There is just a breath of wind in North Hollywood. The fan palms barely tremble.
Basir Beria steps out of his shop on Lankershim Boulevard with a red fighter kite. He walks to a planter where people drop their cigarette butts and kicks up some dust to see which direction it drifts.
The late morning light is bright and scattered, swallowing depth and distance. Beria flings the kite into the air, and after a few nimble tugs, it whirls skyward, quick as a swift.
The kite darts about frenetically at first, fighting the short leash. The Afghan shopkeeper lets the string unreel from a homemade spool. The kite spirals for a moment, until he tugs again. The red rhombus rockets up and across the boulevard in big blazing pulses.
Beria dances with this fiery apparition now. He ignores the recycling truck rattling through his vision, as he does the buses, billboards and ratty birds. He moves about the sidewalk as if he's waltzing, right arm outstretched. The kite responds to every twitch of his forefinger -- flitting this way, arching that way, carving a bit of volume in the flat Valley sky.
At 47, Beria is strong and barrel-shaped, with thinning hair and a thick asterisk of scar tissue on his little finger that testifies to a much darker day.
He brings the kite low over the tar shingle roof of American Drapery and lets it dip behind the iron fence of a Suzuki motorcycle lot. He whips it up just as a truck threatens to mow down the line.
He could do this for hours, flirting with traffic. Flying a kite is meditation, transcending purpose.
But he should get back to the cash register, where purpose knocks with a heavy hand.
A year ago, he opened a small convenience store, Smoke House and Magazines, on Lankershim just north of Burbank Boulevard. He works behind the counter 10 hours a day, seven days a week to make it pay the bills -- selling Newport 100s, Swisher Sweets, coffee, energy drinks, booty magazines and, occasionally, a handmade Afghan kite.
He misses the hours he used to while away building kites in his spare time. There is pure beauty in shaving down the slivers of bamboo, bringing lissome frames to life with swaths of rice paper and cotton string.
But after 23 years working for other people in this country, he has little to show for it. He buys his blue jeans at the Salvation Army and rents a peeling tract home in Tarzana, which he shares with his wife and children, parents, brother, sister-in-law and three nieces and nephews. He shelled out his savings, took out a loan and borrowed from family members to open this shop.
