The Greater Los Angeles Bus
System Book Club presents:
The Case of the LA Metro Passenger
or A Token of Respect
It was another sunny day in Hollywood. That meant good conditions for tourists, film crews, and beach goers.That meant driving.
And that meant cars. On the road. Lots of them.
If there’s one thing LA didn’t have, it was a shortage of drivers.
PI Sam Anderson made a decent and fairly exciting living as a motorist violations investigator, clear cut tail gate cases mostly, but on occasion there were jobs not so easy in the right/wrong department. Just 10 days on the clock, he went undercover as a resident of Park-LaBrea Apartments to track down the owner of a particularly jarring, over sensitive car alarm that was keeping the building up nights. Turned out the owner was a 90 year old, half-deaf consumptive living on her own for the last couple years. The last gift her husband and children had given her before their untimely deaths in the otter lake at Sea World was this car alarm. She said she’d rather die than lose that alarm, said it put her to sleep at night, said it kept her going in a world filled with nothing but suppositories and half-eaten Lean Cuisines.
Unfortunately for her, that alarm was in a car. Sam’s jurisdiction.
Towing that car away was one of the hardest things he had ever done, and not just cause the old lady turned out to have a fantastically strong grip. Driving away, he could see her, a broken wrinkly lump, weeping old people tears in the middle of the street. She died two hours later.
“The law was the law,” Sam had told himself driving away, but that was brief comfort. Being completely right didn’t make the inadvertent murder of nonagenarians any easier. But, those were the nuts life dealt you. Sometimes you got tasty peanuts, other times you got punishing cashews; Sam just happened to be this lady’s last cashew.
Author's note: Now of course, that’s not meant to be taken literally. Sam wasn’t physically transformed into a cashew. It’s just a figure of speech, like when detectives are called hard-boiled. It means they’re tough, not that they’re actually giant hard boiled eggs. How would they conduct investigations if they were hard-boiled eggs? It would be pretty difficult to do any under cover work as a 6 foot tall hors d'oeuvres. People you even thought were friends would be trying to put you on trays or at least trick you into attending art gallery openings and political fund raisers, and before you knew it--Gulp!--down the hatch of some obese conservative Republican, clogging his colon, making him even more irritable, and increasing the chances he'll push through some right wing transit bill that would make a horse and buggy dirt highway look positively draconian. I mean, really, the only thing worse would be an inefficient subway system. Anyway, back to our exciting story.
The case being offered Sam at this moment was a whole different matter, and the man in front of him, the Assistant Vice Comptroller of the External Token Reimbursement Sub Committee for the LA Metro Service (Los Angeles’ fabled subway system), knew it. He’d done his homework and had almost definitely discovered Sam’s secret, the reason he’d been forced into business on his own in the first place.
Back in ‘90, a few years after he’d started, Sam broke the one rule traffic violations investigators can never break. It wasn’t that he’d pocketed over $1.50 in dashboard change that day alone—everybody skimmed. It was that he got caught. Then the IRS got in on the game, asking a million nosy questions about the $14.72 Sam had spent that year but had failed to declare on his taxes.
“Those are nice socks. Is that One HUNDRED percent cotton?”
“Stop N Shop Oats? When d’you start buying name brand cereal?”
“Nice bathroom, can I pee in it?”
Three years of probationary status and a glove compartment full of failed dreams later, his status had been reinstated to full investigator at the department. It didn’t take long though before the stifled whispers as he entered a room and the refusal on the part of the bureau to up him to Bumper Sticker Fraud -- checking accuracy of claims that someone’s son really was an Honors student or if someone notorious for lack of sports prowess would in fact, rather be playing hockey -- forced Sam to go private. Since then, it had been an up hill battle to establish his own business, but he’d done it. Now this guy might be threatening to take away all he’d worked so hard for, all he’d strived toward all these years, simply because of one mistake Sam had made when he was young, a rookie!The most embarassing part about it all this was, the car Sam had stolen the change from, was a Miata.
“So, Sam…” The Metro suit stopped, distracted. He noticed a map of the NYC subway system hanging on the wall, a memento of the days when Sam still dreamt of joining the big boys in the Big Apple tracking down big turnstile jumpers, skipping out on big subway fares . The suit giggled to himself. The guys at the LA Metro didn’t have to worry about any of those things.
“So, Sam, you seen any good dashboards lately?”
So he did know. Big deal.
“Look, whatever you have to say, say it, and get out.”
“I wouldn’t be talking’ like dat to a future employer if I was you.” The suit began tossing a Metro token in the air, one of the millions supposedly in circulation but which would never touch civilian hands. Mostly the Metro guys just used them for fishing lures or amateur hypnosis parties.
Brilliant scam, the Metro. Making the tax payer foot a multi-billion dollar construction and employment fee for an extensive underground subway no Los Angelino would ever get around to using. No passengers. No upkeep fees. No need to pay a large staff. Instead, give a handful of confusing but legit sounding titles to a few loyal goons, and voila, gravy. It made Sam’s dashboard scam look like chump change. His mind sifted through lost opportunities as the suit went on.
“I’ll put it real simple for you. We got a job that needs someone real good-like, on the QT. And you need a job.”
It was true. Since the police had started installing cameras at stop lights, a lot of business had dropped off. For an old traffic sleuth like Sam, that was bad news. Damn robots. Sam poured himself a cup of java and leaned against his desk.
“What’s the job?”The suit smiled a thousand token, 6 zone, 3rd rail smile. “I knew you’d take it. Now siddown. What I’m about to tell you’s is confidential like. Breathe a word a dis and I’ll have da boys at the DMV muscle your class D into a class G, and I don’t think you got a 16 ton tractor trailer or a novelty Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile, do you?” That stung. “So keep ya mouth shut, Miata. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
”Good.” The suit began recalling what had happened. “Now you’re not gonna believe what I’m about to tell you’s—“ The suit suddenly paled. “What I’m about to tell you’s is very—“ Again the suit paled. “The thing of which I am about to speak to you’s, it’s, well, it’s—“ The suit was about to pale again.
“That’s enough suspense.”
“Right. We, uh, well, we found someone on one of the cars.”
“What?” Sam choked on his coffee, dropping the cup on the hard wood floor. It shattered. The cup, not the floor. Obviously.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Otherwise, what would Sam and the Suit stand on if the floor were to sudenly disappear? Imagine a world without rules and physical laws. You could not write a story because all sorts of crazy things like this would be happening all the time. No, this is not what the English language was made to conjure in our minds. It was made for speaking and writing, writing wonderful prose works, haunting and daring in their originality, yet not at all propagandist, works that make you see both sides of an issue, even though one side is inherently right due to the over bearing evidence of it benefits to, let's say a large scale city suffering from severe expansion problems but for which a subway may not make sense due to the frequency of earthquakes. The English language is a beautiful thing.
“I told you, you should sit down. Anyway, last night, one of the guys, the Executive Vice CFO of the Token Insignia Redesign and Public Re-education Office, was gonna sit in one of the trains and pretend to take it for a spin, sit in the seat, make choo choo noises, for kicks, see. So he gets in the head car. He stops dead in his tracks and let’s out this scream like he’s seen the head of the Department of Transportation or something.”
Sam pulled on his tie nervously.
“And this guy’s like 300 pounds, 6’5’’, easy, so we know not a lot’s gonna scare him.” The suit stopped abruptly. The pupils on Sam’s Felix the Cat clock made a full revolution before the suit was able to summon back his personal demons. In words. He didn’t actually use black magic to conjure demons that he, personally, was in control of.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: “Summon back personal demons” referred to the fact that the man from the Metro was trying to deal emotionally with what he’d experienced in order to then explain it to Sam without leaving out important details. It’s a figure of speech. Like the cashew thing from before. But not so much like the coffee cup thing. But still beautiful, like English. Or a newly painted GE series 7 52-seat electric-gas hybrid.
“So a bunch of us just drop our sticks in the middle of a very big game in our Subway Series Street Hockey Platform Championship—the Hollywood Exhausters were beatin the North Hollywood Smoggies by like 5 so the game was almost done—but we drop it all anyways and run over to our buddy and he’s just starin into one of the cars, eyes as big and wide as our annual budget, which I should mention we squander on exorbitant trifles and bribes. We still can’t see the big deal so he lifts one hand and points to the window of the car. And there it was…”
“And there he was. A passenger.” The suit was terrified. “Mind if I smoke?”
“With the millions of exhaust spewing, inefficient cars on the road, why would one more source of dangerous airborne carcinogens bother me?”
“Good point.”
“Could it have been an EPA spook?”
The suit lit three cigarettes and a cigar.
With LA’s air pollution as bad as it was, it really didn’t matter what people did to their lungs anymore. People thought they had no hope of ever finding an easily accessible and environmentally sensible mode of public transportation anymore. If only more people knew about LA’s best kept secret, the bus system, thought Sam.
“Nah, Christine Whitman’s a personal friend of the Big Man,” said the suit. He meant the head of the LA Metro himself. It seemed the Metro had its fingers in a lot more pies than even Sam had thought possible. “She wouldn’t sick any of her people on us. We got the goods on her and how she called a moratorium on auto industry mileage and road efficiency standards suggested by the last EPA chief. One of the few organizations to raise their emissions standards regardless was the LA Bus System, by the way. So, it’s not them. We got a dozen agencies under our thumb, the DMV, the LAPD, even half the guys on Cheney’s so called Energy Commission which will undoubtedly push for further oil and coal development which means extensive wildlife drilling and a coastal oil spill average of %24 if he ever gets around to informing the public about it, making use of public modes of travel all the more important in the coming years. We got everybody for god’s sake. The only guys we can’t crack are those goddamn unbribable bus system bastards. They’re so self righteous with their fleet of efficient and environmentally friendly gas and electric hybrids, covering the whole of LA county. But no, we checked with a buddy who knows a guy over there and he said it wasn’t them.”
“I don’t get it. No one rides the Metro.”
“Exactly.”
“Then who could it be?”
“We got on the horn and checked with everyone, but no one knew who this guy was. We had to figure he was just a regular passenger.”
“What are the odds? Well, what happened?”
“We had to take him where he wanted, of course. But none of us knows how to operate the trains. So we lied to him, said the steam engines were out or Injuns were attacking or something—what do we know about trains—and he gets this funny look on his face like we’re all crazy. We told him one of us would be happy to drive him but he just asks where is everyone.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, exactly. How do I explain that LA is a city of 18 million people wholly convinced that a reasonable portion of their population rides the Metro subway each and every day and that without that assurance, a wave of guilt would sweep across the city’s millions of lip-service environmentalists and force them into political action, clogging civic leaders with requests for a yet more extensive subway line, one encompassing more than the one stop for every 200 square blocks we have now and forcing unwanted eyes to pry into our ledgers and begin funneling some of our funding, which as I said we squander regularly on the most decadent of bells and whistles for our families and friends like the time I bought a gold mink coat and a diamond coat hanger for my best gal, to those bastards at the LA bus system, adding to their already comfortable and reasonably priced fleet?”
“You can’t.”“Exactly. So I told him he should take the bus.”
“Sound advice. I still don’t see how I fit into the picture.”
“Well, like I said, you can’t breathe a word a dis to anyone, but we don’t know where the nearest bus stop is. We need you to investigate it for us, and fast.”
”What’s the rush for?”
“The guy’s waiting in my car outside.”
“You shoulda said.”
“Well I just did, Johnny Smartass. Now what are you gonna do?”
“First I’m going to go online to the LA Bus Coalition’s easy to use website and type in our zip code.”
Sam did.
“Then I’m going to click on the icon for the nearest pick up spot. What’s his destination?”
The suit handed him a scrap of paper with a residence in the swanky East Hollywood district. Sam typed it in.
“There, corner of Hollywood and Vermont. If you leave now, you can make the 2:15. But don’t worry if you miss it, because the LA Bus System is nothing if not extensive. Another bus’ll be along every 10 minutes following until 8 pm when the service switches to ‘on the half’ then ‘on the hour’ after midnight.”
“You sure know a lot about the Los Angeles Bus System.”
“Know thy betters,” Sam quoted the old proverb.
“You’re a good man, Anderson. I’ll pass your name along to the Big Man. Here’s your money.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank me later.”
The suit smirked and handed Sam a large, jangling bank bag. He practically blew out the door.
By that, it’s meant to convey that the suit walked out the door in a brisk fashion.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: He didn’t actual detonate a small explosive at the door’s hinges to blow it out into the hallway or that the door was somehow on fire and he extinguished it with his very breath, a literal "super sleuth.". No, no, it’s just more of those wonderful figures of speech.
Maybe things were looking up for Sam. He decided he’d been wasting his time as a PI. It was time to ante up again…but this time he’d be on the right team, a team that cared about efficiency, cleanliness and convenience. The LA Bus System. First thing tomorrow, he’d put in for a job through an old pal's standing offer.
Sam sat down to enjoy some new coffee and count his money. He opened the bank sack.
“Damn.”
The LA Metro had once again cheated a citizen. What’s new about that?
Sam poured onto his desk the thousands of LA Metro tokens he’d been paid with, as useless as the hundreds of empty tunnels spread underneath the thronging metropolis.
“Well, maybe I can smelt them into a likeness of one of LA’s finest. I speak of course of the LA Bus System operators.”
Muffled through his office window pane, the sound of a bus rumbling by brought a brief smile to Sam’s lips. The floor shattered.
posted by Carol at 11:29 PM
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