The celebrities also like that Tomas wears tattoos that tell you he belongs to the Eighteenth Street Gang. Tomas is six-three and you can see the definition of his muscles through his shirt. Sometimes he takes his shirt off. Not too many young white people have a huge tattoo of the Virgin Mary on their back and a gold crucifix dangling from a chain against their chest. He never tells his clients he is not Mexican. Sometimes he buys pit bulls in Venice or downtown where all the black people have them chained in their alleys and when you drive through the alleyways you can hear them barking for miles. The sound echoes between the buildings. He can buy them for forty dollars there and then place an ad in a West LA newspaper like the Evening Outlook and sell them for a couple hundred dollars. Sometimes he gets them from Compton or East LA, but he never lets me go with him anywhere east of Crenshaw. They are cheap nasty dogs and not even the best guard dogs, but ever since they started killing children everyone seems to want one. Selling them is an easy way to get money; Brentwood and Santa Monica people will come with cash (our neighborhood is at the poor end of Santa Monica, bordering Venice, so it does not scare them) and they do not expect the pit bulls to be trained. You do not buy one to be a nice pet, or a safe one. You chain them to a tree outside your house and dare people to attempt to get inside. A lot of young white people from West LA come because they want to be cool and think owning one is like having a tattoo or being branded on a shoulder or arm. But celebrities do not buy pit bulls. They buy American bulldogs and Rottweilers and Tervurens and Bouviers and other expensive dogs that require extensive training. Purebreds. My brother used to sell Akitas, but after Nicole Simpson’s dog failed her, people on the Westside stopped buying them.

Mainly Tomas prefers to breed American bulldogs—pedigrees—and he raises them and trains them and he pets them and sometimes he even has to feed the puppies from a bottle. The ones he keeps long enough he trains according to the Schutzhund method. Each time he sells a puppy he falls quiet and pretends he does not care about it leaving, that he will never see it again. He will not scratch its chin or pet it in front of a customer, but afterwards, he will go to the window and watch the customer carrying it down the steps. Sometimes he will stand there for a very long time.