It is a nightly performance, a curious sort of automobile ballet on the quaint wide boulevard that meanders through the north end of Lincoln Park. Every model car imaginable wanders, weaves, pauses, turns around, speeds up, slows down. The lone drivers are also of every sort imaginable–white, black, brown, Asian, young and old. They have one thing in common, though; they’re all men.
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Surely this stretch of parkland, from Montrose to Foster, is one of the sex centers of the city. Nearer the lake and the Drive, in the unlighted parking lots on either side of the boulevard, teens writhe against each other in the back seats of cars, and stony-faced businessmen accept the ministrations of street hookers they’ve found on Broadway and Sheridan. For them the draw is darkness–not being seen. Here, on the well-lighted boulevard, seeing and being seen come first.
The man in the brown jacket froze. To judge from the panic in his eyes, the couple was his boss and his wife, or his minister and his wife. Or a couple of reporters out taking names and snapping pictures. His face would be plastered on the front page of the Sunday Trib. His wife and children would boot him out of his comfortable Franklin Park home. He’d be fired and his bank account gutted. He’d be arrested and charged with sexual perversion. He’d be slapped in the state prison at Joliet, where inmates would dispense their peculiar justice by turning him into their sexual plaything.
Pulling into one of the unlighted lots, the Escort escaped the glare of the boulevard’s streetlights. Again he kept his headlights on, breaking another code here. His beam flooded the interior of a car, apparently unoccupied. Suddenly a girl’s head popped up. With disdain on her face, she flashed the finger. Quickly the Escort’s lights went out.
