The Bouncer

Excerpt From: The Bouncer

The sign on the portable corridor coming off the JetBlue flight read, Welcome to Austin, Live Music Capital of the World.

It cheered me up after the long, long wait in airports stretching from New York to Long Beach in California, not to mention the turbulent three-hour flight here. I took it as a good sign. I believed in signs. I’ve always looked for them and found them, good or bad. This was good. I loved music, loved live music in particular, and I was about to throw myself right into the music scene working for my brother.

To me, it was like a personalised welcome mat after being shuttled around the country due to inclement weather. I felt lucky that I’d made it. Seventy-two passengers had agreed to fly all over the place to finally land in Austin and we felt we knew each other well enough to exchange numbers and promises of cocktails.

For several horrible hours, we’d circled first one New York airport, then another and after a detour to New Jersey, had been left on the tarmac in Newark. Waiting. We couldn’t get to an arrival gate due to overcrowding. In an incident, which made all the TV headlines, the flight attendants had run out of food and had rationed us to two peanuts per person and half a cup of water each.

JetBlue rallied, saving the day. One of their planes heading to Florida turned around and rescued us. A group of seasoned flight attendants boarded our plane like the sexiest cavalry you ever saw, stampeding down the aisle carrying food, drink and bringing abundant good cheer. Among them was my brother’s husband, former boxer and now-flight attendant, Tito Calderon.

He picked me out right away and came straight over to me.

“This is a funny old way to meet,” he said. “You doing okay, Kevin?”

To tell you the truth, like everybody else, I’d started to panic quite a long time ago. Especially when I saw the news of our unfolding melodrama on the screen in front of me, which of course magnified our predicament.

“I’m fine, Tito.” I tried to act macho. Tito was hot. Hotter than hot. He radiated the kind of sexual chemistry that ought to be forbidden in real life. It should be left on the screen for guys whose names end in Clooney or Damon. I wondered how my brother coped with the attention magnetism like Tito’s must bring.

Satisfied I was okay, Tito gave me a couple of bottles of iced water, several snack bags and moved on to help a breast-feeding mother handle her squalling baby.

I glimpsed his wedding ring. It made me feel good, for my brother’s sake that he wasn’t the kind of guy who took off his ring when he was a travelling man. I caught Tito’s gaze and we smiled at each other. He took charge of the screaming baby, handing a bottle to one our frazzled, original flight attendants.

“Can you warm this for me, please? Thirty seconds ought to do it.”

She looked as if she wanted to squeeze the contents all over his face. Instead, she snatched it and thundered her way back to the galley.

I could hear her surly words. “Excuse me. Excuse me, please.”

The new JetBlue crew made instant TV headlines as they escorted us from the plane to one of their waiting buses across the snow-dusted tarmac. Tito acted like he was used to having cameras on him and I wondered just how bad I looked.

Once he was sure I was safely on the bus headed back to New York, he gave me a quick hug. I detected very faint aftershave. Holy frickin’ heck. My dick got hard. Was that bad when it was your brother’s husband?

“See you back in Austin,” he said. “I’ll be home tonight.”