ETA
I'd love to share with you all a short story penned by the wonderfully talented GG Flores--a dear friend--and edited by me. Enjoy this transit-laden narrative based in his native LA Metro Area.
Groans ruptured the silence of Melly’s sunlit studio. She didn’t wake up on her own timing—in fact she had actually been trying really bravely to stay in her REM cycle—but it was 10:35 am in the unincorporated subdivision of Rosamond, just north of Palmdale, where she was reluctantly paying rent, and since the summer solstice was just three days behind her, only somewhat visible in the dusty rearview mirror of recent memory, it was already 106 degrees Fahrenheit in her section of the Mojave. The high desert had kicked her out of bed.
Last night was really fun, she remembered as a half thought, but chains of alcohol dehydrogenase were putting in work somewhere in or around her liver trying to reshape whatever grain liquor was in that Gold Four Loko she got at Ernie’s Liquor #4 for 5.99 into something her body recognized as nontoxic, and it was really hard to experience anything but discomfort. At least she hadn’t drank alone; she was finally making friends, and she was pretty sure her mom and them would have been proud of her, if they were all still on speaking terms. Alas, not since that carne asada.
Rolling out of bed always reminded Melly of that one time she saw an american alligator at the LA Zoo spin-dismembering a raw chicken–with a ferocity only matched by her cousin Aja attacking a Zankou roast with pita and toum-sticky fingers–splashing her with anthropogenically-swampy water through the chainlinks. She hit her linoleum floor with most of her body and immediately sensed something was off: it was about 25 degrees hotter than the assignment she had given her (admittedly very disobedient) AC unit last night. A quick walk to the bathroom-kitchen proved her right, the GE had finally kicked the bucket and was blowing hot air. “Gross,” turning it off quickly, “I have to talk to my landlord.” She hadn’t seen him since she first moved in, and had hoped to never have to talk to him again, but the list of repairs was getting longer, and the time to demand he do the bare minimum was nigh. One thing at a time though; she forced down a cup of Brita water, distinctly tasted a fluoride-manganese-PFA cocktail that dodged the filter, and started moving on her day.
Her phone’s clock let her know she had plenty of time to get to work (good, because that drive was something vicious), but banners and a popup insisted rather insolently she charge the device. “You’re fine,” Melly dismissed, “I got a charger in the car.”
Her body’s own version of a notification system also complained, hungry. She had only just gotten paid the day before, so the fridge was still empty, save some inappropriate-for-this-early-chelas–there probably was time to shop for groceries and concoct a simple meal, but Melly reckoned she had earned eating out.
Outside was hot enough to threaten an egg’s liquid constitution. Melly’s apartment enjoyed a row of Canary Island palms that looked very spectacular in the Craigslist photos but in reality were no taller than her neighbors’ Great Dane named Heinrich, who was very large for a dog but still waist height. Good for knee shade, but nothing to cover her face from n+1th degree burns on her way to her beloved Dark Grey Pearl Infiniti G37. The keys jingled into and out of the door and into the ignition, but the car made no noise beyond the door beeps and small ignition clicks, even when prompted with a hard couple of turns that normally convinced the engine into a low straight-piped growl. She knew the starter had been suffering, but she had been dogging “el Fin Fin” on the freeway a little too hard on her way home the last couple of times, and who knows what component had gone out. “Fuck, not this. How will I charge my phone on my way to work?”
She stumbled out of the car, back into the stuffy unincorporated subdivision air, which was only slightly less dense and blistering than the air in her currently useless car, a moment of bliss as melanin enhanced vitamin D synthesis in her face, before the rest of her day resolved in front of her. She had exhausted her sick days, work was 65 miles away (a literal 24-hour walk, she guessed correctly) in Silverlake, and she had to clock in in less than 3 and a half hours. She had never traveled to any part of LA on the bus from Rosamond and only took public transit in the high desert one time, to go get engine coolant from the Autozone on 50th and N when she ran out the year prior.
She was halfway into getting dressed for work and mostly out of her post-sweat-sleep grogginess when she remembered that the California High Speed Rail had just opened its Palmdale station. Huh. She had been hearing about it for what, decades at this point? Billions of dollars in development, Elon Musk picking up or dropping part of the project? Too much News to follow, a fever dream, and in this heat and economy, through the frustration of weaving legs through Dickies legs and forcing buttons into polo collar holes still tight from the dryer, it just didn’t sound right. But she checked her phone maps and there it was, a 3 hour, 17-minute ETA: Kern Transit 100 bus to the Antelope Valley Transit 1 bus to the “CHR,” then from Burbank, the LA County Metro locals 222, to the 2, to finally arriving at OUID, the dispensary she’d been working at since back when she lived in, um, Echo Park. She hated recalling how close she used to live to her job, and how the only thing keeping her tied to LA-just-off-Sunset was the artsy “Eastsiders” who paid $70 for eighths of outdoor sativa, to write mediocre skit scripts and whatever other semi-creative endeavors they required tetrahydrocannabinolic-acid assistance with.
Armed with her best mineral sunscreen and widest-brimmed hat—a straw number from her dad, recently and tastefully modified by a goat locked away in a Hesperia-ranchito petting zoo who had become locally notorious for including unfortunately-nearby headwear in her dietary enrichment plan—Melly made her way to the bus stop for her 2-transfer route to the high-speed rail station. It was a 10-minute walk with no shade, unless she walked within property lines and on the edge of buildings with ominous No-Trespassing signs and Neighborhood Watch posters featuring a suspicious-looking man that she always thought looked like her tío Feo. Yes, of course she had considered Uber, Lyft, and their local new competitor, Drovedly, but the cheapest ride was the latter and it was still a 20-minute wait for 65 dollars (at the same time: Melly’s friend drove for them for two months and never took home a paycheck larger than 300 per week), plus would arrive only 27 minutes faster than the bus. The math didn’t math, and she could always thug it out for the walk, is what she kept telling herself as she finally arrived at the sign and the loose pole that amounted to the 100 bus stop for which she had been unknowingly fated for that day.
She was ushered farelessly onto the bus by a very pretty driver with a nice set of gold adorned twists who beamed at her and warmed her already-overregulated heart. Melly collapsed into her first artificially-cooled seat of the day, took in the smell of the refrigerant, and finally felt ok. She recalled that the last time she rode the bus she had just been glued to her phone the whole ride; this time she was conserving her battery (which she had managed to charge to 34% before leaving home) and decided there would be adequate entertainment outside her window. The desert and its built environs are beautiful in a stark sort of way, but for someone nervous to get to work they feel despairingly endless.
The second bus stop was somehow more barren than the first. It was later in the day and the Sun-Earth-Kern County system was being even more unkind to her than before. The 1 bus almost passed her, she suspected on purpose; a speculation supported by her immediate argument with the driver over the 40 cents she was missing from the $2.40 fare. Eventually Melly won because an even more argumentative rider joined their discussion at the next stop with a single mangled dollar bill that he struggled to insert into the farebox, and she was able to slink into the rumbly back row for the 19 stops before she got to the terminal.
For a city named Palmdale there honestly weren’t that many palms, which she decided were not good shade trees—even when they were meaningfully taller than the ones her landlord settled her with—what with the having to stand far enough from the base to catch the projected sun cover of the crown or squeezing into whatever shadow you got from the trunk and moving radially along with it through the day. Melly heard her grandma’s voice reminding her, “They’re not even native mija. That’s the gringo’s fantasy of Alta California.” Washingtonia-palm-ignorance aside, she wondered what her nana would have thought of the native flora—the manzanita clinging on the side of the concrete aqueduct or the sage dancing in the wind of the passing cars—when she realized she was in the shade of a structure outside the window. She leaned her head as far out as one could against a vertical pane of glass to see a familiar stranger: the same five-over-one geometric blobs of uniformity that started to pop up all over her barrio around the time she was kicked out, first by her family who decided she had smoked her last Dutch on their porch, and then by those same buildings whose business-casual housing agents rejected her because of this or that: not having credit (“don’t get a credit card you will mess up your life”) and no cosigner (“no, I’m not signing that, también, get out of my house, pinche morra”), not making 3x the rent, and just generally failing vibe checks. She tried her hand at a co-op in an abandoned Korean Presbyterian church, rent-controlled roommates three times her age and half her communication ability, and even a squat; but she was tired of dirty dishes left in pews, drama over $30 light bills, and having to (allegedly) tap a mainline for running water. All the good units were taken years ago anyway. She had been banished to the boonies, where at least she could afford her own studio.
As countless blocks of new, desert-named developments swooshed by—Creosote Courts, Agave Apartments, Saguaro Studios—with first floors promising crowds of diverse faceless people and businesses that would never arrive, Melly yearned for home. Not her new home. She missed her home home, a palilogia by which she meant where she was born and spent her childhood and pre-braces years (an extremely socially and dentally painful 5 year period that preceded the precarious financial situation leading to that fateful family-disintegrating carne asada): the bungalow house with the water-swollen door, the caring vecinos who always saved pupusas for her, and the gorgeous trees that annually rained veiny pink-purple flowers named something funny, with two Ls somewhere, that she had, at some point (instructed by a well-edited online cooking video), made into an exceptionally bitter drink and, with decent success, had finally rendered edible with copious muddled strawberries and sandía.
She was missing it extra bad today.
The coach pulled into the layover, slinking under and into the umbra of the very large and out-of-place transit station suspended over the street. It looked like what a architecture firm website might laud as “state-of-the-art,” Salesforce-Plaza-like—the monstrous Dyson appliance that replaced the Transbay Terminal in Embarcadero, SF—that Melly reminisced about from the one time she went to the Bay Area on a whim with her ex from Oakland. She didn’t miss him or their hyphy breakup at all, but she distressingly found herself missing Bay Area transit prices, when she approached the terminal and saw: “One Rider One Way, Peak Hours, $27.50.” Melly produced the same flummoxed expression her 10th-grade Algebra 2 teacher got during the quadratic formula lecture, which freshly annoyed the ticket lady behind the 3” plexiglass window; but Melly had to get to work and it was just this once, hopefully, so with her ticket in hand she made her way toward the platform.
She stood in the very long and dull interior, with alien, ovular lighting fixtures overhead and painted art on the walls that Melly imagined had to have been commissioned online, or maybe purchased at a Goodwill and vectorized for resizing. She barely had time to squint down the length of the tracks to look for silhouettes of other train-waiters before It glided into the terminal, far faster than she would have liked. The sleek glass door of the giant snake hissed slightly, opened quickly, and closed just as impatiently, almost hitting Melly from behind as she entered the empty car. The train slithered forward before she was able to sink into the spacious brown leather seats. Before she could whistle at her chair’s luxury, an immaculately made-up conductor in an eggshell suit with red epaulets and a silly feathered hat came by and checked her ticket. “Oh I’m sorry, you’ve purchased an economy ticket and this, you see, is the first class section,” he expressed with more pomposity than the zip code called for. Melly’s face remembered Algebra 2 for the second time in 15 years and he responded with a frown that appeared preloaded into wrinkles she hadn’t noticed before. “I’m going to ask you to please move to a more appropriate carriage.” She looked out the window hoping some landmark or road sign would back up her claim to the seat but they all flew by indistinguishably. He ushered her impatiently for three cars until she found her seat in the economy section (which she later found out was the only publicly available ticket—first- and diamond-class cars were reserved for donors of the CHR that contributed approximately 10 and 100 times her annual income, respectively). The car seemed much more squalid than it should have for a supposedly new train. The floor was already decorated with footprints from dirt, divorced from shoe bottoms and eloped with the tacky surface whose spilled source Melly didn’t want to think about too hard. Stick, unstick, stick—she added her own prints before reclining into what she knew to be a wet cloth seat. Her knees grazed the seat in front of her, and she noticed a slightly taller man than her with his knees miserably to his chest across the aisle. She spent no more than 15 minutes on the damp couch before the profile of downtown LA flew into view. She would have missed her stop had it not been the end of the line.
Union Station was just as stately and art deco as she remembered, except for the part where the California High Speed Rail retarded to a halt. It wasn’t so much that it wasn’t spectacular—it was—but that the glass semi-sphere adjoining and stylistically boxing with the old station opened up to a vista filled entirely too much by the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Melly wondered if her cousin was still in there—she last heard he was doing a 2-year bid downtown for liberating a federal armory’s worth of water guns from the South Gate WalMart for the fourteenth annual Wet-n-Wild donuts-in-the-intersection style takeover. She would have welded her G-37 rear differential for his first day out in different circumstances. Damn. “Free him or whatever,” she muttered on her way down the elevator, which had already picked up an off smell she couldn’t describe, and moved with the same smoothness of the train, leaving its passengers a bit sick from the G forces.
She hit the tile ground floor of the station running. The transfer from the train to the bus was tight and she could already see a write-up being outlined in the highly kiefy OUID back office for her mild tardiness. She burst out onto the parking lot and into the Los Angeles heat dome, sprinting down the sidewalk toward Alameda St. and running around 5 tents with creatively affixed blue, black, and camo tarps, jerry-rigged swamp coolers, and upside-down bicycles in various stages of fixed or disrepair, then turning more sharply than her knees could handle toward Cesar Chavez Blvd. Her already dirty Sambas collected more adhesive, this time a green, probably-spearmint gum on the corner of Spring St that someone had just spit out. A 3-second moment of panic looking down and trying to scrape it off made the difference—she arrived at Cesar Chavez and Broadway to see the bus pulling off without her, struggling up the hill burning clean natural gas into the underside of the Hill St. Bridge. She contemplated walking (1 hour 22 minutes) and Drovedly again (she forgot it only served the Antelope Valley and surrounding blast radius, and Uber beat out Lyft as cheapest alternative at $34), but instead slumped onto the dirt embankment and pulled down her company-issued dad hat over her eyes in defeat. 18 minutes later, 2 minutes ahead of MTA’s schedule but 5 minutes behind Melly’s, and 2 dusty pant pockets later, came another 4 bus to whisk her away down Sunset Blvd. The driver could sense her energy and avoided a fight with her by accepting a penny as valid payment. The bus was full so she found a 3 square-foot patch of space between two grandmas with identical folding carts and Food for Less bags of peanut butter and celery among other less exciting things. They were gossiping fervently about a third, unseen nana’s granddaughter and her boyfriend, something about a secret child and a pregnancy hidden in a quinceañera dress. She only understood a third of the Spanish they spoke, and another third she didn’t catch from checking her phone for the time. She spammed the door button on the wrong stop, apologized profusely, and vaulted off dangerously on her correct stop, almost twisting an ankle on the way down but managing to hold on to an expired parking meter for support. She burst through the front door of OUID, hoping for a miracle of managerial negligence, but her shift lead was there to greet her. He waited for the customer-announcement doorbell to stop ringing before,
“You’re late Melly.”
“I know, boss. I know.”
GG Flores (
) was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA, Mexico within the rotten aura of dodger stadium (90012 por vida) and is currently a bus driver. they enjoy word salad, 29” bmxes, pick-up basketball, and watching the US empire retreat its tentacular grip on the world. they are mad that Elon Musk owns half the sky, and is tired of living in a “democracy” with “free market” housing but when you can do nothing and there’s nothing you can do, you do what you can. | A guest post by
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