Page 89 of Bounced!

“Benji over there is our Director of Communications, currently narrating the entire event into a lavalier mic for an audience of thousands online. Peter, beside him, calm as a still pond, is a veterinary surgeon. He wrangled the whole animal side of the day and held Benji’s leash in every way that mattered. They’re together, in case you couldn’t tell. Over there, Adrian, our dancer, is working the food line with Rod. Brendan, Adrian’s other half and another vet, is the guy comparing notes with Peter about a hawk.”

“I think the hawk,” Grant said, brow bunched, “might need explaining.”

“The hawk was Peter’s fault,” I explained. “When he learned about our event, he called in the Raptor Center of Tampa Bay, a thought he’d had about drawing a crowd.”

Apparently done with our interview, I watched Grant wander off to see the birds. He stopped before the amazing woman who’d brought them. Her name was Kim, and her smile was bright enough to light the entire block. Kim had shown up with two owls and a red-tailed hawk on gloved fists. As it turned out, nothing on this earth pulled a Florida family across a street faster than an enormous bird looking disappointed in them.

There was a line. There was a long line. Kids stood rapt. Grown men asked shy questions about wingspan. Kim smiled and patiently answered every question. The hawk just glared.

The only problem with the Raptor Center’s presence was that the Paws and Pours section was twenty feet away. We had, at the same benefit, on the same block, both predator and prey. Our brilliant Peter hadn’t thought that one through.

Dear God, the dogs had opinions about the owls.

Every dog on the street had spent its whole domestic life being assured it sat atop its own, very personal food chain. Every one of them took a single look at an owl swiveling its head a full one-eighty degrees and reconsidered its entire theology. A pack had gathered at the invisible line between the two exhibits, not barking, too smart to bark, just staring up at the birds with the deep, existential unease of animals who had recognized, for the first time, that those feathery things ate creatures like them.

A chihuahua tried to climb inside a cooler. Somebody’s labradoodle simply laid down and gave up. Dosty, my brave boy, took one look at the hawk from across the street and pressed himself so hard into Mark’s leg that Mark had to walk bowlegged for an hour.

“He’s fine,” I told Mark.

“He’s using me as a blast shield.”

“He knows quality cover when he sees it.”

“There is a bird looking at your dog like he’s a menu item, Dante. Your dog’s chosen me as the thing that dies first—”

“Family,” I chuckled and kissed his cheek, then left him there, load-bearing a greyhound.

Rod fed the entire street. He’d set up along the sidewalk with three flat-tops and Adrian at his side. He cooked for six hours without once sitting down. Ironically, the thing he cooked, the thing that had a line nearly as long as the hawk’s, was grilled cheese sandwiches.

Except Rod didn’t call them grilled cheese.

“Cheese Toastie,” he announced, handing one to a delighted child. “Next. Cheese Toastie. Next.”

“Rod.” Benji had drifted over, mic still hot, scandalized. “Cheese Toastie? What are you, British now? Did you leave for London and come back? These are grilled cheese sandwiches, you beautiful—”

Rod handed a Toastie to the next person in line and shrugged, unbothered, a man at total peace. “Is good name,” was all he said.

“It’s a colonizer’s name—”

“Next,” said Rod. “Cheese Toastie.”

And that was the end of it, because you couldn’t win against a man that serene, and Benji knew it. He took a Cheese Toastie and ate it in defeat, then filmed himself and called the sandwich “life-changing.”

The dunking booth almost caused a schism.

The problem was that everyone agreed we should have one, but nobody agreed on who should sit in it. Finn refused on the grounds of Irish dignity, whatever that was. Mark volunteered and was vetoed by me on the grounds that I was not going to spend the evening watching strangers throw balls at the man I loved. That was my job . . . with my balls. Benji wanted to do it for content and was vetoed by everyone on the grounds that Benji would somehow monetize it. Chase suggested Jacks. Jacks looked so betrayed that Chase apologized to him twice.

It was Tyler, the worst white-man-dancer ever to don a Lightning uniform, who settled it.

“I’ll do it,” he said, already unbuttoning his shirt while scanning for the best camera angle. “Are you kidding? If people pay to dunk a guy off the internet, they’ll give you all their money up to dunk an actual pro hockey player. Besides, have you seen my pecs? Look at these babies. Just watch. I’m a draw—”

“You are menace,” Erik said, fondly, in his flat Viking way.

“I’m a draw, Erik, a goddamned draw—”

And he was, God help us. He was a draw. The second word spread that attendees could dunk a Lightning player for five dollars a ball, the line snaked halfway down the block. People who’d never even watched a hockey game paid to throw at him. The gays bought shots just to stare at the muscular guy in the glass booth.

Tyler heckled every single thrower. He taunted children, blew kisses, and did commentary on his own dunking in a running patter that Benji filmed in its entirety. Every time somebody caught the target and dropped him into the tank, he popped out of the water with his arms in the air like he’d scored a goal. The whole street roared. He made, by the end of the night, nine hundred dollars, one ball at a time, being publicly humiliated on a stage in front of Ybor.