“Someone needs to call the motherfuckin’ police! Three motherfuckers been stabbed up in here!”
I never expected to hear those words in my life – especially not while peacefully waiting for train home on a Wednesday night. But sure enough, it was 10:30 p.m. at the Universal City train platform – a place I had previously harbored fond memories of from another night, when an insane Brazilian man with no shoes wandered back and forth attempting to hug everyone while exclaiming, ‘Welcome to Universal City! It is the place where people come from all over the universe! Let me give you a hug of welcome!”
I avoided that guy that night. And I sure as hell wasn’t about to try and get too involved in the attempted triple homicide that apparently lay before me. As the crowd on board what I now lovingly recall as the Midnight Meat Train came pouring out and running for the exit escalators, the people around me on the platform who were waiting to board just stood in confusion.
After all, we wanted to get home. WE hadn’t seen the alleged stabbings occur. Maybe it wasn’t too big a deal after all. Maybe the stabber had just run off the train, leaving it safe for us newbies to board. Maybe the stabber had offed themselves, making it a double murder-slash-suicide combo. Or maybe they would now be sitting peacefully, having already stabbed who they wanted and now wanting to just go home themselves. As the woman on board kept screaming for the “PO-lice!” I snuck around the crowd and looked through the window to find a skinny 20something Latino guy in a white T-shirt spattered with blood.
It looked like a gusher. I’d seen enough episodes of “ER” in my time to know that this wasn’t a good situation to get involved with. There was also a pair of feet laying flat on the floor, the rest of its body hidden behind a row of seats. I didn’t really wanna see what else was there. So I backed away, found the emergency call button for the authorities and pressed the button.
The operator came on quickly: “Whats the problem?”
“Um, there’s someone claiming that three people got stabbed on board a train here at Universal City.”
“Are you sure this happened?”
“What, do you want me to get on board and launch the investigation?”
“There’s no need for sarcasm, sir.”
“But there IS need for a fucking cop! Send somebody down here!” I cried out, as the original woman started wailing again, “PLEASE! Someone get the PO-lice!”
The operator finally listened. “We’ll send someone in five minutes.”
My job was done. I ran for the escalators myself.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been called upon to save the day onboard the Metro- aka the City of Angels’ public transit system. I had previously been given the title of “Captain Save-A-Ho” onboard the 180 bus from Hollywood to Pasadena one night in March 2007 when I called upon both the Highway Patrol and the Glendale Police Department to pull over the bus after a guy had smacked his girlfriend square in the nose and continued to taunt her as she tried to stop a gusher of blood. As six squad cars finally pulled the bus over and the guy was led away in cuffs, he cried out “What ARE you?! Captain Save-A-Ho?!”
It was one of my proudest moments in life. In fact, I almost made a T-shirt to commemorate the occasion.
The other name for the transit network of buses and trains in our fair city is MTA, which I’ve come to realize in five years of riding really stands for “Must Take Anyone.” And while I haven’t been to a state fair in about 20 years, I have to say that every single day or night on board the LA transit system makes up for a lifetime of midway carnival geeks.
I’ve seen it all on board here, often with one of my best friends and personal sidekick, Heather. I have to ride the system because I had a sleep disorder so close to narcolepsy that I’m a menace to society anytime I try to get behind a steering wheel. She, meanwhile, had been a college student whose parents decided to pay for her education and her dorm room while leaving her on her own in terms of personal safety.
Together, we’ve come across all manner of humanity: a black gay dwarf named Chucky who dances for pocket change on board the 217 bus Saturday nights in Hollywood; or our dear friend Kent, an erudite fiftysomething gay man who has tried for the past three years to convince me that we could be more than friends, and forcing Heather to play my girlfriend on numerous occasions just so he would LITERALLY get off my back.
Then there are the people in costumes. We’ve seen a guy in a giant Tigger costume, a teenage dweeb dressed in Jedi robes with a light saber who muttered “It’s a living” in a pissed-off voice when I said he must really be quite a “Star Wars” fan. We’ve seen white men in curly ‘fros that would put Black Panthers to shame. Or a guy who looked like Kato Kaelin with Keith Richards-worthy wrinkles, who rolled his tongue out to reveal the wrapped up packets of heroin he hides in his mouth to avoid the police each day.
But our favorite had to be the black transvestite who was built like an NFL cornerback yet managed to look rather stunning in a glittering purple dress and a wig that made he/she/it look like one of Tina Turner’s backup singers. The best part was when they went from talking seductively in a woman’s voice to barking out “Hold that train!” like he’s Barry White on a killing spree.
You learn a lot on a train, or especially on a bus, in LA. I’ve been privy to conversations between criminals and their friends, in which a guy fresh out of jail and still wearing a City Jail uniform shirt is already hatching his next big crime spree after running into a fellow ex-con buddy who’s now a security guard. Another time I got caught sitting directly between two guys from rival gangs who recognized each other from the time they spent in prison together, and nearly decided to restart their rivalry and attempt killing each other right then and there. When I asked if I could please slip out of their way, they finally calmed down and laughed about it, before agreeing to tutor me in prison slang and the best way to start a car without a key.
THAT”S info you need for the real world, and it’s only a buck 25.
We’ve seen aging strippers attempt to pole dance on board train cars while other passengers begged her to keep her clothes ON, street preachers telling us how to get saved while making us feel extremely endangered, and a black man in Chinese robes who jumped off the train car at each stop before busting a few dance moves and leaping back on again.
Ah, but one can’t forget the scents on board either. Aromatic splendors abound, strange smells that can be found nowhere else thanks to the mysterious mingling of humanity, nasty leftover food and general lingering haze of alcohol that hangs in the air like an old closet filled with mothballs. It’s so bad that a fantasy of mine and Heather’s is to spend a day riding the rail system while leaping on and off cars and spraying Febreze into the air. The only thing holding us back is wondering if we’d confuse and startle people with actual fresh-smelling air and have them thinking we were waging a mobile terrorist attack instead. .
Last year, amazingly, the MTA announced that it was named the best transit system in America. How this happened is beyond me. Or if it really IS true, it makes me weep for our nation and fuels my desire to move to Canada the moment our presidential election is over.
The MTA brags about this victory, with splashy onboard ads that show pictures of happy, smiling people gazing into each other’s eyes while saying “Take Metro to Flirt.” Now anyone who’s ever ridden the MTA more than twice knows that there’s NOBODY onboard that you’d want to flirt with, including me. I once had a drunk Mexican guy nearly puked on me while I was wearing a suit on board the 2 bus on Sunset on a Friday night – and that’s the closest I ever want to come to exchanging bodily fluids with ANYONE onboard the MTA.
Other ads say, “Take Metro To Go Out” or “We’ll Get You Home Safely.” I’m sorry, but if I had a choice, I’d still take my car. I’d rather risk a drunk driving ticket because at least in my own personal vehicle I won’t have a bum pass out on my shoulder.
Even worse are ads that say “Take Metro to Shop”, featuring Paris Hilton holding a gold handbag she just spent $5000 on on Rodeo Drive. Yeah, I’m sure the first thing she’s looking for after a shopping spree is the next bus or train. They should be a little more realistic and say “Take Metro to Shop” while showing a closeup of someone’s hand turning purple from holding 52 plastic bags from the 99 Cents store. That’s MY reality.
But is there ANYTHING normal, or pleasant, that happens aboard the MTA, you ask? On occasion there’s a driver with extra flair and personality, like a guy named JB who treated his riders with such friendly attention that they formed a club called The Loco 180 and rode together night after night for years, trading funny stories between JB’s illegal stops at Hooters to buy chicken wings for everyone onboard or for equally illegal 7-11 Slurpee runs.
There’s also the opportunity to learn about all types of people. Not just the freaks, but sometimes you can have a conversation in the same bus ride with a young couple from Sweden and an Iraqi refugee. It’s almost like attending the UN without having to spend the money for plane fare. At the same time, mass transit is our ultimate social equalizer, the last true vestige of honest democracy in action as you come to realize that ANYONE – truly ANYONE – can sit right down next to you and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. I think that every presidential candidate should be forced to ride the Los Angeles MTA for a year as a test of character and courage and as a way of seeing the REAL America in a way that small-town diner photo opps never will.
People say that mass transit is the wave of the future, even here in LA. As gas prices soar and the environment goes in the toilet, more and more of you – yes, you, the supposedly normal, suburban yuppies and middle and upper-class homeowners – will be adding to the mix and experiencing the exotic wonders of a Los Angeles bus ride for yourselves.
My only advice to you is threefold: 1) always carry a cellphone for emergency phone calls to the authorities. 2) sneak a can of Febreze into your purse, backpack or briefcase for those emergency “special moments” when you just can’t take the actual scents on board anymore. And 3) always have a camera at the ready, whether by phone or otherwise, to record evidence – either for the inevitable police investigation, or at least for your friends and family who just can’t believe what you saw that day.
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