“Uh . . .” I don’t have much of a nightlife these days. And if I did, I’m guessing a place called Swine would not be part of it.

“Brooklyn!” she yells. She tacks on an intersection to narrow it down for me.

“Okay?”

“Do you know a guy called Reid?”

“I do!” I press a finger to my ear, now desperate to hear better, a bolt of anxiety landing straight in my stomach. “Is he all right?”

She laughs. “He’s fine and dandy. Probably he wouldn’t want me calling you, but I think he might’ve lost his phone or something.”

“Oh,” I say, confused. Who would ever describe Reid as “dandy”? Why is he at a bar called Swine? And, for the purposes of my absolute selfishness in regard to this particular matter, did he lose his phone before or after my attempts to reach him?

“I don’t—I’m not sure why you’re calling me?”

“Well, honey,” Gretchen says, laughing over a loud clatter of ice being put into a glass. “He just tried to pay his bar tab with your business card.”

It isn’t where I’d want to have my first fight practice.

Swine is the kind of bar that might make a tourist happy, that might make it into a guidebook for its gimmicky theme, its eagerness to attract a crowd. Oddly enough, the exterior is something Reid and I might’ve snapped a photo of on a walk—a white brick wall with bold, black block lettering, a big drop shadow with diagonal grading, a crude but clever outline of a pig, its various good-for-food parts blocked out and labeled in a thin slab serif. Over an arched opening in the wall there’s a curving script indicating a “Biergarten,” a patio from which plumes of woody smoke rise into the night sky.

But outside of its clever lettering, everything else about this place tells me Reid—and I—would’ve wanted to keep on walking. So far as I can tell, there’s about ten million people in that Biergarten, and every man I can see is wearing some version of the same outfit: boat shoes, no socks, cropped-style khakis or slim-cut shorts, pastel-colored shirts. I almost check my phone to see if I’ve teleported out of Brooklyn into some college town’s rush week.

It’s so incongruous to imagine Reid here that I don’t let myself wonder at my surroundings for long. I push through the heavy front doors into the non-Biergarten part of this sideshow and am met with a wall of noise. The crowd in here is different, more skinny jeans and beards, even a few leather bracelets.

So it’s pretty easy to find the man I came for.