Courting Trouble

down his back. He was more muscular than the Kevin she knew, but maybe he had started working out in prison.

Anne heard the characteristic ringa-jinga of a summer Mummers string band, and a phalanx of harlequins in orange, magenta, and black sequins began to parade past. The costumes caught the sun in riotous color, and sky-high peacock feathers sprouted from their elaborate headpieces. The crowd burst into applause, except for the blond man pushing his way to the curb.

She wedged her way through people, toward the front. The music, clapping, and cheers got louder but she blocked it all out. The Mummers’ string band surged in full glory, then strutted by. The crowd, finally permitted to cross, pressed forward, with the blond man in the lead, crossing Broad Street, then breaking into a casual run.

No! “Please lemme through. I gotta get through!” Anne shouted and took off after him, fighting the crowd. Everybody was trying to cross at the parade break, west to east and east to west, jostling each other out of the way. She stayed on her feet but when she reached the other side of Broad, she’d lost sight of him.

No! Where was he? Anne looked wildly around. People were streaming toward Broad, and she ran the other way, sprinting upstream. Only an expert could sprint in Blahniks, and she qualified. When the crowd thickened, she jumped into the air to see him above the crowd.

There! Her heart leaped when she did. He was two blocks away! Straight down Locust, and he was taking a left, onto the cross street. She ran for it, confident that he couldn’t detect her now that he’d turned the corner. She banged into only one man and apologized over her shoulder as she turned the corner. Then she stopped. Kevin was nowhere in sight.

Anne looked desperately down the street. A young woman was striding toward her, a block away. She would have been on the block when Kevin turned onto it. Anne straightened her sunglasses and hurried over to her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m looking for my friend. He’s tall and blond, but he wears his hair really short, almost shaved. Did you see him? I thought I just saw him come around the corner.”

“Was he wearing a white T-shirt?”

“Yes!” Anne couldn’t believe her good luck, and the woman pointed to the top of the street. A windowless storefront lay in the next block, and it appeared to be open for a very active business. A crowd flowed into the place from the sidewalk, and red, white, and blue balloons flew from a sign. “In there?”

“Yeah. He went inside, I think.”

“Thank you!” Anne said. She almost hugged her, but remembered that she was Uncle Sam, so hugging strange women carried federal penalties. She caught her breath and made a beeline for the store.

10

Frankie & Johnny’s, said the sign on the storefront, in funky black letters. The windows had been covered with plywood and painted black, and the large front door, also black, was nondescript. Anne slowed her step, and a man at the end of a group going into the place smiled back at her as she fell into step behind him and went inside.

Dance music blared from the pitch-black within, and the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke assaulted her nose. She recognized the song instantly, The Weather Girls singing “It’s Raining Men.” And when her eyes adjusted to the light, Anne saw that it was. The place was packed with bodies moving to a single beat, and all of the bodies were male. Shirtless, tank-topped, flag-shirted, and tattooed; they were all men, with only one or two women. She turned around and peered through the darkness at the crowd near the door. They were all men, too. She stood, rooted uncertainly to the spot. She was inside a gay bar, for the first time in her life. Mental note: New things are disconcerting at first, then stay that way.

She suppressed the strangeness and tried to find Kevin in the crowd. Where was he? Redheads, shaved heads, brown hair, baldies, and fades; she couldn’t see the blond head for the darkness. The only illumination came from red, white, and blue spotlights roaming over the crowd, flashing with the boom- boom beat of the music. Everybody was moving, shifting, boogying, changing places. It was almost impossible to keep track of any one of them, and Anne couldn’t see a thing for the darkness and smoke. Not to mention her sunglasses. Was Kevin really in a gay bar? He wasn’t gay, not that she knew. He’d been fixated on her.

She lingered, confused. The bar had looked like a small storefront from the outside, but inside it was so much bigger, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling and a half-shell of a balcony that held dancing men and a stage. A long martini bar lined the room’s right side, and affixed to an immense mirror behind the bar flickered a huge martini glass in hot-red neon. Anne used the mirror to try to find Kevin, but all it reflected was an anonymous, sweating throng of men.

Wasn’t there a bouncer at the door? Everybody here was built like a bouncer. She peered through the cigarette smoke at men pouring into the bar. Behind them she spotted a muscle-bound man in a white tank top bearing the bar’s logo. She wedged her way to him, breathing in the commingled odors of chocolate martini and Paco Rabanne. “Excuse me,” she shouted to the doorman, to be heard over the music, “did you see a blond, tall, white guy come in here, just a minute ago? His hair is short and he’s muscular. He was wearing a white T- shirt!”

“Yeah, plenty!” The guard cupped his hands around his mouth. “Why, he underage?”

“No, but I have to find—” Anne started to say, but the crowd came between them, dancing as soon as they came in the door and crossed the threshold. Her heart sank with the realization that Kevin could have gotten past the guard the same way she did, on the far side of a big group. Maybe someone else had seen him come in.

She made her way to the other side of the packed entrance, where a lineup of flat-screen TVs mounted ceiling-height showed a Jennifer Lopez video on mute. Anne sidestepped to two men standing against the dark wall near the door, who were wearing matching white tank tops with jeans shorts. “Excuse me!” she shouted, and they turned to her, still moving to the boom-boom. “Excuse me, did you see a man just come in here, five minutes ago? About thirty, blond, tall, very muscular?”

“Don’t I wish!” shouted one of the men, and they both laughed. Other men stood grouped around the door, all of them drinking and bopping to the music, which was segueing into Grace Jones’s “I Need a Man.” She approached the second group, but they hadn’t seen the man. Neither had the third group. The fourth asked her if she wanted to party, and the fifth told her that her sunglasses were so Six Flags. She agreed, but like Grace Jones, she still needed a man. A blond man in particular.

She looked around. All she could see with any clarity at all was a bartender by the cash register, illuminated by a single pool of halogen. He also wore a white bar-logo tank top and was shaking a gleaming martini shaker. She made her way through the crowd to the bar, which was packed, and finally got the bartender’s attention. “I’m trying to find somebody, a blond man in a T-shirt. It’s really important.”

“Did you ask one of the Muscle Queens?” he shouted, and when Anne looked puzzled, he translated. “Security.”

“I didn’t see any security, I asked the doorman.”

“Then try the manager, in the back office. He can help you.” The bartender waved her off, responding to the clamoring customers, and she edged from the bar, made her way around the dance floor, and found an office, past the rest rooms. She knocked on the black door and laughed with surprise when it opened. The manager was dressed like Uncle Sam, too, but in a classy beard, real satin stovepipe, and a shiny blue jacket with fancy lapels.

“I’m jealous,” Anne said. “You have the jacket.”

“No, I’m jealous! You have the Blahniks.”

Anne laughed. “But my sunglasses are so Six Flags.”

“That’s why they’re great!”

Anne slid them off, feeling fairly safe with him. He wouldn’t recognize her and he certainly wouldn’t hit on her. “Can I bother you a minute?” she asked.

“Sure, come on in.” He ushered Anne into his office. He had a Madonna-type headset hanging around his neck, was about five foot eight or so, with silvering at his close-cropped sideburns, and he was slightly overweight. Mental note: Evidently not all gay men work out, which is to their credit. “What’s your name?” he asked.

Uh. “Sam?”