Harbor Nocturne Read Free Page B

kebab and, if that wasn’t enough, another main course of beef in tomato sauce. And somehow fearing that her Cleveland cousins would leave her home unsatisfied, she served with their breakfast a plate of burek, pastry made of cheese, apples, and more meat, just in case their cholesterol had not spiked yet. And she packed them some thin fried pastry, to take with them in case they got hungry after boarding, but mostly to prove that the old-world way of cooking was alive in San Pedro.
    Goran was sixty-four, one year older than Dinko’s mother, and forty years ago he had almost left Ohio for Los Angeles to apply for a job as a longshoreman, hoping to work alongside Dinko’s late father, Jan. That was until the call came from another cousin, offering an apprenticeship as an electrician. And so Goran stayed in Cleveland, married Tina, and had four children with her. They were extremely proud of their grandchildren and had bored Dinko with family history to the point of his almost wanting to smoke some grow in front of them, which he figured would induce cardiac arrest from both senior citizens, if his mother’s feast didn’t do it first.
    While he was driving them on their brief tour, Dinko said, “You can also call the town Speed-ro if you want to. Sometimes I think half the population under fifty are tweakers. It’s like Zombieland. You’re afraid they’ll bite you and you’ll turn into one.”
    “What’s that mean?” the older man asked. “Tweakers?”
    “Crankheads. They smoke their crystal, mostly. Pedro will never be what it was back in my grandpa’s day or even my dad’s day. Nowadays it’s sorta where the ocean meets the ghetto. Definitely not a southern California beach community, that’s for sure. You can get hit over the head with a beer bottle and robbed. We call it being robbed at beer point.”
    “So sad,” Tina said.
    “The town is just overrun with Mexicans,” Dinko said. “Gaffey and Pacific are our main streets, and Pacific is full of Mexican shops and dollar stores and people selling junk right out on the sidewalks. There’s a street gang culture now, and tagging everywhere by baby gangsters. You stand still too long, some little BG might come along and tag your ass within an inch of your life.”
    “It’s a shame what’s happened to America’s towns,” Goran said.
    “Of course, Pedro is not really a town,” Dinko said. “It’s part of the city of L.A., but it’s far removed from the rest of the city by that skinny strip of land between Normandie and Western that takes the L.A. city limits way down here to Pedro. We’re here because L.A. needed a port, so they took that strip of land and stuck the Harbor Freeway in the middle of it.”
    “I’ll never forget coming down here the other night on the freeway after you picked us up at the airport,” Tina said. “All those lights from the Port of Los Angeles. Thousands and thousands of those tall orange lights, and the crazy pattern of storage tanks and cargo containers stacked up as far as you can see!”
    “Those’re low-pressure sodium lights,” Dinko said. He’d brushed up on port stats when he’d learned that his mother would make him tour the relatives around Pedro. “The port handled eight million containers last year. More or less.”
    “And those huge cranes out there at night!” Tina said. “From the freeway they look like scary monsters from a Star Wars movie or something.”
    “Good call,” Dinko said. “George Lucas and his crew loved those big cranes. They look sorta like the giant white Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back .”
    “How many people work at the port, Dinko?” Goran asked.
    “The December report I just read said over nine hundred thousand jobs and thirty-nine billion in wages and taxes were generated by the Port of Los Angeles last year. Of course, we refer to the rest of the city up north of here as Los Angeles. We say, ‘I’m driving up to L.A. today’ even though,