Don’t Mess With A Mustachioed Man Part 2…

This is a continuation of “Don’t Mess WIth a Mustachioed Man Part 1” Check it out if you haven’t!

Where we last left off, an angry Drunk Guy on a Virgin America Flight I was on, was up in the flight attendants faces, pissed off because they wouldn’t serve him more booze and because he had overheard me talking to them about his level of drunkenness, I now return you to Drunk Guy On a Plane Theater:

“You lied to me! You son of a bitch.”

“Sir, you need to return to your seat.”

Angrily, “I will not return until you tell me why you lied to me! I thought you weren’t serving me because the flight is almost over but the truth is, you think I am too drunk!” If you find yourself in an argument where you are arguing your level of drunkenness, there is a good chance you are “too drunk.”(Unless that argument is “You are too drunk to stand here and pee your pants…”) Now if the flight attendants are politely hinting that you have had too much to drink, take the freaking hint. Don’t push it, because they are trained to be very sensitive to the matter because of FAA rules. It’s not like the swinging sixties when you could drink ten high ball and take your pants off and your fellow passengers would laugh and follow suit. It’s the post 9/11 world where your fellow passengers are just hoping for their chance to go viral as a plane hero smacking down a potential drunk terrorist.

“We need you, Ron Burgundy.”

So the flight attendants are starting to get frank with the drunken man, “Sir, you have clearly had too many. We are trying to be polite…” Our perp just kept arguing though:

“You were lying to me. You couldn’t tell me to my face that you thought I had too many…” He started to drops f-bombs and get physically aggressive too. Now normally I am the kind of guy who would just look at the person next to him and say a snarky comment like, “Somebody needs a visit from the clue-fairy.” (Honestly I don’t see myself as saying that, but I couldn’t think of any other snarky comments.)  But as I looked beside me, I saw the family with their little girl, I heard the murmurs of people behind me, “Superman save us…”, and I heard the flight attendant’s voices start to elevate in pitch. They needed back-up. They needed someone to break this guy out of his psycho-drunk logic and get him to sit down. They needed a guy with a mustache.

Since I am new to being a man of action, I had to go through a game plan in my head, to make sure I got it right. “Okay. I am in full-uniform. He will probably think I am the pilot of this plane. Who would mess with the pilot of the plane? Only an absolute nut. If he gets aggressive I’ll go for his legs. Do you think he is going to get aggressive? Why haven’t you watched more MMA? It could help you in a situation like this…” So after what seemed like an hour of coming up with a rock-solid game plane,  I took one look across the aisle at the dad holding his girl gave him a nod and then sprung into action.

When you are the tall guy, it feels really good.

I stood up behind Drunk Guy and realized that I was a half a foot taller than he was. There is no better feeling to a conflict-adverse wimp like myself than to realize the your foe is six inches shorter than you. Of course that feeling of superiority can quickly disappear when you realize your foe is a Muay Thai master. Lucky for me, in this case he was not (or if he was, he exercised Muay Thai restraint).

…Unless the short-guy is Bruce Lee.

I put my hand firmly on his shoulder and caught him by surprise with my best Val Kilmer-Doc Holliday voice, “Sir, you need to sit down now.” He quit talking. He turned around and I like to believe got one look at my mustache and said (drum roll), “Okay.” Then he sat down. I gave a mustached-wink to the flight attendants and sat back down. Nobody said it out loud at that point, but I knew what they were all thinking, “That man is our hero!” I wasn’t sure, but I kind of thought they might radio ahead and schedule a ticker-tape parade for me. But I didn’t want any of that. For a guy with a mustache, thanks is more than enough. That’s just how mustache-guys are.

As I was sitting in my seat, getting back to the Direct TV and self-congratulations and going over my briliantly concieved plan, Drunk Guy yell-whispered to me, “Hey! Hey thanks man. It would be nice if you actually worked for this airline.” Shoot. Turns out Mr. Drunk Guy was more observant than me and had happened to notice that Virgin pilots are the only pilots in the industry that wear solid black shirts and I of course was wearing a white button up. Later he made a very quiet trip to the lav, but passive aggressively shined his cell phone light in my eyes. I had to reel in the mustache at that point because part of me was thinking,

These guys clearly have evil-mustaches. They bring similar powers as a good mustaches but with a sinister vibe.

“Oh he didn’t. It’s mutha-f-ing-go-time.” But I decided that I had enough conflict for the day. After that, Drunk Guy sat down quietly for the rest of the otherwise uneventful flight. We landed on time. Pulled to the gate without incident. The flight attendants did come by and thank me and all was good with the world.

EXCEPT: That warning I told you about. One of the fight attendants had radioed up to the captain at some point and said they had an aggressive passenger in the back. apparently they had never called back up and said that everything was fine because when we landed, the captain came over the radio and told everyone to remain seated. LAW ENFORCEMENT was coming on board to remove a Drunk Guy! I would have felt a little bad for him if he hadn’t done the thing with his cell-phone light. But I tell you who I did feel bad for: his girlfriend. She was not involved in the incident, but Drunk Guy asked the cops if she could come too. So this poor woman who looked beat-down by years of living with the drunken tool, had to be escorted off the plane by the law men in front of an entirely full flight.

It was okay to drink on Led Zepplin’s airplane. In fact if you weren’t drunk and unruly you were tossed out the back without a parachute.

I couldn’t help but feel a little responsible for the incident, after all if I hadn’t gone to the back and dissed on the Drunk Guy with the flight attendants, the dude would have never gotten so aggravated, but in this day and age, you just can’t get drunk and angry on an airplane without some repercussions. I mean there was a family that caused a flight to divert just because they complained about the in-flight movie!

Radio Shack still exists. How? I’d just like to say that the toys from Radio Shack were the worst ever.

The truth is, even though I would have loved to hunker down and do nothing that day, there are times in a man’s life when he is called upon to take action. For a man with a mustache, those moments come more often than for others: shooting a man between the eyes, making love to a beautiful woman after you have just made love to a beautiful woman, calling out a bait and switch sales technique at Radio Shack, etc. You have to answer, “Yes, ” at those moments because if you don’t, your mustache will anyway.