I waited 20 more minutes. Nobody. And then, from the opposite side of the shopping center, came a young man with a Jamba Juice in one hand, a Starbucks bag in the other and a cell phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear. "Oh shit," he said to the phantom on the other end of his call. "I have a customer." He hung up and approached me. His name was Brian, and he looked like the lead singer of Nickelback, without the goatee. "Some real valuable paintings I got here," he said. I looked at his smoothie and his pastry, then at the Jamba Juice and Starbucks at the distant end of the shopping center, barely even in sight, and said: "Really?" "Yup," he said. "Once in a lifetime opportunity, right here. I usually don't do this. Just came back from the Suncoast. We had a big show for Rich Little—you know him?—and on my way back to California—that's where I'm from—I thought I'd stop here for the day. Business has been boomin', too." I looked around. "Really?" "Yup," he said. "Been out here since nine."
He had the pink nose, farmer's burn and inescapable B.O. to prove it. "How much these things cost?" I said. He said: "Depends: Little ones are $150, medium ones $250 and big ones $300. But they don't last long. That's why I don't have a website—they don't last long enough to post them on there. This is valuable stuff right here, man. Straight from the painters themselves. People swoop 'em up. I sell these things five days a week, and I make a good living, too."
I said: "Do you have a business card, just in case I want something later?" He said: "No, actually I don't. No worries though, man. I'm always around."
Like most of us out here in the Las Vegas Valley, I already knew that much—and that, in truth, is why I had to finally see what his sort is all about.