Looking back, it seems odd that I opened the store the second day of the riots, but that morning we weren’t especially afraid. The horrible things that were happening were all happening far from Silver Lake. No one I talked to the night before was afraid for themselves. Even the LA Times seemed to take an optimistic tone. The newspaper box chained to a lamppost in front of my store boasted the headline VIOLENCE ERUPTS. Violence that erupted could just as easily collapse. But a riot, the word they’d so carefully avoided—though the TV stations had not—a riot raged and roared until it burned itself out.

Pinx Video was on Hyperion in a little stretch of storefronts with a dry cleaner on one side, a takeout place called Taco Maria on the other, and a gas station across the street. Large, plate glass windows ran across the front of the building, but there were no windows on either side or in the back. And, no, our storefront was not pink. The landlord had refused to let us change its dusty blue, but we did hang a pink neon sign in the center window. It said PINX VIDEO in all capital letters and beneath in turquoise 3-Day Rental.

My late—my late what? I never knew how to talk about Jeffer Cole. I suppose I could say he was my late boyfriend, though that lessened the relationship. My late lover sounded like a tragic romance novel—Read My Late Lover and bawl your eyes out! My late partner sounded like we were in business together, and though we were that too, it made me feel like I was trying to hide something. My late husband was the one that felt right, but I had no legal claim to it. Usually, I went to great lengths to avoid the phrase entirely.

Jeffer and I had opened Pinx Video together in eighty-nine. The name was his idea. Pink because we wanted to stock a lot of gay movies. But ending in an X because we wanted to stock a lot of gay porno movies. Actually, Jeffer originally wanted to call it Pinxxx, but I put my foot down. All those X’s seemed vulgar. As though we planned to only rent porno movies.

It was ten o’clock when I walked in. We didn’t open until eleven, but Mikey Kellerman was already behind the front counter dutifully counting out the cash drawers. In his mid-thirties, he had pale brown hair that he was losing quickly. He wore a blue T-shirt with thin green horizontal stripes, a pair of jeans with a slit over the right knee, and Doc Martens. Over his heart, he wore a small, black Silence = Death pin.

A television sat on a raised shelf on the counter behind him. Normally, we only used it to check damaged videos or to play titles that weren’t moving—hoping to tempt the browsers. It wasn’t even hooked up to cable. Mikey had pulled up the antenna and it played a snowy version of the local news. They were showing scenes of people being dragged from vehicles the night before.

Following my eyes to the television, Mikey said, “I hope that’s okay. I thought we should know what’s happening.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Just maybe not when the customers start coming in. The sooner everyone forgets about what happened, the better.”

“What happened? It sounds like it’s still happening.”

“I’m sure they’ve got everything under control,” I said, naively.

“That’s not what they’re saying.”

“It’s not stopping?”

“It’s spreading. Five people have died.”

“Turn the sound up.”

The news anchor, who looked tired and stressed and had likely been talking for hours, said, “We’re getting word that the mayor has expanded the curfew area beyond the South Central area to all parts of the city. There have been reports of looting in Culver City, Van Nuys and along Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.”

For the first time, I wondered whether or not we should open the store for business. I wondered whether or not we were safe.

“Do you think we should open today or not?”

Mikey didn’t hesitate. “No. We shouldn’t.”

“I think you’re right. You can take off if you want. I’ll call people and let them know not to come in.”

“Oh no. I should stay and help protect the store.”

The store wasn’t much more than a big room with three rows of shelved video boxes. There was a small office, a bathroom for employees and a storage room behind the counter where we kept the actual videos in plastic boxes: black for general releases, brown for porn.

“I don’t think we need to do that,” I said. “I doubt anything will happen and even it does, everything’s insured.” And I had no idea how I’d go about protecting the store even if I wanted to. “There’s really nothing in here except a few hundred plastic boxes and a lot of used videos.”

“It’s your business, though. You and Jeffer created it. Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

I didn’t have time to think about what Pinx Video did or did not mean to me since apparently we were in the middle of a riot, so I said, “I think your safety and the safety of everyone who works here is more—”

“Do you have a gun? That’s what they’re doing in Koreatown. Standing on their roofs with guns.”

“Of course I don’t have a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn’t get up on the roof—”

“Do you know anyone who does? Can you borrow a gun?” he said, as though we were discussing a cup of sugar needed for his favorite cookie recipe.

“No. I’m not going to borrow a gun.” He got a look on his face. One I’d seen before. “And neither are you.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he did what he thought was in the store’s best interest whether I liked it or not.

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Go home. We’re just going to lock up and go home. Who’s supposed to come in today?”

“Mindy’s on at noon. Carl and Denny at four.”

“All right. I’ll call them. Put the cash drawers back in the office.”

“You should probably take them home, don’t you think?”

It hardly mattered. Each drawer held two hundred and fifty dollars in change. Like everything else, the money was insured. It barely seemed worth the trouble to bring them home. I shook my head and said, “Just put them in the office.”

After I’d called everyone, I tried again to get Mikey to leave. “You should go home and stay there. Is Randy at the hospital?” Mikey’s boyfriend was a nurse at County.

“He’s been there since yesterday. Doesn’t know when he’ll be home.”

“That many people have been injured?”

“A lot of injuries, yes. But a lot of heart attacks, too. People are having heart attacks just because they’re scared.”

It was terrible to think about; things were so bad people were dying from fright.

“If it gets any worse you should go down to the hospital with Randy. I’m sure it’ll be safe there, and they could probably use the help.”

He frowned at me. “We should do something about the computers.”

On the front counter were two computers set up with custom software to check out customers. There was a third in my little office. There was also a dot matrix printer for printing out receipts. The whole system was connected by a maze of cords, which made disconnecting them (and eventually re-connecting them) a nightmare.

“We’ll just pull the shades.” There were transparent, tinted plastic shades meant to block the afternoon heat. They cast a gray film on the place and you could still see in. Just not well.

Mikey gave me his look. “I’m putting the computers on the floor, at least.”

“Fine. And then we’re leaving.”

* * *

Sometimes I felt like a ghost.

I met Jeffer when I was twenty-two. I’d moved out to Los Angeles from Michigan with the idea of doing something in show business. I loved movies, but I didn’t like people looking at me so I never wanted to be an actor. I also wasn’t exactly creative, and that put a lot of showbiz jobs out of reach. Well, most.

I had a bachelor’s degree in business, though to be honest, after four years of study I wasn’t entirely sure what business was about other than common sense. Most of my classes stated such obvious things I had trouble staying awake. The main benefit of my education turned out to be the offer of a couch to sleep on in Studio City.

In the back of Drama-Logue, I found an ad for a production assistant on a low-budget movie. I answered it. The pay barely covered the cost of gasoline, but I did meet Jeffer Cole. He was the production designer, almost ten years my senior and about the most attractive man I’d ever seen in person. I went from my friend’s couch to Jeffer’s bed and never left. Well, not until the end. I did leave at the end.

For a couple of years I waited tables, while Jeffer became increasingly successful. At first, I made more than he did on a regular basis, but by the end of our first year he was working all the time and out earning me by leaps and bounds. In eighty-eight, we bought a house, something that was almost inconceivable to me at twenty-four, and then, the next year, we started Pinx Video. At twenty-five, I was a businessman, a homeowner and a devoted partner. Life was perfect. For about a year.

At times I felt like a ghost. I think I hadn’t had enough time to become myself before I met Jeffer, and then I was part of Noah and Jeffer, Jeffer and Noah. We went to a party once and I overheard someone saying about me, “It’s like he has no personality when Jeffer leaves the room.” It was a cruel thing to say, mostly because it felt true.

That’s what I was thinking about as I drove home in a riot. Strange, I thought. Very strange. But then I remembered it was almost the anniversary of Jeffer’s getting sick; the great unraveling of secrets and lies; the beginning of my floating away from him, ghostlike and empty.

My apartment was less than a mile from Pinx Video. Around the time Jeffers died, I’d moved to a small, one-bedroom apartment on a hill in Silver Lake. Not one of the better hills, a hill well below Sunset. The good part of Silver Lake was north of Sunset surrounding the actual lake, of course. Fanning out from there were some decent blocks, but then, when you crossed Sunset, you came to a hilly area where altitude and income fell into step. The wealthier people lived at the top of the hills, while the poor and desperate lived at the bottom.

Not that my apartment was the kind of place where rich people lived. The dishwater gray building was a small six-unit L wrapped around a shabby, old-growth courtyard. There were thick, shaggy palms, birds of paradise and a dribbling fountain, leaving only enough room for a single metal table and chairs. A cement stairway—painted rusty red—came up from the street and garages to the courtyard, then a wooden stairway led to the second floor. A red-tiled walkway with white railings ran across the entire second floor.

My place was on the second floor at the front giving me a southwest view of the basin. As I was unlocking my door that morning, I glanced out and saw plumes of smoke rising above the city in at least a dozen spots. I suppose most of them had been there when I’d left two hours before, but I hadn’t thought much about them, assuming they were left over from the night before. Now they seemed ominous; a hint of the future rather than a glimpse of the past.

I wasn’t sure if the apartment measured six hundred square feet, if it did it was just that. The living room was small, too small for a full sofa so I had a second-hand love seat that I’d wrapped in a crazy black and purple print I’d gotten at the new IKEA in Burbank. Beside that there wasn’t much other than a black leather chair with a bent-wood frame—also from IKEA, it was called POONG or something unpronounceable along those lines—a veneered armoire from the thirties which held my 13-inch TV/VCR combo, my video collection (or at least part of it), a compact stereo and a stack of CDs I’d gotten from a record club. On the wall over the POONG chair hung a Hockney poster that Jeffer had bought me at the LACMA retrospective in eighty-eight.

There was a faux Danish modern dinette set that I’d put in front of the window next to the dining area off the kitchen. That area was too small for the table, so I’d turned it into an office area by putting my sixties-style metal desk under the corner windows.

The minuscule, U-shaped kitchen had appliances that were brand new when I was in high school and very little counter space, most of which was taken up by my most important appliance, the microwave.

The bedroom had a wall of closets, and a wall of built-in cabinets and drawers, leaving exactly enough room for a queen-sized bed. I had set my bed in front of a do-it-yourself bookcase made of concrete blocks and planks of wood, using it as a kind of headboard. This eliminated the need for nightstands, which there wasn’t room for anyway. I’d painted the entire apartment dove gray and put in bright white miniblinds. I ignored the sculptured brown carpet as best I could.

I put on a Dionne Warwick CD and kicked off my shoes. I went into the bathroom to wash my face. I don’t think it was dirty, but just the idea of a riot made everything seem sooty and thick. I tried not to look at myself. If I had I would not have seen the ghost I felt like but instead a reasonably attractive young man of around twenty-eight. I had brown eyes and unremarkable but symmetrical features. The most noticeable thing about me was my hair. It was massively thick and stubborn. It did whatever it chose and I had little say in the matter. I’d tried every product out there and nothing tamed the beast on my head. At that particular moment it needed cutting, but I could hardly put out a bulletin to stop the riot so I could find a barber.

I tried even harder not to look at the rest of me. If you were being unkind you’d call me delicate, frail, skinny—I couldn’t for the life of me keep weight on—elf-like even. And if you were being kind, well, there were few kind words for a man of my stature.

Dionne was nearly finished loving Paris when the phone rang. I pressed pause on the CD player and picked up the cordless. It was Louis from downstairs.

“Marc is on his way home from the studio. They’re shutting down. Did you close the video store?”

“I did.”

“Good idea. I’m making lunch. Come down.”

I’d barely said yes when he hung up. Louis was partial to short telephone chats and long after-dinner conversations. I didn’t need to change my clothes; I dressed casually at Pinx—though not as casually as my employees. Still, I changed into a pair of khaki shorts, flip-flops, a mock turtleneck and an over-sized jean jacket. I ran a comb through my hair but quickly gave up trying to subdue it. Then went down to the courtyard about ten minutes later.

Louis had a glass of chardonnay already poured for me. The sky was thick with clouds—the marine layer—but that didn’t matter. There was an umbrella stuck into the center of the metal table in the extremely remote chance it rained.

Sitting on the ground next to the table was a high-end boom box tuned to KCRW. They were discussing whether the Federal government might now file charges against the LAPD officers accused of beating King. The guest was fairly certain they would.

“We live in strange times,” Louis said coming out of his apartment. He and Marc lived directly below in an apartment that was identically small. While I had a view, they’d claimed this end of the courtyard for themselves.

Wearing navy shorts, penny loafers, a light blue dress shirt and an apron that said “Finger Lickin’ Good,” Louis was tall, nearly forty and spreading in the middle. His eyes protruded a bit and his smile was wide, giving him the look of a jovial frog. I wasn’t the first to notice it; there was a collection of miniature frogs on his kitchen windowsill. In one hand he held a plate full of uncooked ribs.

“We live in strange times, so you thought you’d barbecue?” I asked.

“It was that or pack up the car and flee.”

He set the ribs on the table and bent over a small hibachi. In a short while, he had the coals lit and sat down with me at the table.

“So. Can you believe the verdict?” he asked.

“It was shocking.”

“I don’t see how they could come to that decision. Between the videotape and Gates himself saying it was…what was the word he used, an aberration?”

I sipped the wine. It was cold, sweet and tart at the same time, and warming as it went down. The glass had sprouted beads of water. I rubbed at them while I listened to the sirens in the distance.

“I don’t remember much about the beating. I wasn’t paying attention,” I admitted.

“Well, it wasn’t an aberration. I’ve seen the LAPD beat people like that before.”

“You have?”

“Absolutely. I mean, there was no video camera handy. And the person was white. But you have to know LAPD makes a habit of this.”

“So, it’s systemic?”

“Again, the video. Look at all those other cops standing around watching, doing nothing. That’s systemic.”

“What about people saying King was on PCP?”

“And it gives you superhuman strength?”

I shrugged. That’s what they said, but I had no idea.

“If that man had superhuman strength they left it out of the video,” Louis said.

Just then, Marc came up the stairs. He was smaller and wider than Louis, and about ten years younger. He wore gray wool slacks, a white shirt and a red tie. In one hand, he carried the jacket that went with the slacks, in the other a scuffed briefcase. His face was round and his lips were what my mother’s generation would have called bee-stung.

Not bothering to go inside, he flopped down in one chair and tossed his things in another, before he pulled out a pack of extra-long menthol cigarettes.

“Oh. My. God. I just drove through hell.” He lit his cigarette and inhaled. “I took Washington to Vermont, my normal route. Huge mistake. I had no idea that South Central was like a block away from there. A block! They started talking about it on the radio. Did you know that it goes all the way up to the 10? I certainly didn’t. And there I was, a block from the 10. And then, almost as soon as I realize that, I glance over and there are these guys trying to break into a liquor store on the other side of the street. I mean, the place had all these security bars and they’re just ripping them down like they’re curtains—Louis, why haven’t you gotten me a glass of wine?”

“Well dear, it seemed rude to walk away while you were talking.”

“Go get me wine. I’ll talk louder.” He inhaled deeply from his cigarette. “So, every few blocks there’s someone trying to break into a business and then…OH MY GOD!” he yelled so Louis could hear him inside. “I get to Washington and Vermont and there are two, not one but TWO GAS STATIONS ON FIRE!”

Louis came out of the apartment with a fresh glass of wine for himself and one for Marc. “You didn’t stop for any red lights, did you?”

“Are you crazy? Not after the things we saw on TV last night.” He took the glass of wine. “Oh thank God.” After a long sip, he continued. “I don’t know what happened. This morning—I mean, I drove the same route at eight-thirty—nothing was happening, nothing was being broken into, and nothing was on fire.”

“I guess rioters like to sleep in,” Louis suggested. “They were up late last night, after all.”

“Did you really run red lights?” I asked.

“Only the one at Washington and Vermont.”

“So, there were no fire engines at that intersection? No police?”

“No, the gas stations were just burning.”

“Well,” said Louis. “We’re glad you made it home safe.”

“Yes, my being dragged from the car and beaten would have ruined your appetite.”

“Well, it would have,” Louis said. “Though not as much as worrying about how I’d get the Infiniti back.” He looked at me and said, “It’s on a lease.”

I enjoyed Marc and Louis and their banter. I felt safe with them for some reason. I wondered what Jeffer would have thought of them. I doubt he’d have liked them. I remember the first time I brought Jeffer up, Marc said, “Good God, what kind of a name is Jeffer?”

“He was Jeff as a child. And then Jeffrey. But he liked Jeffer best.”

“Pretentious,” Marc said.

“Now, now,” Louis interrupted. “Don’t speak ill of the dead. Not when there are living people you can speak ill of.” And then he did just that, taking a few swipes at the president, who I found too bland to be worth insulting, or Pat Robertson or the mayor. It was fine with me, of course, since I preferred to talk about anything but Jeffer.

“Did you close the video store?” Marc asked.

“Of course he closed the video store,” Louis replied for me. “He’s here isn’t he? He wouldn’t just leave his employees to fend for themselves.”

“Do you think it will be all right?” Marc asked, pointedly ignoring his lover.

“Well, they’re not sure it’s going to get this far,” I said. “I’ve heard most of it is still happening in South Central and Koreatown.”

“Yes, I imagine Koreatown’s getting slammed,” Louis said. “It’s one thing to murder a child. It’s another to get off scot-free.”

“It was involuntary manslaughter,” Marc corrected.

“You say potato I say murder.”

White flakes of ash began falling through the air. One or two at first, then more. The wind picked them up somewhere nearby. A somewhere nearby that was on fire.

“And Koreatown didn’t kill the girl, that cashier did. It’s not the neighborhood’s fault. It’s really the judge’s fault, she’s the one who reduced the sentence. They should go burn her house down and be done with it.”

“And the jury out in Simi Valley. They should get their houses burned down. Come to think of it, they can burn the whole Simi Valley.”

“I blame public transportation,” I said quietly.

“What?” Louis asked, and they both looked at me.

“Public transportation is terrible in L.A. The rioters can’t get to Simi Valley.”

Louis erupted into laughter. He put the ribs onto the hibachi, and when he stood up noticed the white flakes of ash floating in the air.

“Huh. Who says it never snows in Los Angeles.”