Chapter 14
After a fourteen-hour flight our core group landed in Tokyo, although local members would be joining us—I wasn’t sure of the Tuxes’ complete roster, but Brock told me, during the flight, “Reggie’s cagey about names and numbers, but there are Tuxes everywhere. Check for the bow-tie tattoos.”
I’d noticed a tiny black bow tie, really just two connected triangles, on Reggie’s bicep. Brock now unbuttoned his shirt, and hidden between his impressive pecs was an identical symbol. “When did you get that?” I asked.
“You have to earn it. Reggie decides. Two weeks ago I waylaid a Russian mole at the store, by hog-tying him with cashmere sweaters and shoving a decorative vintage shoe tree in his mouth. The guy had almost strangled me in the basement stockroom, where he was meeting with another sales associate, who I’d been keeping an eye on.
They’d been using a tennis trophy display piece as a drop-off for stolen discs and hard drives.
By the time Reggie got there, I had both of those creeps stashed with the out-of-season snowsuits. ”
“So Reggie rewarded you?”
“He made sure I was okay, and then he took me to see a friend of his, an ex-SEAL who’s had troubles with addiction, so Reggie got him into a program, where he had occupational therapy and learned to tattoo.
He works out of a tiny apartment in Gowanus.
At first getting inked felt weird, because it meant I was pledging allegiance to the Tuxes.
Reggie said it isn’t required, but you know what?
I really liked the idea. It’s not just my initials or some Celtic knot that a drunk high school senior gets over spring break in South Beach.
It means something. And I love that it’s butch, because it’s a tattoo, but it’s also swanky. ”
Brock’s only a year older than me, but his favorite words are “swanky,” “swellegant,” “chichi,” and “soigné.” He once said, “Slang comes and goes, and there’s always some seventeen-year-old calling me cringe and then I have to tell him only fifty-year-olds are still saying ‘cringe.’ So 1930s adjectives confuse everyone.
Some guy sent me a dick pic and I texted back, ‘golly gee willikers!’ ”
As the plane began its descent into Tokyo, I was sure: I wanted my own Tuxedo Society tattoo, but I wouldn’t ask for one.
Reggie would bestow the honor, if and when I was ready.
I still coveted an Oscar and a Tony and maybe a Grammy for my audio recording of the unauthorized biography of a Real Housewife, but for the first time in my life, that little permanent bow tie gave me some semblance of a concrete goal, something less flagrantly egotistical.
The tattoo would mean I’d become something in between a knight of King Reggie’s Round Table, a Jedi, and whoever saved the tribe in Avatar from gentrification.
A bus took us from the airport to the Olympic Village, so I only saw the city from the window.
Tokyo looked beautiful and overcrowded and like any boisterous urban hub, but with a teetering maze of office buildings, sizzling neon, and LED signage everywhere, for a glossily patchworked Blade Runner visual chaos.
Tokyo has often been used as a backdrop for studio thrillers, so I cautioned myself: the rest of the world isn’t America’s movie set.
The Village had been put together over the past year on the outskirts of town, and the Games would be taking place at a new, architecturally dazzling stadium nearby, along with pre-existing sports venues throughout the city.
There was a high chain-link fence around the Village, topped with barbed wire, surrounding five-foot-thick concrete walls.
After previous terrorist attacks, Japan and the other nations were taking no chances.
While there were banners and flags everywhere, along with billboards and Jumbotrons celebrating the Games, I was attuned to the ever-present risk: the Olympics always present a tragically popular ground zero for protests and political retribution.
We were brought, single file, through a forbidding, gated archway striped in the Games’ signature colors of purple, lime green, and orange, and fans were already streaking their hair in these vibrant hues.
We were wanded and patted down by uniformed guards, and our duffel bags were passed through metal detectors.
Marcus had managed to hack this system remotely; through my terry-cloth Team USA headband his voice said, “Now,” and when I placed my knapsack and yoga mat on the rolling rubber belt, no alarm beeped.
I still hadn’t employed any of Edwin’s weaponry, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to, but I was here for a reason.
Timothy, Brock, Miles, and I, along with a horde of legitimate American athletes, were corraled by relentlessly cheery, helpful guides in official Olympic gear with photo ID badges on lanyards around their necks.
“Welcome to the Olympic Village,” said a young woman named Yuriko.
“Here’s your swag!” She handed me the first of many canvas goody bags, this one bulging with a pair of $1,200 sunglasses, the latest earbuds, a chocolate version of an Olympic gold medal in gold foil, a pair of shearling-lined Uggs, and assorted wet wipes, soaps, colognes, and condoms, all with the Olympic logo, an endorsement that the manufacturers had paid dearly for.
And always remember: no one appreciates free crap as much as an out-of-work actor.
The Village was bustling with great-looking, ideally built, smiling, and excitable people my own age and even younger, of every race, nationality, and language (translators were provided).
The Olympic Village was a Disney utopia, diversity at its finest. Everyone waved to us and we waved back, even though I was a deliberate imposter, and I’m not talking about the weary trope of “imposter syndrome.” I was passing as something I wasn’t, like cheating off a child genius’s geometry quiz.
Just by looking at me, the career athletes were most likely thinking, Jeez, Team America’s gone seriously downhill.
Our dorm was prefabricated and massive, as if it had been ordered from a big-box store and ratcheted together with those primitive wrenches.
There were white walls and long hallways, with companionable lounge spaces furnished with beanbag chairs, squishy leather couches, and tables laden with fruit and varieties of water.
The dorm could’ve been a starship hurtling through the cosmos as we were tucked into pods where we’d artificially nap for the four-hundred-year journey to Mars (which is the plot of every sci-fi epic that doesn’t make its money back, with the stars awakening decades too soon, in their underwear).
The many identical foamcore doors opened into small rooms with twin beds built from the sturdiest industrial cardboard; online scuttlebutt sniggered that this less-than-reliable construction material would discourage boisterous sex, but everyone’s accumulated hormones would find a way.
I’d be bunking with Miles, and as we unpacked I assumed my latest role: the name on my credentials was Sky Collier, which belonged to the actual alternate.
Reggie, it turned out, had assigned each of us based on our physical resemblances to the real things, in case anyone started Googling—this coincidence most likely accounted for Reggie’s willingness to bring me back into the fold.
My return was provisional and could be revoked. I was far from a true Tux.
The legit Sky Collier was way more firm-jawed and vee-shaped than me, but we were both brunettes in our mid-twenties, of a similar height.
If I were Sky Collier, what would I be thinking?
In an All About Eve strategy, I’d “accidentally” break Miles’s legs so I could replace him, but this wasn’t a helpful mindset.
And let’s get this out of the way: being called Sky Collier was as far from “Andrew Birnbaum” as I could get.
If I’d chosen “Sky Collier” I’d have become a laughingstock, but since it wasn’t my doing, I loved it.
“Sky Collier” was a fighter pilot mated with the sideburned, leisure-suited stunt man/detective hero of a 1970s network series.
As if I’d been switched at birth, a significant portion of my now fully healed brain was certain: I was always meant to be Sky Collier.
I would thrive as Sky Collier. I am Sky Collier.
From what I observed, the athletes were both jolly and eager, and more fixated and neurotic than anyone on earth.
They’d devoted their lives to this moment, to their heartbreakingly contained shot at Olympic glory, and they were being obsessively supervised and rated by coaches, parents, and fans.
The only way I could comprehend such soul-numbing stress was to substitute a childhood memory of my Cub Scout troop.
At our annual jamboree, held in a high school auditorium, my ten-year-old self, as the only Jewish Scout, had been recruited to stand onstage alone, before two hundred squirmingly bored fellow Scouts, and explain the meaning of Passover.
I’d vomited immediately afterward and been hospitalized for dehydration, because it turned out I had mono.
That was my Olympics. People still think I died.
But Sky Collier was neither Jewish, gay, nor an actor. So I’d be jock-ish, farm-fed, and unflappable. “Sky?” said Miles, from across the room. “Let’s go find Elki.”
“Dude,” I replied, hoisting my crotch, “let’s hit that shit.”
“Darling,” Miles replied, “reel it in.”
We wandered through the Village as if taking in the sights, with Marcus, via our earpieces, steering us toward the Danish dorm.
We lingered outside, usurping the locked entry as someone else was leaving, and I asked if anyone had seen Aksel, a person I’d made up.
Standing near a lounge, there he was: Elki Jenstromm, on his phone, sipping from an Olympic-branded juice box.
“Elki?” said Miles, to renew their acquaintance.