Every morning for the
four years of high school, I would catch the 158 bus south down Woodman Avenue
and every evening, I’d reverse the process and take it northbound back
home. Compared to the way my world is
now, with maintenance, insurance, and traffic, the bus ride was cheaper. Of course, if someone had asked me then, economy
would not have mattered. I was miserable. First, I had to walk several blocks in the
cold morning or blazing heat to the bus stop; then, I could pile my books and
belongings on the seat next to me in the vain hope that the bus would not
become too crowded and I would be forced to share a seat with some stranger. On the way home, the kids from the public
junior high school invaded the entire space, shouting and screaming, and even
though I was older than most of them, they still intimidated me with their
noise and obnoxious behavior.
I’d like to say I used
my time wisely on those mornings and evenings, but I did not. Mostly, I stared out the window,
people-watching. Many of them, like me,
were simply following through on their daily routines, and therefore, I saw
many of them every day in the same spot, as if frozen in an almost-still
photograph. I watched them and made up
histories and stories for them. The old
lady who wobbled down the sidewalk from the supermarket carrying the
ingredients for her evening meal. The
two gangbangers out on the stoop of an apartment building staring menacingly at
the traffic. The old duplex where my
uncle and aunt used to live before they decamped for Palmdale. The tiny music store that tempted me, once,
to get off the bus early and go inside.
Sheet music, a few instruments, a lot of dust, so I mustered courage and
asked the proprietor if he ever needed some help. No, no, he muttered, he did not make enough
money to hire anyone, and he was, in fact, selling the place if I knew any
buyers.
As much as I tried to
escape taking the bus, I always seemed to wind up back in my seat. For a while, a co-worker from a job I picked
up at a travel agency to pay my tuition used to drop me off on her way home,
but she couldn’t do it with any regularity, so back to the 158 for me. A classmate would pick me up some mornings as
he drove by, but our schedules never seemed to match up properly to make it a
regular occurrence. The best time was
when my father would lend me his truck.
Ahh, the freedom of one’s own car.
But those times were few and far between.
Once, on a hot May
afternoon, I walked home from the school after playing in the band for
graduation. The trip that normally took
about 20 minutes on the bus took more than two hours on foot. And even though the neighborhood is dangerous
now but not so much then, I still encountered some scary people on the trek
home. Their stories were clear in the
glare of their eyes; no need for me to fictionalize them at all. They were real life scary. I also set a dangerous precedent by walking
the route. My mother decided if I could
walk it once, I could do it more often when she didn’t want to drive down to
pick me up. The bus stopped running
about eight o’clock in the evening, so when I was at band practice until ten at
night, she was always tempted to tell me to walk home, although that would have
meant a midnight arrival. In the end,
common sense and the fear of looking like a bad parent kept me safe and sound
in the passenger seat of my family station wagon on those late nights.
In the era of the ‘80s,
my era, the band Missing Persons had a song entitled “Walking in L.A.,” the
main idea being that no one walks in L.A.
It is also true that no one takes public transportation in L.A. unless
there is no other choice. L.A. is a car
city, and to be without wheels means walking the streets which are filled with
cars but light on pedestrians, especially in the suburbs where I grew up. In a place where you might be the only one
walking down the street through neighborhoods of tract homes, you became a
target for bullying and random acts of violence. At one house on my route to and from the bus
stop, the teenagers threw rocks, bottles and anything else they could find at
me. I did not know them, nor did I ever
have any encounter with them previously.
It was simply a crime of opportunity.
Often when standing at the stop, people would throw things from their
cars at me, or shout out obscenities and threats. I often tried to figure out why this kept
happening. Was it something in the way I
looked? Did I stand in such a way as to
invite violence?
What I’ve learned from
being a bus rider, a walker, a bicyclist, a car commuter, is that Los Angeles
is a hard city to travel in, and one best be careful on the streets. Walking in New York has its own pitfalls and
dangers, but there are lots of people walking, and there are cabs and subways,
and people have options. Here in Los Angeles,
one either has a car, or one is at an extreme disadvantage. Traffic is so bad that buses are often late
or don’t show at all. They are crowded
and smelly. Currently, there is a class
action suit in progress originating with the bus operators who feel they were
poisoned by the pesticide sprayed in the buses to ward off cockroaches and bed
bugs. One wonders if the daily
passengers, the ones without options, should be part of that lawsuit.
Every day, a staff
member at the college where I work walks two miles uphill in the morning and
downhill in the evening to catch her bus.
I see her, walking through the mist and again, in the dusky
twilight. I’ve often stopped to offer
her a ride, which she only occasionally accepts. The most grueling part of her journey must be
the uphill climb in the morning, as the campus sits on a hilltop. In the heat of summer, I don’t know how she
does it. And she is not alone: there are
many others making the uphill trek, domestics climbing to their jobs cleaning
multi-million dollar homes.
We are a city of
isolates, of loners, of people in their bubbles all moving toward
something. We are in our cars with
satellite radio and entertainment systems.
As we pass one another, we see cartoons playing silently in the minivan
next to us, or the man gesticulating wildly and talking to invisible people, utilizing
his hands-free cell phone built into his car.
In a city where no one walks and only the desperate take public
transportation, we try to build barriers to ward off the Other. We avoid interaction because it threatens our
equilibrium. We surrender to the
imaginary world where we control our own destiny because we have a car. I drive, therefore I am. But what I learned riding the 158 on Woodman
Avenue for four years of high school is that even in a crowd, we are alone. We do not control our destiny, nor the time
it takes to reach our destination.
Regardless of how we arrive, we are the citizens of a constipated city
in desperate need of some relief.
