HOLLYWOOD — The newsstand on my corner used to come at you from four sides. You walked up and the racks closed in from every angle, and the man inside sat in the middle of all that paper like the pit at the center of a very loud fruit. It is one rack now, a rack and a half if you count the gum and the lottery slips, and he sits closer to the sidewalk than he once did, because there is less behind him to lean against.
I have watched it shrink for a decade the way you watch a tide go out — not in the moment, only when you look up and notice how far the water has gone. First the foreign titles left, then the trade weeklies. The second wire rack of paperbacks he kept turning long after the spinner had stopped earning its rent, because a turning rack looks like a going concern. What is left is the local daily, a thinning stack of glossies, and him.
I still make the trip. Most mornings I do not need a single thing on that rack; I have a phone like everyone else, and it tells me the news before he has cut the bundle open. But I go, and I hand over my coins, and I take whatever I have half-decided to want on the walk down. It is the least efficient purchase I make all week and the one I would miss the most.
Part of it is him. He knows which knee is bothering me before I say so, because he watches the way I come down the hill. He holds the crossword edition back on the days it sells out early, folded under the register with my name on it in pencil. When my sister was sick he asked after her for months, and when she got better he was the second call I wanted to make, after our mother. You cannot get that from a screen, and I have stopped pretending the screen is trying.
The rest of it is stubbornness, and I will own that. Every shuttered stand in this neighborhood closed on a morning when its regulars decided, reasonably, that they could skip just this once. I do not want to be the once. A corner with a newsstand on it is a corner where somebody is expected to show up and open, and a somebody who opens is a reason for the rest of us to be out on the street at eight in the morning, nodding at one another, awake to the block.
He tells me he will keep it going as long as the numbers let him, and we both know what that means, and neither of us says it. So I buy the crossword I will finish and the magazine I will not, and I overpay for the gum, and I take the long way back up so he can watch my bad knee and report to me tomorrow how it looked. The rack is half empty. I keep it that much fuller.