This all happened in a single day.
It starts in the morning with a guy smoking inside the train. It used to be that I thought this was the worst thing that could possibly happen — how dare you think that it was okay for you to smoke in a train or bus?
A bit later, a kid/teenager pulls out a gallon bottle full of golden-brown alcoholic vapors, and starts chugging it along in time to the train’s gait.
We proceed onward, and all is calm, until a guy starts shouting on the metro as we started on our way back. He shouts: “That was a pretty face, for a 13-year-old girl.” This is an old man. And he keeps shouting this again and again. Perhaps he’s confessing to a crime. Then he starts cursing. Then he starts shouting that he’s Jesus.
In the end, a very brave kid calms him down by talking to him in a very friendly, soothing way.
Then, I hear a trrrrrrrrrr. I look up. A guy in a blood-red sweater is patrolling the aisle with some gizmo. Later, I’m told it was a taser he was peddling to us passengers. There are other crimson-clad peddlers: one has a tray full of perfume bottles. One’s an old man selling chips and soda.
As the sun starts to set, we arrive back at 7th Street Metro Station, underground, with still a few legs of our journey to go. We hear on the loudspeakers that: trains are delayed! There’s a power outage in downtown Los Angeles.
That’s exactly the reason given: “a power outage in downtown Los Angeles.”
A power outage in downtown Los Angeles? We ask ourselves. Is it even possible for one of the biggest cities in the mighty United States to have a power outage? What does it even mean, so the whole downtown has no power? We try to search for more information online through our phones, but there’s nary a mention of it in the news, so we conclude this must be so common an occurrence that it doesn’t curry attention anymore. The only news we find is about how two women in Los Angeles were just killed at two separate intersections as they sat in their cars, or something. And there’s also a bulletin about the Grammy’s, but no, that can’t be tonight, we haven’t heard anything else about it otherwise.
Due to the train delays, we decide to see take advantage and do some sight-seeing. We ascend up from the smelly gloom of underground station, and we see that we are surrounded by forbidding skyscrapers in the darkening sky. A barefoot guy in shorts and a t-shirt comes along, and roots about in the trash can on the street corner. He finds a discarded styrofoam drink, takes a sip through the pre-loved straw, throws it back in, and then roots around some more and comes back out with a single slipper. Someone says: maybe he’s a heroin addict.
Since everything around us is so depressing, we decide the gloom of the underground station will be more cheerful, so back down we go. The platform is full of stranded passengers. There’s one train on the platform, but it’s not moving. Some harassed metro driver is fielding questions — “when’s the next train to Union Station???” — without being able to answer anyone to satisfaction. He finally has enough and walks off. At this consequential moment, we take a chance and get on the inert train, even though it’s supposedly going in the opposite direction of what we want — to North Hollywood. By sheer luck, I hear a very muffled intercom announce that actually, the train would be going to Union Station. But apparently, no one else hears that. So we get on, in a few seconds the doors close, and the train chugs off, indeed in the direction of Union Station, leaving behind the platform-full of stranded people eager to go just there.
Thus, we have the entire train to ourselves, except for a man in a yellow shirt and a girl with thick shiny long braids. The man comes alive when we roll into the next station, Pershing Square. He leaps up. “What? This isn’t going to North Hollywood? Did it just get switched?”
The girl smiles in sympathy. They start talking, and eventually the man asks her, why is there a sweater and pants thrown on the dirty train floor in the corner?
I’ve been on this train a while, the girl says, so she knows what the deal is. “A man had been sitting right there, and then he started screaming, and then he took all his clothes off.”
The man who thought he was going to North Hollywood shakes his head. “What can you do but laugh?”
So we make it to Union Station. Luckily, the power outages don’t seem to have followed us here, and we think, onwards to the last leg of our journey! We’ll soon be done!
Famous last words.
We go to catch our final train, but a notice says: “Due to an incident at Highland Park, trains are not running between Highland Park and South Pasadena.” It doesn’t say anything else, nothing about a solution or a fix, or will they have buses to shuttle us past the closed tracks. But we get on the train anyways. Sure enough, the automated announcer keeps saying: “The last stop for this train is Highland Park!” This automation, with its cheery, jolly voice, is not at all fussed about our predicament, or the fact that we’re all about to be stranded at Highland Park, at night, with tons more miles till we reach our intended final station.
We get to Highland Park. Luckily, out of the blue, metro workers materialize. They point us down the road from the station, where indeed a shuttle bus is waiting for us. It’s already full, likely from the influx from previous trains, but we cram ourselves into a tiny bit of space, and hang on for dear life as the bus revs its motor and bumbles its way past endless liquor stores to get to South Pasadena.
And what exactly is the big incident that closed the tracks at Highland Park? We search on the news, but again, there’s nary a mention of it. But we do find an article that the day before, there had been a carjacking and two people were kidnapped. The most we can find out is the brief communication on the metro website, which says that there’s been a “train-person accident” at Highland Park.
Someone tells me later that this probably means someone committed suicide. Honestly, living in Los Angeles, who can blame them?
We get to South Pasadena, and the bus-load of passengers re-converges on the platform there, under the stars — just kidding! There are no stars in Los Angeles. They don’t like shining down on this flaming heap of depression. We wait for a train to come. And we wait. And wait. No train comes, though. We just see two trains barreling through going in the opposite direction, back to Union Station.
So what happens during all this time that we have to wait? Of course, someone has to start screaming randomly. This time it’s a woman in a purple coat, one of our fellow passengers on the platform. Everyone ignores her except for one old, white-bearded man who has only one leg remaining, and is in a wheelchair. But his physical misfortunes appear not to have daunted the spirit of his tongue. The lady is screaming something about how we need to row across the ocean. The old man answers her: you need to row your **** back off the platform. Then the lady starts screaming about fruitcake, and the man says, “you’re the fruitcake.”
There’s some more to say about this old, white-bearded man. He wasn’t with us on the bus from Highland Park. He just rolls up in his wheelchair as we’re all waiting on the platform. As he rolls himself up the ramp, his hands gripping the wheels of his chair, a group of polite young teens takes note, and one of them rushes over to push him up from behind. I’m not sure if the old man tells them “thanks”. Instead, he looks at them carefully, considers the matter, and says, “no, you’re too young.”
What are they too young for, pray? It’s soon clear. The man in the wheelchair is selling drugs. It’s not long before a man who’s still young, but clearly not “too” young, sidles up the platform. A transaction takes place with the man in the wheelchair. Business concluded, the customer moves nonchalantly off. But honestly, this is par for the course, that was not the first drug deal we saw on the metros this day. In light of everything else, the drug deals seem quite benign.
After about 30 or 45 minutes, a train going in the right direction finally shows up, and without further excitement, we make it back.
Oh, and as for the Grammy’s? Turns out they were taking place at that very moment, full glitz and glamor five blocks from 7th Street Metro Station where the presumed heroin addict was rutting around in the trash for something to drink. We speculated, maybe that’s why the power was out. Because it was need for all the lights and finery for all the fine people at the Grammy’s.
Now, who wants to come visit? Loserville, the land of dreams.
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