a whole city in a subway car

I like the Metro Red Line hope it does actually expand all the way to Santa Monica, as proposed. Los Angeles needs all the positive public transit experiences it can get...

December 29, 2005

My father and I are going to take my cranky and handicapped 91 year-old grandmother June to Tijuana so she can show us where, when she was a teenager, she used to go buy heroin for her uncle Edgar from the Jewish dealer (who also owned one of the biggest stores in town). The plan is we're all going to take the train down to San Diego together, spend the afternoon and evening there, then go to Tijuana the next morning. It should be interesting...

I decided to take the Metro Red Line from North Hollywood to meet my father and grandmother at Union Station.

At the first stop, an African-American man in his mid-late 20s with a CD player sits down on the bench next to me. In his case (a small black and silver hard CD case), he has: CDs, toothpaste, a mini-toothbrush, a large stack of condoms (“my personal hygiene items,” he explains). But what he doesn’t have in the case, it turns out, are extra AA batteries. Which is a problem today.

He turns off the now-dead CD player and tells me that he lent the player to one of his housemates and, in a considerate but convoluted scheme, she put in her own cheap AAs so as not to run down his. She even left him 2 additional batteries (“The cheap kind. Not Duracells like I always put in.”) He changed out the first set of batteries on the Orange Line earlier that morning. But the second set just died, right now. And unfortunately, the space in his CD case/wallet where he usually keeps those “extra extra batteries” had been replaced with the personal hygiene items. Which, he said, his voice dipping slightly, meant no more music until he got to work, another subway train then bus away, albeit lots of prospects for safe sex.

But the commute was worth it, he said, even without the batteries. Where he was living now was much nicer than the place he had left. “No gunshots.”

In Hollywood, a young Latino kid with a sweatshirt, trendy low-slung baggy cargo pants, a long beard and shaved head, gets on the train. He’s carrying a hard CD wallet, a CD player and a large, worn bible. He sits down next to me, in the seat adjacent to the now music-less man. Across from him a young white woman is buried in her book.

My neighbor turns to the teenager with the bible and CD player and asks, “What are you listening to?”

“Christian rap.”

“Is that like regular rap?”

“Sort of.”

“Then why not just listen to regular rap? Is it the cuss words?”

The teenager shakes his head. “Even without those words, it’s what the music’s about. It hurts your soul to listen to that stuff. This is more uplifting.”

“Have you ever listened to Israeli rap?” asks the woman, setting aside her book.

“No,” the teenager says.

“Now that’s uplifting,” she says. “The lyrics are great and the beat – it’s mixed with some Arab stuff. It’s amazing.”

The teenager and my neighbor nod.

“Where can I get it?” the teenager asks.

“Maybe at one of those Armenian stores on Santa Monica,” my neighbor suggests.

“I don’t know.” The woman shrugs. “Some friends brought me some from Israel.”

All three start to talk to each other. The woman tells them that she just finished college and is working two jobs: one at Metro (which runs all the subways and buses in the city – my neighbor nods and says, “I thought I recognized you from that. I’ve seen you riding the subway before.”) and the other at the Jewish Journal. She’s hoping to get her first by-line in a couple of weeks.

My neighbor gets off at the same stop as the woman. As they walk across the platform together to catch their next train, they continue their conversation.

The teenager slumps back into his seat, opens up his Bible and resumes reading. I glance over his shoulder and realize he’s scouring the explanatory notes in the margins, running his index finger over the tiny lines of text. So intent, as if trying to absorb the whole page in a glance. Or the whole word in the span of a simple subway car during a typical morning commute.