by Peter Millar
The bus ride down to Santa Monica takes longer than I imagine, quite a bit longer in fact, so that it’s nearly 4:00 p.m. by the time I’m strolling along the Pacific seafront and down the pier with seagulls wheeling in the salty air above me and a bottle blonde in a bikini doing an interview on the sand to a guy with a sound boom and a very long lens. I do a double take for a moment, in case it’s Pamela Anderson. But it isn’t. At least I don’t think so. But then I once stood next to Noel Gallagher at the bar of a London club for an hour without recognising him. Celebrity status isn’t absolute. And nor is my eyesight these days.
Santa Monica is nice, as nice as my friends had said it was: a bit like Brighton, but with a better beach. And sunshine. I could have stayed there longer – though if I’d booked in there I doubt if I’d ever have seen anything more of LA – but football beckoned and the admittedly uninspiring Home Depot Stadium, home to LA’s own ‘galacticos’ was in the southern part of the city, and starting to look a lot further away as I came to work out the scale on the map I was looking at. I had no idea. Simply no idea.
The only obvious route by public transport – and I’m beginning to realise that a taxi ride might be a lot longer and a lot more expensive that I had considered – seemed to be to take the express bus back to the ‘light rail’ network which would whisk me across downtown to the ‘South Central’ area and the stop I had worked out to be closest to the stadium. When a bus reassuringly rolls up within a minute or two, this plan seems to be working fine. Until it stops again about five minutes later, still – as far as I can tell, there being no break in the urban continuum – well within Santa Monica.
The reason it has stopped is traffic, which is a good reason, because there is a lot of it. In fact, it is not a good reason at all because there is a hell of a lot of it. And none of it moving, other than – very occasionally – between one red light and another. And there are a lot of red lights too. Before I know it the sun is indeed going down on the Santa Monica Boulevard. And unless I do something, and quick, it’ll also be going down on my chances of getting to the game for kick-off.
With the bus sitting there stationary, I decide to take a little advice and edge up front to ask the driver how long it’ll take us to get to the junction with the rail line. ‘Oh, I dunno,’ he says with that air bus drivers seem to be born with, ‘at this time of day… could be 40 minutes, could be an hour and 40 minutes.’ Which sends me into a blind panic as that means they’ll be booting the ball downfield before I’m even on the right tracks. Clearly touched by this odd foreigner’s predicament – or deciding I’m a bit touched and better off his bus – the driver does something wonderful and almost unimaginable in health-and-safety-obsessed London: he opens the door for me between stops and says, ‘You can get off if you think you can get there faster.’
All I know is that I can hardly get there much more slowly. I take him up on it, and indeed before long am a good hundred yards in front of the bus, not that this is much good because the rail line is maybe four or five miles away – I told you it was long, that old boulevard. The only answer is a cab, and to hell with the cost: a driver who knows his way and can cut the corner across town, taking the backbearings, the ‘rat runs’ as we’d say in London. The only trouble is: there isn’t one. And even if there was it wouldn’t be any good, not on a grid system. A London cabbie would be ducking and diving down. Showing off the secrets of ‘the Knowledge’ and making the route up as he went along, playing a great maze game to beat the jam just for the hell of it. But not here. I examine the cross-streets hopefully but in vain. The cross-streets only funnel more cars out of them into the main road; it’s like watching arteriosclerosis in real time.
There is a James Joyce short story in Dubliners which is one of the best things he ever wrote, certainly one of the most comprehensible. It is called ‘Araby’ and is the brief story of a boy determined all day to get down to a bazaar to buy something and when he gets there it is too late, and the moment that he realises that fact, in a closing market, with the stalls shut and dusk falling all around him, is a life-defining bittersweet realisation of the poignancy of the human condition.
Well, that’s what I feel like right now, with the sunset faded into an eerie purple neon-and traffic-lit dusk, and here I am stranded on the endless Santa Monica Boulevard of life, with the street numbers somewhere in the low thousands with an infinite number ahead and behind, having hopped back on the bus when it catches up with me, then off again in fresh despair, with no escape down side streets leading nowhere, and the creeping insurmountable certainty that the game I had arguably travelled 6,000 miles to see would be started – and at the current rate possibly even finished – before I got there.
It’s not that in the great scheme of things it matters all that much. But what hurts is the conspiracy of the universe to trample mindlessly on even our most modest aspirations and remind us of our own essential insignificance. Nothing hurts more than being told simply, ‘You don’t matter’. And absolutely nothing hurts more than being told it by a series of traffic lights.
In the end it was past a quarter to seven when the 720 pulled up at a stop near a junction where a building opposite displayed the world ‘Wiltern’ and something made me ask the driver if we were near the Metro Rail.
‘Sure, just over there,’ he indicated, and I realised with a feeling of almost nausea that ‘Wiltern’ was another of those ‘cool’ contractions – Wilshire and Western – that Americans seem to love so much in the absence of proper place names. I jumped out, only to realise that I then had to stand while my bus and another wave of unthinking traffic ploughed past – one day American transport planners will realise it makes sense to put underground rail entrances on both sides of the road, won’t they?
Wilshire/Western is the end of the line. It would have improved Los Angeles’s public transportation no end – not to mention made my journey that evening almost tolerable – to have pushed the line out west, ideally as far as Santa Monica. But that would have brought us back to those La Brea tarpits.
At least the train is ready to depart within seconds of my boarding it. I look at my watch. The trouble is that I have no real idea how long the trip will take. At least being on the metro line frees me from the tyranny of the traffic but there’s no way I’m going to catch the start of the match.
By the time I’m changing at 7th Street/Transit Center just four stops later I realise they’re probably already kicking off. The Blue Line south is right there in front of me, irresistibly tempting even though I know that on the overlaid map, the striped beige ‘transitway’ route comes closer to the stadium. The trouble is I don’t really know what the transitway is or how to get on it. I do the obvious thing: I ask a man in Metro Rail uniform. He seems amused by my question, or at least the accent in which I ask it and replies in heavily Spanish-accented American: ‘Is not here.’
‘The transitway?’
Quizzical look. ‘The bus.’
‘No, this,’ I said, pointing to a map with the stripy beige line, ‘transitway. Is it a tram,’ then remembering my vocabulary, ‘a light rail.’
‘Si, this,’ he indicated the train at the platform. ‘Train. Metro Rail. Blue Line. Very quick.’
‘But to Artesia Transit Center, the other tram. Does it go from near here?’ I had noticed that the beige line said that from 37th Street it was at street level, before, I assumed, descending underground.
‘Is on the other side of the square. A long walk. I think they should put it here, but is on the other side. The bus.’
But I’m not talking about the bus, I want to scream, or am I, I start to wonder? The truth is I haven’t really got a clue what I’m talking about here, in any language. Then the horn sounds to close the door on the Blue Line and I jump on board, just in case. ‘Very quick,’ the metro man tells me, so I sit down and seal my fate. Opposite me a Hispanic-looking girl sitting reading a book looks friendly and intelligent.
‘Excuse me,’ I start to
explain, ‘do you know the Home Depot Soccer Stadium?’ She smiles encouragingly, but not optimistically. ‘Near Artesia,’ I add, hopefully helpfully.
‘This train goes to Artesia,’ she says in perfectly comprehensible American English.
‘To the Home Depot Soccer Stadium?’
‘I don’t know where that is.’
‘I think it’s nearer to here,’ I say, pointing to the end of the beige ‘transitway’ line.
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘then you need to get out here,’ – points to Imperial/Wilmington – ‘take the Green Line and then the bus.’
‘Right,’ I smile dubiously and sit back to wait, as the train suddenly surfaces and turns out to be a tram, trundling along the streets next to the cars and, like them, stopping at red lights. I grit my teeth, not quite audibly: my companions in the compartment by now include four pudgy but tough-looking white guys in their early thirties who are discussing whether the tattoos they just had on their forearms in order to get a free T-shirt might be some sort of advertising gimmick. Yeah right. Apart from them there are two middle-aged women telling a not terribly bright-looking 20-something bloke, ‘And he financed the Nazis.’
‘Who, the president?’ says the young guy, unwilling to believe this, even of George W. Bush.
‘Naw, not him. Nor his daddy. His granddaddy, they bankrolled them Nazis in the Second World War.’
This is news to me too, and I wonder if they are possibly confusing the Bush dynasty with the Kennedy dynasty, but right now I am more concerned with the ticking clock which shows I’ve already missed the first quarter hour of play. The list of stations shows eight more to go, and the view from the window is increasingly of unlit streets, broken-down trucks, and low-rise dwellings with broken windows and beat-up cars outside. The one thing signally lacking is pedestrians of any kind. Or taxis. This is not the sort of area I’m keen to jump out in.
Eventually, almost 25 minutes into the first half by my reckoning – but to give up now would make a mockery of the whole day – we pull into Imperial/Wilmington, and the friendly girl opposite says: ‘You want to get that bus,’ (meaning ‘if’), ‘you need to get out here.’
So I do. Uncertainly. Particularly as when I reach the platform above there is another blockade of metro ticket inspectors, backed up by armed police already detaining serious numbers of my fellow passengers, though happily not the friendly girl, who waves as she points me towards the Green Line and disappears into a night that looks less than welcoming.
My ticket is fine, but I am torn now between jumping on the Green Line for two stops to catch an unspecified bus to Artesia Transit or getting back on the Blue for another stop to where the ground appears to be further but at least in a straight line west. This is a straight-line city, I’m thinking. The Blue Line arrives first deciding the matter for me.
The next two stops to Artesia are not reassuring. There is a fat black woman in the corner surrounded by black bags which I suspect contain all her worldly possessions. She has her hand over her mouth as if trying not to be sick. I move up the carriage and stare through the door into the pitch black of the outer LA suburbs. The guy standing by the door I am staring through is big and black and wearing excessively baggy clothing and I glimpse something in his hand which looks like a curved handle that I realise might easily be that of a flick knife. He snatches a glance at me, and pulls a length of cloth from his pocket with his other hand. The train pulls into Artesia station. It looks like we are both getting off here, except that I am having second thoughts.
Now, I pride myself as being pretty much colour blind when it comes to human beings, but you can’t ignore context. The one previous time I had been in Los Angeles, I was writing an article for The Sunday Times on racial attitudes between Simi Valley – home to the jurors who had just acquitted four white policemen of beating up black motorist Rodney King, even though there was clear video evidence of them doing so – and South Central LA, where I was now. The verdict had led to rioting which caused $785 million in property damage, and in which 2,300 people were injured and 55 killed. They made the race riots in London’s Brixton or Liverpool’s Toxteth pale into insignificance in comparison. To put it bluntly, I’m nervous here, even though I’m fully aware that this young black man might be equally worried about some middle-aged white bloke with wild eyes peering over his shoulder in a dark station. After all, who’s to say I’m not carrying a gun? People do. Especially around here.
The station is a bleak, empty car park with lots of parking spaces for buses but no actual buses. The guy with the object in his hand that might have been a knife and might not melts into the dark. Central LA is awash with street lighting, so why not here? Maybe the mayor’s once-a-month ‘green’ initiative to get citizens to turn off non-essential lighting is applied permanently in South Central. Maybe it all depends on what you think is essential, and for whom. It certainly doesn’t look like level standards apply citywide.
By now it’s gone 7:35 and my attempt to reach the Galaxy ground by half-time has obviously drained into the dust and even getting there by the start of the second half is beginning to look bleak. As usual there are no cabs. On the other side of the station is a neon-lit casino, providing the only illumination in the car park, but a sharp fence has been erected to block off access even to its car park. I wander up and down aimlessly, all of a sudden completely at a loss and obviously looking it. Suddenly bright torches shine in my face from across the car park, and I hear: ‘Hey, you, come here.’
Terror mingles with the idea that armed muggers don’t usually carry torches, not in England at least.
‘You okay?’ sounds a less than threatening question. Certainly less threatening than they look. There are two of them, bulky, white 30-somethings in uniforms of some sort, not obviously police. Private security according to their shoulder badges, though security for whom is not clear.
‘I’m lost,’ I admit hopelessly.
‘Where you lookin’ for?’
‘The Home Depot? Do you know it? I mean the soccer stadium?’
‘You need to buy something, for your house?’
‘No!’ I almost scream, even if this is maybe a reasonable thing to assume about someone asking how to get to the ‘Home Depot’. Bizarrely, of course, we can all see the Home Depot itself, in big red letters on the side of a warehouse a few hundred yards away that seems to stretch for miles. Unfortunately it, like the casino, is on the other side of a high, sharp fence, and then again, even if it weren’t, there is always the possibility out here that it actually does stretch for miles; and even if the stadium was next to it – which is by no means certain – the game would probably be over by the time I’ve walked its length. But these guys haven’t a clue what I’m talking about. I’m not dangerous or in danger – a little loopy maybe but that’s not their problem – so instead of giving me a lift, as I vaguely hope, they clamber back into their unmarked cruiser and cruise off, leaving me looking at their vanishing tail lights. And then a voice comes out of the dark, soft, quiet and uncertain: ‘Hey, señor.’
I look over and there’s a dark-skinned guy – so dark he might have been African but his features are Latino – leaning against a large stone pot containing some sort of semi-tropical tree; he’s beckoning me over. What have I got to lose? He’s about 70 – or maybe 35 and just had a hard life (which is how I’m feeling right now) – and making an instant value judgement from my appearance, switches to English: ‘You want futból?’ (the vital word is definitely said in Spanish). I nod, trying not to look too desperate. He smiles: ‘You need bus, it comes here,’ he points to one of the parking spaces with a sign next to it, ‘maybe five minutes. Goes near stadium, you ask driver. Okay?’
Okay? I could almost embrace him. I head for the stop, about 20 yards away, leaving him to smile and mutter something to a woman seated next to him whom I hadn’t even noticed, wrapped in a swathe of blankets like a Peruvian Indian. Who knows? Maybe they are. But after five minutes there’s still no bu
s. It’s nearly 8:00 p.m. now. At best, if I’m lucky, I’ll catch the last few minutes. Then it rolls up, out of nowhere, and the driver stops and opens the doors. And turns off the lights.
‘Uhh,’ I hardly dare ask him, knowing from south London that displaying the teensiest sign of impatience to a bus driver will encourage him to start reading the paper and open a flask of tea, ‘When does this bus leave?’ He’s black – I mention this because he’s clearly looking at me, thinking ‘he’s white’ – and after a pause of about nearly 30 seconds says, ‘You want to get on this bus?’ I nod, doubtfully: ‘It goes to the footb… soccer stadium?’ He thinks for a good minute, then nods: ‘I guess.’ By now a few more passengers have materialised, black or Mexican – Hispanic (funny how I’d never really thought of ‘Hispanic’ as a racial term before now, certainly not one I’d apply to the Spanish. I wonder if Americans ever do, and decide it’s a catch-all euphemism that implies mixed Native American – Inca or Mayan – blood). None of them are white. I’ve been a racial minority often before – on buses in southeast London, but I’ve never been looked at as if I shouldn’t be there. Until now.
We move off and I’m standing – which gets me more looks – hey, it’s what we do in England – up front, near the driver. I suggest it would be kind if he could give me a nod when we reach the nearest stop to the ground, ‘I mean, stadium.’ And he just shakes his head and says, under his breath but meant for me to hear, ‘You people. You should use your cars.’ I’ve no answer to that. At least none that he would understand. And then eventually, after 15 minutes of trundling along mostly dark streets, the Home Depot’s red neon comes back into sight, from the other direction, and there’s a wash of white floodlights in the sky and the bus stops and the driver yells, not turning to look at me: ‘Saaaccer.’ And I get the message. And get off. I can hardly believe it. I’ve got there at last. Alive and in one piece. There’s still everything to play for, except that the game’s nearly over.