Nobody walks in LA
When we first arrived here at the apartment, we needed to run down to the local mall for a few things. A telephone, for one. You call SBC up to have them activate your phone line, but they don’t actually give you a phone, you have to buy one yourself.
So we pull up Yahoo Maps, and hey, the South Bay Galleria is just a couple of blocks down the street. Having memorized the route, we set off. On foot.
I’m used to walking everywhere back home. Unfortunately, I’m also used to fresh air. Walking two and a half miles in LA smog is different.
The lack of pedestrians should have tipped me off. The odd looks people gave us from their cars was another clue. We should’ve taken the bus.
But then, I’d figured paying $1.25 for two and a half miles was a ripoff. Exercise, right?
We took the bus back, hauling three bags of groceries. Little did we know that we’d gotten on the 710 - the Metro Rapid. And the closest Rapid bus stop to the apartment was half a mile in the other direction.
We got better at it as the weeks passed. We learned the difference between Orange Metro Local buses and Red Metro Rapid buses, that the local Gardena line only cost 75 cents but you had to wait 45 minutes between buses, which were frequently late.
Last week we took the bus up to Westwood, for a meeting with the agency. This was new - before, if we needed to get to downtown (or Santa Barbara) we rented a car and took the Santa Monica freeway north. Expensive, but we needed it for the DMV road test.
So. I do what I usually do, which is open up mta.net and figure out the combination of buses we need to get somewhere. For some strange reason, the MTA website wants me to take the Gardena 5 south to the Galleria and get on the 210 there.
I say hang it, and figure it out on paper.
So we get on the 210, not at the Galleria, but at the Crenshaw-Cherry intersection across the El Camino parking lot. The 210 is the north-south orange Metro Local that runs along Crenshaw.
Despite equal opportunity and affirmative action, there’s a clear delineation between neighborhoods in this city. Torrance and Gardena are middle-class towns, and the bus is nearly empty when we get on. At the first stop in Inglewood, it fills up.
Wikipedia’s entry on Crenshaw contains the worrying sentence "…growth of the gang-dominated crack cocaine trade in the 1980s made Crenshaw one of the most violent neighborhoods
in Los Angeles, with the stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard between Slauson
Avenue and Adams Boulevard remaining a virtual free-fire zone for years."
Nobody walks in LA. And as we pass Slauson, I see neighborhoods not much different from the one we’ve been living in for the past two months.
I look around, and realize that at this point, we’re the only non-black people on the bus. And I’m the only one wearing a tie.
Oh, well. Crenshaw must have changed a lot since the ’80s. Didn’t see a single gun-toting gangbanger anywhere. Lots of old people. A few in wheelchairs. Not very many our age, but then everybody our age is probably at work.
You can tell where Inglewood ends and downtown LA begins, however, by noticing where houses don’t have bars on the windows.
So we get off on Wilshire. The bus is mostly empty again at that point. Downtown LA, and we get on the 740 heading west.
740 on Wilshire takes us through Beverly Hills, straight through the Miracle Mile. The contrast between Wilshire and Crenshaw is mind-boggling.
I remember stopping on the corner of Rodeo and Wilshire, blinking confusingly at the garish facade of some big store. I don’t really remember the name. Versace and Prada, they mean nothing to me.
Oh, the rest of the trip was uneventful. We get to Westwood, get to the agency thirty minutes early, have pizza and a salad for lunch, etc. Walking past the Hammer Museum, I can’t get over the realization that even in the heart of LA’s business district, in a place where penthouse condominiums sell for $20 million, the streets still smell like piss.
Like piss. Because nobody walks in LA, and wearing my cheap, ill-fitting suit, carrying my battered leather document case, my unemployed ass isn’t worth anything.
Not in this town.
