When Convenience Gets Dangerous : Oxnard: Working the graveyard shift at the city’s most crime-plagued minimarket is perilous, grueling and not very rewarding.

On a hot night several months ago, Donald Sides learned the most important rule of his job. As the new night man at the Stop N’ Go convenience store in Oxnard’s La Colonia, Sides was busy learning the routine when a group of young men entered the store looking for trouble.

One of them, Sides recalled, grabbed a candy bar and headed for the door.

“I ran out in front of him and said, ‘Hey, man, I saw you take that. Now pay for it or put it back.’ ”

The man, dressed in the long black jacket favored by a local gang, stared Sides in the face and said, “No way.”

“There I was, alone in the store, nose to nose with this homeboy over a candy bar,” said Sides, a 41-year-old father of five. “I had no back-up, and I was standing there ready to die for a Baby Ruth.

” . . . I’ve learned to avoid confrontation when things get dicey. Confrontations get you killed.”

No one who works the graveyard shift at the Oxnard convenience store likes his job. The work is dangerous, grueling and not very rewarding. The men took the shift in search of better lives, either for themselves or for their families.

But by watching the people come and go from the 24-hour store, Sides said, the clerks have gained a unique perspective on the mechanics of the neighborhood.

The area around Rose Avenue and 1st Street is a mix of single-family homes and public housing projects. Ice cream trucks playing pied-piper tunes crisscross the region during the day.

At night, the melodies are replaced by sirens. Police say the area is plagued by crime and gang activity.

“We respond mostly to fights, drugs and gangs around here,” said Joe Tinoco, an Oxnard police officer who patrols the sector around the Stop N’ Go. “It’s a rough part of town.”

The store has called for assistance 135 times since Jan. 1, according to David Keith, an Oxnard police spokesman. That makes it the most dangerous in the city, with twice the average number of calls as similar convenience stores in Oxnard.

On Saturday night, for example, police were called to a gun battle that erupted in the market’s parking lot. Two men went to the hospital with gunshot wounds and a third victim was run over by a car. Police said they do not know whether the hit-and-run victim also was hospitalized.

While some of the police calls are for fights, car thefts or drugs, Stop N’ Go clerk Eloy Magana said many are the result of shoplifting.

“There’s three types of people that we see,” said Magana, a cheery 24-year-old who works from 3 to 11 p.m. “There are good people who spend their last penny buying a piece of candy for their kids, there are the people who trade $20 in food stamps for a $10 bill so they can buy beer, and there are the people who don’t pay for anything, they just come in and take it.”

The people who take, he added, mostly take beer.

“We call them beer runs,” Magana said. “It’s when a kid comes in, grabs some beer and runs.”

The clerks keep track of how much beer is stolen on a clipboard crammed with notebook paper. Each page chronicles about $200 in thefts. They have compiled five pages since May.

Sides said he knows immediately when a beer run is planned. “They come in a group making all kinds of noise. They sound like hyenas. Then they’ll try to distract us at the hot dog stand or near the soda case while one guy grabs a 12-pack and makes a run for it.”

The beer stolen is always Budweiser, Sides said. “One time a younger kid ran out the door with Bud Light and we all laughed.”

But the thefts are hardly considered funny. The clerks call police after every one. Occasionally the thieves are identified during parking-lot line-ups, where the clerk is asked to finger the culprit. Only 19 arrests have been made since January, police said.

“Most of the time,” Sides said, “they get away long before police can catch them.”

The store is busiest in the evening. On some days, customers will line up the full length of the floor, about 50 feet, to buy beer.

But even when the rush hour has passed, the store is rarely empty.

Customers come in a steady flow. Between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., they are looking primarily for beer. From 2 to 6 a.m., when beer sales are prohibited by law, the store sells junk food to night owls and coffee to early risers. And at 6 a.m., local fieldworkers line up for ice, cigarettes and more beer to start a day’s work.

It is one of the busiest stores in the Houston-based National Convenience Stores Corp.’s nationwide chain, selling as much as $8,000 of food and beer a day.

“It’s as if Budweiser was the life blood of this area,” Sides said. “This stuff moves. I mean it moves . They knew exactly what they were doing when they put this store here. It is in a perfect location. They’ve got a gold mine right here in the Colonia.”

In the center of the clean, brightly lit store is a mountain of about 1,000 12-packs of Budweiser. The cases are covered with colorful signs advertising sales and contests. Clerk Carlos Diosdado said he guesses that if the store sold the beer only from the display, it would be gone in one night.

Diosdado, a soft-spoken 31-year-old, has been working the graveyard shift for more than a year. He says he recognizes almost all of the early morning customers.

He describes the majority of people who come in during early hours, when beer sales are off-limits, as eccentric.

On a recent Saturday morning, a woman came in looking for handouts.

“She will beg all day, then come in with fistfuls of change. She will tell customers she’s 50 cents short or a quarter short until she has collected enough for food or booze,” he said.

The police stop her periodically and tell her to go home, but inevitably she returns.

About 2:30 a.m., a teen-ager in baggy pants stepped to the counter and pulled from his pocket a large wad of $50 bills. He placed the money in front of Diosdado while he searched his pants for a single.

“Give me a deck of cards,” he said casually as he tucked the wad of money back into his pocket.

He told Diosdado he was going to Las Vegas, but Diosdado suspected otherwise. “Where does a kid get that kind of cash?” he asked. “That’s not from working in the fields.”

Several people stopped into the store for matches and lighters. “They come in every night,” Diosdado said. The anxious customers, he suspected, needed the implements to light crack cocaine in a nearby alley.

But for every oddity, the store serves several people who come for nothing more than a cup of coffee or a snack before work.

“I just wanted a cup of java before I head home,” said Charles Payton, a retired postal worker who runs a morning paper route to pad his pension. “This place is always here for me.”

“About 80% of the people who come in here are good people,” Sides said. “They are hard workers. Honest people. Many of them don’t have cars and, in the middle of the night, we are their lifeline.”

Sides says he understands the people who come into the store because they are, in many ways, just like him. Three months ago, financial trouble forced him to drop out of Oxnard College.

He works during the day as a computer technician for the Navy and was hoping to get a degree in mathematics so he could be promoted. But he also wanted to send his oldest daughter to college.

“It’s difficult, but you’ve got to make choices like that,” Sides said. “I want my kids to be able to do what they want to do. That’s why I’m sitting here.”

Sides studies the register tape, computing figures in his head to ensure they match the amount of cash on hand. When he finishes, he grabs a sweat shirt and stocks shelves from the store’s freezer. About the only task he actually enjoys is working the counter.

“I especially like it when the kids come in,” he said. “I challenge them, asking them to figure out the change. I feel like these kids lost out. They don’t have the opportunities I had when I was growing up. It’s tough for them here.”

Soon, Sides said he will have saved enough to return to college. “Until then,” he said as he prepared to leave the store at 2 a.m., “I’ll have to be satisfied doing this.”

Diosdado works the remainder of the morning--until 7 a.m. He, like Sides, is hoping for better days. After moving to Oxnard from Mexico, Diosdado began looking for a place to settle down.

He lived in the Lemonwood section of Oxnard for several years before moving to Ventura, where he lives in a mobile home with his wife.

“It’s not the best, but I know I am lucky to have work at all,” he said. “People are lining up for jobs all over the place. I’m glad I don’t have to do that.”

Diosdado took a week off recently and drove to New Mexico, where he hopes to live one day.

“I’d like to buy a house there,” he said. “That’s what I’m working for.”

As the sun rose, the drone of the store’s refrigerators was drowned out by the banter of local farm laborers who came to refuel for a new day. After picking up bread from the adjacent bakery, several workers ignored the hour and filled up on beer.

Umberto Quiroz, a 27-year-old who cuts cabbage at a nearby Oxnard farm, explained that workers enjoyed a quick beer before work because they were not allowed to drink it in the fields.

Most of the men, however, opted for fresh water from a vending machine and bags of ice from the Stop N’ Go freezer.

“They have a difficult job,” Diosdado said. “A difficult life.”

Both he and Sides said they had respect for all the people they meet through the night.

“These are real people,” Sides said. “Some of them are really bad off. It’s like they’re in a cage, reaching out for help, and no one is coming to lend a hand.

“That’s what we see from here,” he said as he stepped behind the register to sell a man two cartons of milk. “These are just good people looking for a better place.”