Chapter 20 #3
As our group got rowdier, to salute both Jenn’s recovery and the acquisition of the Atropos, the evening blended the banquet sequences from Bridesmaids, My Best Friend’s Wedding, and Wedding Crashers.
Rom-coms have morphed from the wisecracking couplings of the screwball era to a gang aesthetic.
Maybe falling in and out of love is now a group pastime, which led me to cherish my Tuxes membership even more, because I’d been growing closer to everyone at the table.
If being gay and moving to New York City are about finding your tribe, I’d been lucky enough to find my body-armored militia.
I began to choose a classic Burt Bacharach tune for us to harmonize on.
As midnight loomed and the dining area cleared out, Jenn stood and declared, “I’d just like to say that, thanks to the Tuxes, I’m not just starting to feel better, but I’m getting close to my ultimate dream, which is to appear in an episode of Friends called ‘The One Where Jennifer Aniston Accepted That Having a Single Classic Hairstyle and Never Changing It Is Enough for a Fulfilled Life.’ ”
As we shouted “Here, here!” and “Jenn for Jen!” Reggie’s expression darkened, and I saw why: Jack Stanton was standing at the railing of the next-level-up balcony, flanked by ten crew members in Empress Olympia black coveralls, with black bandanas knotted jauntily around their necks.
This tableau was unsettling, like a gang of moving men who’d heave your furniture out the window and into traffic.
“Did y’all really think you’d get away with it?” Stanton snarled. “That I wouldn’t run a backup check with my own goddamn expert? Who took one look at that phony-as-fuck emerald and told me I’d been hoodwinked?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” said Reggie, still seated. “Lady Tresselmere is an unimpeachable authority.”
“And I don’t know who in East Shitsville that woman was, but she ain’t no Lady Tresselmere. I just saw on CNN that the one and only Lady Tresselmere’s in police custody. Where you belong.”
“Maybe not,” said Reggie. “Unless you’d like the IRS to investigate your trafficking in untaxed antiquities.”
“Give it back, and get off my ship.”
“We don’t have the emerald.”
“Fellas?” said Stanton, addressing the men on either side of him, whose assault rifles were pointed at our table.
“Are you really going to shoot up your own property?”
“No, I’m gonna shoot up a tableful of thievin’ varmints.”
Varmints? I’ve been called a lot of things, but this was a first. Stanton was stomping into Elmer Fudd territory.
“Don’t do it, Stanton. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
“It looks to me like a passel of pansified pretty boys and their Manhattan dollypops.”
“Hey,” said Jenn, “I’m nobody’s dollypop. And I’m going through a bad breakup, so I wouldn’t mess with me. Have you ever heard the words ‘hormonal relationship aftershock rage’?”
“I’m gonna pick you off one by one, until I get my emerald. Who wants to go first?”
As Reggie raised his hand, volunteering as Stanton’s target, the Tuxes did what we had to do.
We swiftly activated the battery packs in our pants, or in the case of Mikaela and Pei-Sze, their evening bags.
The whirring, drone-like mechanism in my party hat hummed to life, along with that of everyone else at the table except Jenn, who’d refused a party hat because she’d spurned “hat hair.”
As one, the Tuxes rose, slowly at first but gaining momentum, until we were levitating ten feet above our chairs.
At first, dangling in midair left us more exposed, but by shifting my shoulders, movement was doable.
Stanton and his cronies were staring at us, unsure if we’d become some onboard illusionist’s trick, or an airborne coven without fangs or wings.
“What the hell?” said Stanton, confronting our floating birthday fest.
“Still want that emerald?” asked Reggie.
“I’ll take it off your cold dead body,” said Stanton, as his men pulled back the triggers on their weapons.
Reggie raised his party horn with the fluttering streamers.
“Happy birthday,” he said, aiming the horn at the sharpshooter to Stanton’s left.
He tooted, and within seconds the dart was lodged in the guy’s Adam’s apple as he moaned and tumbled off the balcony, onto a table filled with the remains of a family’s multicourse Tacos, Truffles & Tortellini Tastebuds Ahoy Combos.
Whatever stragglers were left screamed and ran for cover, with only the warring factions still occupying the atrium, on one level or another.
“What the fuckety fuck…?” said Stanton, and then to his men, “FIRE!”
Before the bullets blasted, the Tuxes took our party horns and let loose with a New Year’s Eve?style cacophony.
Five of Stanton’s men collapsed, one taking a header into the evening’s still-gushing multitiered chocolate fountain, as his unconscious body became coated, like a delectable after-dinner strawberry.
As Stanton’s remaining troops continued shooting, the Tuxes spun and somersaulted, high above the floor, like celestial mermaids or carousel ponies run wild.
By twisting my body I could soar even higher, and Brock and Mikaela zipped headfirst at the balcony, blaring into the faces of disconcerted gunmen.
Timothy executed a mid-flight pirouette, avoiding another barrage, as Pei-Sze took out a guy by first kicking the rifle out of his grip and then blowing a dart into his butt, in tribute to Michelle Yeoh at her most lethally dexterous.
As the Tuxes twirled and dipped through the air, they called to mind everything from those chimney sweeps skipping across London rooftops in Mary Poppins to the wafting children led aloft by Peter Pan.
I wasn’t flying, not exactly, but I was Superman-adjacent.
Flight is my most-longed-for superpower, because it facilitates crime-fighting and also eliminates those deadening lines at airports, plus, with the right star wearing the cape, it just looks surpassingly cool, as the ultimate escape from schoolyard bullying or cocktail party boredom.
Stanton’s henchmen had been incapacitated, their twitching bodies littering the atrium.
We hadn’t sustained any casualties, but Reggie hovered only a few yards from Stanton, who’d hoisted a western-style shotgun, undoubtedly a vintage Winchester reconditioned at great expense.
Our horns had been loaded with only three darts each, and Reggie had exhausted his supply, like the rest of us.
“A duel to the death?” Reggie proposed, relying on Stanton’s most overheated Remember-the-Alamo, Kevin-Costner-as-the-Marlboro-Man-in-a-Range-Rover pretensions.
The prospect of watching Reggie fall from the sky appealed to Stanton, who was certain that with our leader dead, the other Tuxes would shamefully surrender.
“Just how do you intend to kill me?” Stanton sneered. “Whatcha got left? Or are ya all tooted out?”
“Mano a mano,” said Reggie, whose fists couldn’t counter Stanton’s close-range bullets. “But first, since we’re both quality warriors and gentlemen of Gettysburg—a toast.”
Again, Reggie was leaning on Stanton’s love of the cheesiest battlefield clichés, the tired flourishes from his ice shows and paintball arenas, as initiated by a guy whose Montana ranch had heated towel racks and valet parking.
As a graceful Timothy handed Stanton a glass of champagne, Reggie retrieved a matching crystal flute from a tray on a balcony table.
The two men raised their glasses with a dignified, old-world, we’re-the-only-real-men-left politesse, with Stanton ready to defy death by causing it.
“Salut,” said Reggie.
“Here’s mud in yer eye,” said Stanton, who really should have been wearing a ten-gallon Stetson and twirling a handlebar mustache as he told his chauffeur to “giddyup.”
Both men drank, and as Stanton set his glass down and Timothy took Reggie’s, Stanton pointed his shotgun, saying, “I betcha the real emerald’s in your fancy-ass luggage, tucked inside a pair of balled-up socks.
You thought you could put one over on a gamblin’ man.
Well, buckaroo, your estate’s gonna pay for the damage to my ship. ”
This last remark was more petty than grizzled or dashing, and as Stanton prepared to shoot, his eyes rolled back in his head, he made a gurgling noise, and he slumped over the railing like an abandoned garment bag.
Then his body weight caused him to plummet headfirst into Jenn’s birthday cake, which she’d wheeled into place below.
Stanton hadn’t noticed that, amid the gunplay, Mikaela had deposited a petal from one of Edwin’s decorative Hawaiian leis into his glass, where it had completely and undetectably dissolved, incapacitating him as a result of his foolishly cinematic gesture.
He was out cold, covered with buttercream frosting, and Reggie had the Atropos.
As the Tuxes descended to the ground, Reggie told us, “We have to abandon ship. The lifeboats. Now.”
Without bothering to change our clothes, we ran to the port side of the ship, with Brock, Timothy, Mikaela, and Pei-Sze climbing into one boat, while Reggie activated the system that loosened the moorings and lowered the craft until it settled into the water.
Brock was already on his phone, alerting a yacht several miles out, owned by a member of the Tuxes, that would rescue the castaways.
Reggie and I stayed behind momentarily, to return Jenn to her suite.
“You’ll be safer here,” said Reggie. “When Stanton and his idiots wake up, they’ll be too embarrassed to admit what happened.
If you’re questioned, just say you were on what was supposed to be your honeymoon, and you were seated with a table of partying drunks.
Threaten legal action against Waveriders Global.
Your story will check out, so we’ll get together back in New York. ”
“I’ll be okay,” said Jenn. “But what about you guys?”