Korean tea and traditional snacks

Talk of tea usually revolves around China or Japan. These countries boast innumerable varieties and ancient tea-making traditions. South Korea does, too, yet you hear less if anything about them. What you also don’t hear about are their tisanes.

For a nation the size of Portugal, Korea produces a staggering number of herbal and fruit teas. Pine pollen and honey tea. Ginseng, ginger and jujube tea. Infusions made from roasted corn and Job’s Tears. Such variety makes sense when you consider the richness of their landscape: both hardwood deciduous and coniferous forests filled with fruits, roots, nuts, seeds, blossoms, leaves, herbs and berries. All make appearances in their teas. Occasionally I set aside the sencha and mao feng in order to indulge in Hanguk’s overlooked beverage pleasure dome. To spread the word, I wanted to tell other tea drinkers about Korea’s incredible tisanes and suggest Seoul teashops where travelers can try them. Seoul’s Insadong district offers the best place to start an exploration, because of the neighborhood’s central location, subway service, and the density of teashops and cafés.

As a passionate, daily tea drinker of over twenty years, I’ve tried many of Korea’s tisanes, even though I’ve not yet visited the country. I buy imported bagged and powdered versions, and I’ve made a number myself using fresh ingredients. Here are five different tisanes and a list of Seoul teashops where I’ve never been, but which do serve these teas. One day I’ll hopefully get to drink some of these in Seoul, too.

1) Five Flavors Tea

Omijacha, image from Koreajjang.wordpress.com

Omijacha (오미자 차), or “five flavors” tea, at Jidaebang (지대방)

(2F 196-6 Gwanhun-dong, Jongno-gu. Phone: 02-738-5379)

In Korean, cha means ‘tea.’ Although English-speakers frequently use the term ‘tea’ to describe any hot beverage, tea is technically derived from the tea plant, Camellia sinensis. A tisane is an herbal beverage containing no tea. Koreans drink green and black teas, yet the term ‘Korean tea’ usually refers to uncaffeinated, native tisanes as well.

Omijacha is brewed from the berries of the Chinese Schisandra chinensis vine. In traditional Chinese medicine, Schizandra is considered an adaptogen, like ginseng, and restorative, believed to help the heart and kidneys. It’s also said to contain all of the five distinct flavors central to Chinese medicine: salty, sour, pungent, bitter and sweet. Opened in 1982, Jidaebang is one of Insadong’s oldest teashops. They serve omijacha hot on cold days and iced during Seoul’s sweltering summers, sprinkling a few pine nuts on top, which float in an appealing contrast to the bold red tea.

2) Quince Tea

Mogwacha, image from irenefranseda.blogspot.com

Mogwacha (모과차), or quince tea, at Yetchatjip (옛찻집)

(2F, 196-5 Gwanhun-dong, Jongno-gu. Phone: 02-722-5019, or 02-722-5332)

Mogwa is a Chinese quince which yields a tart, sweet brew reminiscent of citrus. ‘Jip’ means house in Korean, and Yetchajip translates as ‘Old Tea House.’ Insadong has been Seoul’s arts district since the Joseon Dynasty. Hidden within the neighborhood’s maze of bustling streets and alleys, Yetchajip’s building – a hanok, or “traditional house” – was built over 125 years ago, making it Insadong’s oldest teahouse. Although it’s a bit difficult to find, many people considerthis quiet, cluttered shop one of the most peaceful places in Seoul. Light is low. Fountains trickle and candles flicker. Birds chirp from a cage. Tea selection is limited (nine hot and seven cold), but ingredients are high-grade, and. The quince tea might be one of their best sellers. Tea comes with a small plate of traditional snacks, many made from glutinous, sweetened rice.

Here are a few interior photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/68558939@N00/4245023786/

3) Citron Tea

Yujacha

Yujacha (유자차), or citron tea, at Star Miss Lee Café (별다방 미스리)

(Address TK. Phone: 02-739-0939)

Yuja is a tangy citrus fruit popular in Japan and China. Korean grocers sell this tea in jars, where the fruit is preserved in honey or sugar like marmalade. When people start to develop a cold or sore throat, they often spoon a bit into a mug to treat the symptoms, but nothing compares to fresh versions made in a teahouse.

Star Miss Lee Café sells yujacha and nostalgia. Located on the second floor above a convenience store, it offers games, toys, childhood comfort foods such as dosirak boxed lunches, and tea snacks such as yakgwa, a fried cookie dipped in honey. Patrons can also hang notes from nearly any surface, including an indoor tree. Here is the menu: http://www.missleecafe.com/menu.php Also, some photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seoulkorea/4946926893/in/photostream/

4) Jujube Tea

Daechucha (대추차), or jujube tea

Daechucha, image from CNN

Westerners might be shocked to find so much stuff floating in their tea. Blossoms, pine needles, sliced jujube fruit – with so much plant matter floating in the cup, they could mistake it as soup. It’s a problem of texture rather than taste. Western palates are accustomed to clear beverages; we’re only still getting used to tapioca pearls in tea. But the same ingredients that commonly appear in many Korean porridges and desserts also decorate teas such as daechucha.

Daechucha is believed to stimulate your appetite and help you fall asleep. You’ll commonly find jujube teas blended with ginseng, ginger and honey. Fans of herbal liquors such as Chartreuse will enjoy this classic combination. Herby and earthy without being medicinal, it carries a rich taste of earth similar to a roasted beet. Despite how that sounds, it’s surprisingly appealing.

Jujube tea is so popular that it’s sold at most teahouses, so you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a standout version.

5) Persimmon Punch

Sujeonggwa, image from My Korean Kitchen

Sujeonggwa (수정과), or dessert punch, at Banjjakbanjjak Binnaneun

(6 Gwanhun-dong, Jongno-gu. Phone: 02-738-4525)

Koreans drink tisanes for health, but they also drink them for taste. Fortunately, even their healthiest teas are delicious. Sujeonggwa is a dark red brew, sweet enough that it’s called punch. Made from cinnamon, dried persimmons, ginger and peppercorn, it’s commonly garnished with pine nuts and served as dessert. Each ingredient boasts a number of healthful properties, from aiding digestion to increasing circulation. Sujeonggwa is sold commercially in cans, such as the Paldo brand’s popular 8.4oz version. As with jujube tea, sugeonggwa is so widespread that travelers who ask around should easily find a solid teahouse version. From what I can tell, though, there’s a teahouse named Banjjakbanjjak Binnaneun that brews their own sujeonggwa and sells tea serving sets. Another place to get good homemade sujeonggwa is Su Yo Il (수요일).

Perched on the second floor above the main road through Insadong, Su Yo Il means ‘Wednesday.’ Although this café is bit on the pricey side, they often throw a whole persimmon into their sujeonggwa. With such a great view from the window seats, high prices seem worthwhile.

Ready-to-drink teas, just stir into water

Further info:

For more info, you can also check out the book Korean Tea Classics, written by Hong Kyeong-Hee (a native Korean, he teaches the Way of Tea at a wing of the Panyaro Institute for the Way of Tea, outside Seoul), and Steven D. Owyoung. Also, check out this this food-focused blog by a vegan named Mipa.

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.

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.

            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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.