The San Fernando Valley is a midnight...

The San Fernando Valley is a midnight mosaic of neon and shadow.

The wind unsheaths an October chill. The traffic lights talk to nobody. Broad shuttered avenues stretch through the dark. Empty.

But there are outposts in the night. There is a world born as Monday dies, as the citizens of the night begin their vigil.

Dave, the part-time actor who mans the 24-hour newsstand at Van Nuys and Ventura boulevards, sees his overnight shift as a kind of civic duty.

“L. A. is such a miasma,” he says, arms crossed in a sweat shirt and jean jacket. “You need a sense of community. It’s important to have someplace to go at night. I feel like being out here makes me an important part of the community.”

12:15 a.m. The Red Chariot rolls toward closing time, half full. The Red Chariot is a sports bar in Van Nuys: red Naugahyde, electronic dart board, football players in sun-splashed helmets crashing on a wall screen.

The flower lady comes in quietly. She visits 50 Red Chariots a night.

“I’ve been doing this for five years,” Sarah Gunn says. “I stick to the mom-and-pop places. The places on Ventura Boulevard are kind of snooty and hostile. . . . The gay bars are my best customers. I sell 300 roses a week.”

Balloons bob around Gunn as she maneuvers past burly dart throwers toward a couple. They slump together in an embrace, heads resting on the bar, either feeling romantic or about to pass out.

Gunn wears a sweater, a denim skirt and no glaze of religious zeal. Gunn isn’t a flower vendor fronting for a sect. This is business.

“It’s called Sarah’s Garden,” she says. “I keep the flowers in a cooler at my house. Call it a cottage industry.’

The bartender buys a $3 rose for April, a blonde waitress who resembles a young ghost of Michelle Pfeiffer and wears fuchsia skeleton earrings. She shows off her gift to two drinkers, whose attention jumps from April to football and back again.

The flower lady leaves. She says she has a chauffeur waiting.

1:40 a.m. Smoke and conversation drift among crowded tables at the House of Billiards on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks: Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, English tinged by ethnic urban villages of the East.

“Hey, Al, what was the most money you ever lost on a pool game?”

“Five hundred. Most I ever paid off was a hundred.”

“What was the most you ever won?”

“Two hundred.”

“Who was the best pool player you ever saw?”

“Efrem. He plays at a table over there. He’s scary.”

Counterman Tom Halligan announces over a microphone that people should wrap up their games. Sundays and Mondays are often busier than weekends, Halligan says. “Sometimes I think, who are these folks? Don’t they have to work?”

They are stunt people, musicians, limousine drivers, waiters and waitresses. Some of them will head to a 24-hour pool hall in Hollywood when Halligan clears the place.

2:55 a.m. The digits glow on the bank clock across from the Sherman Oaks newsstand. The wind ruffles newspapers and magazines watched by a lone sentry, Dave, a former New Yorker who goes to acting auditions by day.

“There’s a lot of good conversations out here,” he says. “We have huge discussions, five or six people talking about East-West relations, UFOs, God, the Dodgers.”

The regulars come on foot and in cars and include cops, taxi drivers and people who bring Dave food.

“You got the alcohol crowd after the bars close. They kind of hover around the pornography. Then you got your caffeine crowd about 4:30 a.m. They stop and pick up the Wall Street Journal. . . . And there’s a definite crowd of local weirdos. I’m polite to them. They’re people too. They’re just insane.”

Among memorable moments, Dave gives high marks to the night of the double moon.

“I was out here one night with some people. Regular customers. We were discussing the Kennedy assassination. Then all of a sudden we get mooned. Double-mooned. A male and female moon out of a white limousine.”

3:30 a.m. He works security at a hotel in the Universal City area. He doesn’t want his name used. But as cars hiss by on the Hollywood Freeway, he smokes and talks.

“Hotels, man, you got all kinds of hustles going all night. Women, you know, professionals, you can tell which ones they are, try and keep them moving if they not with somebody. Folks hanging around outside, all this money floating around, can they get a piece of it. Follow-home robbers after a big banquet or something; people worry about that.”

The hotel job is better than security jobs he’s had, such as one at a liquor store near downtown.

“Stress, man. I’m sitting there in uniform wearing a shoulder holster”--he slaps his chest--”the whole time I’m waiting for some drug addict to come in and pull something crazy.”

He flicks the cigarette into the gutter.

“Action? Hell yes, there’s action here at night. You just gotta watch for it.”

5 a.m. In the parking lot of the Canoga Park Bowl, a driver sleeps in an old Chevrolet, head against the window. There appears to be a sleeper amid clothes and luggage in back. Inside the bowling alley, Cresencio puts aside his mop and surveys the gleaming wooden floor of the alleys, the phalanxes of pins. No customers.

“Maybe because it’s the night before Halloween,” he says in Spanish. “They want to do things with their kids today.”

Cresencio is from Mexico. He used to have a day job. He worked for a good man, a Cuban who owned a textile factory. The boss worked for years to get two adult sons out of Cuba. When he finally got them out, they ruined him, Cresencio says.

“They spent all the old man’s money. They bought cars, houses, spent it on their wives. They went out all the time. They had debts. The two kids ended up spending some time in jail.”

So the factory folded. Cresencio found a new job.

“I sleep four or five hours, that’s it. I’m used to it. People who work at night come in and bowl. After 6, they start drinking. I go home.”