On the Metrolink, 1/9/08

People sing to themselves in Union Station. People sing to themselves, or else they wash their hair in the sinks, or complain about the fact that there must be “more than 100 payphones in this got-damned place, and ain’t none of them working,” or they chase wriggling children across the slate floors, navigating between angry young men in hoodies or sad fat women eating bagels in leather chairs. It’s not like the airport, where everyone has a Place to Be. Those people are here, sure, but endure a lackluster mixing with their opposites. Through it all, the women in the coffee shop endure. They endure the “hurry up, please, my train leaves soon” and the “let me count this out in pennies” with equal inscrutabilities, trading no obvious looks with each other and betraying sympathy for neither the wayward b-boys nor the cross-eyed personal assistants. You can get caffeine there, and an ample supply of celebrity-themed and product-pushing magazines to fill the time from here to Riverside, here to San Bernardino, or even here to Oakland.

Union Station is next to Little Tokyo. Adjoining the tracks here is a weird mix of upwardly mobile condos and industrial junkyards, teeming increasingly with graffiti as the train passes the public housing projects on the left and joins up with the poor concrete-encased LA River- a waterway notable mostly as a showcase for public art. I saw a new one on the way in today – “MONEY SAIND,” as if the T were accidentally converted there at the end, or perhaps an extra N added by mishap. Under the overpass, there’s a tent city tucked out of view from everyone but the residents and we commuters – a secret shelter against apocalypse, a reminder of catastrophe averted by those riding in from the suburbs, or else a last glimpse of left coast urban planning as you light out for parts unknown except to strip mall developers and the Argonauts of the drive-thru.

At Cal State-LA, the first stop on the fringes of the city, there are curious murals that combine a hint of the surreal with a smidgen of the neo-classical. Winged eyeballs soar over Corinthian columns – the sort of thing you’d expect to find on a black light poster rather than on a train station wall. The eyeballs (there are a pair of them) flank a smelly elevator, and to their right is a giant, twisty staircase carpeted with cigarette butts and ivy. In order of frequency.

I was early to Union Station today and sat outside for a while. It was one of those days when you can smell the sea from downtown, the marine haze lifting slowly from penthouses and corner offices alike, to be replaced later in the shift change by an altogether different kind of haze, contributed by cars idling on the 101, the 110, the 10, the 5, the 60, the 134, the 405. An older man with bad teeth, wraparound sunglasses and a decaying fisherman’s cap asked to use my cell phone, had me dial the number for him. His ride from the station, being perilously late, was told off. A promise to be there soon extracted, my phone was returned and our talk turned (as it always does here) to freeways, the problems with them, and then (this being Union Station) to the virtues of train travel. “I like to stretch out and space out. You feel me?”

El Monte Station is next – a blighted landscape of gravel and warehouses decorated with incongruously pastel stripes and precarious stacks of pallets. Loading, unloading, a universe of invisible goods probably bound for anywhere but El Monte. This is the heartbreak of transcontinental shipping, its grey and Folgers-smelling underbelly. Nobody gets on or off. The woman next to me applies a thick swatch of eyeliner, dabbling angled brushes into small pots and squinting into a gold monogrammed compact.

If I say that the streets here are like nothing on earth, you will understand that they are like everything on earth: staggeringly and pointlessly complex, easy to enter and hard to leave, coded by taste, smell, relative unami perhaps, only the obscure senses and certainly not sight or anything so easily reduced to its essential properties. There is no question of recovery if you are lost here – only a fading promise of recollection.

Eyeliner applied, she slumps into her book, ignoring her jingling phone. I don’t recognize the ring tone, but I’m sure Stephen would. This is Baldwin Park. No takers.

On the way out, to Covina, we pass the delightfully named “Celebrity Gourmet Catering,” a faded banner urging us to become foster or adoptive parents and what looks like a vast inland sea of dumpsters – foreboding, teetering toward the edge of a gravel pit, purple bougainvillea spiraling over the fence as if wishing to reach in and perfume the lot of them. Then we are in the land of single-family homes, narrow on both sides of the tracks and offering only a blur of domesticity interrupted by pocket groves of citrus. I think I’ve written before about the secret pools here, the miraculous profusion of tire swings, the parade of tarps shrouding … what? No time to guess – only swaths of blue like waves as the neighborhoods ripple by.

Past Covina the view is corrugated, aluminum, rusted and zig-zagged with the unfolding battle to keep graffiti at bay, as if to stage a bulwark between Los Angeles and Pomona, the city’s surly stepchild – once the idyll of celebrities and with its own Fox theater, now fallen on harder times with the progress of that fall scrawled on every cinder block in the city. We are suburban now, yes, but not in any East Coast sense rather, under the urban not in the way of a hierarchical ranking but as a support, a pushing up towards the inevitable boil, the spill-over, contributing to the ways the city strains against itself as if urging it on or whispering in its ear.

Here is the Secret Bucket Loader Burial Ground. There is the Great Western Mid-Size Rock Depository. To map this place in the way it deserves would be to overturn the old order of landmarks, to raise in its place an exotic geography, a spray-paint demography, a topography so alien that even the straight-tracked train would get lost out here, entering Claremont Station.