A little fish story

AS HE WATCHES HIS FATHER SLICE THROUGH A MACKEREL TO MAKE BAIT, Salvador Pulido Jr. rubs his tongue over a freshly drilled molar. The knife turns the fish’s dull green scales red and crunches its bones, and to the 5-year-old, it whispers fulfillment of a promise: in exchange for a visit to the dentist, a trip to the Redondo Beach Pier to fish.

The Novocaine and tears seem far away now, as distant as the Pulidos’ small house near the 110 and 105 freeways, close to Imperial Highway and Vermont Avenue.

Children often negotiate with parents: snowboard trips for good grades, a beach visit for chores. But snowy mountains and towering conifers are beyond the Pulidos’ means. Their outdoor choices come down to one: the pier.

“Six pounds?” Salvador Jr. asks anxiously as his father baits the hook. By ocean standards, a 6-pound fish is small, but Salvador Jr. has never landed a catch that big.

The boy has already cast his Penn rod, purchased at a swap meet, over the pier’s edge for two hours. Each time the hook has come back empty. The mackerel slowly defrosting in a white plastic bucket are disappearing.

“Six pounds,” says his father. Pulido’s wife, daughter and mother sit on a nearby bench, faces to the breeze.

Pulido’s hands glint with fish scales as he casts the baited mackerel and passes the rod to his son. Salvador Jr. starts to cry; he’s worried his fish may never appear.

Pulido holds him close, squeezing him affectionately with blood-stained hands.

“Shhh, hijo,” he whispers. “You have to keep trying. You put it in again and again and then, pop! Your fish will come.”

Dreams of the Big One

Southern California piers are escapes from the city, quick ocean visits that don’t require getting wet or spending too much money. Entry is free, and anglers pack the edges doing what they’ve always done, hoping to catch something enormous.

Late in the 19th century and early in the last, the piers in Southern California served as platforms of commerce for steamers ferrying cargo and as political leverage for cities vying to become the port for Los Angeles. After that title went to San Pedro, landlubbers, lured by vaudeville acts and penny arcades, started to discover these tar-soaked structures.

Today, most have been cleaned up and shored up for restaurants, film crews, carnivals, aquariums, shops and the anglers that crowd their rails.

Redondo’s pier is unique along the coast. Unlike the others, straight lines into the ocean, it is a vast, looping expanse of concrete, wood and steel. Restaurants and novelty shops crowd one another, and on its farthest reaches, you can feel the planks shift as swells push against mollusk-crusted pilings.

Knife marks scar the wooden rails; out here sardines, mackerel and squid are the preferred bait. Gulls fight and screech for scraps.

Anglers crowd the rails each day. They arrive at dawn and in the late afternoon. They come at night with propane lanterns.

The Redondo Beach Pier is at the end of a long underwater canyon that extends to the Catalina Channel and funnels halibut, bonito, even the occasional salmon and shark, to within casting distance.

Pulido checks his lines and raises himself onto a crutch and cane -- he contracted polio as a child -- and moves closer to where 10-year-old daughter Flor does her math homework on a bench. Her assignments are filled with jagged numbers where her pencil has pressed into grooves in the planks.

Though only 12 miles from their house, the pier seems far away from their crowded neighborhood of older homes and newer apartments, where they and other families live behind wrought-iron fences and share sidewalks with teens selling drugs.

He says his children like it here “because the air is clean,” Pulido says. “I don’t let them go outside at home. There are too many gangs.”

Pulido, 37, was born in Michoacan, where his mother sold their home to pay for the move to the U.S. In a Tijuana bar she met a man who agreed to ferry them across the San Diego border.

It was 1974, and Pulido was only 6 but still he remembers crying from the loud music until his mother whispered: “Shhh, hijo. In America, they will fix your legs.”

At the pier, Pulido rises to help his son with the rod.

“Watch, hijo,” he says. “The tip will bend when a fish eats the bait.”

Endurance test

Nearby, other anglers are not having much luck either. Not even Ron Eastridge, who fishes here every day and imagines himself the pier’s self-appointed steward. He glances at the Pulidos and also eyes his line to make sure his sardine is still swimming.

He has silver earrings and blond hair that falls almost to his stomach where a tattooed woman with exposed breasts and a sombrero gives a come-hither look. Eastridge’s sunken eyes offer no such invitation.

“When I was 11 years old, my mom would drop me off here on Friday afternoon and not see me until Sunday night,” Eastridge says. “Now, if you don’t speak Spanish or Vietnamese, you’re out of place.”

Hours pass, but still no fish.

“You must always be hopeful, hijo,” Pulido instructs his son.

Neighboring fishermen grumble: The catch is bad all around. Old men set down their poles and wander about, glancing in others’ buckets. A group of French-speaking tourists clomp across the pier’s planks and photograph the fishermen.

Empty-pouched pelicans sidle up to pieces of cut bait; they try for stealth, and failing that, lunge. The light begins to wane.

“Fishing is all about false promises,” says Eastridge. “You can keep a bait fish alive all day if you hook them right. You’re trying to offer that bonito the false promise of a meal.”

A police officer approaches and asks Eastridge if earlier he had seen an Asian woman in a pink blouse. Her body was found washed up on the beach.

At a restaurant on the pier, a TV film crew shooting an episode of “The OC” herds Eastridge and the Pulidos out of the camera’s glance.

“I swear to God, I’m gonna call my agent and tell him I quit,” an actress in Ugg boots, a tight sweater and stage makeup complains as she walks past Hot Dog on a Stick. “I hate how this place smells.”

Lessons of the Pacific

The smell of the ocean and America are inseparable in Pulido’s mind. Two years after settling in Los Angeles, a schoolteacher took him to the Venice Pier and taught him how to bait a hook and cast. Now he repeats the lesson with his son.

“If the fish is too big,” he warns Salvador Jr., “the rod may break.”

He always chooses the same part of the pier, as far from land as possible, where the ocean fills every inch of his gaze and where he can’t see the charter boats that carry fishermen at $24 a head. It is more than he can afford. He shifts his legs and picks dried fish scales off his hands.

He wonders how he can teach his children to be proud of him. Not by selling flowers on the roadside. Not by selling Popsicles from the ice cream truck he purchased for $1,500 last year.

In the fall, Pulido took $300 from his ice cream sales and took his family to Catalina Island. Flying fish leaped into the air and plunged underwater until they became turquoise shadows. Salvador Jr. laughed at fish that can fly.

The sun begins its slow slide into the ocean. Time is running out. But Pulido still has hope. Every cast brings possibility. One 6-pound fish can change everything.

Suddenly, the pole Salvador Jr. holds jerks. Pulido rushes over. Father and son lean over the rail, hands intertwined as they hold the rod and spin the reel handle. The rod tugs hard downward, then the hook shoots up, the steel shank glints in the light, empty.

Salvador Jr. accepts his disappointment. His attention wanders. Pointing in the direction of Catalina Island, he asks, “Is that where we went, Papi? Is that the flying fish?”

“Si,” Pulido says as he closes his tackle box and joins the rest of his family. Together they turn their backs on the water and head home.

Times staff writer Charles Duhigg can be contacted at charles.duhigg@latimes.com.