The Anschultz Entertainment Group saw their own opportunity and seized it, creating a kind of indoor annex to the market within the Staples. The goods and services were slightly more high-end; there was ample seating, plumbing; the ventilation system functioned, if not the AC; security was more present and less likely to shake one down; and it had the reassuring familiarity of a mall. There also tended to be a number of spontaneous parties breaking out of luxury suites that had been rented by slummers, or erupting in the aisles when the DJ who commanded the PA system played an especially groove-worthy track.
Initially only pockets of both markets served beyond midnight, but as more and more sleepless were drawn to the candle flames, wood-burning grills, and improvised bars built on cinder block and scrapped Formica countertops, more and more shopkeepers began to extend their hours. It was a matter of only a few months before the market’s late-night trade was catering specifically to the sleepless demographic, a segment of the population that as often as not had little or no foreseeable need to keep its savings intact or to cling to personal possessions of value.
The Midnight Carnival was a name of unknown origin. And for any cheer it might suggest one could more realistically draw to memory the fetid smell of summer midways, the gap-toothed carneys, and the inevitable greasy stickiness unpleasantly covering one’s hands at the end of the day.
Honestly, I have no idea why I loved the place.
Vinnie the Fish worked from the back of a permanently immobilized late-model El Camino. The tailgate, dismounted and resting on waist-high stacks of milk crates ballasted with chunks of broken concrete, served as his work surface and service area. Standing behind this improvised counter, he’d reach into one of the dozen or so coolers that filled the open bed of the El Camino and pull out calico bass, California sheeps -head, bonito, the occasional horn shark, yellowtail, or moray, and gut, scale, debone, or fillet the fish to order.
A wobbly Webber grill was home to three cast iron frying pans that he’d occasionally squirt with olive oil, tossing in fistfuls of mussels, smelt, and rock shrimp. A damp rag wrapped around his hand, he’d toss the mollusks, crustaceans, and fish, sprinkling them with salt and pepper, waiting for the mussels to open, the skin of the smelt to crisp, and the shrimps to pinken before dumping them onto thick folds of newspaper, datelines from two years gone by, garnished with half a lemon, a dollop of his wife’s homemade tartar sauce, and a white plastic spork.
I sat on an upside-down bucket at the counter, watching as he passed one of these packages to the potbellied Cambodian he paid in fresh fish to sit on the roof of the El Camino with a sawed-off Louisville Slugger across his knees and the butt of a Smith & Wesson AirLite.41 Magnum sticking from his belt. The guard was only a few years younger than myself, bald, with a scar that should have been mortal running from ear to ear. He squeezed lemon over his meal and sporked it to his mouth, bite by bite, his eyes never ceasing to roam over the customers and the jostling crowd in the immediate area.
Vinnie dipped a meat hook into one of the coolers, brought out a two-foot kelp bass, and held it before a stout Salvadoran abuela attended by a whippetlike teenager with MS-13 tattoos on his neck and face who eyed the Cambodian much as his grandmother eyed the dead fish. She ran her fingers down its flank then held them to her nose and gave a sniff, instantly shaking her head and complaining in loud Spanish about the price Vinnie had chalked on a piece of broken slate in front of the counter.
Vinnie’s only reaction was to drop the fish back in its cooler, lift one of the pans from the grill, give the contents a toss, and nod at the next customer, a young Chinese housewife who immediately requested the immaculate bass, setting off a wail of protest from the granny claiming prior ownership. The gangster grandson made a move toward the housewife, and the Cambodian slipped off the roof of the El Camino, half-finished dinner in one hand, stubbed baseball bat in the other. The boy struck a pose, chin out, arms akimbo, but his grandmother hooked him by the elbow, hissing in his ear, dragging him from the path of the bowlegged Cambodian, both of them disappearing into the crowd, trailed by the hood’s string of threats and promises of retribution for the disrespect shown his grandmother.
He had good reason to love his grandmother, as she’d undoubtedly just saved him from a severe maiming. Watching the Cambodian carefully set his meal atop the roof before boosting himself back onto his watchtower, I was sure she had seen as clearly as I the easy menace of a death squad veteran. Though she would have remembered the look from National Republican Alliance soldiers; it was much the same in the face of a former Khmer Rouge.
Vinnie completed the sale of the disputed fish to the Chinese housewife, gave the pan a final toss, emptied it into a wad of paper, and passed my dinner to me, steam rising, oil and fluid from the mussels already seeping through the bottom.
I tossed one of the smelts in my mouth, the skin popping, soft flesh all but melting, tiny bones crunching.
A perfect moment. But for the murderer atop the car.
Two of us in such close proximity was a grave imbalance of things. But such was the world now. It was not rare to find two sets of hands covered in so much blood dining at the same establishment. And it would become less rare with every passing day. Our numbers would grow. That was the shape of things.
Sad world.
Vinnie took advantage of a pause in the line of customers and pulled a can of Tecate from one of the coolers, popping it open as he came around the counter and lowered himself onto another of the buckets.
“Mara Salvatrucha cocksuckers. That kid, he brought his grandmother here to try and start shit. One of their jefes was by last week. They’re trying to lay claim to the fish trade. They already take a piece of every job down on the ports. All those empty shipping containers that piled up in ’08, ’09, MS-13 is running protection on the Inland Empire drought refugees FEMA has been stuffing into those things. Those are the lucky ones. Newcomers are being housed in the cars that never got off the docks when the dealers went belly up. Anyway, they run the ports, they think they should have a piece of anything that comes out of the Pacific. This punk, tattoos on his eyelids, like red monster eyes on his eyelids. His thing is, he tells you what he wants, what he’s gonna take from you, then he goes eye to eye with you, but he closes his eyes. Supposed to freak you out, those monster eyes, plus the idea that he’s so tough he can close his eyes in front of you and not worry about what you’re gonna do. Vireak there was over at the port-o-potties. And don’t think it was some damn coincidence that the asshole came around to baksheesh me while Vireak was taking a crap. So he tells me there’s a new tax on fish. They’re gonna be needing one pound out of every three I bring into the carnival. One-third of what my uncle Paulo and my cousins catch on my boat. A third of what I buy from the guys who ride their catches over from the piers every sundown. Guys who still hang their lines over the rail and put their catches in wicker creels and ride it here on bicycles. Not just from Venice and Santa Monica; I got a guy who rides up from Huntington. One-third. So he tells me that’s the new tax, and then he puts his face close to mine, and he closes his eyes. And stands there waiting for me to fold.”