Alone in a Crowd From 11 to 7 : Profile: Always taxing overnight shift just got scarier for O.C. 7-Eleven clerk with counterpart’s slaying in La Habra store.

Some nights she gets tired, so tired that she can’t stand up straight, so tired that her eyes become a brilliant shade of ruby red, like the cherry juice eternally churning in the Slurpee machine.

She gets tired of drunks, tired of druggies, tired of prostitutes and their pimps. She gets tired of hypochondriacs and kleptomaniacs, tired of every manic insomniac who sees her store as the last clean, well-lighted place on Earth, a way station between the weird night world and their beds.

She likes people, proclaims herself a “people person,” cares about her customers and asks about their problems.

But there are nights when humanity’s nocturnal wanderlust leaves her so numb that she can barely find the strength to do her ritual pre-dawn mop dance: Just one quick boot-scoot up and down the aisles, she tells herself, humming a country-western song, and then I can go home. Shut my eyes. Sleep . . .

At least for a few minutes, until the kids wake up and want cereal.

Working the 11-to-7 at the 7-Eleven is never easy for Angela Mitchell. But this week, the 23-year-old clerk and every other 7-Eleven employee working overnight in Orange County got a terrible reminder that the job is more than tiring, it’s potentially life-threatening.

Days after a 7-Eleven night clerk was shot and killed at a La Habra store Monday, some are calling for the Southland Corp., the Dallas-based parent company of 7-Eleven stores, to tighten security.

Mitchell, meanwhile, ignores the tightening in her stomach as she dons a black smock and begins another solo night shift, for which she will earn $46, before taxes.

“If I live my life in fear every day that I’m going to get killed in a robbery, I’ll never get out of bed,” she says, gazing at the dark, busy boulevard that runs alongside her store. “I have thought about it: What would happen to my kids if something happened to me? But I have no choice. I have to work. I have no high school diploma, I have no skills.”

Much of Mitchell’s brave fatalism comes from an informal staff of “co-workers” she’s assembled: A girlfriend checks up on her almost every night. A boyfriend visits several times during her shift. A burly homeless man keeps a constant vigil outside, so long as she feeds him grilled hot dogs.

*

When Mitchell’s support crew is absent, she regards the customers as her personal security force, ragtag though they may be. Many in the all-night cavalcade are more like Mitchell’s clients than consumers. Through the fog of beer or the haze of hunger, many manage to flash her a strange smile of amity and recognition.

“This is Costa Mesa,” Mitchell declares, watching the store suddenly fill up with nicotine addicts and caffeine addicts and sugar addicts, all clamoring for their 3 a.m. fixes. “No one sleeps. No one sleeps here, I swear!”

In Mitchell’s world, it is true. No one sleeps, and everyone smokes. Seldom does a customer not want a pack of cigarettes to go with his burrito, his bubble gum or his Budweiser.

Mitchell is grateful when business is slow, because only then can she catch up on straightening the shelves and calling her boyfriend.

But she also becomes apprehensive when the store is empty, because she doesn’t relish being alone.

A single mom, minding the fort.

Gazing at the street, she wonders briefly who will walk through the door next.

Thankfully, it is the man with no shoes. His bright blond ponytail bobs like a limp banana peel as he lets loose a ferocious sneeze. Clearly, he is catching cold.

“Maybe I should put on my shoes,” he says slowly, meditatively, as if the notion will require long, thoughtful consideration.

His silliness has a soothing effect.

Next comes the woman with the large spider web tattooed on her arm, who loudly debates the merits of peanut butter-flavored bubble gum.

Then, the California Lottery’s most dedicated player. A short, dark-haired man, he arrives every hour, like clockwork, to buy another fistful of lottery tickets. His expression is fierce. He is playing as if his life depends on the outcome.

Why he feels compelled to play so assiduously at 4 a.m. is a mystery that doesn’t overly intrigue Mitchell.

But he too lends the store a certain relaxing rhythm.

In her 18 months on the job, Mitchell has made close friends, mediated some nasty fights and shooed away countless over-indulgers.

Like the tedium, excitement comes in spurts.

Just a few nights ago she summoned paramedics to the store because a man wobbly with drink tripped and struck his head. Later that same night, some teen-agers decided to smash a car window in the store’s parking lot.

Typical, Mitchell says, wiping down the Slurpee machine with a wet cloth.

“One thing I can’t tolerate in society is drunks,” she says. “I don’t like drunk people.”

But there are nights when taking this attitude seems tantamount to a doctor decrying his patients.

Drinkers often arrive at Mitchell’s store in droves, racing to beat the 2 a.m. deadline for liquor purchases.

Mitchell says she enforces the law without fail, which often brings her face-to-face with loud men, flushed with drink, who won’t back down.

Mitchell’s standard response is a prim smile and an indifferent shrug.

But when she hears about men who gun down clerks without provocation, as in La Habra--that’s a confrontation she can’t imagine.

Her girlfriend turns pale at the mention of the shooting.

“I would find me another job,” says 20-year-old Gina Ventimiglia, Mitchell’s best friend, who drops in at 1 a.m. to eat a turkey sandwich and sit with Mitchell for a while.

Mitchell frowns at her friend, reminding her that there are things about the job she enjoys.

“I like working here because it’s near the hospital,” Mitchell says, referring to a nearby center for the developmentally disabled. “It makes me realize, no matter what obstacle I have in my life, it’s nothing compared to [the patients’].”

*

But Mitchell’s obstacles are formidable. Thrown out by her parents when she was a teen-ager, she’s drifted from job to job in the food service industry and barely makes enough to support herself and two children.

Each payday, she collects $180 from 7-Eleven.

After $126 in weekly rent to a local motel room, plus a $30 loan payment, she has $24 for food and sundries.

Food stamps help, but it’s a tight squeeze.

“Right now, I’m exhausted,” she says. “But, you know, what can I do?”

As her shift winds down, Mitchell hoses off the parking lot, sweeps the mats and counts the money in her cash register. Her boyfriend calls a few times to make sure she’s all right, and she tells him in a breathy whisper that she dedicated a song to him on the radio.

She pleads with him to stay awake and listen for it.

Slowly, the sky lightens and the customers become freshly showered businessmen instead of worn-out party-goers.

Under the category of “small blessings,” Mitchell’s replacement arrives on time.

Strangely, it’s unclear if Mitchell is describing a blessing or a blinding intrusion when she gazes through the window at the mountaintops and groans:

“The sun.”