scream and not quite a cheer. Mostly, it was a collection of individual noises that had arrived simultaneously from different people from every conceivable direction.
Tyler was indeed wearing the Speedo.
And nothing else.
It was electric blue.
Printed across the front in bold white letters was the word “GOAL.”
“I had it custom made,” Tyler announced over the noise.
“OH MY GOD,” Benji squealed.
“The font,” Erik said, “is bold but appropriate.”
“ERIK, PLEASE,” Skyler said.
Tyler stood in the spotlight, basking in our attention.
Then he turned around.
And the back of the Speedo read, “FIVE HOLE.”
The room went from loud to something that had no name, a human reaction that existed somewhere between hysteria and cardiac arrest. Jacks grabbed Skyler’s arm, Chase grabbed Finn’s, and Benji grabbed the bar because the bar was what was nearest.
“FIVE HOLE,” Benji shrieked, pointing, unable to form a more complete sentence.
“It’s a hockey term,” Tyler said.
“I KNOW WHAT IT IS—”
“It refers to the space between the goalie’s—”
“NOT IN A GAY BAR!” Benji had tears streaming down his cheeks.
“I wanted the Speedo to be educational,” Tyler said. “The front is the objective. The back is the method.”
Finn made a sound that had never previously come out of Finn. It sounded like whales humping.
“Are you okay?” Chase said.
“I’m fine,” Finn wheezed.
“Your face is—”
“I’m fine,” Finn said, still that color.
“Is legitimate hockey term,” Erik said to Finn with completely earnest reassurance. “In hockey, the five hole is the most—”
“Erik,” Skyler said.
“I am providing context—”
“Oh, he has the context,” Skyler said through his own disbelieving laughter. “That’s why he looks like that.”
“Ah.” Erik looked at Finn. “I see.”
Then the disco kicked in properly, and Tyler began to move.
What followed was objectively, technically, artistically, the worst dancing anyone in the room had ever witnessed.
It was also immediately and completely riveting, in the way that terrible accidents on the side of the road command complete attention.
What made it even more hilarious was that Tyler had clearly practiced, had clearly looked in a mirror and seen something the mirror had not actually shown him, and was now deploying the result with the intensity of a professional athlete competing for gold.
His hips went left.
The rest of him followed two beats later, like a sentence where the subject arrives after the verb.
“Oh no,” Adrian said from beside me with the horror of a professional watching something he loved being processed through the wrong equipment like, say, a meat grinder.
“Is he—?” Jacks started.
“Yes,” Benji said.
“But the timing—”
“I know.”
“It’s not—”
“I know,” Benji said.
Tyler, entirely unbothered by the critical discussion happening around him, had moved into what appeared to be the burlesque-adjacent section of his performance.
He was working the trench coat, which he had picked back up from the floor and was now using as a prop, draping it over one shoulder, sliding it down his arm, and offering it to the room with the tease of a man who had watched too many cabaret videos in preparation for this and had absorbed the aesthetic without the technique.
“He’s doing burlesque?” Chase asked with delighted disbelief.
“He’s doing something.” Finn snorted. “I’m not sure burlesque is the right word.”
“What’s the right word?” Chase said.
Finn watched Tyler execute a slow turn that accelerated unexpectedly in the middle and ended approximately forty degrees past where it was supposed to.
“I don’t think there is one,” he said.
“There is word in Swedish,” Erik said.
Everyone turned to him.
“I will not say it here,” Erik said.
“ERIK,” Tyler called from the spotlight, having apparently heard this. “WHAT’S THE SWEDISH WORD?”
“Keep dancing,” Erik said to Tyler, whose grin widened to maniacal proportions.
“ERIK, THE WORD!”
“Is accurate word,” Erik said.
“I’LL TAKE IT,” Tyler said, and pivoted into a new section of the performance that appeared to involve his torso independently of his lower half, which was its own remarkable achievement.
Benji had his hands on the bar and was taking deep breaths. His tears were still flowing freely. “His core,” he said. “What’s his core doing?”
“Different things than his legs,” Adrian said.
“Are those supposed to go in opposite directions?” Jacks asked.
“No!” Adrian snapped.
“Could they theoretically go in opposite directions?”
“Not like that,” Adrian said. “Not at that speed.”
“And yet,” Benji said.
“And yet,” Adrian confirmed.
Tyler had located the pole that supported the corner of the bar canopy and had decided, mid-performance, that it was part of his act.
He approached it with intention, made meaningful eye contact with it, and wrapped one leg around it, caressing a higher section with one hand as though milking a cow.
“Is he—?” I heard Finn stammer.
“Yeah,” Mark said flatly. “He’s going to hump that pole.”
“Poor pole,” Finn replied.
The humping lasted approximately two minutes. Jokes swirled about those two minutes being the longest Tyler had ever lasted in anything off-ice. None of this stopped his next move.
With one leg still curled affectionately around the pole, Tyler slung an arm around it in the internationally recognized move of a man about to attempt something that required training he did not have.
“Oh shit,” Skyler said, half out of his seat.
“He won’t actually—” Jacks started.
Tyler attempted to half hump, half scale the pole.
The pole remained stationary—and emotionally unmoved by the sudden pairing.
Tyler achieved approximately six inches of elevation before the laws of physics made a firm and non-negotiable point about the relationship between grip strength, momentum, and the GOAL Speedo.
Tyler returned to the floor with a catastrophic thud.
He looked up at the room.
Then he pointed at the pole.
“You and me later,” he told it.
The room lost its mind.
“HE JUST THREATENED THE POLE,” Benji shouted.
“It’s a pole. Why threaten a—?” Jacks asked, tears cutting off his question.
“He’ll be back for it,” Chase managed, wheezing. “He made a commitment. They might’ve bonded.”
Tyler, having made his position on the pole clear, returned to center spotlight and transitioned into what could only be described as a go-go-adjacent sequence. His arms flew above his head, while his hips moved in a circular gyration.
Then “It’s Raining Men” began, and the last semblance of order devolved.
“He’s doing me . . . to ‘It’s Raining Men’ . . . and he’s straight!” Adrian said, watching with the fascinated horror of someone encountering their reflection in a funhouse mirror.
“He’s doing his version of you,” Benji said.
“He’s doing what he thinks I look like from the audience,” Adrian said, his horror growing.
“Is that what you think you look like from the audience?” I said.
Adrian turned to look at me, his mouth agape. “Of course not.”
Tyler had added what appeared to be a hair toss to the routine, which was complicated by the fact that Tyler’s hair was approximately half an inch long, which meant the toss was more of a neck commitment than a hair event.
Still, he deployed his toss with the full conviction of a man who had longer hair in his imagination.
“ADRIAN,” Tyler called, pointing. “I LEARNED THIS FROM YOU.”
“YOU DID NOT,” Adrian called back.
“THE ARMS LIKE THIS—” Tyler demonstrated the arms, looking more like one of those blow-up creatures car lots used to attract attention than a dancer.
“THOSE ARE NOT MY ARMS.”
“THESE ARE SO YOUR ARMS.”
Tyler pivoted into what appeared to be the emotional climax of the performance. The disco track dipped into a dance remix of “Let’s Get it On,” causing Tyler to produce a single long-stemmed plastic rose.