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By Root 1057 0

he ordered a Ballantine and nibbled at the beer nuts. He took a long swallow from the brown bottle and looked around the club. He wanted to remember the details, the table by the window where a mound of fried shrimp and crab cakes attracted really hungry foxes, the corner off to the side where couples did the bob and the cha-cha to the Four Tops crooning “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” the card game going on in the back; he could tell it was a card game by the high-roller look to the men getting the nod to go on back by the substantial bouncers. The sounds of laughter mixed with the music and booming conversations swirled around his head as if a flock of giggling, cursing geese circled overhead. He wanted to be able to drop the details on Perry tomorrow, wanted to let him know that yet another Saturday night had come and gone and he had handled himself on the Strip. He turned and looked around him; he had taken Perry’s warning seriously about watching his back, but the figure approaching him now, squeezing between the cigarette-smoking, fried shrimp–eating, hand-slapping bouquet of partyers made him straighten his back and adjust his shirt collar over his windbreaker jacket. She had a creamy brown face framed by a startling yellow headband that pushed her Afro back into a puff of hair and gave her a look of regality. Sizable gold hoops dropped from her ears, her neck, all along her tight black shell, her arms; even a gold-hooped chain belt hung around her black and yellow–striped hipster skirt. She made an opening through the clump of loud talkers that separated her from the bar and was now walking, no, it seemed to Tyrone, floating right toward him.

She lowered her eyes, a subtle way of saying hello, he realized, as he tried to match it with his own brand of cool. But the sensation taking him over now would not be subdued and turned his mouth up into a smile so wide he was embarrassed.

“Hey, young blood,” she whispered into his ear, and he felt as though the caramel-shaded frosted lipstick she wore coated her words and melted to a warm sweetness in his ear.

“You of age, young blood, in case they start carding in here tonight?”

“I got more than a card to prove my age, baby. But how about if I start by offering you a drink?” He tried to keep a point on the ends of his words so that his drawl wouldn’t creep through.

“Scotch and soda,” she said to the bartender, who was now standing right in front of where Tyrone sat.

“Another Ballantine,” Tyrone said as he put a five-dollar bill on the bar and got down from the stool so that she could sit. He edged his body in next to her and smiled and lifted one eyebrow slightly. He hoped she could see it through the blue air; he’d come to know the effect his eyebrows had on women. Even though it still caught him by surprise when a beautiful woman responded to him with passion-tinged breathlessness. It certainly had with Ramona. Right after their first date, when they’d taken the subway over to North Philly to the Uptown to see Sam and Dave, Martha and the Vandellas, the Delfonics, after they got off the el, tired and hoarse from the audience participation those shows evoked, he offered to give her a tour of his father’s printshop. She’d seemed mildly impressed as he told her how he worked such and such printer, and mixed colors, and spread ink. And when they were getting ready to go, he raised his eyebrow, not as an overture, more just asking, so what do you think? She was all over him then; her lips covered his face, his neck, almost popping the buttons on his shirt, trying to get to his bare chest. He pushed Ramona from his mind now. She hadn’t come on to him like that since.

The bartender placed their drinks; she clinked her glass against his beer bottle and then drained it. He tapped his finger against the bar to the beat of the music and pretended not to be shocked at the speed at which she emptied her glass.

“Okay, young blood, so you were gonna prove your age.” She swiveled the stool so that she was talking right in his face. He thought he could smell her lipstick. “What you