It was an early Saturday October evening. Nathaniel sat in his car on a shady residential street in Glendale. Satellite Sports Radio 3 was playing the UCLA football game. Nathaniel parked there from time to time. It was a pretty street with mature magnolia and oak trees, manicured lawns, and bungalows with wide heavy porches and a pumpkin by the door. He was there to listen to the game and enjoy the beautiful and cool evening. The sky was on fire at one end and dark blue on the other. The scent of eucalyptus and magnolia trees sat heavy in the air.
Every evening was like this, the sweet air of citrus trees and magnolia flowers, and the ocean mist that settles over the city eventually becomes an orange fog covering a grid of lights stretching in every direction. Tonight will be a good night to sleep with the windows open. Tomorrow morning he will run 5 miles in Griffith Park. He’ll go to the Ghetty with a close friend, check it off the list of places he wanted to see in LA before the end of the year. Tomorrow they’ll eat mushrooms in the parking lot and avoid being chatty on the tram heading up the hill. They’ll sit on the lawn overlooking Los Angeles just in time to enjoy rest of the evening. His friend wants to eat chili cheese dogs at Tommy’s on Colorado Blvd. The one up the street and across from the 7-11, or down and across the street from Trader Joe’s if you’re coming from Pasadena.
Joggers went by, then folks walking their dogs, and eventually a steady flow of people enjoying their evening, waving and grinning past each other. Black people, white people, a few Asians, lots of strollers and spandex jockeys commanding their fast bikes briskly moved past Nathaniel’s truck. The evening’s light dimmed, covered ones skin and the neighborhood’s stucco homes in varying shades of blue.
One of the walkers stood out. He wore a white track-suit with green stripes and the logo of an athletic shoe company. He was a thick fellow with a puffy Elvis pompadour, sideburns, yesterday’s 5 o-clock shadow, amber lens sunglasses, and gold chains. His headset blasting Cindy Lauper’s “Good enough”, the song from the Goonies, a movie made in the 1980’s about a gang of white kids and one Asian who search for pirate treasure. The track suit struts past Nathaniel’s car, like the star football player in those high school movies. It was his world. His outfit was slick and the hair was right.
The song trailed off as he made his way down the street, eventually boarding the passenger side of a car at the end of the block. There was another man in the drivers side. Nathaniel mused about the posibilites. A drug deal is too easy, a private eye delivering the goods on a cheating spouse is predictable, and a man-on-man sexual transaction between two strangers sounds absurd. He couldn’t make out the other person, just silhouettes.
The street lights came on. There were far less people out now, just a few joggers. A short while later he hears a loud thud and a flash of light from the car down the block. A cyclist also notices, slows down, looks back, then decides to continue his route up the street, around to Verdugo Blvd, and up the road to La Canada and a warm shower. Tonight the biker will treat himself to the Warehouse Store frozen pizza his sons left behind when they were over last weekend.
Nathaniel kept his gaze in the direction of the car. After a few minutes the track suit exits the passenger side door, pulls up his pants and fixes himself, closes the door and struts back towards Nathaniel’s car, they catch a glimpse of each other, the young lad enjoying a Saturday evening in his car and a middle aged man strutting a new track-suit, off-white, green stripes, soft, flexible, warm, and not a drop of blood. He nods at Nathaniel and Nathaniel nods back. He disappears around the corner. The game was over, UCLA 34 - Oregon State 14. Post game announcers and the sound of barking dogs down the street punctuated the evening. Nathaniel’s edible was wearing out.