A newsstand where the world still unfolds as print fades to black

A red truck pulls into an empty parking lot off Fairfax Avenue just before 6 a.m. René Portillo gets out in a rush and heads to a blue shoe box of a building wearing a message in faded paint: “THE NEW YORK TIMES Expect The World.” To the right, a California Lottery banner proclaims: “Millionaire made here.”

Portillo unbolts two padlocks and flicks on the lights. He rips the plastic tether on a stack of newspapers and begins arranging them on a wire rack. Then he hears footsteps.

“Buenos diiiiiiias,” he says, greeting his first customer with the chirpiness of a morning person, even if he might not be one. The men chitchat in Spanish as Portillo rings up the man’s stack: seven copies of the Los Angeles Times, seven more of the New York Times, three USA Todays, two Orange County Registers and one La Opinión.

The man works for CNN and comes in every weekday to buy papers to take to work. After he leaves, Portillo peels his breakfast banana. Then a customer with a tangled, graying beard and dirt caked on his red cheeks shows up, buys a cold Starbucks mocha for $3 and walks around the shop. He pauses in front of a magazine with Kim Kardashian on the cover and asks her a couple of random questions.

“Et tu, Brute?” he says. “Are you ordering a hamburger again?” He puts his ear next to her picture for a second and shrugs. She didn’t answer, he says as he walks out. Portillo laughs and waves goodbye.

It’s just another day at Centerfold International Newsstand.

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Sure, Portillo says, the Fairfax neighborhood stand has become a lot less international over the years. When his brother, Manuel, bought the place in 2006, it carried dozens of dailies from overseas: the Times of London, Egypt’s Al Ahram, five newspapers from Italy. Now the brothers make half as much money, and their foreign offerings have dwindled to weekly versions of the Guardian and Le Monde and a Russian-language paper printed in New York.

“People have the Internet for anything,” he says. “Now only old people come in — like me. I don’t like the Internet.”

And yet with several out-of-state newspapers and more than 400 magazines to choose from, including four about wristwatches, Centerfold has managed to survive in a city full of shuttered newsstands. Village Center Newsstand in Westwood closed at the end of last month, and the famously all-night World Book and News in Hollywood shut down a month earlier, although it’s since reopened under new ownership, with a slightly smaller selection.

But if business doesn’t turn around soon, Portillo says, Centerfold will probably go the same way. Calvin Naito, who lives near the newsstand and drops in once a week, doesn’t want to hear that kind of talk.