by Jeff Nazzaro

(image c/o ktla)

It’s Veteran’s Day, 2019, and the Metrolink commuter train into LA is all but empty. The private university I teach at instead gives us something called Autumn Day off, on a Friday, so it’s all good to me. Another week of work, barely hanging on but hanging on. I’m rocking my light-tan silk sport coat and palm-tree tie from Goodwill, and this whole train’s the Quiet Car. We’re five minutes early into Union Station, then I just miss what I guess was an all-but-empty Red Line train. The Purple Line fills up but not as bad as a usual Monday, then the Blue Line, naturally, is a mess. Delays. Small throng on the 7th St. platform looking this way and that and down at their phones. But a train pulls in as I trot up, so I join the throng and when the train clears out, we all get on.

Crowded. I move across the car and stand in the doorway. It’s the rear of the front end of a double car. Just before the train leaves the station, a tall, thin man hurries on and thumps down into the empty aisle seat by the door across from me. He looks up at me. Then he looks again. He keeps doing it. I take my book, an Alice Munro collection, out of my bag, open it to the next story, “Free Radicals.” Then I realize I’m standing in the doorway on the side of the train on which at each stop the doors will open, so I gather up my bag and slide across the aisle to stand in the opposite doorway. Two seconds later, the man who had repeatedly looked at me jumps up out of his seat and stands right beside me. 

He stands very close to me, looking straight ahead. But whatever. It’s a free train. I take my book out, open it back up. “Free Radicals,” here we go. As I read the opening lines, the man standing next to me takes out his phone and with it plays some hip-hop at top volume.

I stand there. I’ll admit I had wanted to move when the man first jumped up and stood next to me, because there seemed to be no good reason for him to have done it, but I thought it wouldn’t be polite to move. I still have those thoughts sometimes, even after years of this commute. Now I know he’s fucking with me and has been ever since he hopped on the train just before the doors closed. Is it the jacket? The tie? I don’t know. My face? What’s the difference. All I know is, pride or principle, I no longer care. I pick up my bag and move to the rear car. He doesn’t follow.

Walking through the front section of the rear car, I can still clearly hear the hip-hop, but I stop in my tracks. For a mini homeless encampment seems to have formed in the back. It’s not, of course, like the little stretch of Hope St. between Washington and the 10, which is a mini Skid Row, one of hundreds, if not thousands across the City of Angels and up and down the state, the West Coast. This one here on the train boasts just three occupants, all, I presume, less, rather than more, temporary.

Let’s see, there are two white guys, one who looks to be around my age, large, bearded, and scruffy, and one quite a bit younger, also neater, trimmer, soberer. Then there’s a black man, ten years the oldest of the three, partially shielded by his overloaded utility cart and several plastic shopping bags of various make, model, and association that form a buffer against his, I realize, two new friends. He sits quietly as they, particularly the scruffy one, engage in a spirited discussion. Okay, so it’s a scruffy-guy monologue, and he’s on about one of our national obsessions—race:

“I used to love white people,” he says. “Now I like black people better. Black people are far more generous.”

Proceeding in a frenetic back-and-forth as to the fundamental differences between white people and black people, his focus stays firmly on the former. 

“I grew up around white people,” he says, beginning to wrap up his speech. “Here’s the thing about white people: If you’re doing hard drugs—hard drugs—they’ll say, ‘Oh, you have a disease, you need help.’ But if you want money for a beer, they’ll give you the hand.” He pauses here for effect and no one says anything. “I’ve had guys come up to me and be like, ‘We’re the same, bro.’ We’re not the same. Look at you: you’re wildly successful, and I’m homeless.”

Here the man with the cart interjects: “What they need to do is give us all some jobs,” he says.

“That’s a very good point,” the scruffy man says, and then he starts in on some of the jobs you can do for quick cash: moving furniture in and out of office buildings, clearing fields of brush, gofer on a construction site. “Gofer jobs are the best,” he says, “because you know you’re getting paid cash at the end of the day.”

The only time the youngest of the three joins the talk is when his larger friend starts in on Trump and how he is down to earth and gets jobs for African Americans, at which point the smaller man is forceful and concise:

“No, he’s hateful and discriminatory and that’s all.”

“Hey, I’m not a fan,” the man with the beard says. “All I’m saying is he’s down to earth.”

“No.”

“Okay, not a fan.”

At Florence, a middle-aged black man rolls into the middle of the discussion in a beat-up old electric wheelchair. 

“Good morning, everybody,” he fairly intones. “How are we today?”

But he’s rolled into the wrong space for his chair or his mellifluous voice to command much attention this morning. The man with the cart just looks at him and purses his lips. The bearded man has switched onto Michael Jackson.

“Dude, you don’t get charged with the same thing for twenty-five years and not be guilty.”

His younger friend isn’t buying it at first but finally hedges.

“He was gay. Then they made him start writing all those songs about pussy, and it fucked with his mind, man, his mind. That’s why he did it. I love his music, though. He was a genius. One of the best.”

Next up is Watts. Up ahead, at 103rd St., a black woman in purple pants and a leopard-print jacket runs up, snakes under the crossing gate, and darts across the tracks. As the train pulls in, the Michael Jackson excuser cranes his neck around to look out the window.

“Hey, does anyone know, is there a shopping mall here?” he says.

“Yes, sir,” the man in the wheelchair says. “Follow me right this way, that’s where I’m headed now.”

The younger man keeps looking out the window.

“What do they have there? Food4Less?”

“Sure, Food4Less, come on.”

The guy with the beard and his younger friend follow the man in the wheelchair off the train at Watts. The man with the cart looks down, adjusts a few of the bags at his feet, and leans back, shaking his head.

I go stand by the door in the front of the car to get off at Willowbrook. A man walks up from the other car and stands directly behind me. I glance. It’s my old friend with the hip-hop on his phone, though it isn’t playing now. In fact, I haven’t heard it since Washington St., so I figured he got off downtown. But here he stands, behind me for a minute, before moving down to the end of the car, the end that lines up with the steps up to the Green Line platform. I get off and walk the platform the length of the car back to the steps. Just as I get there, the man who stood behind me for a minute gets there too. We both take a step up, side by side, then he takes a step back down and walks down the platform. I continue up the steps.

When I get to the Green Line platform, I fully expect to see the man who took one step up and one step down waiting for me, but no. I do see the woman who snaked under the crossing gate in Watts sitting on a bench, pretty as you please in her purple pants and leopard-print jacket. She is, if nothing else, quick. A well-built black man walks by, leans down, and whispers something in her ear. It is not well received. He continues down the platform. I want to ask the woman what he said but think it will only make it worse. 

Up here over the South LA freeways, it’s hazy and cool. I stop and let the dirty air wash over me, then I see a man come up the steps, stop at the top, turn, and take a seat one step down from the platform. My friend from the train? I can’t see his face, but no, I don’t think it’s him. And what difference would it make? I walk over to get a closer look. He wears dark pants and a gray hoodie, the hood pulled up and drawn tight. He’s hunched over on the top step, sobbing.  

I walk back down towards the middle of the platform and stop to kick the sad two-dimensional iron foot of the peeling-paint clown sculpture. This thing needs to be put out of its urban-blight misery or touched up or something. Then I hear them. Then I see them. It’s the guy with the scruffy beard and his younger friend. I’d wanted to butt into their conversation before but didn’t. Not my place. Now they’re looking at the big map of bus connections. The younger one is. The older one is looking up the platform, right at me. I can’t resist.

“Hey, didn’t you guys just get off the train at Watts?”

“We got off one stop too soon,” the younger one says without taking his eyes off the map.

So much for all my hustle up and down stairs and across streets. So much for snaking under crossing gates in purple pants.
“You know where you’re going?” I ask him.

He doesn’t look at me. He says, “I know, I know.”

“We just got out of a day in jail,” the older one says.

“What for?”

“For charging my cell phone. He got arrested for waving to a cop.”

“I tried to flag down a cop,” the younger one says.

“He just waved to him and they arrested him.”

“You know those red ‘do not enter’ barriers at the stations?” he explained. “I crossed over that to flag down a cop, and they arrested me for that.”

“They arrested me for charging my cell phone for ten minutes.”

“Where?”

“I guess they’re cracking down on people charging their phones,” the older one says. 

He’s even more excited than he was on the train.

“He had two cups of coffee this morning,” the younger one says.

“Where’d they arrest you for that?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Down where all the courts and everything are.”

“He had like four cups of coffee this morning.”

“Civic Center,” I say, looking at his face, his eyes. That must have been some coffee.

“I’m from up north. Going through here, though, don’t you think California is just burned out? Don’t you think it’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I come here from Riverside. I get in and get the fuck back out as quick as possible, you know?”

“Oh, there are so many great punk bands from Riverside,” he says, then he pauses, but doesn’t name any bands.

I don’t know any, either.

We stand there on the platform, traffic whizzing by.

“I used to be a punker,” he says.

“A banker?” I say.

“No, a punker.”

“A what?”

“A punker. Like Mohawks and safety pins and knee-high Docs.”

“Oh, a punker. You must know the Minutemen, then, from San Pedro?”

“Oh, the Minutemen. Great band. I met them—before D. died.”

“Who?” the younger man asks.

“The Minutemen. Great artistic band. So influential. Man, without the Minutemen you never would have had Nirvana. What does that say about us as a culture, that our biggest rock star was a guy with bleach blond hair in a friggin’ cardigan sweater?”

“We came of age in the eighties,” I say. “They gave us Madonna and AIDS, and we’re sitting there trying to go through fucking puberty.” I watched him not say anything. “I was at one of Nirvana’s last shows, in Fitchburg, Mass. Kurt stops at one point and goes, ‘We heard that some of you guys down in the pit are grabbing girls’ butts and boobs. You might think it’s funny, but it’s not, and if we catch you doing it we’re gonna kick your ass.”

“Same! I caught that tour in Oakland, and Kurt was all weird, but that groping thing was part of his shtick, like smashing old shitty guitars with those Day-Glo orange amps: “Hey! You tried to grope her! You’re out of here! Kurt was a woman in a man’s body—a feminist.”

The westbound train comes, last stop Redondo Beach. We all get on. The younger guy walks down to the middle of the car to look at the Metro map. The older guy keeps talking. We’re about the same age, grew up on opposite coasts of the same country, and now here we are on the Green Line bandying band names back and forth like we’re at freshmen orientation or something: Husker Dü, the Pixies, the Pogues, the Mars Volta.

“Grunge didn’t kill the hair bands, Guns N’ Roses did,” he says.

“Yeah because Guns brought the blues back to metal.”

He’s talking to me and keeps looking up for his friend.

“He’s still there, don’t worry, man,” I say.

His friend is looking back. I figure they’re getting off at Crenshaw since they were looking for a shopping center, and as long as the younger man is looking out for this big scruffy wayward soul, all will at least transitorily work out. 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, looking around, looking back. “They say the most poignant moment in your life is when your dad dies, but for me it was when Nevermind knocked Dangerous out of number one.”

“My father’s still alive,” I say, “with fucking Alzheimer’s in assisted living somewhere in Rhode Island.”

“Mine’s fine, I guess, but if I could have one musician still alive it would be Kurt because, like, what was he going to do next?”

We pull in and out of Crenshaw.

“For me it’s Jimi Hendrix. That guy could have done anything.”

“Oh Hendrix is a great choice. I was talking to this guy yesterday—wait, that guy—and he said, Hey!” he shouts towards the middle of the car, “what were you saying yesterday about Prince?”

“What?”

Aviation/LAX.

“Prince!”

“This is me, man,” I say. “Good talking to you.”

“Great talking to you, man!”

The train stops, the doors open, and I step out into the El Segundo sunshine and breeze. 

Then I hear a big, loud, “I love that!” just before the train doors close.

Jeff Nazzaro teaches creative writing at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary publications, including Blood & Bourbon, Corner Bar Magazine, and Amarillo Bay.