Is the Los Angeles metro safe? Part 5

I got on the metro at night after dark. Bad idea, but that’s how it went.

It was a Saturday night. By some miracle, my train section was completely empty. I relaxed … for two stops.

Then, a man gets on. There’s 5 other train sections that he can sit in, but he has to come sit with me — and then start singing and howling some weird song — and then punching the seats and the bags he was carrying. Oh, I don’t know — maybe he was being creative and trying to use them for a drum?

Any case, he seemed really erratic, and I didn’t want to be alone with him. At the next stop, I rush out the door onto the platform, and hightail it to the door of the train carriage right behind me. I make it just in time. But I hesitate — because this carriage is full of people — and they’re all men — and what I have learned is that Trash Angeles is basically the biggest collection of trashy, filthy men in the world, they must be breeding in mosquito eggs and in the sewage to have become so plentiful. But there was no time to be prudent, I had to get on the train. Not only was this one full of men, it had black moldy oranges littered all over the floor. And liquid stains. Of what, no one knows.

I found a seat, and the thought that occurred to me was: What am I doing? Am I seriously riding alone on the metro at night in this trashy city with a bunch of men? What am I seriously, actually DOING here?

So as not to leave it as a cliff-hanger, though, none of those men bothered me. That’s kind of a miracle for Loserville. I need to make a list of all the men (and women, too) who curse me out when I walk out the doors here. For no one to have bothered me is something of a record.

No one cursed me out this time. There was an old, white-haired man in a wheelchair missing a leg. There was a man doing a video chat into his phone in sign language. A man a few seats away eventually noticed and looked at him oddly. Turns out it was because he knows sign language, too. He caught the eye of the man on the video chat, and started signing to him, and before we knew it, the two of them were having a full-blown, very engaged conversation across the train, completely silently, just through sign language.