Launched a Kickstarter to raise money for my book “Crowded: Portrait of Life on a Teeming Planet”

I’m writing a book proposal currently titled Crowded: Portrait of Life on a Teeming Planet. In an effort to raise money to fund two short reporting trips to finish the proposal, I’ve launched a Kickstarter.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2116677151/crowded-portrait-of-life-on-a-teeming-planet

The Architecture of Density, by photographer Michael Wolf

The book is narrative nonfiction about the profound yet overlooked ways dense communal living has shaped human affairs, including everything from our moods to our businesses to interior design. Crowding isn’t just an environmental and urban design issue. It’s a social, psychological and moral issue. With over half the world population now living in cities, it’s also our future. As the novelist Don DeLillo said, “The future belongs to crowds.” I plan to portray what that future looks like, how we’re preparing for it, and write the first book to detail exactly how crowds have shaped human history through time. Once I finish the proposal, I can find the right publisher and get to good hard work of writing the rest of the book.

I’m trying to raise  $3,000 by June 1st. Funds will cover flights to Tokyo and New York City, and small rooms in lean, inexpensive lodging like the YMCA and a capsule hotel. I’ve never asked people for financial help before, but I’m enormously passionate about this book, more excited than I’ve ever been about a project, and I believe that the subject’s global scope will impact the lives of city-dwellers both in the U.S., Canada and in Europe, and in developing countries such as China, India and Bangladesh. Maybe it’s a tall order, but it’s also a big world, and I want to make this book happen any way that I can, so I’m asking for help. As the saying goes, where there’s a will. If you feel like contributing a little, be it financially or by spreading the word, here’s more information.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2116677151/crowded-portrait-of-life-on-a-teeming-planet

Thank you for helping make Crowded a compelling read and a book to be proud of.

Love to all,

Aaron

Roundtable discussion about travel chapbooks at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Am happy to share this roundtable chat I had with writers Courtney Maum and Bart Schaneman over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. The subject was travel writing and chapbooks. Tobias Carroll asked the questions, and I was as excited to hear Courtney and Bart’s answers as I was to have to think about these topics myself. Here’s the link:

 

http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2013/05/13/talking-travel-chapbooks-and-a-sense-of-place-with-courtney-maum-aaron-gilbreath-and-bart-schaneman/

 

Make sure to order copies of Courtney’s chapbook Notes from Mexico here at The Cupboard, and Bart Schaneman’s Trans-Siberian here or over at Thought Catalog. You can still order my chapbook A Secondary Landscape here at Future Tense Books.

 

My Self-Published New York Times “Metropolitan Diary” Piece

            Whenever people tell me that New Yorkers are unfriendly, I tell them a story. In the Park and 33^rd subway station one February morning, I noticed someone leading a pale woman by the arm in a crowd of commuters.

            When I offered help, the first woman said, “I think she’s diabetic. Are you diabetic?” The second woman shook her head and moaned. Her eyes were open but registered nothing. The first woman introduced herself as Margo, and the stranger in her arms as Carly. “You’re going to be okay, just take slow deep breaths.” I took Carly’s free arm and helped her up the stairs. Amid the crush of pedestrians, she squeezed my hand, and I held it tight.

            We sat her on Park and leaned her against a building where she crumpled over, head down, arms in her lap. “Carly?” I said. “Can you hear me?” Margo called the paramedics.

            Pedestrians streamed by. The sun warmed the frigid air. A passerby in a suit stopped and took her pulse. “You eaten?” he said. She shook her head no. To raise her blood sugar, I gave her the only sugary thing I had: a ginseng sucker.

            I ran inside a store to get water. When I returned, a doctor in gym clothes stood in the first stranger’s place, asking pointed questions. Carly admitted she hadn’t eaten since 9pm the previous night.

            A woman stopped and asked us if everything was okay. “I’m a nurse,” she said.

            “I know CPR,” said another passerby. “If you need it.”

            At Carly’s request, Margo called her boss to say there was a problem. She worked at a nearby fitness magazine. Minutes later, a short woman bounded across the street.“Oh no!” she said, and stroked Carly’s hair.

            The doctor disappeared but left his card. We all joked about the great medical services on the street.

            Before the paramedics arrived and lectured us on eating habits, Carly looked up and, for the first time, seemed to make out our faces. To me she said, “That sucker you gave me was dee-sgusting.” Shelaughed. We all did.

NOTE: Here’s where the published Metropolitan Diary pieces appear. It’s a lively section, always worth reading:  http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/category/metropolitan-diary/

Next Big Thing blog chain

Many, many thanks to writer and NYLON editor Melissa Giannini for passing me the mic to do this Next Big Thing post. Below is my interview about two works of narrative nonfiction I’m writing. I’m proud to pass the mic to the super talented essayist and memoirist Steven Church, author of The Guinness Book of Me and The Day After the Day After: My Atomic Angst, and co-editor of the literary magazine The Normal School. Check the mic, one-two.

What is the working title of your book?

Currently, it’s Crowded: Portrait of Life on a Teeming Planet, though it’s hard to settle on a title until the entire story’s been written. I’m also working on another book of narrative nonfiction, this one a first-person narrative travelogue set in Canada. It’s called Canphilia. It’s essentially my attempt to understand Canada and Canadians, and to reconcile my ignorance with my strong attraction to the country. Since that book is slower-going, Crowded has overtaken it. But that’s what crowds do, I guess.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea for Canphilia came like many of my essay ideas: from looking closely at my fixations. I’m obsessive. I fall deeply, and my interests lead me to read and learn as much about various subjects as I can. Be it music, food, a city or book, people or myself — I want to experience life fully, and to understand. I’ve been enchanted by Canada for about half my life, but one day I realized how strange a fixation that was since, despite having some Canadian friends and taken a few long trips through the western provinces, I didn’t really know much about the culture. I realized that my issue reflected that of many Americans: we shared the world’s longest international border with the world’s second largest country, and we knew little more about Canadians than clichés. That became my theme: do we even know what makes a Canadian a Canadian? What they stand for? How they think and act? And what do they think of us, anyway?  I spent months shaping that into a book proposal, and now I’m plotting my drive across their country in search of some enlightenment. The idea for Crowded came from feeling crowded in my daily life, which I’ll talk about more below.

What genre does your book fall under?

Crowded and Canphilia are narrative nonfiction, though I’ve been calling the former a narrative social history, and the latter a first-person narrative travelogue. They mix essay, memoir, participatory journalism, scientific exposition, profiles and history. It’s storytelling, swift and built from scenes, dialogue, action and characters, all accurately reported.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? 

Jawas, all the way. I’d have Tusken Raiders work the crew’s food service stations.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book? 

Canphilia: Who are the Canadian people, and why do I long to live somewhere I know so little about? Crowded: The story of one loner’s vision of human history through the story of the crowd.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’m still writing both books, but I only started Crowded in late January, so I’m making good time. Sleep is overrated, especially when you work tea shop (caffeine).

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre? 

Some stellar works of participatory journalism and narrative nonfiction that I love and keep high on my bookshelf: Taras Grescoe’s The Devil’s Picnic: Around the World in Pursuit of Forbidden Fruit, Susan Orlean’s Saturday Night, Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, and Bill Bufford’s Among the Thugs.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

For Crowded, real life. I was eating lunch inside a café across the street from work. The place was packed but thankfully not as noisy as it can be. I was reading the Susan Orlean chapter of Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft, and when a guy sat down next to me, a few lines came to mind: how much elbow room do you need to get by in life? To thrive or just keep your sanity? I scribbled them down on one of the stained wrinkled pages in the back of the book, then I had to race back to work since my thirty minutes were over. The next day, I typed the scribbles and kept exploring the basic idea, expanding the range of my gaze and spelunking all the fissures in the topic, and I kept looking more closely at my life. The subject was all there, all around me. Now I have a stack of library books about sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology, ancient England and China, and photocopies of all sorts of music and historic stuff, and a thick manuscript. It’s fun, and it all started with a stray thought following a bowl of soup.

What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?

The fact that, if you live in or near a city — which over half the human population now does — you can relate to it. If you’ve ever sat near a screaming baby on a plane, watched someone in line buy the last pastry, struggled to find something on your messy office desk, or been smooshed at an awesome, sweaty rock show, then this is your story. Also, the human comedy of urban life, sleeping in a closet, scrambling over people on trains, and brushing your teeth while you pee and check your phone and close a cabinet. Life is crazy.

When and how will it be published?

With hope and with time. Meaning, hopefully sometime! (And the help of my brilliant, tireless agent.)

Joseph Mitchell’s first piece of published writing since 1965: “Street Life”

Revered nonfiction writer Joseph Mitchell worked for The New Yorker from 1938 to 1996 but never published a word after 1965. The first new work of his to appear in forty-eight years did exactly that: appeared. With little fanfare or announcement of its arrival, not even a perfunctory tweet, the piece was slipped inside The New Yorker’s February 11, 2013 issue with all the ceremony of a subscription card.

Entitled “Street Life,” the piece is one of three excerpts from a memoir that he started in the late 1960s and early ’70s and never finished. After filing his classic profile “Joe Gould’s Secret” in 1964, Mitchell never submitted anything else for publication. For the next thirty-two years, the magazine kept him in their employ. He regularly came to his office, dressed in suit and tie. His colleagues heard typewriter keys tapping behind his closed door. They passed him in the hallway and rode the elevator with him. This is how it went until he died in 1996 at age eighty-seven. No one knew what he was working on, and no one seems to have asked. As fellow staff writer Roger Angell later wrote: “No one made jokes about him, or expressed ill temper about him; there was pride, in fact, about working for a place that would indulge such an epochal oddity. The piece, when it came, would be worth the wait.” The piece people expected never arrived. Unless Mitchell biographer Thomas Kunkel finds unpublished profiles in the author’s papers, these three first-person narratives might be the only new work readers get. The question is whether they were worth the wait.

This new excerpt comes to us from Thomas Kunkel, author of Genius in Disguise, the biography of New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross. Kunkel discovered it and the others while researching a forthcoming Mitchell biography. The New Yorker plans to publish the other excerpts at some point in the future.

I’ve written about Mitchell before, specifically about his enormous direct quotations and what they reveal about the nature of truth versus fact in narrative nonfiction. Like many Joseph Mitchell devotees, I’d been waiting years to read something new from him—ten, to be exact. Other fans, some who have been reading Mitchell since the ’60s, had been waiting forty years. And then there it was, a gem hewed from Mitchell’s estate, nestled between pieces from Susan Orlean, Adam Gopnik and Ian Frazier, regular contributors whose company might have made Mitchell’s presence and this February issue seem like any other, were his work and legend not partially defined by his preoccupations with death, the past and gallows humor. In this darker light, his story carries the eerie sheen of a message from the grave.

I discovered the piece accidentally early Sunday morning. My girlfriend and I were lying in bed, flipping through the magazine, when I saw the words “By Joseph Mitchell” and sat straight up. “Mitchell?” I said. I stared in disbelief at the author’s photo on the title page: the unmistakable figure in a dark suit, hands sunk in his pockets, one foot folded over the other, standing confidently in front of Sloppy Louie’s, a seafood restaurant whose owner Mitchell profiled in his well-known piece “Up in the Old Hotel” in 1952. This memoir, and his visage, came out of nowhere. The suddenness of it, like his sly expression and distant stare, gave me chills. Here was a man reporting on his own life seventeen years after it ended, in words he put down four decades ago. I read “Street Life” twice that day.

As someone who has read about Mitchell extensively, I’m tempted to say that I knew this work was there, hidden in his papers among the discarded profiles and pieces that went nowhere. Signs of continued production pepper the historic record. Besides the recollections of colleagues hearing Mitchell’s typewriter keys, Mitchell’s daughter Nora Mitchell Sanborn told The Guardian in 2012: “[My] father was always writing. He would talk about certain projects and get involved in a million things. He had oceans of paper in many file cabinets, at home and at the office. Unfortunately these papers have been in storage since he died and in the charge of his executor [from whom his daughters are estranged].” The truth is that I never would have guessed those oceans of paper contained a memoir.

In The New York Times recently, New Yorker editor David Remnick said, “What’s so poignant about [the excerpts] is the sadness of the incompletion but the brilliance of the voice.” The voice, the declarative sentences, the catalogues of details, many of the hallmarks of Mitchell’s canonical nonfiction are here. What’s different is the volume: that recognizable voice often takes a maximalist tone, what Remnick describes as “more Joycean.” Mitchell is still pushing the boundaries of the form, seeing how much material he can include before the paragraphs bend and narrative snaps. But the lengthy sentences, long lists and repetition that defined pieces like “Old Mister Flood” and “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” now exhibit a manic quality. Where older pieces contained direct quotation that ran between four and ten straight pages, here we have a sentence on the first page that contains four hundred and thirty-nine words, thirty-one commas, one emdash, one parenthetical remark and a semicolon. Many paragraphs in “Street Life” reach such a dizzying pitch that you question the author’s mental state, even wonder if some sort of psychological collapse caused his forty-year silence. For some readers, the voice will try their patience and cause them to turn to the next piece. For others, the voice will deliver exactly what we’ve been missing.

“I keep on walking,” Mitchell says early on, “sometimes only for a couple of hours but sometimes until deep in the afternoon, and I often wind up a considerable distance away from midtown Manhattan—up in the Bronx Terminal Market maybe, or over on some tumbledown old sugar dock on the Brooklyn riverfront, or out in the weediest part of some weedy old cemetery in Queens. It is never very hard for me to think up and excuse that justifies me in behaving this way (I have a great deal of experience in justifying myself to myself)—a headache that won’t let up is a good enough excuse, and an unusually bleak and overcast day is as good an excuse as an unusually balmy and springlike day.”

At another point he says: “[I] have been down in three tunnels while they were under construction—the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel—and watched the sandhogs forcing their way inch by inch through the riverbed.”

Later he says: “Pretty soon my obsessive curiosity began to dominate me, and I went to a succession of Masses in St. Patrick’s that encompassed seven Sundays, the Easter-cycle Masses, and then I went to Masses in such representative Eastern Catholic churches that are in union with Rome, Syrian-rite churches and Byzantine-rite churches and Armenian-rite churches; and then I went to Masses or Liturgies in some Orthodox churches, Greek Orthodox churches and Russian Orthodox churches and Carpatho-Russian Orthodox churches and Ukrainian Orthodox churches and Bulgarian Orthodox churches and Serbian Orthodox churches and Romanian Orthodox churches; and then I went to Liturgies in two so-called Old Catholic churches, one that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Manhattan and another that I found in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn.” It isn’t simply the information that’s important here, it’s the pleasure the author and the reader experience while hearing these items strung together, side-by-side. To my ear, it seems Mitchell has fallen in love with the sound of it all, the way each name offers a variation on the theme of churches and tunnels, Orthodox this and Orthodox that, adding a slight twist to the stock he’s temporarily toying with. In this way, Mitchell resembles a baby making sounds after discovering the sonic capabilities of its lips. The fact that the person who wrote this was well into middle age makes you think that, despite the dearth of published work, Mitchell still found great pleasure in working with words.

If this piece provides many readers with their first taste of Mitchell, the exuberance and details might not provide a good introduction. It piece might run some of them off.

In addition to the strength of Mitchell’s voice, the other difference between “Street Life” and his previous work is the subject matter. In place of characters like Joe Gould, shad fisherman and Caughnawaga Indian construction workers, the piece’s central character is Mitchell himself. Irrespective of its origins, this is the rarest sort of Mitchell piece: an entirely first-person narrative.

In it, he describes his compulsive wandering around New York City. He talks about what he calls his “obsessive curiosity,” and his attraction to “old restaurants, old saloons, old tenement houses, old police stations, old court houses, old newspaper plants, old banks, and old skyscrapers.” In a broad sense, “Street Life” tells readers a lot of what they already know: the aimless walking, the preoccupations with old New York, marginal New York, underground, off-limits and working class New York. Setting the scenes of his profiles, Mitchell often included comments about his personal habits. The most recognizable might be the opening lines of “Up in the Old Hotel,” where he says, “Every now and then, seeking to rid my thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market. I usually arrive around five-thirty, and take a walk through the two huge open-fronted market sheds, the Old Market and the New Market, whose fronts rest on South Street and whose backs rest on piles in the East River.” Mitchell opens “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” which an equally dark, revealing admission: “When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries there. …Invariably, for some reason I don’t know and don’t want to know, after I have spent an hour or so in one of these cemeteries, looking at gravestone designs and reading inscriptions and identifying wild flowers and scaring rabbits out of the weeds and reflecting on the end that awaits me and awaits us all, my spirits lift, I become quite cheerful, and then I go for a long walk.”

If the themes are the same, “Street Life” offers unique particulars. We learn about a few specific moments from his explorations – his encounter with a priest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, for instance, who told him “a church is simply four walls and a floor and a roof inside of which the Mass is celebrated. Never mind the ins and outs of the architecture,” and the way a certain Mass gave Mitchell “an aperture through which I could look into my unconscious, a tiny crack in a wall that all my adult life I had been striving to see through or over or around—” For all its detail and personal revelation, though, “Street Life” never answers the question at the core of his legacy: What else was Mitchell working on all those years?

For seven pages, Mitchell speaks in a controlled frenzy, cataloguing his travels and the city’s topography, and when your patience starts to wane and you begin to wonder where the author is going with all this, he ends a sixty-seven line paragraph to say, “And now I must get to the point.” He then goes on for thirty-one more lines – not lists but a candid description of his paralyzing homesickness, where he felt at home neither in New York nor his native North Carolina – before drawing to what feels like a close: “Then, one Saturday afternoon, while I was walking around in the ruins of Washington Market, something happened to me that led me, step by step, out of my depression.” Ah, you think, here it comes, the moment of revelation, the insight we seek, a portrait of what he was doing for forty years behind his closed office door. Instead, he says, “A change took place in me. And this is what I want to tell you about,” and a black diamond icon marks the piece’s end. Because Mitchell never finished the memoir, we assume he never got around to writing the section that would have addressed this.

“Street Life” provides a deeper look inside the mind of one of our best nonfiction writers, but its charms cause certain frustrations. To fans, Mitchell’s life was already incomplete. The memoir reminds us of this. After making peace with the permanence of the Mitchell mystery and the finality of his work, this story comes along out of nowhere and stirs up the kind of sediments that Mitchell’s characters dredged for fish and oysters, leaving readers with a renewed and possibly irrational feeling of hope, a sense that we might finally find out what he was working on all those years, if not here in “Street Life,” then maybe in the next memoir excerpt. If not there, then maybe in the next, or at least in Kunkel’s biography. The most seductive thought of all: That an entirely new long-form profile of a personality as compelling as Joe Gould might sit in the author’s papers, waiting to be discovered. Until Kunkel tells us otherwise, we are left with this titillating fragment, this story that repeats so much of what we already know in different language, and reminds us what Mitchell already knew: that we really don’t know as much as we think, that nothing is finished until we ourselves are finished, and that the known body of an author’s work exists, like the old wharfs and train tracks that lined the shores of New York Harbor, in a state of flux. It’s as if Mitchell came back from the grave to tease us. “Okay,” he seems to be saying. “You want to know what I was up to all those years? Sit down. I’ll tell you.” And just as he starts to speak, he disappears again.

On Any Given Day: Downtown Los Angeles and Violence in America

Police had cordoned off the intersection of Broadway and Sixth Street, in Los Angeles’s old Jewelry District, before I arrived. I was walking aimlessly downtown that afternoon, killing time and eating tacos, when I spotted the bright yellow tape. Some men had robbed a jewelry store, and one of them had been shot.

Five police cruisers parked near the crime scene, along with several unmarked detective cars and three news vans. A Telemundo TV anchor in a tie stood in the middle of Broadway’s southbound lanes, shooting a segment. A Channel 5 anchor and her cameraman set up in the intersection as onlookers stood by watching.

“What’s goin’ on down here, man?” one pedestrian asked another. The second guy shrugged.

A third man walked up. “Someone get killed?” No one answered. The second guy, the shrugger, walked off in silence. Despite the sizeable crowd of lookers, even more pedestrians ignored the scene entirely, streaming past and barely glancing, as if everything was normal, just another day of crime and camera crews in downtown LA.

Maybe it was. The intersection was a hive of pawn shops and jewelry stores. Dave Tipp Pawn Shop stood on the northwest corner, Omid Jewelry on the northeast corner, and Broadway Jewelry Plaza on the southeast. Police buzzed around Broadway Gold Center, a corner shop with an iridescent interior that stood next door to another gold and diamond retailer called L.A. Noosha.

As if the sight of cops and news crews would make a cool keepsake, onlookers held up cell phones to shoot videos and snap photos. One young guy stood beside the Telemundo van and filmed the filming of their segment. The other talking head stood near the northeast corner by the crowd, reading her notes and discussing revisions with someone on the other end of her cell phone.

I stood on the curb beside Omid Jewelry and took in the scene. The stink of urine kept wafting by. The breeze carried the heavy scent between buildings, a dizzying mix of dirty truck stop urinal and cat litter ammonia that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. When someone walked by with a greasy slice of pizza, it briefly displaced the smell. The cherry cigar of a young kid in baggy jeans also helped conceal it, then the breeze shifted and the odor returned.

A pedestrian walked up and asked an employee at Omid, “Someone rob a jewelry store?”

Dressed in blue jeans and a dark collared shirt, the employee sat on a stool outside the store, one leg up, one down, and eyeballed the stranger. “Don’t know,” he said. That or he wasn’t telling. His job was to beckon customers. While cops surveyed the crime scene and journalists colonized the street, the man kept yelling “El pagar del oro!” in a Spanish accent, adding what sounded like, “Low price, like for gold!”

Unsatisfied with his response, the stranger walked off, and I caught the employee’s eye. In sync, we nodded.

To find out what happened, I started asking around. I leaned into a conversation to ask three strangers if they knew the details. I talked to an older man on a bike, and a twenty-something taking cell phone photos. The story was vague but simple: when two armed men tried to rob Broadway Gold Center, the security guard pulled out a gun and opened fire. The guard was an off-duty reserve sheriff deputy. When the criminals ran, he darted outside and kept shooting, hitting one in the back. “The one robber went down,” the bicyclist told me. “It hit him in the lower back, and boom, just down. His buddy kept running, just left him like that. Somehow he got up and made it to the getaway car.” A helicopter circled above downtown, searching for the suspects.

Another person contradicted the bicyclist’s account. The kid that got shot didn’t get away. He got caught and treated at the scene. And there weren’t two robbers but three. While two hit Broadway Gold Center, the other went next door to L.A. Noosha and jumped the counter to grab a handful of gold chains.

Nobody knew anything more about the guard: why was a sheriff deputy moonlighting as security? Was that common practice? “He’s a cowboy,” said the man on the bike. The guard’s actions were questionable. In late afternoon, this area was bustling. His bullets could have hit anybody, which suggests he was more interested in protecting jewelry than civilians.

I leaned against Omid Jewelry and listened to the helicopter echo between buildings.

Although the police tape left room on the sidewalk for pedestrians, it shrunk the corner of Broadway and Sixth into a tight passage. People inched between the tape and Omid like cattle in a chute, their shoulders bumping and hands rubbing as they squeezed through.

A scowling tan redhead in a blue tank top pushed through the crowd and yelled “Fuck!” Exasperated, he swung his dirty backpack back onto his shoulder after a passerby bumped it off, and he pushed into the swarm.

A city worker in a neon yellow vest came rolling up the street. Pushing a trash can with an enormous plastic bag full of trash set on top, she announced her arrival with a friendly, “Beep beep.” She stopped beside Omid and waited for a gap. One never came. “’Scuse me,” she said to no one in particular. “Comin’ through. ’Scuse me.” At first, her voice was sweet, but the longer she waited and the more people streamed past, the firmer her tone became. Finally she yelled, “Hey! You need to you move. I’m comin’.” Still, no one stopped.

A stranger emerged from the crowd and held out his hands to restrain the others. “Hold up one second,” he said in a booming voice, “someone’s coming through.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, her voice soft and genteel again. When she wheeled past, a rush of people filled the opening behind her like seawater in a tide pool, and somehow, in her wake, a tiny white Rite-Aid bag tumbled through the maze of tromping feet without hitting a single one.

“El pagar del oro!” yelled the man at Omid. “Low price, like for gold!”

Out of nowhere, a woman with long eyelash extensions and green reflective tights asked me, “What happened?”
“Robbery,” I said. “That place there.”

She looked across the street. “A robbery?”

“Two guys got away,” I said, “and one got shot.”

“Shot? He die?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She squinted hard at the store then turned her head so fast that her thick braids twirled and draped across her shoulders. “That’s crazy. Glad he lived. Recession havin’ hard times out here.” As she walked up Broadway, the scent of perfume mixed with the stink of piss.

Beside me at Omid, a security guard stood by the door, hands in his pockets, white text on a black windbreaker announcing his position. A man stopped to ask the guard what happened.

The security guard smiled and shook his head. “No. No know.”

“You don’t know? You’re the security guard.”

The guard smiled again and looked at the man, and then at me. “No entiendo ingles.”

“No entiendo ingles?” The stranger stood close to the guard but leaned closer, staring hard through dark lifeless sunglasses as if he were about to reach out and push him. After a moment he said, “Uh, huh,” and walked off.

Behind him, a mother in a colorful headwrap walked by, telling her two young daughters: “It’s quiet. Look how quiet it is. Why’s it so quiet when somethin’ happens?”

After filming her segment, the Channel 5 news anchor slipped under the police tape and cut through the crowd. Wearing a skirt and pink sport coat, her stilettos were so sharp that she had to take tiny, stabby steps to maneuver. Outside of Omid, she paced around the sidewalk, making a spectacle of talking loudly into her phone as if she were some minor celebrity.

Once her cameraman arrived with his equipment, a Hassidim with a thick beard and a dark suit greeted them outside the store. He paused to point to the mezuzah on the doorframe. “Here is the scroll I mentioned.” The cameraman shot footage of the exterior and the scroll. Inside Omid, the anchor held her microphone over a glass case and asked an employee questions in a voice too low for me to hear. The guy next to me kept yelling “El pagar del oro!”

After the crew finished their interior shots, the bearded man led them outside and thanked them. “Okay,” the anchor said. “Thanks.” To her cameraman she said, “Great exteriors, too,” and brushed invisible fuzz off the front of her coat.

“Let me get a shot of this gentleman here,” the cameraman said as he aimed his camera at the security guard.

I scoot away to get out of the shot, and an older businessman and a young hip kid came from different directions and stepped beside me at the same time. The older man asked, “What happened?” I told him.

The young man listened and chewed his food. He had a small bouquet of flowers in one hand, wrapped in brown paper. “Wow,” he said, “shot in the back.”

I said, “That a pork bao?”

“Yeah, from up the street.”

The other man said, “Thanks for filling me in,” and left.

A young couple walked up, arm in arm. From their blissful smiles and wobbly sway, they looked like two lovers who’d been out drinking, even though it wasn’t even four o’clock. A police officer stood nearby, tearing down the yellow tape, and the couple asked him, “What happened?”

He wore dark Ray-Ban sunglasses and tugged at the tape with the delicacy of a bulldozer. “A robbery,” he said after a long pause. He wadded the tape into a ball in his hands, then he smiled. “Watch the news,” he said. “Watch the news.”

“Ah,” the young guy said, “thought someone got killed,” and squeezed his girlfriend around the waist. They tipped forward, like two jovial drunks, and walked up the street.

It turns out that two thieves dug a tunnel into Broadway Gold Center in February of 2011 and stole approximately $3 million dollars’ worth of jewelry. The store normally locked their merchandise in safes, but it took three hours to move the jewelry from the safes into the cases, and three hours to move it back, so on this night, they left the jewelry in sight. As one local jewelry store owner, Mahvash Zendedel, told CBS news after today’s heists: “This is very dangerous. Police, police we need help, more police here on the Broadway.”

The cop tugged at the tape, and as the rest of it came down, a surge of pedestrians streamed across Broadway, a river of living bodies rushing past me and the security guard and the gold. Cop cars and black sedans pulled away, falling into formation with the meticulous ease of migrating geese. Except for the group of detectives in suits outside L.A. Noosha, the intersection looked the same as it would on any other day. Cars passed unimpeded. Pedestrian traffic flowed, brisk and blasé, as if nothing had ever happened. People’s deadpan faces and the pulse of their lives erased evidence of the event, their feet scouring the scene of this day’s bloodshed, and the intersection of its fleeting significance, but not scouring it from memory, because with all the guns and money around, and the idea of the American cowboy, nothing can cleanse the certainty of the violence that lies ahead.

 

Loncheros of the Rural San Joaquin

Even though Urban Dictionary defines ‘lonchero’ as “lunch time consensual sex between two Gay Males,” it more commonly means lunch or taco truck.

Like Denny’s and credit card debt, loncheros are everywhere, from Texas to Seattle to North Carolina’s Research Triangle. In Los Angeles they’re so numerous that they even have their own association, La Asociación de Loncheros L.A. Familia Unida de California, to advocate for themselves as “an asset to the economic and socio-cultural landscape of Los Angeles” whose owners “contribute to the well-being of the communities they operate in,” and to protect their business interests. Another community forum in LA keeps lunch trucks up to date on threats and relevant developments.

I’m devoted to taco trucks. I eat at them wherever I travel, and I’m rarely disappointed. The loncheros I find most interesting, though, are those serving rural areas. Out there amid sprawling farm fields, near little but train tracks and irrigation ditches, you can’t help but wonder how these loncheros stay solvent. Where does their electricity come from? How often do customers arrive? And is it frequently enough to keep the meat fresh and produce circulating? While passing through California’s rural San Joaquin Valley recently, I ate a bunch of tacos.

You might have driven through the San Joaquin en route to somewhere else: going from LA to San Francisco, maybe, or from Oregon down toward Interstate 10. It’s that hot flat place bisected by I-5 and Highway 99 that often smells like manure and onion soup. You might not have known it had a name and just called it “that shithole.”

Sandwiched between the Sierra Nevada and Coast Range, California’s great rural core stretches over four hundred miles north and south and around fifty miles across, forming one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions. With nearly 300 commercial crops, everything from almonds to olives, tomatoes to rice, the Central Valley produces 25% of all table food in the United States and houses the world’s largest cotton farm, five of the country’s top ten agricultural counties, and the birthplace of the raisin.

The San Joaquin is the drier southern half of the Central Valley. Scorching in summer, foggy in winter, it’s flat as a board and consistently ridiculed for being featureless, backwards and boring―and understandably so. This is a land of pickups and truck-stops, ample fodder for meth references and redneck jokes.

For reasons too complicated and confusing to bore you with here, I love the place. To me, it’s the ugly dog that you can’t help petting. Here are some of the loncheros of the rural San Joaquin. I like that phrase because it sounds like a western.

1) Chelitas Tacos

“Chelitas Tacos,” said the sign on the passenger door, “by Consuelo Rodriguez.” Set beside a McDonald’s, across the street from the Auto Zone, this lunch truck in the town of Lamont was parked on the side of the Rancho Viejo Carnicería lot.

I asked for two tacos and a side of refried beans. The cook handed me a plate covered with grilled onions and hunks of beef. Hot tortillas came in a basket, their heat locked in with a towel even though it was over ninety degrees out. When some time passed, Consuelo threw open the window screen and said, “You need more tortillas?” I said no thank you, I was okay. She brought three more anyway, in another basket.

Three tables sit under a metal awning, which sit in the shade of some scraggly pines. Chelitas likely gets its meat from the Rancho Viejo Carnicería. It definitely got its electricity from there: two yellow cables ran through a hole in their nonfunctioning fountain drink system and plugged into the side of the meat market. It was a symbiotic relationship. At one point, a carnicería clerk came out in his apron and had the cook make change from a $20 dollar bill.

The truck’s menu was unusually diverse: tostadas, tostilocos, huaraches, molitas, quesadillas, sopes, posole, flautas, tacos, nachos, burritos and a hot dog plate. No prices were listed, which explains my shock when I pulled out my wallet to pay and the cook said, “Setenta.” Seven dollars? Since I ordered one carne asada, and one pastor taco, plus beans, I only expected to pay around $4.50.

Did they sucker a gringo? Doubtful. The cook had taken my order while Consuelo was out, and because my Spanish is rusty and his English poor, he seemed to think I ordered the carne asada plate, which was fine. He delivered a feast.

As I ate, cars lined up at the McDonald’s drive through window. Car after car after car, slaves to the predictable blandness of frozen, pre-formed patty life. I salted my meat and doused it with salsa, and as much as I wanted to eat it all there, I took half of it home. It was a lot of meat.

2) Two Pupusarias

Tita’s Pupuseria wouldn’t sell me a pupusa without cheese. “Beans and pork, yes,” the clerk said. “Squash and cheese, yes. But not beans and squash. Cheese.”

I’d been polite when I first placed my order, explaining that I don’t eat much dairy, and that for various health reasons, I only wanted beans or beans in vegetables in my pupusa, no cheese. She said she couldn’t do that.

“But you can do pork and vegetables?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, staring at me through the window. “And beans and pork.” She stepped away from the window and returned with a large Ziploc bag full of grated cheese. “See? It’s all grated.” She held the bag out for me, kneading the heavy bottom as if to prove it was harmless. She pointed to something behind the counter that I couldn’t see, and said, “And that’s the meat.” I didn’t know how to respond. “How about a sopa?”

I said, “No thanks.” I come from a family with extreme heart problems, so I try not to eat fried food.

She said, “How about tacos?”

“I’m all taco’d out. I’m craving pupusa.”

“How about beans with tortilla on the side?”

I didn’t say this out loud, but beans with tortilla on the side sounded as appealing as eating cold refried beans straight from a can. I stared into her eyes. They offered no sign of diplomacy. “So you won’t sell me a pupusa at all, is what you’re saying?”

She nodded yes. “Sorry, mijo.”

I went across the street. There was another pupusa cart in the ARCO lot.

This was at a travel center on I-5, outside the town of Buttonwillow. A pupusa mini-explosion seemed to be sweeping through the small cluster of gas stations and motels from top to bottom, so a few hundred yards. There was Tita’s Pupuseria Salvadoran & Mexican Restaurant on the north end, next to Castro Tire & Truck Wash. There was Tita’s pupusa lonchero, in the potholed dirt lot beside the highway onramp. And there was Elsy’s Antojitos Centro Americanos on the opposite side of the street.

The two times I’d eaten at Tita’s, it was just a Mexican food cart. That was many years ago, and it might have even gone by a different name. But they served basic lonchero menu items – tacos, burritos, Jarritos – and had a really nice salsa bar on a foldout table and offered hand-roasted Serrano peppers. There were no pupusas.

The other time I ate here was at a lonchero in the E-Z Trip Food Store parking lot, across from Denny’s. Again, it was tasty but no frills. They made me a bean burrito with no cheese, no problem.

Elsy’s Antojitos Centro Americanos was so delicious that it made me grateful for Tita’s rejection.

Along with tacos, burritos and enchiladas, they sold pupusa for $2.75 a piece.

I stepped to the window without a moment’s wait and, despite my inclination to avoid meat that night, I ordered one with pork and beans, no cheese. The clerk didn’t even mention the cheese. She just wrote it on the ticket and took my money.

Parked on the north edge of the ARCO station, Elsy’s stood on the east side of the travel center, on the edge of a vast sandy lot, undeveloped and covered in native desert scrub, that stretched as far east as I could see.

 

A Hispanic man selling oranges and cherries parked his pickup truck on the street below the ARCO sign.

Eleven semis parked in a row next to the lunch truck, some for the night, others just resting momentarily.

Thirteen of us ate here, all men. “Excuse me,” one said while lowering himself on my bench. His friend waved a friendly hello as he took a seat at our table. There were four wooden picnic tables under the metal canopy, and for 8:30 at night, this place was packed.

While placing his order, one trucker said “Sinaloa” to the cook. It was the only word in his rapid fire sentences that I understood. A pickup pulled up, playing Norteño, and three men piled out. Three other men in Western shirts and jeans stood around a pickup, leaning against the red rim of the bed. Two wore cowboy hats. Behind them towered the familiar red and yellow McDonald’s sign, its colors cast against the crepuscular blue of night.

3) Tacos Mi Casita

In the town of Buttonwillow proper, on Lokern Road, this lonchero was parked in a decommissioned gas station. Had I not just eaten breakfast, I would have eaten here.

4) Ricos Tacos

When I arrived at Ricos Tacos, two men in uniform blues stood at the counter eating, covered in sweat.

Located on Mt. Whitney Avenue, outside the 3000-person town of Riverdale, this lonchero leads a lonely existence.

Mt. Whitney Ave isn’t a popular route to anywhere. Tourists don’t pass by. People heading to the Indian casino near Lemoore or up to Fresno take other routes. Customers seemed to be truckers, locals, farm hands and factory workers.

Ricos Tacos overlooked a dirt lot and sprawling green fields. Parked against the eroded eastern wall of the gutted Hancock Gasoline Market, there were no tables or places to sit. There was shade, though. You could park your car under the big tree and sit on your trunk or hood. The view was nice and the silence peaceful.

The tacos were great, too. Served on bright yellow corn tortillas and loaded with rich, juicy asada, Ricos garnished them with a thick sliver of lemon and radish slices, all for $1.25 a piece.

Riverdale is one of many small towns set amid the braided channels of the King’s River alluvial fan, southwest of Fresno. Because this area’s tiny rural towns are tied to the rich soils and high water table of the King’s River, they often grow grapes and have more large, shapely oaks than towns to the south and west, so I think of them all as a unit. A sense of isolation and insularity also permeates the area.

When you park at a condemned building, you have to make your own energy. Ricos draws part, or maybe all, of it juice from a generator mounted on the grill.

After I ate, I stepped to the front of the truck in search of a trash can. I found a gray plastic tub standing against the market wall, hidden by sumac. One side had cracked off like a broken tooth. Old paper plates and napkins filled it, covered with gravel and a fine gray powder looked like cement dust. When I snapped a photo from that position, a door on the back of the truck swung open, and the cook stepped out. He came right over and said, “You taking picture.”

I said Yes, I was, and explained that I liked write about places where I ate. He nodded and stared at my camera, still unsure. “I saw you taking pictures,” he said and pantomimed the process, understandably unnerved at my intentions. There was a sign in the front window announcing that the last food inspection certificate was available upon request. Maybe he was concerned about health inspections, maybe immigration.

I explained that I only wanted to post photos of his truck and food online. “Is that okay if I do?”

He said, “Sure, that’s okay.” He extended his hand to shake. “What’s your name?”

I told him it, first and last, as we shook. “What’s your name?”

“Orlando,” he said and went back inside to cook the food of the man who just pulled up in a maroon pickup.

5) San Joaquin, California

Another truck parked on Colorado Road, just before entering the town of San Joaquin. Set on the dirt shoulder flanking the train tracks beside a cotton field, it stood alone at 7:20pm, with no customers.

Oompa music played from inside it. Cars passed, no one stopped. Cool wind blew. Say what you will about this corner of California, but it was beautiful here, peaceful.