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.

 

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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

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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/

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Sneaking on to the Set of Some Movie Whose Name I Didn’t Even Know: An Overly Long Story

The crane offered the first sign that the Hollywood machine was operating nearby. It stood against a gray loft building in downtown Los Angeles, a powerful light perched atop it. Further down Main Street toward 7^th, tents, trellises and vans lined the opposite side of the street. A small crowd stood in front of a fancy, historic hotel, their arms crossed and cameras out,scanning for famous faces. It was a common LA scene.

I don’t care about actors, but I am nosey, so I stopped to watch, too. The scene reminded me of the time two friends and I were walking down Sunset Boulevard in the early 1990s. It was Spring Break. We came upon a crowd. On the sidewalk, a camera crew surrounded a piano, and who stepped out of a nearby trailer but Little Richard. Little Richard! One of the architects of rock and roll!

I leaned against a fire hydrant and looked up at the hotel marquee. The New Yorker, it said. I thought, There’s a New Yorker hotel here like the one in Manhattan? That didn’t seem right. As my eyes started to glaze, a blonde man in cargo shorts stopped while shuffling past me. “Are you with us or background?” he said. He stood at an angle, leaning back mid-step.

“Background,” I said. I figured, Why not? Let’s see what happens.

He waved his hand. “Okay, come with me.” With a determined shuffle, he led me across the street. “I’m going to have you do a walk here,” he said. “Why don’t you take off your backpack and set it somewhere.”

I tried to play it cool. “I was wondering about that, but no one could tell me a good place to keep it.”

He looked me up and down, tilting his head. “Or you can just wear it on one strap. It looks cooler that way.” We stepped onto the curb and into a cluster of cameras and crew members. “I’m going to give you to Stephanie. She’ll take care of you.”

A rush of adrenalin buzzed my extremities. As he recrossed the street, I looked at the two other extras standing beside me. I intended to say hi, to acknowledge our linked destinies with a friendly nod and revel in the fact of our accidental brotherhood;instead of glancing at me, they watched the cameras.

Cameras, extras, playback monitors – was this actually happening?I looked around for proof that I hadn’t lost my mind, and I texted my girlfriend: “Snuck on a movie set and am going to get my ass on film.”

“OMG!!!” she replied. “Which one?!?”

I texted: “I have no clue!” That was the best part.

As vain as I am, seeing myself on screen has never been one of my fantasies. Unlike many Americans, I’ve never read an article in People or US Weekly. I never wanted to be an actor. Most celebs are as boring as the blockbusters they star in, and I wouldn’t recognize half of them if they were standing inches from my face. I do like mischief, though. Since I was on vacation and looking for fun, I decided to see where this madness would lead, because now that I had penetrated the set’s inner sanctum, my objective became simple: remain undiscovered long enough to get on film.

            While waitingfor this Stephanie person, my fellow extras paced around, taking the slow, self-conscious steps that people in movies take while killing time.One was a dark-haired teenager wearing khaki pants, a plaid shirt and black sneakers. He kept his hands in his pockets and arched his shoulders, looking both insecure and like someone whose parents made him do cereal commercials as a kid. The other guy was in his thirties. Dressed in a brown sport coat and poorly tailored trousers, he had buggy eyes and wore a stereo earbud in one ear like an FBI agent. Maybe he was listening to a sporting event. Maybe he thought it made him look important, like he belonged beside the cameras, instead of with the other extras across the street. If so, he needed to remove his dumbstruck expression by closing his mouth. It hung open like a chimp’s.

Like me, these two guys were acting. While I tried to look natural in order to avoid detection, they tried to play the role of the seasoned professional, projecting a mixture of distance and engagement, ego and aptitude, a vibe that acting coaches might call “casual.” But as they did their best to seem blasé, their rapid eye movements revealed just how closely they were paying attention.

Inches away, the actors rehearsed. A blonde woman in tight pants and a dark-haired man in tight pants pulled up in a blackvan and parked on the curb. The man driver got out, clutching a small metal case. The passenger stayed seated. Then a black town car slammed to a halt, and its passengers stepped out to block the man’s passage. One had a pistol tucked into his belt.

From what I gathered, the bad guys in the town car were trying to get the suitcase from the good guys. Beyond that, details were hazy:who were these people? What was in the case? And what movie was this? Whatever it was, it looked like some real bottom of the barrel sci-fi stuff, one of those straight-to-DVD franchises whose target audience was single guys who drank energy drinks at clubs and wore too much cologne,in which case I’d never find it unless I got the name. I couldn’t ask anyone. That would reveal me as an intruder. I had to be sneaky. Imagine my disappointment if I left this set without the most basic information. Unable to tell my friends what exactly I had done, to know the key detail about what I’d wandered into, I’d spend the rest of my life denied the small satisfaction of this trivial triumph. And I’d never be able to view footage of myself! It was already disappointing that fate had delivered me onto such a low-grade production.

Stephanie showed up. She wore practical shorts and a brown ponytail and gathered us beside one of the cameras. “You’re people on the street,” she said. “You’re going to walk through here, past the van. Okay? Between the cars.” The three of us nodded. “See that guy in the hat?” She pointed to a guy on the other side of the shot. “When you get to him, stop.”

Butterflies filled my stomach. I’d never acted before.I mean, besides during bad sex, boring dates, job interviews, college classes, to cops giving me tickets, in court before judges, as a teenager lying to my parents, and returning food to grocery stores.

“You got it,” I said. Only when she scurried off did I realize that she hadn’t told us what route to take. Should we walk to the left of the neighboring camera, or the right? When she said “between the cars,” did she mean we walk between the van and car and actors, or just past them on the sidewalk? The former seemed weird. What kind of pedestrians walked diagonally across an empty street to pass through the center of a violent showdown?

A water tanker drove by and wet the pavement, leaving behind a dark glossy surface. A man with a headset directed cars to line up along the curb. On 7^th, police redirected pedestrians around the barricades. To me left, one cameraman asked another, “What’s your mark?” and someone set down an orange cone.

I kept debating where to walk. If I stayed on the sidewalk, should I go around the tree or over its knobby roots? The way the camera stood beside the tree, it blocked easy passage. I’d have to be careful not to bump it.If I bumped the camera or stumbled on the roots, I’d ruin the entire shot. All those extras by the hotel, all these lined up cars, the way they drove off in sequence to resemble real traffic, and the way the good guys parked their van in a specific place – they would have to redo everything. That was a lot pressure. My chest tightened considering it.

            Part of me wanted to leave, to just say Forget it, it was a funny idea that didn’t pan out, and split before I messed things up. But what would be the worst that could happen? I tripped. Someone yelled “Cut!” I looked like an idiot, and they hid me in a group shot. Big deal.

Men in pinstriped suits gathered in front of the hotel, dressed to resemble people in Midtown Manhattan.Watching them, I wondered what expression I should use in my shot. The face of the vacant walker was what, distant? Unaware? Maybe I should look annoyed. This was “Manhattan,” after all. With the crowds and cabbies and unaware tourists,walking there could be irritating. But shouldI look down at my feet, or look up at the street? Maybe I could fix my gaze on some distant point, act like there was something down there, like, Oh, hey, a three-legged dog, how adorable. Here on the edge of LA’s Skid Row, there could very well be a three-legged dog, companion to a one-legged man.No, that was a sure sign of bad acting. I knew enough to know that it was a no-no to remotely acknowledge the camera, yet part of me still wanted to angle my face in a way that would make me as visible on camera as possible, to frame myself so that anyone watching whatever shitty movie this was would see the screen and, not knowing I was in it, say, “What the hell? I think that was Aaron Gilbreath, the guy I used to work with at Subway Sandwiches!” And by the time they recognized me, I’d be gone, poof, already off screen, leaving an even stronger air of mystery than my split second appearance had. Those startled viewers would have to rewind the movie to confirm what they saw, and when they did, they’d find a blurred profile of my aging face egging on the camera, taunting this production and the entire film industry with eyes that said, “You suckers got a hole in your security perimeter so wide that any jerk off the street can walk right in.” Thinking this only made me want to taunt the camera more, to look at it and pucker my lips in a kiss, all sultry like, Yeah, baby, it’s me, Mr. Can’t Act AG. Totally invading your air space, messing around where I’m not supposed to be. But I couldn’t get away with that. Plus, I had a huge, red zit next to my nose that was hideous. Maybe it was best not to look in that direction at all. I should probably just try to look expressionless, like I wasn’t thinking about anything, let blankness be my mood. The only hitch then would be appearing too self-aware. Part of the trick of acting, I assumed, was making it look like you weren’t trying at all.

I decided to go for “absorbed.”

The sun had set and turned the damp air cold. I started to shiver. I was the only extra wearing shorts. That made me nervous because it made me stand out. Crew members shuffled by, carrying coffee cups and equipment, and I kept expecting one to ask for my credentials. Instead of discovery, I stood there and looked at the kid in the khakis and the chimp in the suit with the gaping mouth, and I realized how we three were competitors. Our refusal to acknowledge each other felt like a declaration of war: I’m getting in this shot whether or not it means pushing you aside. After Stephanie left, the kid moved close to the camera as if to ensure that when it started rolling, he would walk out first – the little punk ass. I decided to let him. He had the cocky air of the semi-seasoned. I’d watch where he walked and copy him.

Someone with a bullhorn yelled, “Okay, lock!” Others said it too, moving the word through the crew like the wave at a football game. When he said, “Rolling!” another chorus rose up, the word “Rolling!” echoing down the street.

Extras in suits started pacing Main. The men at the hotel’s outdoor restaurant started eating prop dinners and fake talking. Cars launched from the curb in succession, impersonating Manhattan traffic. This is really happening, I thought, holy crap.

Beside the second camera, Stephanie stood behind the kid. He pulled his hands from his pockets and didn’t know what to do with them. The good guy’s van pulled up beside us. The bad guys arrived soon after. Stephanie placed her hands on the kid’s back, and his body went limp and expectant. She watched the scene unfold, waited for the right moment. When she shoved him forward, he took a few stumbling steps and stopped, turning to face her. His eyes registered fear. He seemed to need reassurance but was too nervous to look at her directly. He raised his hands as if to say “What, now?” and she waved at him like a cowgirl shooing cattle – arms out, wielding knuckles.

I’d misread him. He was as inexperienced as I was. At least now I knew where to step.

For all his resistance, the kid’s pass took seconds. When he stopped on the opposite side, he looked shaken, his eyes darting around like he’d just dodged a spray of bullets. I stepped beside Stephanie and took his place but someone yelled “Cut!” before she sent me out. The crew reset the shot. Extras resumed their positions. I worried that they’d get what they needed before I got on camera.

A guy with the headset called out, “Security, scoot back! Can you scoot back please?” and a man in a uniform backed deeper into the hotel parking lot.The crew locked. They rolled. The chimp in the sport coat crossed during the next take, and again they yelled “Cut!” before I crossed. Standing there taught me what I’d never known before: that acting amounted to boring repetition and a squandering of resources to produce to a few seconds of footage from one dumb angle.

During the next take, crew yelled “Rolling!” The kid crossed again, and with the chimp staring with his mouth open on the other side of the set,Stephanie took her position behind me, waiting to send me on my maiden voyage.

From the corner of my eye, I saw her arms rise. They hovered behind me like the front blade of a waiting bulldozer. I waited, too, expecting to feel the hard bump of palms on my shoulders. I stood straight and attentive, my entire body like hairs electrified by anticipation. The actors sat in the van, acting. Or maybe they fumbled out of the van, holding the suitcase. I don’t remember. I was so terrified that everything I looked at I looked through, as if it was already an image on screenrather than something I was living, which was when Stephanie’s hands touched my back.

She pushed, and I stumbled forward. Over the tree roots. Around the camera tracks. Through the frame and into the shot. I’m here, I thought, I’m on camera! Then the voice of reason: Look casual. Look regular. Another distracted dude on the street.

For seconds that felt like minutes, I was doing it, strutting calmly through the shot, acting like a guy not acting, just one of the one and a half million people in Manhattan. Projecting calm like, Ah, you know, just another day on the set, could take it or leave it, I strut right past the actors as they faced each other in their phony looking standoff. Then someone yelled, “Cut!” or “Reset!” – some term that you don’t want to hear in the middle of your first cross – and the actors went limp.

I stopped by a playback monitor and thought, Stephanie, you idiot, you sent me out prematurely. Didn’t she know how to do her job? My one chance to get on film, and she ruined it!

She stood on the other side of the cameras, talking to another crew member, as I and my fellow extras watched her like obedient puppies. Someone important said something about breaking it down for the next shot, and bulky men in knee-length shorts started dismantling the set. With brisk, efficient movements, they collapsed mounts, moved lights, shifted camera tracks to new positions, set up silk diffuser panels beside the van, passed each other sealed bags of sand, and unfolded equipment that resembled archaic dental devices.

I moved to a spot against a wall and watched. This was going to be a close up. I feared that I’d missed my chance. I also figured that if I hung around long enough, another opportunitymight arise.

While crew prepared the shot, Stephanie shuffled across the street to the food station. A long trough on wheels, it stood in the hotel parking lot. They weren’t using extras, so I walked over to scan the offerings. Bottled water, soda, yogurt – I reached in and grabbed some carbonated lemon Arrowhead water from a pile of ice. As I debated whether to take a sandwich or a cup of fresh fruit, a short, bulky man in knee-length jean shorts and a dark tee appeared. “You both with crew?” He held out his hand. “Got your union cards?”

The chimpy background actor with the sport coat stood beside me. “No,” I said, “we’re background.”

“We’ll have a station set up for you on the other side soon,” the man said.

I held up the water. “You need me to put this back?”

“No. You can keep that, buddy.”

I thanked him and entered the hotel restaurant, which served as the extra’s temporary headquarters. Actors packed all the booths. They lined the lunch counter, occupying every stool. A kid slumped against the counter, his chin resting on his hand. All the skin on his cheek bunched, and when I stepped into his line of sight, his blank eyes met mine, the expression unchanging: bored. He made no attempt to hide it.

Voices filled the room. “I wonder how much they pay the restaurant to take over this place,” one man said to another. Another guy with sandy hair and a strong jawline told a short, cute brunette about the yoga studio he went to, how he wanted to open his own studio, and about “the importance of water in human metabolism.” Beside me, a pudgy white guy told a young man with dreadlocks, “I have a few other jobs lined up.” He listed some recent background shoots he’d done, one involving the reggae-rock band Pepper. He dropped the band’s name as if it was supposed to impress, but the guy just nodded his head and kept his eyes on the floor. “I’ve been pretty busy,” the first man said.

To get away from the inanity, I went over to the table of food in the corner. Extras stood around it while a tall, muscular man set up a coffee pot. I eyeballed the selection: small bags of Frito-Lay brand chips, generic shortbread, chocolate chip, lemon and oatmeal cream cookies. Next to this spread, my bottle of Arrowhead resembled a trophy, a symbol of wealth and privilege that reflected a film set’s social hierarchy, as well as the treasure that awaited those who worked hard enough to rise through the ranks. It was late and I was hungry, so I ate a few cookies and a bag of Sun Chips.

As I crunched, the guy beside me lifted a container of chocolate-covered graham cracker cookies, the kind whose waxy sides turned reflected light dull. He studied the label with pinched eyes and an amused grin. “This is Dollar Store food. The packages look like they’re from the 1980s.”

I said, “They taste like they’ve been on the shelf since the ’80s.” I’d already eaten five cookies. This was dinner. I took an unripe orange and a second bag of chips and stood outside by the restaurant tables.

An extra in a suit leaned back in one of the chairs, arms behind his head. “So I’ll see a check in about a week?”

“Yeah,” another extra said. “Some commercials can take a month.”

The first guy smiled, surveying the set with the relish of a landowner who just recognized the value of his property. “You do enough of these you can get a place down here,” he said. “Not that I’d move downtown if I had the money. This area is weird, man. It’s fine right here. But go that way a little and it gets bad. It’s fucked.”

That was true. Skid Row began on the next street to the east and contained one of the largest permanent populations of homeless people in the US, with some estimate as high as 5,000 residents. Main Street ran through an intermediary zone where Skid Row’s squalor overlapped downtown’s hip, gentrifying edge. It gave me an idea: steal a bunch of food for local homeless people.

A female crew member marched into the restaurant with a checklist, her loud voice cutting through the hum of overlapping conversations. “Okay, anyone who wants to come back tomorrow to work, I need you to raise your hand.” A few hands went up, but far less than half. She scanned the room, tapping a pen in the air to count hands. “Once again,” she said, “who is available to come back tomorrow? I need a show of hands and then for you to come see me so I can mark you on the list. If you don’t step forward, I’m going to have to come around and ask all of you, so let’s make this easy.” Barely anyone moved.

In this, the worst economy in decades, surprisingly few people wanted to get paid to stand around doing nothing. The lack of interest was even more confounding considering how strongly America mythologized film and television, and how many Americans seemed to covet actors’ supposedly cushy lives. Here we were, on an actual set, and most extras wanted to abandon their entry-level position inside the Hollywood circle. To do what, return to their lives in suburbia? Go home and stare at TVs? Maybe they didn’t like their roles. Maybe they thought the storyline was trash. Or maybe the job was more boring than expected – all work and no glamor, too much standing around. Their disinterest reminded me of some line I thought I once heard in a movie, but might actually have made up: “Everyone starts at the bottom, kid. Grab a broom.”

I wanted to come back. Standing around doing nothing here was more interesting than sitting on some crowded beach like I’d done countless times before. I didn’t know how to sign up, though. The woman with the clipboard had the eyes of a pit bull. When she saw that my name wasn’t on the list, she’d spot me as an intruder in a flash. I needed a script, a plan.

I leaned against the lunch counter and tried to devise a strategy. Maybe I could sneak a peek and pluck a name from her list: Joe So-And-So, yeah, that’s me. That only seemed to work in movies, though. To complicate things, half the time extras gave their names, she’d mark them off the list and press the clipboard to her chest, blocking any view. Over the din of chatter, I tried to listen to what other people said while signing up. To look legit, I figured I could copy their lines. She left her position by the door and walked through the room, asking for volunteers. As she circled back, she stepped close to me and seemed ready to ask for my name. I moved away before she could. This was tricky. The other challenge was slipping more chips, oranges and cookies into my bag without anyone seeing.

While eavesdropping, I heard the woman ask an extra which casting agency he’d used. When he muttered his answer, she said “Central?” and marked him off the list. I’d seen enough movies to know that “Central” must be insider slang for Central Casting. When she walked outside, I made my move.

Trotting up behind her I said, “Hi. Excuse me. I have a little problem.” She turned to face me, offering a broad but superficial smile. “I want to work tomorrow, but apparently I’m not on the list.”

She leaned back and clutched the clipboard. “You’re not?

“No,” I said. “Another crew member spotted the error earlier.”

“Who’d you go through?”

With the ease of a veteran I said, “Central.”

“Central?” She studied my face, lingering on my eyes as if searching for something – fear, hesitation, maybe. The truth.

I didn’t budge. She didn’t either. We didn’t seem to blink.

What resembled the faintest sign of a grin appeared on her face, the vaguely upturned lips of an athlete enjoying the tension of a contest. She looked at her list, then straight into my eyes. “And you don’t have voucher?”

“I don’t,” I said, doing my best rendition of a disappointed innocent. “No voucher.”

“You did a cross with no voucher?”

“I did. I wouldn’t normally, but when I called, no one at Central could clear it up.”

This is it, I thought. It’s over. She’s going to ask me for ID, ask who I was and what I was doing here. Maybe she was going to raise her voice and use some corny stock lines like,“Who the hell do you think you are, barging onto a set like this?” or, “Do you think this is a game?” Maybe she’d just yell, “Get out of here!” Whatever she said, in the terrifying scenario playing in my mind, I imagined her screaming at such volume that extras would stream out of the hotel to investigate, and the commotion would serve as a warning to all the pedestrians on 7^th that sneaking onto a set was a horrible idea, never do it. She might call security. She might even call the cops; this neighborhood was filled with them. If the gig was up, then I wanted her to yell something like “This is a movie. This isn’t some joke,” so that I could give her an equally cheesy reply like, “I don’t even know what we’re filming!” and then run.

She dragged her gaze across me from legs to waist to face. “Well, I can’t have you working without one. You’ll need to go through Central if you want to come back tomorrow. I just called it in. It should be up on the website in about twenty minutes.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

She said, “K,” and walked up Main.

My stomach unclenched as the distance between us increased. This was the point where some people would have left. They’daccept that they’d lied and gotten away with it, and they’d get out while they were ahead. Why push your luck? To me, her reaction wasn’t amnesty. It was the curtain call for Act I, and the show, as we all know, must go on. I still needed to get on camera. I also needed to steal more food.

Back in the hotel, I decided to stay out of the clipboard woman’s line of sight while I waited for the chance to weasel into another scene. I also took the opportunity to slip some oranges into my backpack, then some chips. With my back turned to the crowd, I wrapped napkins around a stack of oatmeal cream cookies and slid them into my bag. These would give a few homeless people a little snack tonight.

After many nervous minutes hoping that nobody saw my thieving, the crew member who pulled me into this mess came inside, cupped his hands over his mouth, and said, “Okay, I need all background outside, please.”

I stepped onto the sidewalk and made myself visible by standing on the edge of the crowd. He stood beside the hydrant. “Can everyone hear me?” The crowd said “Yes” with a loathsome indifference. “This is going to be a group shot. Okay? There’s going to be a bright light from the top of the building, a series of flashes. I need you to look confused and scared. Cover your eyes, shield your face, look away – that sort of thing. You don’t know what’s happening, only that it’s bright and loud and you want to know what’s going on. Look up at the building and point.” Extras started chattering amongst themselves, repeating his directions and often laughing at them. The man’s voice echoed under the hotel marquee. “There’s also going to be a loud noise. You won’t hear that now, we’ll put that in later, but I need you to act like you do. Cover your ears. Look away and then up at the building. You’re scared but want to see what it is. Okay, everyone got that?”

“Yes,” we said.

After a few seconds, one of the extras asked what others were probably wondering, too: “So, just, cover our eyes and ears?”

Another extra answered for him: “Oh no! Alien invasion!”

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind!” someone yelled.

The crew guy smiled and nodded yes. With a few waves of his hands, he split the crowd in two – one group to work the north side of the street, one to work the south – and then subdivided the halves. He pointed at me and two people to my left. “I want you three here: one, two, three.” I looked over at my new partners: a brunette in her mid-twenties in a skirt, and a boxy man with stringy silver hair, cut long in the back, and baggy, oversized closes. We smiled at each other and surveyed the set. Extras had parked their cars in the middle of Main, scattered haphazardly to look like traffic had suddenly stopped to check out the lights.

The crew guy led extras to their positions. When he took my group to the south side of Main, he stood us between two parked cars on the edge of the shot. There, alone, we looked at each other and shrugged.

The tanker had driven by and rewet the street. My stringy haired partner said, “For some reason they always wet the street. They think it looks better for some reason. Even if it’s not raining in the shot, they wet the street.” His voice sounded lethargic, which made him seem spacy. When he spoke, he only looked you in the eye for part of the time. The young woman ignored us and stared at some indeterminate point in the crowd.

I wanted to ask if either of them had done this before, and to find out why they decided to be extras. I wanted to say something that would require them to say the name of this movie, without me having to ask. Instead, we stood there and scanned the set.

Maybe the crowd exhibited a sense of confusion. Maybe the other guy’s directions seemed inadequate. But as we stood in our positions awaiting our cues, a short, effeminate director-producer person in cargo shorts climbed onto the fire hydrant and spoke through a bullhorn. “Can you all look over here, please?” He waved his free hand until the crowd quieted, then he repeated what the previous crew member in cargo shorts told us about the coming scene: flashing lights, covering our ears, pointing and looking scared.

While the man rattled on, my partner smirked at me and said, “This must be the ending. Something ‘scary’ happens.” He had a droll delivery, a slow, dry voice that oozed a subversive sense of humor. I liked him immediately.

I said, “I’m definitely channeling that Close Encounters vibe.”

My partner and I mocked our directions: “Look! A flashing light! I’m scared!” The whole thing was a joke to me to begin with, so it was nice to share that irreverence with someone else. We practiced covering our ears and pointing at the building: “Ahh! No!!!” Others around us did the same. The atmosphere shifted from a serious night of work to one of open derision. We were mocking the absurdity of the direction, mocking the corny plot, maybe even mocking ourselves for getting wrapped up in all this for money or fun or fame; yet we were also preparing ourselves for the shot. As goofy as this scene was, we weren’t going to get caught on film acting poorly. We were going to nail it, if only because any errors would be preserved for ages.

The director-producer added that there would be some sort of “raining sparks, like fireworks” that they would add during post-production and that we had to imagine sprinkling from the top of building. He suggested we hold out our hands, palms up, as if it were snowing and collect them. “Collect the sparks?” someone said. Yes, the man said. When he dismounted the hydrant, the young woman in our group turned to us. “That’s the most acting we’ve done all night,” she said. “Besides trying to act not bored.”

“I don’t do scared,” said the man with the stringy hair. “I have one expression: confused. I use it for everything.” He showed us his confused face. Furrowed brow, puckered lips, eyes aimed up – it combined the face of a sad puppy with that of a pious friar from some Baroque religious painting. I could see a certain universality in the expression, a one-scene-fits-all utility. But it hardly looked like a suitable stand-in for scared. He held up his hands. “Not that it matters here.”

The first crew guy came back and moved the woman in our group to an empty patch of pavement between cars. She stood still, arms flat against her sides like a mannequin, and listened to his directions. After he went around telling different groups how to play their parts, he jogged back to me. “Okay, I have a job for you. I want you to run across that way—” He pointed through the center of the crowd of extras “—right across the shot. When the actors come running out of the hotel, you’re just going to run. Hold your ears and cover your eyes – whatever feels natural – but keep running. Don’t stop until you get to that grey car there. That should give the shot some variety. Can you do that?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “And just stop at that car there?”

“Yep. That’s it.” He gave my right bicep one firm pat—“Thanks.”—and darted off.

My partner leaned toward me smiling. “Ready for your close up? Now you actually have to act.” I didn’t mention that I’d been acting like I belonged here all night.

Minutes passed. Crew members made adjustments. Extras chatted and checked their phones. One of the drivers in a nearby car sat in the driver’s seat texting without looking up. Goosebumps covered my calves. I was nearing the end of my patience with shivering.

The man with dreads danced in front of us, posing and mouthing song lyrics to himself while making the sort of darting, rhythmic hand gestures you see in hip hop videos.

Waiting for the cameras to roll, my partner and I talked: about how low-budget this production was, how vague and corny our directions were, how the paycheck was too small for the amount of invested time. He lived in the Valley. When I asked his name we shook hands, and his low, dry voice rendered his answer inaudible.

I’d been trying to figure out a way to get the name of this movie without asking him outright. Surely the company told the actors before filming, along with the basic storyline. But how to do it without blowing my cover? Then, it happened.

The actor in the car behind us leaned across the passenger. “Hey,” he said out the window, “what’s this show called again? Daylight?”

“No,” my partner said. “Daybreak.”

“Ah ha.” He tapped the rest of his message into his smart phone. “Daybreak.”

My partner turned to me and giggled. “It’s not a good sign if your background can’t remember your show’s name. I kept calling it ‘Daywatch’ at first.”

“Sounds like your mind combined Daylight and Baywatch,” I said.

He laughed. “It seemed to do something.”

Finally, voices from behind us called: “Alright, we ready? Background, here we go. Locked!”

“Alright,” my partner said. “Time to look confused!”

I wiped my palms on my shorts, eyed my path, and readied myself to run.

In order to help secure my place on what was apparently not a movie but a TV show, I needed to run as close to the actors as possible. As they rushed from the hotel, I’d trot right next to them, even try to weave between as seamlessly as the frenetic crowd would allow.

“Rolling!”

A strobe flashed atop the hotel. Hands went up to shield ears and eyes. People pointed at the building in exaggerated surprise. It felt bizarre to recoil from a sound we couldn’t hear, but that’s what we did, or tried to do. When the actors rushed from the hotel lobby, I took a deep breath and darted from my post. Safeguarding my eyes, I snaked between cars, meandered through extras, and passed so close to the main actors that I almost bumped them. When I got to the other side, the flashing continued, so I stopped by a car and covered my ears. Extras beside me asked each other, “Is it over? Do we keep going?” We kept going until someone yelled “Cut!” Crew members gathered by the monitors behind us, likely to assess the footage. “I feel so stupid,” one extra said to another.

I walked through the crowd and resumed my position.

“How was that?” my partner said.

“Exhilarating.” We both laughed. “Did you do your confused face?”

“I did, but my back was turned so nobody could see it.” He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, likely tired from a day spent standing on cement. Once again, a few seconds of action gave way to the perpetual anticlimax of waiting. “Were you on the bus ride down here?”

“No,” I said, “I drove myself.”

“It was crazy. They put us on a giant school bus. The driver didn’t seem to know how to drive the big bus. He broke off a woman’s side mirror, pulled a lever and the back hatch opened instead of the brake. It was a wreck.” It reminded me of a story a guy told me about riding a school bus into the San Gabriel Mountains to film Jane’s Addiction’s “Stop!” video. “I was working at Wherehouse Records in the Topanga Mall,’ he told me, “and this guy walked up to me and said, ‘Haven’t I seen you at some Jane’s shows?’ …And he reached into his back pocket and handed me a piece of paper – the same paper that they have there on the site – and he said, ‘This is going to be awesome. You should go.’ So I called the number and some guy said for me to drive out to a parking lot in Pomona and be there by 8am and that I could bring one other person with me. We got there and there were three school buses and maybe 150 people standing around trying to figure out what was going to happen next. We all piled into the buses and they started driving up a winding road filled with hairpin switchbacks toward the top of Mt. Baldy. We all got out of the buses and wandered into this pool area where they were setting up the stage and grilling food and handing out beer and soft drinks. The band was all just milling around. All of their families were there – Eric Avery’s dad was working the grill at one point – and Stephen Perkins let my friend Jim check out how he set up his drum kit. It was the most laid back affair ever. We were standing on the stage and the band started hooking up their guitars and such and we said, oh, hey, do we need to get off the stage? And Dave Navarro said, ‘As long as you don’t get in the way, stand wherever you want, dude.’”

LA is a weird place.

The actors went back inside the hotel as crew prepared the shot.

“Uh oh,” my partner said, “here comes trouble.” A disheveled man in a dirty blue Hawaiian shirt and shredded blue pants sauntered down the sidewalk toward the hotel. He held a plastic soda bottle filled with dark fluid, and the tatters swaying around his shins and knees made him look like Robinson Crusoe. His shirt was so soiled that you could see the dark patches from a distance. My partner said, “This will be interesting.”

The man walked past the security guard by the parking lot. He raised the bottle at him and said something, scrunching his face and pointing his entire body like a hunting dog. As he walked by, he spun around a few times, making slow circles as if to take everything in. When he arrived at the restaurant, he stopped and said something to one of the extras, then he darted inside.

“Oh no!” said stringy hair.

“He’ll be happy to see all that food,” I said. “I wish I was in there to see how that was going down.”

We waited, wondering if the cameras would start before the man came back out. When he reappeared, he launched from the entrance as if he’d been ejected. Spinning around, he saw the concierge, stopped and started gesticulating in a wrathful way.

“He’s talking to the concierge like he’s a real person,” my partner said. The guy waved his bottle the way an angry preacher waves a Bible. “Whatever’s in that bottle looks disgusting.”

“If he’s a good actor,” I said, “the concierge will politely run him off.” The concierge said something, and the man turned and shuffled off.

“Rolling!”

We did the shoot multiple times. I would run across the set, stop at the other side, hold up my hands to catch the falling sparks that crew would add in post-production. Then I’d walk back to my buddy on the other side. Each shot seemed the same, my acting as horrible as the previous take. But the crew saw flaws in playback that required multiple takes.

During one shot, I decided I was going to spin in a circle, hands out, palms up, collecting the invisible falling sparks, so after my cross, I spun round and round like a mental patient. I stood beside three extras who were laughing and making comments at such volume that the cameramen and director must have heard. “Oh look,” said the extras, “I’m holding sparks! Sparks are falling! It’s magical, magical I tell you.”

As I waited for the cameras to roll on the next shot, a teenager appeared out of nowhere. “Hi,” he said. He stood close to me, and his gaze displayed an unnerving, dumbstruck vacancy. “Are you guys filming a movie?”

My partner said, “TV.”

The kid’s eyes widened, and the ecstatic, vampiric expression of the star struck overtook his face. “TV? What show is it?”

We both said: “Daybreak.”

He said, “I’ve never heard of it.” Neither had we. The kid stared right at us for what felt like an unnecessarily long time, then pivoted his head to take in the scene: the cameras, trucks, wires, lights. Behind us crew yelled “Lock!” causing my stomach to tense. I’d hoped the kid would hear that and make a swift exit, but he remained there, staring at us as if expecting some revelation.

“We’re just extras,” I said. “Dime-a-dozen, low on the totem pole.”

Crew yelled, “Rolling!”

“Actually,” I said, “they’re filming right now. You should either hold your hands on your ears and look terrified, or head that way off camera.”

The strobe light flashed, and the kid looked at it smiling, as enraptured as someone absorbing sun at the beach. The extras’ hands went up. Mine went up, too. When the actors rushed from the hotel, I made my run. When I returned to my post, the kid was gone. “That was weird,” I said. “That kid. He just walked into the shoot.”

My partner shook his head. “I know. They don’t have very good security.”

Soon after, the crew thanked and gathered us inside the hotel, where the woman with the clipboard collected props and costumes. “Is this a prop?” said the concierge. He tugged on the hem of his maroon vest.

“Yes,” the woman said, “If we gave it to you, it is.” She sent the rest of the extras home and gathered a select group outside for a close up – the last shot of the night. There was no way I could weasel into that. I tried to think of ways to get on that list, but I knew my night was over. I went to grab some more chips and heard a voice behind me: “You still don’t have a voucher, so I can’t have you hanging out.”

Without turning around I said, “I’m taking off right now.”

“Okay,” she said, “perfect. It’s just, a liability.”

When she walked outside, I grabbed more cookies and ate them on the sidewalk, right beside the hydrant where this insanity all started. The air was cool and moist. It was just after 11pm. I texted my girlfriend, “I’m leaving the set,” and savored the privilege of being able to say “the set” with a trace of legitimacy.

I walked north on Main. A few background actors shuffled in front of me, headed to the busses the production company provided. The food service guy stood by a lamp. As I passed I said, “Have a good night, man.”

His eyes registered nothing, but he waved. “You too, bud.”

I turned and took a final look at the set: the scattered cars, the powerful lights casting harsh shadows, the fake New Yorker Hotel marquee. The scene looked small and ridiculous. Real life proceeded around us: people sleeping in cardboard boxes on the sidewalks to the east; hip young people getting drunk on neighboring Spring Street.

Further up Main, the street and I shed our costumes andbecame again what we really were. Free of the industrial bulbs, the deep sense of night settled in. A few dome tents stood against the fence surrounding a parking lot, the low voices of the homeless audible inside.

Up near 4^th, I stepped into the vacant slow lane to take a photo of the old Hotel Barclay.A man with a grizzly white beard and soiled jeans staggered up and stopped beside the entrance, preparing to take a leak. When he turned and spotted me and my camera, he zipped up and tried to strike a casual pose. “Howya’ doing?” I said.

He exhaled cigarette smoke. “Hungry as fuck and have two cents to my name.” All his top front teeth were missing.

I reached into my backpack and handed him three bags of chips. “Take these,” I said. “I’m happy to give them to you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’ll help. Have a good night.”

“You too.” As I walked away I remembered the rest of the loot. “And here’s dessert: oatmeal cream cookies.”

He took the stack in his hand and smiled. “Thanks again. Have a good night.”

Further up Main, I walked past two drunk Hispanic men outside the New Jalisco bar. They stood cheek to cheek on the sidewalk, reeking of alcohol and swaying like they were preparing to dance and then kiss. Further north, a man in a black hoodie and sweat pants sat alone on the steps of a church, a duffle bag by his side. As he made unusual, erratic hand movements to himself, a small tan dog ran across 2^nd into the lawn of the LA Police Department building. I whistled but the dog wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t even turn to look. “Hey buddy,” I said in my soft pet voice. “Come here.” He trotted off and disappeared into the bushes. Climbing into my car on Little Tokyo side street, I felt equally intangible.

When I got online the next day, I Googled “Daybreak” but couldn’t find information. I feared I’d written down the wrong name. It took me an entire month to finally locate it. Turns out, Daybreak is a web series developed by AT&T as a way to cross-sell their smart phones and apps. As the show’s website puts it, “Brought to you through various media and technologies, Daybreak is an interactive story about the magic of technology and its power to transform our lives and aid us in reaching our highest potential.” Meaning, the show is a commercial housed in a sci-fi narrative. The first episode aired on May 31^st, the day after my shoot. Some of the shots I watched them film appear in Episode 5 – shots between the 2:37 and 3:06 minute marks, and between the 3:24 and 3:37 marks; the latter is the scene of my failed walk-through. I can’t see myself in the group shot at the 7:05 minute mark, though if the show ever makes a sixth episode, maybe it will include the additional footage. If so, I’ll be easy to spot. I’m the only person in the scene wearing Vans and shorts.

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Interview Series with Members of Portland, Oregon’s Homeless Population

The city of Portland, where I live, is the urban center of a county with more than fifteen thousand homeless people. That figure includes not only people who sleep on the street and in shelters, but also those who sleep on friends’ couches, in cars, and in transitional housing. People often offer various explanations for why this is: the abundance of social services, the minimum wage, the way the Northwest’s moderate climate enables people to live outside for most of the year. In 2009, Oregon ranked first in the nation for homelessness per capita. I wanted to investigate this; to see who these people are, and how they get by. So I spent the summer of 2011 talking to some of the homeless population here in town.Here are most of the interviews in the series, posted by two literary magazines:

“Just Wander Around: Eddie.” Audio/text interview, Better: Culture & Lit, Issue 1 Fall/Winter 2012.

“Josh: I Like Free Things, Part I and Part II.” Curbside Splendor, August 2012.

“We Have a lot of Resources, and a lot of Drag Queens:  Kevin, Shelly, and Greg.” Curbside Splendor, September 2012.

“You Know, Like–I Don’t Know: Casper.” Curbside Splendor, September 2012.

“My Face Is a Mirror.  Look At it.  You Will See Yourself: Terry.” Curbside Splendor, September 2012.

“Just Stuck on This Corner for the Time Being:  Elizabeth.” Curbside Splendor, September 2012.

“That Got Totaled, and That Was the End of That: 25-Year Old Addict.” Curbside Splendor, October 2012.

“Climb That Mountain.” Audio interview of a hitchhiking kid, The Collagist, October 2011.

Also: The Portland Mercury mentioned the series in September, which was nice of them.

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Pork Broth and Lard Skin: The Flavorful Variety of Ramen in Los Angeles

By the time Lucky Peach magazine did their ramen issue in the summer of 2011, ramen shops and izakayas were already multiplying in many West Coast cities. The issue’s recipes and the unprecedented “Specifist’s Guide to the Regional Ramen of Japan” only fueled Americans’ interest in this popular Japanese food.

You can call this ramenia a hipster fad if you want. Dismiss many US versions as inauthentic. Go ahead and be a grump. But trendy or not, I’m enjoying the dish’s increasing availability.

On a recent vacation, I slurped my way through numerous luxuriant bowls in Los Angeles. Like many of the world’s great cities, LA is an energetic, multicultural mélange. It’s been fortunate enough to have a large Japanese population for a long time. As both a generator and early absorber of culture, it’s no surprise that LA is home to some of America’s best ramen shops. Although they’re all over the city, two neighborhoods boast the greatest density: Little Tokyo downtown, and Sawtelle on the West Side. Here’s a tour through a few:

1) Daikokuya

In the solar system of LA ramen shops, this place is the sun. Located in Little Tokyo on 1^st just east of San Pedro Street, Daikokuya sits across the street from Mr. Pizza (“dinner special available,” says the sandwich board) and Las Galas (offering Philly Combo, Taco Combo, Burger Combo, Quesadilla Combo), and it’s so revered that it’s one of the only reasons many people come to Little Tokyo at all. I’ll be generous and assume that the people eating at Mr. Pizza are lost.

Other Little Tokyo shops top peoples’ best of lists: Aoi Restaurant next door, for instance, Chin-Ma-Ya of Tokyo, and Manten down on 2^nd and Alameda. But the consensus is that Daikokuya beats them all.

Daikokuya is a small local chain with five locations: Monterey Park, Costa Mesa, Hacienda Heights, Arcadia and Little Tokyo. LT’s is a tiny shop. A few booths line the walls. A small counter surrounds the cook station. Demand usually outstrips seating, although on my last trip I got lucky and only had to wait about fifteen minutes.

Some people deride it because of its popularity: “The line is ridiculous! Screw that place! Why wait thirty minutes when Aoi rarely has a wait?” There’s some logic to the latter. Whether or not you think Daikokuya’s is LA’s best ramen, it is, without question, ridiculously good.

Daikokuya is known for tonkotsu ramen, a broth based on stewed pork bones. In Lucky Peach, chef David Chang says, “Tonkotsu is to ramen as Chicago deep-dish is to pizza: it’s a food group of its own, with a style that’s a thing apart, practically a different dish.” Daikokuya simmers their broth overnight.

As the menu says, “the process begins the afternoon before it ever reaches your table by boiling pork bones and joints in a large cauldren (sic) all throughout the night reducing at an undisclosed location. by the time it reaches the stove behind the counter the next day all the goodness is concentrated in our famous tonkotsu soup base.” Their broth is so good, they could cook it in a polluted brake drum for all I care.

This stuff is gravy, a rich, buttery comfort food that packs a salty porcine punch without being greasy. Amid its many layers, it has hints of bacon smoke. On my last visit, it was ninety something degrees out, yet the broth didn’t feel overpowering. And somehow it’s only $8.50! Bottom line: you’re not going to wait in line only to conclude, “That ramen was horrible.” The only regret you’ll have is seeing the bottom of your bowl.

Ramen is composed of four parts: the noodles, the broth, the tare (the salty flavor essence that helps determine the type of ramen it is) and the toppings. Daikokuya tops theirs with stewed bamboo shoots, green onions, a marinated hardboiled egg, bean sprouts and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Their chijiri egg noodles are springy and chewy.

Their hardboiled egg is perfect, with a firm but soft orange middle and a white that absorbs the broth’s flavor.

One key topping is chashu. Daikokuya’s is perfect.

Chashu is simmered pork. Some shops use pork loin; others use pork belly, or kakuni. Different places also spell chashu differently: charsu pork, chasu pork, char siu, hyphenated and not hyphenated. Buttery, laced with ribbons of silky fat that melt in your mouth, Daikokuya sets the standard for this stuff.

Another thing about chashu: ramen shops never seem to put enough in their soup. They use it as a condiment, rather than a central component of the dish, which conflicts not with some culinary code of ethics so much as the American tendency to view meat as a meal’s centerpiece. Even if my desire for more pork is rooted in cultural relativism, I still want more. It’s frustrating to pay $9-15 for a bowl somewhere and still only find one or two slices in it, since no matter how filling the noodles and how savory the broth, you’ll always crave more of that soft, stewed meat. That’s why it’s such a score when you find surprise scraps floating in the bottom, entangled in noodles like incidental fish caught in a net. The lesson: no matter how much it pushes your bill beyond your normal “acceptable” level, always order extra chashu. Go work an extra shift at your job. Book overtime. Sell stuff on eBay. But order extra pork, especially here.

The menu also includes fried rice, chow mein and chicken teriyaki, but who would come here for that?

One guy next to me – a young Indian-American office type guy – leaned over his steaming bowl and didn’t look up once. A single earbud hung from his ear, snaking back to the iPod on the counter. He leaned over his bowl, and after finishing his noodles, spooned up the soup with the repetitive, medium-paced motion of a shovel moving ore from a rock pile, one load after another after another. Then, when he finished, he got up and left. The only time his gaze broke was when the waitress brought his check. She set it beside him and he lifted his head, but he didn’t meet her eyes. He muttered, “Thank you,” and resumed slurping.

2) Suehiro Café

Located on 1^st Street, the main drag in Little Tokyo, this small café’s sandwich board lured me in. Weekend special, it said, tonkotsu ramen $5.99, down from $8.99. The usual crowd stood outside Daikokuya waiting for tables. I would’ve gone to Aoi instead, the little mom and pop place nearly next door – what some people call one of the last old school joints in Little Tokyo – but I’d missed their Sunday 5-9 hours. So I came here.

Suehiro is a small café. The sign by the door says “Maximum Capacity: 49.” A sign in back says “Thank you for helping Japan. We raised $12,518.” Drawings from kids line the walls and back hallway, all slipped into protective plastic sleeves presumably to protect them from tonkotsu broth splatter.

Even for six dollars, this ramen is more than utilitarian. The broth is well above average, the meat meaty and noodles springy. Any place outside of LA, this would likely be considered pretty damn good. The broth is much lighter than Daikokuya’s. It’s less porky, more golden in color, and tastes like it’s made with much more chicken, kind of like a Japanese matzo ball soup. With the popularity of heavy pork broth, it’s nice to have a range options.

Along with the soup, the highlight is the toppings: half an egg; spinach arranged in a generous bunch; nori seaweed; scallions; a slice of pink and white fishcake; and a liberal pile of soft, stewed bamboo.

It’s the traditional, pre-trend Tokyo ramen arrangement, and one whose bounty puts most ramen shops to shame. It would matter more if the pork was better. Toppings alone cannot carry ramen.

The chashu pork is good, but it’s the weakest link in the chain. It’s a thicker cut than Daikokuya’s, made not from belly but from pork loin or roll, which has been sliced and simmered until approaching tender. But it’s not as tender as I like.

Pork loin isn’t buttery or laced with the type of fat that makes belly meat so appealing. Although far from disappointing, it offers proof that being meaty is not enough. You have to have texture and flavor. The thing is, Suehiro gives you so much of it, which raises a deeper question: would you rather have less of the perfect meat, or a larger serving of the mid-range stuff? This is the place to find the answer.

Unlike iconic Daikokuya, Suehiro Café was filled with teenagers and tourists. If that sounds like a nightmare, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Five middle school girls sat at the long table to my left, accompanied by one adult, than mother of one of the kids. When the drinks arrived, one girl with a bob, big eyes and a striped, shirt said, “Ugh. This soda tastes like my medicine.” It was Calpico, the Japanese yogurt soda. The mother and daughter were Hispanic, one kid was white, and the others were, by their own description, “Indian, not Pakistani.” When sushi arrived, the daughter with the bob poked the wasabi with her chopsticks and said, “One time my dad and I bit into that. I thought it was, like, bell pepper, and I put it in my mouth and was like oh my god, oh my god.” She put some fish in her mouth and started shaking her head in disapproval. “I don’t like squishy tuna.”

One of her friends said, “Tuna is always squishy.”

“No,” the first girl said. “The red kind. I don’t like when it’s red.”

To my right, two young, gangly boys sat with their mother. The oldest kid was an early teen. He had feathered, emo hair, tight pants and braces with green rubber bands tied so tightly that they gave him a lisp. “I want a purebred,” he told his mom. “If I can’t get a purebred, I want a part Newfie.”

His mom flipped through one of the thin magazines that stood on a shelf by the front door. “There are lots of jobs in here,” she said without looking up, “restaurants you can work at.”

“Mom,” the younger boy said, “we’re not even in college!”

They each ordered variations of grilled chicken.

3) Tsujita LA Artisan Noodle

 Part I: Ramen

You want to talk about ramen hype? With coverage in the LA Times, LA Weekly and on innumerable blogs and the tweetosphere, Tsujita had peoples’ attention before it even started serving noodles.

Tsujita is located in the Westside’s small but thriving Sawtelle neighborhood, an area sometimes called Little Osaka. Part of a small Japanese chain, this shop is the only North American branch, a fact that the ‘LA’ in the ‘Artisan Noodle’ name only vaguely hints at.

Tsujita offers two menu distinct menus. During the day (11am – 3:30pm) they focus on noodles: ramen and tsukemen. At night (6pm – 12am), they’re an izakaya, serving hot dishes and small plates, as well as a stellar omakase (“I’ll leave it to you,” aka chef’s choice) menu.

Tsujita offers three kinds of tonkotsu ramen: straight up for $8.95; Char-Sui Ramen for $12.95: “Ramen soup topped with slices of roasted pork;” and Negi Ramen for $9.95: “Ramen with thin strips of green onion.”

Head chef Kenta Ikehata

The charshu pork is really good. Tender, buttery, it even has the faint smoky taste of bacon.

Three thick slices float atop the noodles in the basic $8.95 bowl, all carefully placed alongside nori, bamboo and scallions. Although not as buttery as Daikokuya’s, Tsujita’s pork is delicious, so good that in hindsight I can see that I should’ve followed my own advice and paid the four extra bucks for the Char-Sui Ramen.

Three Jewish business people ate beside me. They kept playing what my own Jewish family calls the “Jewish name game”: guessing who’s Jewish based on their last name. One guy talked about trying to find a rabbi for his son who just left for college at Brown. When the waitress came to take their order, one man said, “I’ll have the rah-mahn.”

“Ramen,” said the waitress, scribbling it down.

“Yes,” he said, overcorrecting, “the rah-men.”

When their food arrived, they ate and talked and commented on their first bites. Businessman #1 said, “This is fabulous.”

Businessman #2 said, “Yes. Noodles are too hard for my abilities.” He was struggling to use the chopsticks to get noodles into his mouth.

The lone Businesswoman said, “We’re all here eating pork soup,” and they laughed. Through a mouthful of noodles, she described her father’s death and her mother moving into assisted living. “My mom is eighty-four, on JDate.”

Businessman #2 laughed. “Marketing is everything.”

Another highlight is the large selection of condiments on the counter.

There’s slivered red ginger, hot leaf mustard, sesame seeds, vinegar and pepper — you can dress your noodles to taste. If you like your soup spicy, add some of that mustard. This isn’t wet, hot dog style mustard. It’s the actual mustard plant, diced and leafy and seasoned to add heat but not too much. (Meaning, if you like your Korean food medium-hot, you won’t feel this at all.) It also adds flavor but not a pickly, tart flavor that’s going to overwhelm the soup.

The broth is thick and super porky, satisfying all the points on your palate with its dense flavors and silky body. They cook it for sixty hours. Besides this slow, careful simmering, part of Tsujita’s secret is fat. It comes from the pig parts, as well as a clear slick of lard on top.

Lard, you say? Before setting the bowl on the counter for the waitress, the cook spoons in some soy sauce from one metal bucket, then spoons in liquid lard from another.

Lest you think all Japanese food is healthy, know that, in Japan, it’s common to thicken ramen broth further by adding liquid lard. Some shops add butter. If that sounds like overkill, it is. It’s also delicious.

Take, for instance, Asahikawa ramen, a shôyu-based broth that blends chicken, pork and seafood. Since it’s located on Japan’s cold northernmost island of Hokkaido, Lucky Peach says, “The bowl is topped off with an insulating layer of lip-scalding melted lard to prevent the soup from losing heat in the frigid winter months.” In that same issue, David Chang says, “There’s a shop called Jiro in Japan that has become epically popular for having the most extreme tonkotsu-style broth, with so much pork fat emulsified into it that people talk of getting sick after eating it for the first time. But that doesn’t stop them from returning for the second go-round.” It’s a description that could fit countless junkies’ first use of heroin: getting sick then continuing using. What is it about pork fat that’s so seductive? And ‘emulsified?’ Any food whose preparation requires industrial and pharmaceutical terminology is going to take a toll on your body.

It gets crazier.

According to Lucky Peach’s “Specifist’s Guide to the Regional Ramen of Japan,” restaurants in the town of Kurume, on Japan’s southernmost island of Kyushu, serve their ramen with bits of fried lard. How you fry lard is beyond me, but determined chefs have found a way. And in the frigid west of central Honshu, “The twin cities of Tsubame and Sanjô lay claim to one of the most unusual and unhealthy ramen variants in Japan—an already rich broth made of pork bones, chicken, and sardines is topped with an almost obscene amount of suspended pork fat. There’s enough lard and raw white onion shaken on top that it’s almost impossible to make out the extra-thick, linguini-like noodles hidden below. They say that the salt and calories go a long way to replenishing the body after a hard day’s work making forks and spoons.”

A few words on lard skin:

Lard skin

Lard is a curious beast. Like mercury, it exhibits unusual physical properties that give it strange movements and qualities. Drizzled on hot soup, it liquefies, yet like the top layer of American sausage gravy, it quickly solidifies. Its resting state is congealed, and when it congeals in ramen, lard skin at rest resembles rice paper: a clear, delicate, surprisingly pliable layer. It contains tiny bubbles, and no matter how many times you stir it, as long as the soup is hot, the skin seems to reform. It sticks to everything, draping from the side of the bowl like a plastic pool cover, encasing the noodles, chopsticks and green onions as if this were sous-vide.

like a plastic pool cover

When you look at that reflective film, you know that that is exactly what it’s doing inside your arteries: coating everything and blocking passage. But when it’s on your tongue, you don’t care. You’ll care a few decades from now in the ICU.

In addition to compromising your health, the eating is fraught with danger. Even the tiniest drops will ruin your clothing. Bowls slide across the counter and leave oily traces that you don’t notice until they wet your arms. Pouring your soup into a take-out container requires surgical skill and the ability to disguise your terror in a way that maintains the illusion of masculinity. I even found a pool of liquid lard on the plate beneath my bowl. It had a semi-skin when I lifted it.

Broth like Tsujita’s elbows you in your bloated gut and proves that no matter how much Japan imports and celebrates Americana, it can also out-America America on uniquely Japanese terms. America invents the bacon cheeseburger topped with a fried egg and onion rings, and Japan lets some lard soup harden in your wheezing ventricle. Most ramen is a bacon cheeseburger. Although its complicated and protracted preparation means that it is not necessarily fast food, it does offer eaters a similar sense of comfort and a fatty rush, as well as a comparable physical abuse.

Despite the grim air of mortality surrounding this meal, there is much to love here, as evidenced by my consumption of the entire bowl and half of a second one. One highlight are the noodles. They’re fresh and chewy, closer to angel hair spaghetti than the springy, curly rubber bands most ramen eaters are used to.

Tsujita cooks them three different ways: hard, medium and soft. As the menu says: “Our recommendation is hard!” (That’s also how they like their arteries.)

If the bowls are smaller than the Daikokuya feeding trough you’re used to, then at least the flavor here more than makes up for it. Forget about size. This dish isn’t your penis. The soup’s so rich that a small order is sufficient. If you’re reading this and you’re American, though, you likely think that bigger is better, in which case, Tsujita makes you a dangerous proposal: buy a refill of noodles for $1.50, and the restaurant will give you free soup with it. This practice is called kaedama (替え玉), which translates to “extra noodles.” Since some customers may still be hungry after their meal, or might find the restaurant’s portions too small, some restaurants have a system where you can order extra noodles for a small additional fee. The Ramenaiac website says: “Ordering kaedama is a pasttime that originated with the Hakata style of ramen, in which portion sizes are traditionally smaller.” Many Japanese ramen shops require that diners have enough soup left in their bowl to accommodate the added noodles, which is why diners with foresight will resist drinking too much of the soup if they’re going to order a second helping. That’s why it’s generous that Tsujita includes more soup with the deal: Drink your soup, don’t drink it, they don’t care. You’re getting fresh soup either way. When the waitress brought my extra noodles, I realized the wisdom of not drinking too much of the soup: mine arrived in a new, clean bowl. The second was essentially a naked recreation of my first bowl, minus all the toppings – just soup and noodles.

I dressed it with sliced ginger and hot leaf mustard, then sprinkled it with sesame seeds. I was so stuffed that I could barely get through a third of it.

As Americans, we’re used to ordering more than we should, and eating more than is wise, so when you sit down at a place this good, it’s tempting to just assume you’re going to order kaedama. Eat like a horse, I told myself, you’re not in LA very often. It’s vacation. But Americans aren’t the only ones. A Japanese twenty-something came in, said hi to someone he knew at a nearby table, and in the time it took me to eat half my first bowl, he scarfed down two. His wallet was out to play before I finished slurping up my broth.

During the meal I felt fortunate to be here. Afterwards, I felt sick. No wonder: I’d eaten the gastro equivalent of wall insulation. After paying my bill, I tried to walk down Sawtelle but had to sit down in the shade to keep from throwing up. I pictured what that would look like: the bald gringo, vomiting into a planter. Bloated and remorseful, I tried to keep it together. Like the baby that I am, I text my girlfriend. She texted back the truth: “That’s what happens when you eat lard, baby!”

Part II: Tsukemen

Like those nauseated diners at Jiro, I returned to the source of my torment for more.

Besides ramen, Tsujita serves tsukemen. At first glance, this resembled a healthier soup, one based more on fish than pork and lard. “For 12 hours,” the website says, ”the rich flavors of bonito and dried sardines are simmered together with pork bone, chicken bone and many vegetable creating a succulent fragrance of the sea that is powerful and beyond compare!”

I’m addicted to bonito dashi – that rich, umami-laced flavor based on dried bonito fish (katsuobushi) that tastes like a bacon-infused ocean. A whole, carefully simmered broth of that struck me as liquid heaven. I would have ordered it on my first visit, but once I read the menu’s tsukemen section it was too late; like a miracle, my ramen arrived less than three minutes after ordering. I came back a week later.

Since Tsujita’s so popular, there’s often a wait. If you get stuck waiting for lunch outside, drink some of the barley tea they offer in a large plastic jug. Waiting outside beside me, three twenty-somethings discussed their recent celebrity sightings. A young woman in a high-waisted brown dress said, “You saw Angelina Jolie a few weeks ago, right?”

Her friend, a young man in super skinny black jeans said, “A few years ago. I saw Russell Brand a few weeks ago at the airport.”

She nodded. “You see them at the DMV because they have to go there themselves.”

It’s not that kind of restaurant. It’s just that kind of city.

So, what is tsukemen? Pronounced skeh-men rather than tsoo-keh-men, it’s a cold-noodle dipping style of ramen. Despite its rampant popularity in Japan, it remains relatively unknown in the US. Lucky Peach gives a brief history: “As much a different concept of ramen as a regional style, undressed tsukemen noodles are dipped into an accompanying bowl of fishy, barely diluted broth before slurping. Though tsukemen has taken the ramen world by storm of late, it traces its history to the early postwar era, when the now-legendary ‘God of Ramen,’ Kazuo Yamagishi of Tokyo’s Taishôken, decided to offer his customers soup and noodles separately.”

Tsujita is one of the only places on the West Coast that serves tsukemen, reproducing stateside one of the best recipes in Tokyo. In his 2011 LA Weekly article, Jonathan Gold calls the dish “life-changing” and describes a noodle blogger/cognoscenti known as “Rameniac” who flew from London to LA just to eat it. As Garrett Snyder puts it in his 2012 LA Weekly article, “The tsukemen broth [at Tsujita] starts out as the same tonkotsu base as the ramen, except it’s simmered and reduced for 60 hours, then fortified with bonito until it’s as viscous as motor oil. You dip your noodles, chewy, bouncy and cooked al dente, into the umami-rich liquid, then slurp up the lubricated strands. The proper technique for enjoyment involves consuming one third of the noodles with the broth, the second third with a dash of togarashi spice, and the final third with a squeeze of lime. Although you might have a hard time getting past the pure animalistic bliss of the first section.”

Los Angeles magazine included Tsujita as #88 in their 2012 “101 Cheap Eats” summer roundup and described chef Kenta Ikehata as a tsukemen fanatic who moved from Tokyo to LA to open Tsujita’s first US location. “[H]e’s been known to toil into the wee hours to perfect his pungent broth,” it said. “All that labor has yielded a bowl of silky soup unmatched in L.A.”

The Tsujita menu offers directions to bring out the emergent flavors:

Enjoy Tsujita Tsukemen Style in 3 Stages,

Begin by dipping the noodles into the accompanied soup broth until you have enjoyed around 1/3 of the noodles.

Please squeeze the lime juice over the noodle at the timing you like.

After the noodle is finished you can enjoy the soup at the end by pouring some addition soup stock.

The taste changes dramatically with each stage. Tsujita Tsukemen style at best.

The menu didn’t mention lard, though, and this time I arrived prepared.

I asked the waitress if she could hold the lard in my tsukemen. She shook her head no.

“You can’t tell them not to add lard?” I said.

She said, “Oh, it’s already in the soup.”

“That’s okay. Can you tell them not to spoon more on?”

Yes, she said she could do that.

Some people might see this as sacrilege, akin to asking Katz’s Deli to make their famous pastrami sandwich without the rye bread, but I disagree. Why take such great pains to source and combine specific ingredients only to ruin the dish at the end? Japanese soup stocks have some of the most complex, satisfying flavors on earth. Wanting broth straight wasn’t sacrilege. Dumping lard in there was. I just wanted to eat without feeling ill.

The broth was incredible. Potent and complex, porky and oceanic, rich and savory – like nothing I’ve ever tasted. It was also pretty greasy. A layer of clear fat floated atop the dark, cloudy broth like spillage in the Gulf.

In that 2011 LA Weekly article, Jonathan Gold says, “If you try to taste the tsukemen dipping sauce alone, somebody probably will stop you before the spoon makes it up to your lips.” Either no one bothered to stop me, or they didn’t see me spooning it to my mouth. Same with leftovers: “You are permitted but not encouraged to take home leftovers,” he says. The waitress with the ramen was more than happy to let me take what was left of my second bowl home. By the time I ate all my noodles, though, I was so larded out that I didn’t even want to take the tsukemen home. Less than half the broth remained in the bowl.

Rare or not, I was happy to leave it there. All that flavor, the cooks’ labor, the meticulous ingredients – burying it beneath so much grease seemed more egregious than like pouring generic barbecue sauce over Central Texas brisket that had been smoked for two days.

Maybe my stomach’s too sensitive. Maybe I have a prejudice against grease. I would say that Tsujita just barely missed the mark if I didn’t have the unbearable urge to eat there again.

4) Miyata Menji

Miyata Menji’s small, Spartan space presents a far more welcoming environment than you’d expect from a narrow expanse of white walls and wood floorboards.

A Plexiglas case of cookies stands by the door. Between the cookies and the kitchen, a large group of construction workers sit at the large center table, slurping noodles and sharing boisterous conversation.

Unlike many places, Miyata Menji has chosen the path of simplicity. It offers two items: tsukemen and tonkotsu ramen. Although they serve specials like a curry ramen, their simple menu means they do everything well.

Miyata’s soup didn’t turn my stomach the way Tsujita’s did. In fact, when I asked the hostess if they added lard, she tried to conceal her confusion with a smile. “Lard?” she said. “What is lard? I don’t think so.” There was a sense of finality that countered the rising intonation of her final sentence.

And unlike Tsujita, there was no wait. Miyata’s hostess greeted me at the front door with the traditional “Irrashaimase!,” or “Welcome!” in Japanese, and let me choose a table. She was super sweet and accommodating. Wearing a bright yellow Miyata t-shirt, a dark apron and a white headscarf decorated with Japanese characters, she buzzed around the room refilling water glasses, seating new arrivals and smiling when she caught your eye. A few bites into my meal, she appeared beside my table. “Everything good?” she said. She rubbed her belly. “We have extra noodle if you’re still hungry.”

Part of a small Osaka-based chain, Miyata is a recent addition to Sawtelle’s ramen kingdom: it opened on March 21, 2012, the first American branch in the company. As the LA Weekly reported right after the opening: “Owner and ‘famous comedian’ Menji Miyata wants to spread his food to the world, explains vice president of operations Akihiro Kanda. The 26-seat, cash-only restaurant, which opened on March 23, has yet to make any public announcements of its debut and is relying heavily on word of mouth and foot traffic for customers. ‘The ramen business is blowing up,’ says Kanda.”

A tiny Japanese woman ate an enormous bowl of tsukemen next to an enormous Hispanic kid in a maroon Adidas soccer shirt, eating an enormous bowl of ramen.

While I ate, a brusque middle aged Asian woman stepped inside to grab a menu. When the hostess greeted her, the woman barked, “Do you have cold noodle?”

“Tsukemen?” said the hostess. “Yes.”

“No,” the woman said in unsteady English. “Cold noodle.” They exchanged words I couldn’t hear. Her eyes darted around, and then she left.

The menu describes their take on tsukemen as “steamed noodle with anchovy cabbage, white shallot, grated cheese & vegetable ptage, pork minced, tomato crouton.” It notes: “If you are allergy or dislike to cheese, please tells staff. We are able to make it without cheese.” Looking around, it seemed that most people ordered the tsukemen.

Although I wish I’d ordered it, too, Miyata’s tonkotsu is the stuff of dreams. It’s rich without being heavy, fatty without being greasy, porky but not too salty. It’s the same approach that Daikokuya takes, finding flavor in the slow simmering of broth and adding fat back in, rather than adulterating perfect broth with lard. Like Suehiro’s, the broth here is golden like matzo ball soup, and its medium-body is silky in your mouth.

As usual, they top their soup with scallions, but in a twist that’s unusual among LA’s ramen shops, Mikyata garnishes their soup with diced tomato.

The tomato adds a nice tartness and a soft, fresh texture to each bite, a counterpoint to the hot broth. It doesn’t alter the flavor of the soup, though, which is nice. In what almost seems a cue from Vietnamese noodle dishes, they sprinkle on white shallots and fried slivers of garlic. The combination adds a deep, satisfying punch to the broth that fans of Kumamoto prefecture’s garlic-infused ramen might appreciate.

Another unusual twist: instead of using charshu pork, Miyata uses terisyabu – teriyaki beef. Granted, there isn’t much of it, and maybe it’s more a cost-saving measure than a culinary decision, but the thin strips are flavorful and have that chewy, resilient texture that makes teriyaki so good.

You can add extra terisyabu for $2, and more fresh tomato for $1. Ramen and tsukemen are both $8.75 for a regular size bowl. A large size is available for when you feel like an animal.

While chewing terisyabu, I started thinking: after eating all this pork ramen, what was it doing to my body? If you want a biased opinion, famed Tokyo ramen shop Nantsuttei offers a nutritional analysis of chashu pork. (The lead singer of the Morning Benders, Chris Chu, told The New York Times that of the twenty-five or so bowls of ramen they ate on a 2012 Japanese tour, Nantsuttei’s tonkotsu “blew everything else out of the water.”). Nantsuttei says: “Pork is a great source of good quality protein and contains an abundance of vitamin B1. Vitamin B1 is highly effective in relieving fatigue and is necessary to change glucose to energy in the liver. Vitamin B1 also helps to stabilize your autonomic system and relieves the symptoms of menopause and autonomic dystonia. Pork also contains compounds that reduce cholesterol and help prevent hardening of the arteries. By combining with garlic, which contains scordinin, you can feel the full effect of fatigue relief!” Oh, pork actually protects your arteries from hardening? Who knew. (Notice their website discusses the nutritional profile of green onions, garlic and eggs, but doesn’t list any info about their soup’s salt, fat or calorie content.)

Daikokuya, on the other hand, has taken a more subtle, evasive approach to the subject: “Currently we do not have the nutritional info for our food. It is something we will do in the future, but it is an involved process. Right now we are a small restaurant chain of 4 locations.. The California law requires restaurant chains of 20 or more locations to provide nutritional info.. so we still have time lol. Alternatively, you could look up general item’s nutritional info such as ‘gyoza’ etc.. and find a possible ball-park idea of what it might be. Of course, our recipes are not necessarily the same, so it would not be entirely accurate. Eventually we will have the analysis done.” Now that’s a line of BS I can respect.

Miyata’s only problem is location: the shop is easy to miss. Set off the street, on the edge of a small parking lot, the tiny storefront is composed mostly of a doorway and a yellow awning beside a blank wall.

Walking by, it looks like it’s part of the neighboring hardware store, rather than an appetizing restaurant.

Because it’s set back a ways, Miyata sets a sandwich board by the sidewalk to draw attention. I’d say that I hoped that tactic was working, but the crowd at 12:30 on Tuesday proved that it was.

Despite the seductive decadence of Tsujita, Miyata is my favorite noodle joint on Sawtelle. Simple, savory, with a relaxed atmosphere and friendly staff, eating here is like eating at a friend’s house, expect they leave you a bill. As the red paint on the parking block in front of the door says, “Thank you!! See you again.” Oh hell yeah you will.

5) Asahi Ramen: Japanese Noodle House

 

If we judged a restaurant’s prospects by its appearance, we’d miss some of the best food on earth. A birrieria with bars on the windows whose screens buzz with flies? A man grilling meat on a cart on a downtown sidewalk? Unlike the covers of books, food often works on the counterintuitive, uglier-the-better principle (UTBP). In fact, when it comes to ethnic, neighborhood restaurants, you should ignore the setting entirely. In Los Angeles Magazine, food writer Zach Brooks goes further, offering two rules: “Avoid Anything ‘Clean’ and ‘Real’ – These are code words for ‘expensive’” and “Look Past the Surface – Love the ambience and friendly staff at your favorite restaurant?  Of course you do. Know who pays for that? You.” That’s good advice.

Asahi Ramen isn’t dirty. It isn’t cramped or even faintly crusty. Rather than a hole in the wall, it’s the sort of benign brood cell you find in suburban strip centers next to office parks. Instead of overpriced iceberg lettuce salads and garbage sub sandwiches, it serves twelve types of ramen, more varieties than any other place on Sawtelle.

An hour before closing on Saturday night, the place was jumping – only two vacant tables in a room full of about ten. As the restaurant’s website says, Asahi is a place “frequently visited by film stars, so one wall is like a small gallery with star photographs covering it.” I missed the wall of photos, but the place was a sea of civilian faces.

A middle-aged guy with his girlfriend knocked over his cup of Diet Coke. Ice and soda cascaded over the edge of the table, onto the floor. She giggled and handed him a napkin. “Why is that funny?” he said.

She leaned back in her seat and tightened her ponytail. She said, “It is,” and smiled at me as if we had an inside joke. I smiled back. I couldn’t deny it was funny.

An older woman with buggy eyes and overprocessed big black hair sat next to me with her young daughter and said nothing. The kid watched a kid’s show on a smart phone with the volume turned up. The mother stared past her, past me, straight out the window, her chin resting on her hands as if the life had just left her. Only when the food arrived did the two speak.

“Would you like a fork,” the mother said, “or chopsticks?”

“Fork,” the kid said. Then they ate.

Nearby, a young man ate by himself, slowly and methodically, and drank a Coke.

A jovial couple behind me spent a lot of their time laughing and swapping stories. When the server came by, the man asked, “Can we get this to go?” He and his girlfriend said they loved their ramen but were full. “As you eat it,” he said, “it expands. It grows and grows. You have to watch as it reproduces!”

Japan is home to numerous regional ramen varieties. Despite this diversity, ramen broth is often divided into four basic types: pork-bone based ramen (tonkotsu), salt-based ramen (shio), miso-based (fermented soy bean paste) and shôyu-based (close to soy sauce). Nine of Asahi’s twelve ramen are shôyu-based, but each has a distinctive flavor, due as much to its toppings as its broth. There’s Wakame Ramen (“Noodle with seaweed, bean sprouts, cooked bamboo shoots in a soy sauce soup”), Moyashi Ramen (“Noodle with sautéed bean sprouts and shredded pork in soy sauce soup”), Shio Ramen (“Noodles with roast pork, ½ egg, bean sprouts, cooked bamboo shoots in clear soup”) and Kimchi Ramen (“Noodles with pan fried kimchi and shredded pork in soy sauce soup”).

I ordered the Mabo Ramen.

I’d eaten so many varieties of tonkotsu in the last few days that I wanted to taste something completely different. Often spelled mapo doufu, mabo tofu is one of the most well-known Chinese dishes in Japan, Korea and the West. It’s simple: slices of tofu seasoned in a red, chili- and bean-based sauce, whose flavor comes in varying levels of heat that frequently reaches the popular Sichuanese “numbing” level. Asahi’s menu describes their Mabo Ramen as “Noodles with spicy sauce with ground pork and tofu in soy sauce soup.” It was spicy but not overpowering, just warm enough to have heat and lots of flavor. But the broth was mediocre.

As Asahi’s website puts it: “The broth is derived from meats and 10 different types of vegetables and steeped for over 24 hours. The broth requires vegetables of which 7 would easily spoil, so the profound taste of the broth is very special to the dish.” Maybe the owners prefer the taste of shôyu soups. Maybe they want to specialize in a type that few other LA ramen shops serve, make it their niche. Or maybe shôyu ramen is just easier to make. The problem is, you can taste the difference. It’s not that Asahi’s broth is cheap or lackluster. It’s clearly labored over. It’s just that, for all that simmering and those ten different vegetables, the result is too simple a taste for my palate. Even though I’m partial to stronger flavors – briny, porky, oceanic – Asahi’s stock is savory and salty but lacks depth. You won’t find a whiff of bacon smoke. You won’t find the complex layers of tartness, garlic or butter the way you do at Miyata, or the concentrated seafood character of Tsujita’s tsukemen. The flavor that dominates here is salt, not overpoweringly, but in a simple way. It’s silky on your tongue but flat, which is disappointing considering their range of offerings.

I initially saw the menu hanging in the window and thought, “I want them all. This will require numerous trips.” I ate one bowl and thought, “Eh, next time I’ll eat the Hiyashi Chuka (“Cold noodles with egg, seaweed, cucumbers, and bean sprouts in sweet sour sauce”) and tsukemono pickles.” Maybe shôyu broth just isn’t for me, in which case, I’m a poor judge of quality. Maybe this is actually what ramen is supposed to taste like, and the heavy porcine gravy version is just the now version, the “extreme” next-level, take-it-over-the-top trend soup. Hard to say. I like porky, though.

If this was a person’s first experience of authentic restaurant ramen, they would be missing out on the depth of experience, but Asahi still has many charms. A small bowl of delicious, sautéed cukes accompanies each soup. Nice and crisp, they’re seasoned with what tastes like salt and sesame oil. The staff is super friendly, very attentive. Prices are reasonable and servings large. And unlike Tsujita, overindulgence at Asahi won’t make you ill. If there’s any post-meal regret here, it’s that I don’t live close enough to work my way through their menu.

In addition to ramen, Asahi serves yakisoba, sara udon (katayakisoba), oshitashi (boiled spinach in a sweet sesame sauce topped with shaved bonito), ban ban ji (“marinated shredded chicken and thinly sliced cucumeber”) and mabo rice, even egg flower and wonton soups.

As I ate my soup, servers repeatedly walked to the front of the store to close the door behind customers. The door locks in an open position. I can only imagine how annoying that would be to do all day. If the servers were irritated by it, they concealed it well. When the clock struck ten, they flipped the “open” sign and kept refilling diners’ water, as the rest of us slurped soup and paid our checks.

6) Jinya Ramen Bar

Despite the number of meals I had on Sawtelle, I never got around to eating at Jinya. But for those planning a trip to the area, it’s worth mentioning. As LA Weekly said during my visit to LA, Jinya serves “Tonkotsu ramen – including a black version with black garlic oil and a spicy red version – soupless ramen, gyoza and organic tofu made to order at your table.” The idea that I missed spicy red and black versions makes me ache with regret. That I walked by this joint and didn’t go in – what an idiot I am. LA residents, I ask of you: please slurp a bowl for those of us who cannot.

7) Hakata Ramen Shin-Sen-Gumi

Another venerated place I didn’t get to eat is Hakata Ramen Shin-Sen-Gumi. It’s a small chain with a few branches in LA and one in Tokyo. The Little Tokyo location is on Central Avenue, south of 1^st. In their June, 2012 Cheap Eats round up, Los Angeles magazine said of it: “Mitsuyasu Shigeta’s chain of Shin-Sen-Gumi restaurants serves everything from yakitori to hot pots. The draw at the latest branch in Little Tokyo is a pork-centric hakata-style ramen that’s meant to be customized. From the firmness of the noodles to the thickness of the broth to the flecks of fried pig’s ear on top, you get to choose. » 132 Central Ave., Little Tokyo, 213-687-7108.”

The restaurant’s website explains their unique offering: “Hakata ramen originated in Hakata city located north west of Kyushu . The main characteristic of Hakata ramen is the white, thick soup that is made from pork bones, also called Tonkotsu (pork bone) soup/ramen. Some of the other differences in character it has from other types of ramen are thinner noodles, and the simple decorative toppings of cha-shu , chopped scallions, red colored ginger, and sesame seeds.

In our restaurants we use carefully selected Berkshire pork and filtered water. It is cooked for more than 15 hours with a strong flame from a commercial grade jet burner to make our unique Tonkotsu soup.

Some of you may think, Tonkotsu soup is just a soup, it can’t be difficult to make. soup is like a living thing that must be carefully monitored. The water level, temperature, and strength of the flame must be maintained in order to create the best consistency of coloring as well as taste. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to open our restaurants, as it has happened a few times in the past. We take great pride in our work and food that we serve. We will not be second best!”

I admire their obsessive dedication. It’s one more reason that I need to go back to LA.

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Eating Tacos in LA: Three Beloved Taco Joints

Like a billion other people, I took a trip through Los Angeles recently. Thanks to my food fanatacism, I’m going use the ’60s “Summer of Love” convention to describe my time there, except in place of love, I use tacos and burritos. Here are a few of the more interesting places in LA where I ate Mexican food.

1) La Tehuana

Maybe it seems weird to drive to Koreatown to eat at a taco truck, but if you think about it, it’s sort of weird to let strangers cook your food inside a truck.

Parked on the north side of 3^rd street just west of Normandie, in a dense, residential strip, La Tehuana serves food Monday through Friday, 7pm to 1am, and Saturday and Sunday, 5 to 2. If you sling tacos in the middle of a city this big, it’s wise to stay open late for drunks and weekend revelers.

When I arrived after 9pm, I slid in line behind a Korean couple and some fellow solitary eaters. It was Saturday night. People walked and biked by. Cars raced down 3^rd and piled up at the stoplight. I parked a few feet away, in front of a Korean liquor store whose sign simply said “Liquor” in both English and Hangul.

A guy on a skateboard rode up, ordered an asada burrito and leaned his board against the newspaper wrack that stood in front of the cashier window. Because of the way the truck was situated, the dispenser functioned as a de facto table, which you could relax on while waiting or use to set your drink.

An elderly man on a bike yelled “Get outta my way!” to a pedestrian crossing the street. I leaned against the cool brick wall of Lucky’s Laundry and waited for my food. Three women in aprons and ball caps hustled inside the truck. Two prepared food. One handmade tortillas. When the cashier called the Korean couple’s order, they sprinkled their tacos with cilantro and hot sauce at the salsa bar and carried their food down the street.

If you want napkins here you have to ask for them. Same with utensils. If your order is to-go, the cashier will wrap your plate in aluminum foil. She’ll call your number and slide your plate across the counter: “Cuarenta y ocho!”

I sat on an upturned milk crate and ate.

The coastal air was moist. People continually arrived to place orders. Two tacos cost me $2.50. Every taquería garnishes their tacos differently. La Tehuana doesn’t dress theirs — just meat piled on one corn tortilla. You add onions and cilantro as you like, shredded cabbage, too. A row of condiments and salsas lines a metal counter.

There’s the usual containers of limes and thinly sliced radishes. There are two mulcajetes of salsas – one a thin, smooth guacamole, the other a fiery roasted red, as much flavor as heat. And there’s a Tupperware of plain but workable chunky salsa which seems to be made with only onion, tomato and cilantro; I couldn’t taste lime or salt in there. Inert as it is, it does add a nice crunch and color that makes the food pretty.

La Tehuana makes their own corn tortillas by hand, and they’re delicious. My sole hang up is that they only use one tortilla per taco. Doubling up lets you spread the contents out into a longer taco, which extends the pleasure of the taco experience and keeps your bites from being ridiculously overstuffed. Doubling up also helps keep any wet tortilla from disintegrating in your hands. Even though using one tortilla is an understandable way to cut costs, if you’re known for handmade tortillas as La Tehuana is, I say slap another on there. It’s a minor complaint.

Despite the abundance of local taco options, lots of Angelinos love this place. One woman on Yelp recalled the moment her La Tehuana addiction began: “Saw this random taco truck with a crowded line and I immediately made an illegal U-turn and almost ran through a red light.” Another woman said, “$1.25 for a taco? Great price to pay to get through the gates to taco heaven.” “I once heard you can judge a taco truck by their Pastor tacos,” said a Yelper named Victor, “and let me tell you this trucks pastor is 5 stars.”

Apparently, they used to serve a mysterious, decadent dish called Alambre, which the LA Weekly covered. It wasn’t offered when I went, though I wouldn’t have ordered it anyway. I was here for the tacos, even if they did only use one tortilla.

For dessert, here’s a fun blog, subtitled “Celebrating the Taco Lifestyle in Los Angeles” http://www.lataco.com/

2) El Gran Burrito

Red words painted on the yellow wall say:

WELCOME

TACOS • WE SERVE

TORTAS • BREAKFAST

BURRITOS ANY TIME

“Burritos any time” – I want that on my headstone.

Located just west of the busy corner of Vermont Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, cattycorner from an ARCO gas station, El Gran Burrito Restaurant offers a setting that feel as close to a picnic as you can get in this part of East Hollywood.

The restaurant is a giant patio. The register stands outside, set beside toy dispensers and coin-powered electric rides. Cars race by on the other side of the fence, as breezes blow between tables.

When you park, you step into the covered patio, rather than inside the restaurant, and even if you eventually spot the register, it isn’t entirely clear what you’re supposed to do next.

This convoluted ordering system is guaranteed to confuse newcomers and separate them from the regulars. Like Machos Tacos further up Vermont, though, this place engenders the kind of repeat visits that turn occassionals into regulars.

When I approached the register, the clerk was wearing headphones, scrolling through songs on an iPod he kept in his pants pocket. “Here’s your receipt,” he said. “You hand that to the lady in the window and she’ll take care of you.”

I scanned the dining area behind him for the condiment station. “Do you still have pickled carrots?”

“Yes,” he said, “just ask her for some.” They’d rearranged things since my last visit. No more self-serve carrots. Now cooks doled them out. The restaurant had also moved their entire condiment station inside; it used to be behind the register, in between the tables. It was so exposed that anyone could have stepped off of Santa Monica Boulevard and fixed themselves a bowl of carrots or helped themselves to salsa. Budget eaters like me probably spiked costs.These weird arrangements and idiosyncrasies are half of El Gran Burrito’s charm. The place is down-home, and in a world of chains, that’s refreshing.

Unlike other restaurants further north in Los Feliz, this isn’t the kind of place where you’ll hear talk of food allergies or gluten-intolerance. It’s the kind of place where you use paper towels, not napkins, and you have to fetch them yourself from an automated dispenser mounted on a metal column. It’s the kind of place that spells midnight “midnite” in its “El Gran Burrito Restaurant Midnite Tacos” sign, the kind of place where a kid on a skateboard will roll by on Santa Monica spooning cereal from a paper bowl, and two kids will chase each other through the parking lot, throwing gravel at each other.

You want a plate? Just ask for it. Otherwise, the cook will place your food in a small plastic bag, with the tacos wrapped together in foil, pickled carrots wadded in foil, too. You’ll be thankful for the paper towels’ larger dimensions and heavy gauge. For their size, these tacos are messy.

While I ate, a Hispanic man in his late forties pulled up on a BMX, wearing a white striped shirt and black plaid, knee-length shorts. He asked the cashier for a cup of water. “It’s hot, man.”

“It was hotter yesterday,” said the cashier. “But yeah.”

As the clerk filled a cup, the bicyclist peddled through the dining area, weaving between tables with the agility of a teen. His shorts stretched down past his knees, bright white socks pulled up to meet them.

The first time I ate here, a young black man in a tight purple dress beckoned me over from the neighboring Vermont/Santa Monica subway station. “Pssst,” he said, waving at me. “Hey. Come here, baby.” He was sitting on a bench, his back straight, one leg crossed tightly over the other. “Baby, come here.” People streamed past him, in and out of the subway stairwell. I waved back and said, “Thanks, but I’m hungry and need to eat. Have a good night.” When he kept calling I turned back around and blew him a kiss.

At El Gran Burrito, “everything on them” means that cooks dress the tacos with onions, cilantro and hot sauce. In addition to green, they serve two types of salsa: a chunky wet red one like the kind you’d dipped chips into, and a salsa fresca made of onion, cilantro sprigs and large slices of tomato. There’s too much oregano in the salsa for my taste, giving it a bit of a spaghetti sauce flavor. The salsa fresca is delicious, though. The tacos are stuffed full of meat both tender and flavorful. Not one but two tortillas hold each together. At $1.25 a pop, these are just what you need, especially after midnite when little else is open.

3) Tito’s Tacos

I spotted take-out containers labeled “Tito’s Tacos” in a friend’s refrigerator in Santa Monica one morning. When I asked about the restaurant, she said it was a local landmark, one that I, as a self-described taco fanatic, had to visit. When I arrived in Culver City hours later, I realized that at some point someone else might have mentioned Tito’s to me, too, but one reason I might not remember it was because of their speciality. They served tacos durados, aka hard shell tacos.

No matter how generous the contents, no matter how tender the meat, I don’t care for hard shell tacos. I prefer Mexico City style, which are often called “street tacos”: meat in warmed corn tortillas. Save the hard shell for tortilla chips, which I will also largely ignore to save room for the good stuff like tamales and beans and green chile. Maybe mine is a problem of association: any hard shell taco tastes reminiscent of my Taco Bell childhood, conjuring uneasy memories of cheap cheese atop soy-laced “meat” and the anxiety of going on high school dates with occasional acne. Can any high quality adult taco experience can undo that strong a Pavlovian response?

A crowd pressed against Tito’s five outside windows when I arrived, spilling down the sidewalk in loosely formed lines.

Inside, the same scene, except in shade.

It was as if someone had chummed sharky waters with taco meat and caused a feeding frenzy. Yet the atmosphere was calm, the people in line patient and polite. Apparently, the line often stretches far down the street.

Two women in front of me ordered twenty tacos and two large sides of chili beans. They were headed to a corporate event. A nearby couple carried off two cardboard trays stacked with tacos and chips. I’m sure Tito’s tacos are delicious, but when I stepped to the register, I didn’t order any. I got my other favorite food: a burrito. I snapped two photos through the window and the clerk politely told me, “Sorry, no photos.”

A young guy ordering at the neighboring window said, “Take one when they’re not looking.”

“Normally I would,” I said, “but I want to make sure I get my burrito!”

He laughed. “Good point.”

My cashier put on plastic gloves and stepped to the food station to wrap my burrito.

Like so many of LA’s best restaurants, Tito’s occupies a nondescript building whose architecture and location don’t reflect its iconic status. Down Sepulveda Boulevard’s seemingly unbroken row of old one-level store fronts, past Culver Ice Arena and Johnnie’s French Dip – another iconic eatery – Tito’s sits on busy Washington Place, just west of Sepulveda, beside the 405 freeway. Parking spots line the street, but chances are you’ll have to park on one of the two side streets that run north and south off Sepulveda. The north one is quieter, lined with houses and trees. The shady spots under the 405 are nice, too.

I carried my food through the crowded interior and took a seat on the back patio at a table with a family of four: two teenage girls, their mother and what appeared to be their grandmother. The grandmother spoke quickly in Spanish between long sips of Pepsi from a straw. A heavy man at the table in front of me ate alone: first a taco, then an entire chili con carne burrito and chips. He spooned salsa on nearly every bite, just as I always do.

Tito’s salsa tastes so fresh and alive, it seemed wrong to drizzled it on fried tortilla chips. It’s pureed. Composed mostly of tomatoes, it contains a little chile, a few chile seeds, and tiny, infrequent green bits that speckle its nearly absolute redness. The tomato flavor is intense but not overwhelming, and the flavor is so light and bright in your mouth that it almost tastes like they’ve pureed watermelon in it. I’ve never experienced any salsa like it. It’s exactly what you want on a hot summer day.

Even if you share my devotion to street tacos, Tito’s menu is diverse enough to satisfy. They sell beef and chicken tamales, tostadas and enchiladas, as well as chili beans. By chili, they mean chili con carne: cubes of beef, stewed until tender. As much as I love chili con carne, Tito’s version isn’t the most flavorful. It’s a bit bland. I got a meat and bean burrito, and it didn’t have the strong red chile flavor or complexity that I like. The salsa and tortilla more than made up for it, though.

The tortilla was perfectly grilled, making it both pliable and firm and giving it the essential little dark grill spots that flake off like pastry. It was, without question, the perfect burrito tortilla and folding job. They wrap like only the experts do: tight, origami corners that you can trust to hold up under pressure.

The back patio overlooks a car lot. As I ate, a car salesman taxied a small SUV through the lot, his leg dangling out the door so that the soles of his feet almost skimmed the pavement. Despite the location, the patio is peaceful. Vines festoon the side of the 405. Sitting out there beside the trees, freeway traffic softens from a roar to a calming hum, like a river of cars lulling you into a trance rather than eliciting the sense of terror and traffic jam adrenalin that LA’s freeways often do.

At a large table by the door, seven Tito’s cooks and cashiers ate together. Two still wore their hairnets. All had on red aprons. They were laughing and talking in Spanish. At one point they started singing and clapping their hands. Behind them, in a space beside the alley, stood three towers of tomato boxes, each nine boxes high. A kid with baggy skater pants and a forearm tattoo sat down nearby and ate three tacos. Inside, gringos sat beside Asian, Hispanic and black customers, everyone enjoying a sunny summer day and offering proof that Los Angeles is as multicultural as New York, and that it is this very multiculturalism that is responsible for making it one the world’s great cities.

Here’s Tito’s website. Don’t judge the food based on the quality of their jingle, but do brace yourself for it: http://titostacos.com/

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